I. State Terrorism: Intrinsic to Israel's Zionist Ideology
"A war of terrorism was forced
on us", announced Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a live televised
broadcast outlining Israeli war plans in the wake of the weekend suicide
attacks within the Zionist State. "If you ask what the aim of this war is, I
will tell you. It is the aim of the terrorists... to exile us from here." He
added that: "This will not happen. We know who is responsible... Arafat is
responsible for everything that is going on."[1]
We should contrast this
with the eye-witness report of New York Times journalist Chris Hedges
in Gaza, published in Harpers Magazine:
"It is still.
The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then out of the dry furnace
air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loud speaker. 'Come on dogs,' the
voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!'
I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of
a bitch!' 'Son of a whore!' 'Your mother's cunt!'
"The boys dart
in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the
camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps
parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances
line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.
"A percussion
grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old,
scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight
behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The
soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end
over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I
will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs
and torsos.
"Yesterday at
this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age
of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven year old
boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under
eighteen. Children have been shot in other countries I have covered - death
squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants
were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in
their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I
have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and
murder them for sport."[2]
Does this sound like a "war of
terrorism" was forced on Israel by Palestinian children - or more like the
other way round?
According to the American
Heritage Dictionary, 'terrorism' is defined as follows:
1. The use of terror, violence, and
intimidation to achieve an end.
2. Fear and subjugation produced by this.
3. A system of government that uses terror
to rule.
In light of this
authoritative, lucid and comprehensive U.S. definition of 'terrorism',
Sharon's words take on a new light. It so happens that the facts are exactly
the opposite to his claims. Contrary to Sharon's spin, it is a matter of
record that throughout the history of the State of Israel, the regime has
consistently foisted wars of terrorism on the indigenous Palestinians in
order to secure the State's expansion and consolidation. As early as 1940,
the noted Zionist Yossef Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund
affiliated to the World Zionist Organization, wrote that:
"It should be
clear for us that there is not room for two peoples in this country. If the
Arabs leave it, there will be enough for us... There is nothing else to do but
to remove them all; we mustn't leave a single village, a single tribe... We
must explain to Roosevelt and all the heads of friendly states that the land
of Israel isn't too small if all the Arabs leave and if the borders are
pushed back a little to the north, as far as the Litani, and to the east, on
the Golan Heights."[3]
It is therefore not the
Palestinians who desired to expel all the Jews from the region. On the
contrary Jews and non-Jews had lived in peace for thousands of years in the
land of Palestine. It was the foreign Zionist movement which at its
inception envisaged the complete "exile" of the non-Jewish Palestinian
people from their ancestral homeland, to make way for the new Zionist
regime. Israeli historian Professor Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University
records the little known fact that: "Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs
as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He
said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September
and October [1948]."[4]
What was the principal methodology Israel planned to use to ensure the
expulsion of Palestinians from their own homes? Nothing less than brutal,
violent, indiscriminate, cold-blooded terrorism. Professor Morris elaborates
that:
"During May
[1948], ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the
Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was
immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim... [Even
earlier] On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha... The village was
destroyed that night...Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on April 20...Abu
Zureiq was completely demolished...By mid- 1949, the majority of the [350
depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and
uninhabitable."[5]
The Zionist leadership had
thus clearly planned from the very beginning to absorb the entirety of
Palestine in accordance with consolidating the State of Israel. In internal
discussion in 1938, the first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion
declared that: "[A]fter we become a strong force, as a result of the
creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of
Palestine... The state will only be a stage in the realisation of Zionism and
its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion into the whole of
Palestine."[6] He also
articulated Israel's opposition to the United Nations Partition Plan: "The
State of Israel considers the UN resolution of 29 November 1947 to be null
and void."[7] A later
Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin elaborated that:
"The partition
of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of
institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will
not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital.
Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel.
All of it. And forever."[8]
As a consequence of this
dogmatic mentality, the policy of pursuing the mass ethnic cleansing of the
indigenous population from their own land was an integral Israeli military
strategy, although this was never widely publicised to avoid international
and historical condemnation. Tzvi Shiloah, a senior veteran of the Mapai
Party and a former deputy mayor of the town of Hertzeliyah recalled that "in
1948, we deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war, expelled Arabs.
Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we expelled many Arabs."[9] Israeli historian Ilan
Pappe, associate Professor in Middle East History at the University of
Haifa, concurs that: "There was an unwritten Zionist plan to expel the Arabs
of Palestine in 1948." From 1 April 1948 to the end of the war, "Jewish
operations were guided by the desire to occupy the greatest possible portion
of Palestine."[10]
Unprovoked and systematic
genocidal massacres of Palestinians in their villages subsequently occurred
as a consequence of these operations, as has been documented by the Israeli
military historian Aryeh Yitzakhi - Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Eretz
Yisrael Studies at Bar Ilan University (Tel Aviv) and Senior Lecturer in
Military History in Israeli Defence Force (IDF) courses for army officers.
Yitzahki is particularly qualified in this area due to his in-depth
acquaintance with IDF archives, on which his conclusions are based. In the
1960s, Yitzakhi served as Director of the IDF archives within the framework
of his IDF service in his capacity as historian. He records that:
"In almost
every conquered village in the War of Independence, acts were committed,
which are defined as war crimes, such as indiscriminate killings, massacres
and rapes... For many Israelis it was easier to find consolation in the lie,
that the Arabs left the country under orders from their leaders. This is an
absolute fabrication. The fundamental cause of their flight was their fear
from Israeli retribution and this fear was not at all imaginary. From almost
each report in the IDF archives concerning the conquest of Arab villages
between May and July 1948 - when clashes with Arab villagers were the
fiercest - a smell of massacre emanates."[11]
One of the biggest but least
publicised massacres is that of al-Dawayima village in Hebron District
(population 4,300). On the afternoon of Friday, 29th October
1948, three units of the 89th Battalion (8th Brigade)
entered the village from three directions, leaving the east open, and
occupied it "without a fight" according to an Israeli soldier's testimony.
The soldier continued:
"The first wave
of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. The children
they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house
without dead. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms was employed to
clean the courtyard.... (they) shot her and the baby.... This was not in the
heat of battle.... but a system of expulsion and destruction".[12]
The 1948 war of Zionist
terrorism thus resulted in a large-scale Palestinian refugee problem, with
at least 750,000 men, women and children forced to flee from their homes,
many of them forcibly expelled by the Israelis. More than 300,000
Palestinian refugees went to the West Bank, and some 200,000 went to Gaza
Strip, to settle in squalid, crowded, barren refugee camps managed by United
Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). After 1948 Palestinian refugees
attempted to return to what had by then become the State of Israel, in
violation of the Zionist regime's concocted 'Law of Return'. An estimated
2,700-5,000 of them were subsequently killed by Israeli troops while
crossing the borders - only very few succeeded. Dubbed "infiltrators" by
Israel, the returning refugees had clashed with Israeli settlers, army and
police, during which the number of Israeli casualties amounted to
approximately 190-220 dead during 1949-1954.[13] To stave off the return of the
indigenous population, the Israeli army had began launching attacks on
Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Benny Morris has
documented extensively the numerous killings committed by Israeli forces
during this period.[14]
II. A History of Systematic Aggression
The systematic
initiation of "wars of terrorism" by the State of Israel since then is
a matter of record. The 1967 Six Day War, for example, although blamed
by Israel on the dire threat posed to the Zionist State by the Arabs,
was in fact the primary responsibility of Israel. General Ezar Weizman,
then Israeli Chief of Operations, admitted that Egypt and Syria -
which are conventionally blamed as the initiators of aggression - had
never posed a threat to Israel. "There was never a danger of
extermination. This hypothesis had never been considered in any
serious meeting."[15]
General Chaim Herzog, Commanding General and first Military Governor
of Israeli Occupied West Bank similarly confessed: "There was no
danger of annihilation. Israeli headquarters never believed in this
danger."[16]
The 1967 Six Day War was
actually a war of Israeli aggression, perpetrated to illegally expand the
State's borders. Yigal Allon, Minister of Labour and member of Eshkol's
Military Advisory Committee on the origin of the Six-Day War, had asserted
unequivocally: "Begin and I want Jerusalem."[17] Mordechai Bentov, Israeli Minister of
Housing has elaborated that: "The entire story of the danger of
extermination was invented in every detail, and exaggerated a posteriori
to justify the annexation of new Arab territory."[18] Indeed, the entire episode was
meticulously planned by the Israeli military. General Mordichai Hod,
Commanding General of the Israeli Air-Force admitted that: "Sixteen years'
planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes [of the Six Day War]. We
lived with the plan, we slept on the plan, we ate the plan. Constantly we
perfected it."[19]
Menachim Begin himself has
admitted in this regard that: "In June l967, we had a choice. The Egyptian
Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was
really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to
attack him."[20] The
Israeli Defence Minister of the time has voiced similar revelations.
