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Palestinian Elections Now!
We have never faced a worse, or at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby (within 24 hours, everything that George Bush seems to have agreed with President Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and Palestinian society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of suicide bombing.
Six distinct calls for Palestinian reform and elections are being uttered now: five of them are, for Palestinian purposes, both useless and irrelevant. Sharon wants reform as a way of further disabling Palestinian national life, that is, as an extension of his failed policy of constant intervention and destruction. He wants to be rid of Yasser Arafat, cut up the West Bank into fenced-in cantons, re-install an occupation authority -- preferably with some Palestinians helping out -- carry on with settlement activity, and maintain Israeli security the way he's been doing it. He is too blinded by his own ideological hallucinations and obsessions to see that this will neither bring peace nor security, and will certainly not bring the "quiet" he keeps prattling on about. Palestinian elections in the Sharonian scheme are quite unimportant.
Second, the United States wants reform principally as a way of combating "terrorism," a panacea of a word that takes no account of history, context, society, or anything else. George Bush has a visceral dislike for Arafat, and no understanding at all of the Palestinian situation. To say that he and his disheveled administration "want" anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces, with the status of an over-all desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian Right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone somewhere somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally, for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional US support including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, US policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow. One should always keep in mind though that the Middle East is a domestic, not a foreign, policy issue in America and subject to dynamics within the society that are difficult to predict.
All this perfectly suits the Israeli demand, which wants nothing more than to make Palestinian life collectively more miserable and more unlivable, whether by military incursions or by impossible political conditions that suit Sharon's frenzied obsession with stamping out Palestinians forever. Of course there are other Israelis who want co- existence with a Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar things, but neither group has any determining power now. Sharon and the Bush administration run the show.
Third, is the Arab leaders' demand which as far as I can tell is a combination of several different elements, none of them directly helpful to the Palestinians themselves. First is fear of their own populations who have been witnessing Israel's mass and essentially unopposed destruction of the Palestinian territories without any serious Arab interference or attempt at deterrence. The Beirut summit peace plan offers Israel precisely what Sharon has refused, which is land for peace, and it is a proposal without any teeth, much less one with a timetable. While it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counter-weight to Israel's naked belligerence, we should have no illusions about its real intention which, like the calls for Palestinian reform, are really tokens offered to seething Arab populations who are thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers. Second, of course, is the sheer exasperation of most of the Arab regimes with the whole Palestinian problem. They seem to have no ideological problem with Israel as a Jewish state without any declared boundaries, which has been in illegal military occupation of Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank for 35 years, or with Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people. They are prepared to accommodate nicely those terrible injustices if only Arafat and his people would simply either behave or quietly go away. Third, of course, is the long-standing desire of Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves with the US and, among themselves, to vie for the title of most important US ally. Perhaps they are simply unaware of how contemptuous most Americans are of them, and how little understood or regarded is their cultural and political status in the US.
Fourth, in the chorus of reform are the Europeans. But they only scurry around sending emissaries to see Sharon and Arafat, they make ringing declarations in Brussels, they fund a few projects and more or less leave it at that, so great is the shadow of the US over them.
Fifth, is Yasser Arafat and his circle of associates who have suddenly\ discovered the virtues (theoretically at least) of democracy and reform. I know that I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle, and I also know all the arguments about the besieged Arafat as a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli aggression, but I have come to a point where I think none of that has any meaning anymore. Arafat is simply interested in saving himself. He has had almost ten years of freedom to run a petty kingdom and has succeeded essentially in bringing opprobrium and scorn on himself and most of his team; the Authority became a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption. Why anyone for a moment believes that at this stage he is capable of anything different, or that his new streamlined cabinet (dominated by the same old faces of defeat and incompetence) is going to produce actual reform, defies reason. He is the leader of a long suffering people, whom in the past year he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hardship, all of it based on a combination of his absence of a strategic plan and his unforgivable reliance on the tender mercies of Israel and the US via Oslo. Leaders of independence and liberation movements have no business exposing their unarmed people to the savagery of war criminals lik e Sharon, against whom there was no real defence or advance preparation. Why then provoke a war whose victims would be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight one nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank) Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.
