Zionism - Articles - Zimbio

What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited - Part 1

Wed, 22 May 2008 01:08:41 GMT

posted by sheltercrow

What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited

by Michael Palumbo | September – October 1990

The 1948 war remains one of the crucial events in the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. Its origin can be traced to the beginning of Jewish colonization in Palestine in the late 19th century. Long a part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Holy Land became a British mandate territory after World War I. During this period, the population of Palestine, which had been 95 percent Arab, developed a nascent nationalism as a result of the growing opposition to the Zionist intrusion. There was sporadic conflict, especially in the 1930's, when the Palestinian Arabs dissipated their strength against the British.

An inevitable clash with the Zionists occurred, in November 1947, when the U.N. General Assembly approved a plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. During the war, in which the Palestinians received lukewarm support from the neighboring Arab countries, the Zionists enlarged the Jewish state by force of arms so that it would occupy 80 percent of historic Palestine. Some 150,000 Arabs remained in the new state of Israel, and about 750,000 fled–creating the refugee problem that has plagued the Middle East ever since.

From the outset, the official Israeli version of the 1948 events accused the Palestinians of causing the war and charged them with being responsible for their own exodus from their homeland. As early as August 10, 1948, Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett informed U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie that the Palestinians had “left in obedience to direct orders by local military commanders and partly as a result of the panic campaign spread among Palestinian Arabs by the leaders of the individual Arab states.” For many years this story, with further embellishments, was propagated by Zionist authors and generally accepted throughout the western world, particularly the United States.

In the book Exodus, Leon Uris refers to “the absolutely documented fact that the Arab leaders wanted the civilian population to leave Palestine as a political issue and a military weapon.” In the motion picture version, viewers actually hear (conveniently in English) mythic radio broadcasts in which the Palestinians are ordered to leave their homes by their leaders, who are inspired by Nazi advisers. The Israeli forces, gallantly headed by actor Paul Newman, make a persistent but futile attempt to persuade the Palestinians to remain. The Arabs are terrorized into leaving by the “Mufti's Gang” who are carrying out a diabolic scheme.

Numerous Zionist accounts claim that the Palestinians fled in 1948 “on orders from the Arab High Command” and because of “the fiery propaganda by Arab League orators,” beamed into Palestine from surrounding Arab capitals. Other Zionist authors maintain “many Arabs were encouraged to leave by their own leaders who promised that they would be able to return.”

Various reasons have been offered as to why the Arab leaders ordered the Palestinians to leave their homes. One explanation suggests that they wanted to provide “a clear field of fire” for the Arab armies that were being sent to Palestine, as well as to show that the Arabs refused to accept the partition plan. Some pro-Israeli writers indicate that Arab leaders ordered the Palestinians to leave their homes because they feared that they might help the Israelis fight the Arab armies that were being sent to rescue them.

It is not difficult to understand why the Israeli government and its supporters propagated this story. If they could show that the Palestinians were responsible for their own exile, it would justify the policy of forbidding the refugees to return and later the refusal to allow a West Bank-Gaza state. In recent years this extreme view has become difficult to maintain because of the abundant evidence contradicting the claim that the Palestinians were responsible for their own exile.

Erskine Childers and Walid Khalidi were among the early scholars who pointed out the distortions in the Zionist view of the Palestinian exodus. Using transcripts or audio transmissions, they showed that Arab leaders did not order the Palestinians to flee and that Zionist plans promoted expulsions in many parts of Palestine. But their work had little effect in the United States, where the Hollywood image of the “War of Independence” was the prevalent view.

Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial represents a recent effort to discredit the Palestinians' claim to their own land and revive myths about 1948. Peters asserts that the Palestinians are not the descendants of the indigenous inhabitants of the Holy Land, but infiltrators from surrounding Arab countries. She even implies that the Jews of Palestine have been the innocent victims of a Palestinian invasion before 1948, designed to displace the indigenous Jews! Peters uses extensive footnotes in order to prove that the Palestinians were not indigenous to Palestine and that they were not expelled in 1948. Of course, Peters ignores most of the legitimate books and doctoral dissertations on Palestine demography, much of which is the work of Jewish scholars.