According to the New York Times: "Moshe Dayan, the celebrated
commander who, a Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the
Golan...[said] many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately
provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the government to
take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for their farmland."[21] Dayan testified
that "at least 80 per cent" of two decades of border clashes were in fact
initiated by Israel, under pressure from land-hungry farmers and army
commanders in Northern Israel.[22]
This concurs with the assessment of former Israeli General Matityahu Peled,
who admitted that more than half of the border clashes before the 1967 war
"were a result of our security policy of maximum settlement in the
demilitarized area."[23]
The details of these clashes
have been documented by British journalist and Middle East scholar David
Hirst, who notes that the Israelis "began by staking an illegal claim to
sovereignty over the zone [on the Syrian frontier] and then proceeded, as
opportunity offered, to encroach on all the specific provisions against
introducing armed forces and fortifications...
"They
repeatedly obstructed the operations of the UN observers, on one occasion
even threatening to kill them. They refused to cooperate with the Mixed
Armistice Commission, and when it suited them they simply rejected the
rulings and requests of the observers. They expelled, or otherwise forced
out, Arab inhabitants, and razed their villages to the ground. They
transplanted trees as a stratagem to advance the frontier to their own
advantage. They built roads against the advice of the UN. They carried out
excavations on Arab land for their own drainage schemes."[24]
Swedish General Carl von Horn,
head of the United Nations peacekeeping forces in the region, observed that
all this was "part of a premeditated Israeli policy to edge east through the
Demilitarized Zone towards the old Palestine border (as shown on their maps)
and to get all the Arabs out of the way by fair means or foul...
"The Jews
developed a habit of irrigating and ploughing in stretches of Arab-owned
land nearby, for the ground was so fertile that every square foot was a gold
mine in grain. Gradually, beneath the glowering eyes of the Syrians, who
held the high ground overlooking the Zone, the area had become a network of
Israeli canals and irrigation channels edging up against and always
encroaching on Arab-owned property."[25]
U.S. analyst Sheldon L.
Richman of the Cato Institute in Washington DC reports that:
"This policy
continued well into the 1950s. Most of the 2,000 Arabs living in the zone
had been forced out by 1956. Many moved to the sloping land below the Golan
Heights. In response to the expulsion of Arabs from the zone, the otherwise
helpless Syrian forces on the Heights began firing on Israelis, particularly
when, each year, their tractors plowed further into the demilitarized zone.
General von Horn was convinced the instances of firing would not have
occurred without the specific Israeli provocations."[26]
According to Israeli Defence
Minister Moshe Dayan, the Israeli settlers "didn't even try to hide their
greed for their land," wanting "to grab a piece of land and keep it until
the enemy will get tired of us." Describing the idea that Syria was
threatening Israel before the 1967 war as "bullshit", he affirmed in detail
that: "I know how at least 80% of all the incidents with Syria started...