He has announced that elections will take place in early 2003, but his real concentration is to reorganise the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed principally to serve him and Israel, since the Oslo accords were based on his having made a deal with Israel's military occupation. Israel cared only about its security, for which it held Arafat responsible (a position, by the way, he willingly accepted as early as 1992). In the meantime Arafat used the 15 or 19 or whatever the right number of groups was to play each off against the other, a tactic he perfected in Fakahani, and which is patently stupid so far as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad which suited Israel perfectly: it would have a ready- made excuse to use the so-called martyr's (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing along with Arafat's ruinous regime that has done us more harm as a cause it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain no one has been able to say.
Having therefore made a deal with the occupation through Oslo, Arafat was never really in a position to lead a movement to end it. And ironically, he is trying to make another deal now, both to save himself and prove to the US, Israel and the other Arabs that he deserves another chance. I myself don't care a whit for what Bush, or the Arab leaders, or Sharon says: I am interested in what we as a people think of our leader, and there I believe we must be absolutely clear in rejecting his entire programme of reform, elections, reorganising the government and security services. His record of failure is too dismal and his capacities as a leader too enfeebled and incompetent for him to try yet again to save himself for another try.
Sixth, finally, is the Palestinian people who are now justifiably clamouring both for reform and elections. As far as I am concerned, this clamour is the only legitimate one of the six I have outlined here. It's important to point out that Arafat's present administration as well as the Legislative Council have overstayed their original term, which should have ended with a new round of elections in 1999. Moreover, the whole basis of the 1996 elections were the Oslo accords, which in effect simply licensed Arafat and his people to run bits of the West Bank and Gaza for the Israelis, without true sovereignty or security, since Israel retained control of the borders, security, land (on which it doubled and even tripled the settlements), water and air. In other words, the old basis for elections and reform, which had been Oslo, is now null and void. Any attempt to go forward on that kind of platform is simply a wasteful ploy and will produce neither reform nor real elections. Hence the current confusion which causes every Palestinian everywhere to feel chagrin and bitter frustration.
What then is to be done if the old basis of Palestinian legitimacy no longer really exists? Certainly there can be no return to Oslo, anymore than there can be to Jordanian or Israeli law. As a student of periods of important historical change, I should like to point out that when a major rupture with the past occurred (as during the period after the fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or with the demise of apartheid in South Africa before the elections of 1994 took place), a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself. The major interests in Palestinian society, those that have kept life going, from the trade unions, to health workers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, doctors, in addition to all the many NGOs must now become the basis on which Palestinian reform -- despite Israel's incursions and the occupation -- is to be constructed. It seems to me useless to wait for Arafat, or Europe, or the US, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians themselves by way of a Constituent Assembly that contains in it all the major elements of Palestinian society. Only such a group, constructed by the people themselves and not by the remnants of the Oslo dispensation, certainly not by the shabby fragments of Arafat's discredited Authority , can hope to succeed in re- organising society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically incoherent condition in which it is to be found. The basic job for such an Assembly is to construct an emergency system of order that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in an orderly way with full participation for all concerned. Two, to choose an emergency executive committee whose mandate is to end the occupation, not negotiate with it. It is quite obvious that militarily we are no match for Israel. Kalishnikoffs are not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided. What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilises all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation e.g. , settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks and house demolitions. The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking of, much less implementing, such a strategy: it is too bankrupt, too bound up in corrupt selfish practices, too burdened with the failures of the past.