In most European countries Peters' work has been described as “preposterous,” “not history,” and a blemish on Zionist historiography. In the United States, despite exposes by Norman Finkelstein and others, Peters' book is taken seriously by extreme right-wing Zionists and others who should know better. In recent years, however, a less extreme Zionist view of Israeli history has emerged. Largely reflecting the view of the center-left in their country, the Israeli “revisionists” have gained wide acceptance in this country among liberal Zionist circles.

There is no universally accepted definition of historical revisionism. It seems odd, however, to label as revisionist the books of historians who base their work largely on official sources released by their own government. In a sense, the recent Israeli works perpetuate the new myth that the official Israeli archives and document collections are the only really important sources on 1948. They claim to be objective, but, not surprisingly, their conclusions are expected from liberal and left Zionists.

The best of the revisionists, Tom Segev, a well-known Israeli journalist, received a degree in European history from Boston University. He has written about the Nazi era and has been often quoted on war crime matters, particularly the recent Damjanjuk case. Segev's book on the early days of the Jewish state was a best seller in Israel, with wide distribution in the United States. It is by far the best written of the Israeli revisionist works.

Contrast this with the work of Benny Morris, who writes in the driest possible academic style that makes no attempt at readability. His book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, is a work designed to be quoted rather than read. Despite its flaws and the frequent self-contradictions, there is some usable information and evidence of considerable research in official archives. Like Segev, Morris is an Israeli journalist with a Ph.D. in European history. At last report he was working at the Brookings Institute on a book dealing with Israeli foreign relations in the 1950s.

Until his death, Simha Flapan was National Secretary of Israel's left Mapam party, director of its Arab affairs department, and a distinguished peace activist. In view of his leftist background, it is not surprising that his book is more critical of many aspects of Zionist policy in the 1948 era. Flapan has been widely praised by many supporters of the Palestinian cause, but his defense of the Zionist vision is apparent in his work.

What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited - Part 2

Wed, 22 May 2008 01:31:16 GMT

posted by sheltercrow

What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited

by Michael Palumbo | September – October 1990

[...]

Sources avoided by the revisionists include the BBC and CIA broadcasts monitoring of the Middle East, which have greater reliability than the highly selective Israel State Archives broadcast monitoring used by Benny Morris. This is no small oversight, since most of the central questions concerning the exodus of Palestinians in 1948 involve radio transmissions. These include the Arab attempts to convince the Palestinians to remain in their homes and the Zionist campaign of psychological warfare designed to persuade the Palestinians to flee. Both the BBC and CIA records show that broadcasts by Palestinian authorities and Arab governments urging their people to stay and Zionist psychological warfare radio transmissions urging Arab civilians to flee were very common in 1948. Benny Morris, who uses the radio transcripts from the Israel State Archives, mentions few such broadcasts in his works. Ironically, the BBC and CIA monitoring services are an important source of information for every major newspaper. As a former journalist for the Jerusalem Post, Benny Morris is certainly familiar with them.

Equally disappointing is the failure of the Israeli historians to use the U.N. archives, especially the reports of the United Nations observers in Palestine in 1948. Though they all came from western countries such as France and the USA, which were pro-Zionist, the U.N. observers filed objective field reports which describe the expulsions being carried out by the Israelis during the latter part of the war.

All archives, of course, are censored, but on different subjects. The U.N. archives are censored in order to protect the reputation of the organization and prominent personalities associated with it. It is unlikely that American, British or U.N. archives would censor material on the Palestinian exodus of 1948, which is of no direct concern to them. Clearly, both Arab and Israeli sources on the 1948 exodus must be used with great care, particularly if the information is self-serving.

[...]

Clearly, the testimony of Arab refugees must be used with great care. Initially, I decided not to use the memoirs of Palestinian survivors of 1948, but I soon realized that their testimony was verified by non-Arab sources. For example, there is the case of Amina Musa, an Arab peasant woman from Kabri, a small village in Galilee, who described the devastation of her village on May 21, 1948, during a Zionist attack aimed at apprehending Faris Sirhan, a Palestinian nationalist leader in the area. Within the diary of General McNeil, a retired British officer with large landholdings in Galilee, the entry for May 21 reads: “Every house in Kabri demolished. Faris Sirhan's big new house was the first to go up. He is a member of the Arab Higher Committee in Damascus." On other occasions I found that the refugees' estimates of casualties in Zionist atrocities was lower than those of the U.S. and other neutral observers, who, in some cases, counted the bodies of victims. Of course, not all Palestinian testimony is without error. Taken together with non-Arab verification, however, it can be a useful source for students of this period, particularly since 1948 is not just a historical controversy but also a human tragedy.