"We would send
a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the
demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to
shoot. If they didn't shoot we would tell the tractor to advance further,
until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would
use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was... You do
not attack the enemy because he is a bastard, but because he threatens you,
and the Syrians in the fourth day of the war were not threatening us."[27]
As Hirst observes, the most
charitable interpretation of this Israeli policy was that the regime had
done its best to provoke Syria into opening fire. According to one United
Nations observer at the scene: "It was a premeditated raid of intimidation
motivated by Israel's desire... to bait the Arab states into some overt act
of aggression that would offer them the opportunity to overrun additional
territory without censor".[28]
In the words of the Washington Post: "Israel, with an appetite for
land, for political profit and for strategic depth, was in the Golan
instance... an aggressor, not the victim of aggression."[29]
Israel's war had devastating
consequences for the indigenous Palestinian population who faced the brunt
of the Zionist regime's policies of intimidation, provocation and terror.
Jewish scholar Alfred Lilienthal noted that:
"To solidify
their gains after the 1967 war, according to UN figures, the Israelis
destroyed during the period between June 11, 1967 and November 15, 1969 some
7,554 Palestinian Arab homes in the territories seized during that war; this
figure excluded thirty-five villages in the occupied Golan Heights that were
razed to the ground. In the two years between September 1969 and 1971 the
figure was estimated to have reached 16,312 homes."[30]
In its occupation of the Golan
Heights, Israel expelled a total of over 120,000 inhabitants - mostly
Syrians but also several thousand Palestinian refugees. Israel
simultaneously destroyed two cities, 133 villages and 61 farms. Only 6,396
inhabitants remained in the six villages left standing.[31]
Again and again we find the
same policies of aggression and provocation through terrorism being adopted
by Israel to manufacture a conflict by which to expand the State's borders
and grab more land. The Yom Kippur War of 1973, for instance, was provoked
by Israeli intransigence, and was not an attempt to respond defensively to
Arab military threats to the State's existence. As Yitzhak Rabin admitted:
"The Yom Kippur
War was not fought by Egypt and Syria to threaten the existence of Israel.
It was an all out use of their military force to achieve a limited political
goal. What Sadat wanted by crossing the canal was to change the political
reality and, thereby, to start a political [peace] process from a point more
favorable to him than the one that existed."[32]
Israeli historian Professor
Benny Morris highlights the context of Zionist intransigence in which this
occurred, noting that according to the memoirs of several Israeli Labour
politicians and officials of the 1970s: "Israel's premier, Golda Meir,
rejected reasonable Egyptian peace or non-belligerency offers in 19701,
thus 'forcing' the Arabs to launch the 1973 October War."[33] In fact, Israel's
systematic fabrication and exaggeration of threats to justify the
provocation and initiation of "wars of terrorism" appears to be official
strategy for Zionist expansion. In Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharatt's
personal diaries, there is an excerpt from May of 1995 in which he quotes
Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Dayan as follows:
"[Israel] must
see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep
its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no
it must, invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of
provocation - and revenge...and above all, let us hope for a new war with the
Arab countries, so that we nay finally get rid of our troubles and acquire
our space."[34]
Throughout
Israel's existence, the Zionist State has thus consistently perpetrated a
policy of violent repression against the indigenous Palestinians. As the New
York-based rights monitor, the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR),
reports in summary of the bloody record of Israeli terrorism: "In the 1948 War Israel extended its control over 77% of the
territory of the former Palestine Mandate and expelled almost the entire
Palestinian Arab population...
Only 100,000 residents remained of a pre-war population
approaching one million. Israel conquered the rest of Palestine in the 1967
War, creating another 300,000 refugees, many of them refugees for the second
time. To build a Jewish state on these conquered lands and erase the memory
of centuries of Palestinian existence, Israel:
1. Razed
to the ground over 500 Palestinian towns and villages,
2. Converted
Palestinian-owned land into state property for the benefit of Jews only
(excluding even Arab citizens of Israel),
3. Rejected
the return of any Palestinian refugees while recognizing the right to
'return' of any Jewish citizen living in any other country,
4. Maintained
military occupation of Palestinian land through an explicit 'iron fist'
policy of disproportionate response to Palestinian resistance,
5. Refused
to allow economic development in the occupied territories while re-orienting
Palestinian labor to serve the needs of the Israeli economy, and
6. Refused
to define its own borders (despite accepting the borders specified in
resolution 181) in order to justify continued illegal expansion.