For such a Palestinian strategy to work there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established. This is the great lesson of the South African struggle: that it proposed the vision of a multi-racial society from which neither individuals nor groups and leaders were ever deflected. The only vision coming out of Israel today is violence, forcible separation and the continued subordination of Palestinians to an idea of Jewish supremacy. Not every Israeli believes in these things of course, but it must be up to us to project the idea of co-existence in two states that have natural relations with each other on the basis of sovereignty and equality. Mainstream Zionism has still not been able to produce such a vision, so it must come from the Palestinian people and their new leaders whose new legitimacy has to be constructed now, at a moment when everything is crashing down and everyone is anxious to re-make Palestine in his own image and according to his own ideas.
We have never faced a worse, or at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby (within 24 hours, everything that George Bush seems to have agreed with President Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state. There is always hope for the future, but one has to able to look for it and find it in the right place. It is quite clear that in the absence of any serious Palestinian or Arab information policy in the United States (especially in the Congress) we cannot for a moment delude ourselves that Powell and Bush are about to set a real agenda for Palestinian rehabilitation. That's why I keep saying that the effort must come from us, by us, for us. I'm at least trying to suggest a different avenue of approach. Who else but the Palestinian people can construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before? A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means. The sooner this is realised the better the chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impasse.
Second, the United States wants reform principally as a way of combating "terrorism," a panacea of a word that takes no account of history, context, society, or anything else. George Bush has a visceral dislike for Arafat, and no understanding at all of the Palestinian situation. To say that he and his disheveled administration "want" anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts, retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements, sterile missions by various officials of his administration, and about-faces, with the status of an over-all desire, which of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian Right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he wants to placate the Arabs) for someone somewhere somehow to produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally, for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional US support including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that, US policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow. One should always keep in mind though that the Middle East is a domestic, not a foreign, policy issue in America and subject to dynamics within the society that are difficult to predict.
All this perfectly suits the Israeli demand, which wants nothing more than to make Palestinian life collectively more miserable and more unlivable, whether by military incursions or by impossible political conditions that suit Sharon's frenzied obsession with stamping out Palestinians forever. Of course there are other Israelis who want co- existence with a Palestinian state, as there are American Jews who want similar things, but neither group has any determining power now. Sharon and the Bush administration run the show.
Third, is the Arab leaders' demand which as far as I can tell is a combination of several different elements, none of them directly helpful to the Palestinians themselves. First is fear of their own populations who have been witnessing Israel's mass and essentially unopposed destruction of the Palestinian territories without any serious Arab interference or attempt at deterrence. The Beirut summit peace plan offers Israel precisely what Sharon has refused, which is land for peace, and it is a proposal without any teeth, much less one with a timetable. While it may be a good thing to have it on record as a counter-weight to Israel's naked belligerence, we should have no illusions about its real intention which, like the calls for Palestinian reform, are really tokens offered to seething Arab populations who are thoroughly sick with the mediocre inaction of their rulers. Second, of course, is the sheer exasperation of most of the Arab regimes with the whole Palestinian problem. They seem to have no ideological problem with Israel as a Jewish state without any declared boundaries, which has been in illegal military occupation of Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank for 35 years, or with Israel's dispossession of the Palestinian people. They are prepared to accommodate nicely those terrible injustices if only Arafat and his people would simply either behave or quietly go away. Third, of course, is the long-standing desire of Arab leaders to ingratiate themselves with the US and, among themselves, to vie for the title of most important US ally. Perhaps they are simply unaware of how contemptuous most Americans are of them, and how little understood or regarded is their cultural and political status in the US.
Fourth, in the chorus of reform are the Europeans. But they only scurry around sending emissaries to see Sharon and Arafat, they make ringing declarations in Brussels, they fund a few projects and more or less leave it at that, so great is the shadow of the US over them.