Segev's book has a definite human dimension, providing much personal testimony that brings the story to life. His reliance on Israeli sources is understandable, since his central focus is the Israeli domestic scene. But the first section of his book, which deals with Arabs in the new Jewish state, suffers from a lack of sources which reflect a Palestinian perspective. Arab memoirs or oral testimony would have been highly appropriate here.

Flapan's book is the most disappointing with regard to sources. Based largely on the document collections published by the Israeli Government, it contains only a small amount of new material from Israeli archives and U.S. State Department files. In addition to neglecting the U.N. Archives and BBC and CIA monitoring services and the testimony of Israeli veterans, Flapan has failed to utilize the British Archives. This is a major shortcoming in a book which is supposed to cover the whole range of diplomatic, military and political aspects of the war and pre-war era. The only original research in Flapan's book is a statistical analysis by one of his graduate students, indicating that most of the Israelis killed in the “War of Independence” died in offensive operations.

[...]

Zionist Atrocities

Tue, 21 May 2008 23:36:36 GMT

posted by sheltercrow

Orthodox Jews Demand End to Zionist Atrocities in the Middle East

July 18 – New York | Neturei Karta International

The brutal and indiscriminate attack upon the people and infrastructure of Lebanon by the Zionist State "Israel" is a crime against all basic standards of decency and humanity.

The excuse given for this murderous invasion was the attack by Hezbollah on the IDF. What this might have to do with the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese innocent men, women and children, who are subjected to an ongoing living hell, is beyond comprehension.

Indeed, this current aggression is only the second chapter of the recent viciousness; the first being the furious reinvasion of Gaza and the onslaught on its civilians and the ruination of its basic human services.

Of course, voices may be heard that the IDF are simply responding. This, of course, ignores the question of the evil, implicit in punishing blameless people for the deeds of others. And it totally ignores the root of the problem, the dispossession and subjugation of the Palestinian people which began in 1948, was expanded in 1967 and continues unabated to this day. The crux of the matter is that beyond the immorality of the Zionist treatment of the Palestinians is the ultimate fact -- the ideology of Zionism and ensuing establishment of the Zionist state conflicts with the basic teachings of Judaism.

Zionism is the transformation from Judaism, a G-dliness and spirituality, into a G-dlessness, materialism with nationalistic aspirations. Theodor Herzl and his cohorts, the fathers of this relatively new ideology of Zionism (approximately 100 years), have taken the Almighty out of the equation.

The ultimate establishment of the Zionist State, the fulfillment of the Zionist ideology, takes this blasphemy a step further. The Jewish people were sent into exile by Divine decree. They where then expressly commanded by the Almighty, not to attempt to leave their exilic existence through any human intervention. They were expressly forbidden to create their own state, such as the Zionist state of "Israel". (Talmud, Tractate Kesuboth, p.111).

The Jewish people are forbidden to oppress another people. The creation of the State of "Israel" came about through, the theft from, subjugation and oppression of, the Palestinian people.

Torah Jewry, therefore, condemns the horrifying suffering inflicted upon both the Palestinian and Lebanese people. Because of all of the above, all attempts to achieve peace and stability for "Israel" are destined to fail. The Creator cannot be defied with impunity.

[...]

Zionism and Zionists.

Sat, 20 Apr 2008 20:19:44 GMT

posted by sheltercrow

This post is for those that are concerned that all remarks not directly addressing Zionist Trolls should be placed in a thread specifically concerned with Zionism and Zionists.

Since we must start with something I have place the Wikipedia references to Zionism as the base material.

Zionism is an international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine (Hebrew: Eretz Yisra'el, “the Land of Israel”), and continues primarily as support for the modern state of Israel.

Although its origins are earlier, the movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish State. Described as a "diaspora nationalism," its proponents regard it as a national liberation movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people.

While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, where the concept of Jewish nationhood is thought to have first evolved somewhere between 1200 BC and the late Second Temple era (i.e. up to 70 AD), the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe. It constituted a branch of the broader phenomenon of modern nationalism. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, and after the Holocaust became the dominant Jewish political movement.