Fifth, is Yasser Arafat and his circle of associates who have suddenly\ discovered the virtues (theoretically at least) of democracy and reform. I know that I speak at a great distance from the field of struggle, and I also know all the arguments about the besieged Arafat as a potent symbol of Palestinian resistance against Israeli aggression, but I have come to a point where I think none of that has any meaning anymore. Arafat is simply interested in saving himself. He has had almost ten years of freedom to run a petty kingdom and has succeeded essentially in bringing opprobrium and scorn on himself and most of his team; the Authority became a byword for brutality, autocracy and unimaginable corruption. Why anyone for a moment believes that at this stage he is capable of anything different, or that his new streamlined cabinet (dominated by the same old faces of defeat and incompetence) is going to produce actual reform, defies reason. He is the leader of a long suffering people, whom in the past year he has exposed to unacceptable pain and hardship, all of it based on a combination of his absence of a strategic plan and his unforgivable reliance on the tender mercies of Israel and the US via Oslo. Leaders of independence and liberation movements have no business exposing their unarmed people to the savagery of war criminals lik e Sharon, against whom there was no real defence or advance preparation. Why then provoke a war whose victims would be mostly innocent people when you have neither the military capacity to fight one nor the diplomatic leverage to end it? Having done this now three times (Jordan, Lebanon, West Bank) Arafat should not be given a chance to bring on a fourth disaster.
He has announced that elections will take place in early 2003, but his real concentration is to reorganise the security services. I have long pointed out in these columns that Arafat's security apparatus was always designed principally to serve him and Israel, since the Oslo accords were based on his having made a deal with Israel's military occupation. Israel cared only about its security, for which it held Arafat responsible (a position, by the way, he willingly accepted as early as 1992). In the meantime Arafat used the 15 or 19 or whatever the right number of groups was to play each off against the other, a tactic he perfected in Fakahani, and which is patently stupid so far as the general good is concerned. He never really reined in Hamas and Islamic Jihad which suited Israel perfectly: it would have a ready- made excuse to use the so-called martyr's (mindless) suicide bombings to further diminish and punish the whole people. If there is one thing along with Arafat's ruinous regime that has done us more harm as a cause it is this calamitous policy of killing Israeli civilians, which further proves to the world that we are indeed terrorists and an immoral movement. For what gain no one has been able to say.
Having therefore made a deal with the occupation through Oslo, Arafat was never really in a position to lead a movement to end it. And ironically, he is trying to make another deal now, both to save himself and prove to the US, Israel and the other Arabs that he deserves another chance. I myself don't care a whit for what Bush, or the Arab leaders, or Sharon says: I am interested in what we as a people think of our leader, and there I believe we must be absolutely clear in rejecting his entire programme of reform, elections, reorganising the government and security services. His record of failure is too dismal and his capacities as a leader too enfeebled and incompetent for him to try yet again to save himself for another try.
Sixth, finally, is the Palestinian people who are now justifiably clamouring both for reform and elections. As far as I am concerned, this clamour is the only legitimate one of the six I have outlined here. It's important to point out that Arafat's present administration as well as the Legislative Council have overstayed their original term, which should have ended with a new round of elections in 1999. Moreover, the whole basis of the 1996 elections were the Oslo accords, which in effect simply licensed Arafat and his people to run bits of the West Bank and Gaza for the Israelis, without true sovereignty or security, since Israel retained control of the borders, security, land (on which it doubled and even tripled the settlements), water and air. In other words, the old basis for elections and reform, which had been Oslo, is now null and void. Any attempt to go forward on that kind of platform is simply a wasteful ploy and will produce neither reform nor real elections. Hence the current confusion which causes every Palestinian everywhere to feel chagrin and bitter frustration.