History of Zionism: From Wikipedia

Timeline of Zionism: From Wikipedia

Timeline of Jewish history: From Wikipedia

World Zionist Organization: From Wikipedia

Since the first century CE most Jews have lived in exile, although there has been a constant presence of Jews in the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel). According to Judaism, Eretz Israel, or Zion, is a land promised to the Jews by God according to the Bible. Following the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, Jews were expelled from Palestine to form the Jewish diaspora. In the nineteenth century a current in Judaism supporting a return grew in popularity. Even before 1897, which is generally seen as the year in which practical Zionism started, Jews immigrated to Palestine, the pre-Zionist Aliyah.

Jewish immigration to Palestine started in earnest in 1882. The so-called First Aliyah saw the arrival of about 30,000 Jews over twenty years. Most immigrants came from Russia, where anti-semitism was rampant. They founded a number of agricultural settlements with financial support from Jewish philanthropists in Western Europe. The Second Aliyah started in 1904. Further Aliyahs followed between the two World Wars, fueled in the 1930s by Nazi persecution.

In the 1890s Theodor Herzl infused Zionism with a new and practical urgency. He brought the World Zionist Organization into being and, together with Nathan Birnbaum, planned its First Congress at Basel in 1897. This current in Zionism is known as political Zionism because it aimed at reaching a political agreement with the Power ruling Palestine. Up to 1917 this was the Ottoman Empire, and then until 1948 it was Britain on behalf of the League of Nations. The WZO also supported small scale settlement in Palestine.

Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann (cultural Zionists) and others culminated in the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British government. This declaration endorsed the creation of a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. In 1922, the League of nations endorsed the declaration in the Mandate it gave to Britain:

The Mandatory (…) will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.

A short history of Zionism

Palestinian Arabs resisted Zionist migration. There were riots in 1920, 1921 and 1929, sometimes accompanied by massacres of Jews. Britain supported Jewish immigration in principle, but in reaction to Arab violence imposed restrictions on Jewish immigration.

The1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine led the British to establish the Peel Commission to investigate the situation. The commission called for a two-state solution and compulsory transfer of populations. This solution was rejected by the British and instead the White Paper of 1939 proposed an end to Jewish immigration by 1944, with a further 75,000 to be admitted by then. In principle, the British stuck to this policy until the end of the Mandate.

After WWII and the Holocaust, support for Zionism among Jews and Gentiles increased. The British, were attacked in Palestine by Zionist groups because of restrictions on Jewish immigration, the best known attack being the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. Unable to resolve the conflict, the British referred the issue to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, the UNSCOP recommended the partition of western Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem. This partition plan was adopted on November 29th, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote itself, which required a two-third majority, was a very dramatic affair and led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities.

The Arab states rejected the UN decision, demanding a single state with an Arab majority. violence immediately exploded in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel and the same day, the armies of four Arab countries invaded Palestine.

During the following eight months, Israel forces defended the Jewish partition and conquered portions of the Arab partition, enlarging its portion to 78 percent of mandatory Palestine. The conflict led to an exodus of about 711,000 Arab Palestinians, of whom about 46.000 were internally displaced persons in Israel. The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which included new cease-fire lines, the so-called Green line.

After the war the Arabs continued to reject Israel's right to exist and demanded that it retreat to the 1947 partition lines. They sustained this demand until 1967 when the rest of western Palestine was conquered by Israel during the Six-Day War, after which Arab states demanded that Israel retreat to the 1949 green line, the only "borders" currently recognized by the international community. These borders are commonly referred as the "pre-1967 borders". The border with Egypt was legalized in the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty, and the border with Jordan in the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty of Peace.

After the creation of the State of Israel the WZO continued to exist as an organisation dedicated to assisting and encouraging Jews to migrate to Israel, as well as providing political support for Israel.

'Salute to Israel' and counter demo's 2

Sat, 29 Jun 2008 20:25:00 GMT

posted by billymacrae

(UK, London. 'Salute to Israel' Zionist march and counter-demonstrations. 2008)

(UK, London. 'Salute to Israel' Zionist march and counter-demonstrations. 2008)

(UK, London. 'Salute to Israel' Zionist march and counter-demonstrations.
Jews against Zionism counter-demo. 2008)

(UK, London. 'Salute to Israel' Zionist march and counter-demonstrations.
Jews against Zionism counter-demo. 2008)

(UK, London. 'Salute to Israel' Zionist march and counter-demonstrations.
Palestinian solidarity group unfurl their poster. 2008)