What then is to be done if the old basis of Palestinian legitimacy no longer really exists? Certainly there can be no return to Oslo, anymore than there can be to Jordanian or Israeli law. As a student of periods of important historical change, I should like to point out that when a major rupture with the past occurred (as during the period after the fall of the monarchy because of the French Revolution, or with the demise of apartheid in South Africa before the elections of 1994 took place), a new basis of legitimacy has to be created by the only and ultimate source of authority, namely, the people itself. The major interests in Palestinian society, those that have kept life going, from the trade unions, to health workers, teachers, farmers, lawyers, doctors, in addition to all the many NGOs must now become the basis on which Palestinian reform -- despite Israel's incursions and the occupation -- is to be constructed. It seems to me useless to wait for Arafat, or Europe, or the US, or the Arabs to do this: it must absolutely be done by Palestinians themselves by way of a Constituent Assembly that contains in it all the major elements of Palestinian society. Only such a group, constructed by the people themselves and not by the remnants of the Oslo dispensation, certainly not by the shabby fragments of Arafat's discredited Authority , can hope to succeed in re- organising society from the ruinous, indeed catastrophically incoherent condition in which it is to be found. The basic job for such an Assembly is to construct an emergency system of order that has two purposes. One, to keep Palestinian life going in an orderly way with full participation for all concerned. Two, to choose an emergency executive committee whose mandate is to end the occupation, not negotiate with it. It is quite obvious that militarily we are no match for Israel. Kalishnikoffs are not effective weapons when the balance of power is so lopsided. What is needed is a creative method of struggle that mobilises all the human resources at our disposal to highlight, isolate and gradually make untenable the main aspects of Israeli occupation e.g. , settlements, settlement roads, roadblocks and house demolitions. The present group around Arafat is hopelessly incapable of thinking of, much less implementing, such a strategy: it is too bankrupt, too bound up in corrupt selfish practices, too burdened with the failures of the past.
For such a Palestinian strategy to work there has to be an Israeli component made up of individuals and groups with whom a common basis of struggle against occupation can and indeed must be established. This is the great lesson of the South African struggle: that it proposed the vision of a multi-racial society from which neither individuals nor groups and leaders were ever deflected. The only vision coming out of Israel today is violence, forcible separation and the continued subordination of Palestinians to an idea of Jewish supremacy. Not every Israeli believes in these things of course, but it must be up to us to project the idea of co-existence in two states that have natural relations with each other on the basis of sovereignty and equality. Mainstream Zionism has still not been able to produce such a vision, so it must come from the Palestinian people and their new leaders whose new legitimacy has to be constructed now, at a moment when everything is crashing down and everyone is anxious to re-make Palestine in his own image and according to his own ideas.
We have never faced a worse, or at the same time, a more seminal moment. The Arab order is in total disarray; the US administration is effectively controlled by the Christian Right and the Israeli lobby (within 24 hours, everything that George Bush seems to have agreed with President Mubarak was reversed by Sharon's visit); and our society has been nearly wrecked by poor leadership and the insanity of thinking that suicide bombing will lead directly to an Islamic Palestinian state. There is always hope for the future, but one has to able to look for it and find it in the right place. It is quite clear that in the absence of any serious Palestinian or Arab information policy in the United States (especially in the Congress) we cannot for a moment delude ourselves that Powell and Bush are about to set a real agenda for Palestinian rehabilitation. That's why I keep saying that the effort must come from us, by us, for us. I'm at least trying to suggest a different avenue of approach. Who else but the Palestinian people can construct the legitimacy they need to rule themselves and fight the occupation with weapons that don't kill innocents and lose us more support than ever before? A just cause can easily be subverted by evil or inadequate or corrupt means. The sooner this is realised the better the chance we have to lead ourselves out of the present impasse.
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We need Palestinian elections now.
This is what you really think:
At Columbia University, a professor (Said) described Israel as a Jewish supremacist and racist state and stated that every racist state should be threatened. While condemning the only true democracy in the Middle East, where freedom of speech and religion are encouraged, he expressed no moral outrage at other states where people are not only denied those freedoms but put to death for trying to execute them. Aside from the moral issue of a history professor celebrating the murder of innocent American civilians to a classroom of young people who he is supposed to be educating, we need to ask ourselves: "Why too often do the classrooms in certain colleges and universities harbor intellectuals whose minds are closed to those with other views, particularly those who, like me, are proud and patriotic in celebrating the freedom and diversity of America.
You are an evil man, Mr Said (though I doubt you actually posted that yourself.)
At Columbia University, a professor (Said) described Israel as a Jewish supremacist and racist state and stated that every racist state should be threatened. While condemning the only true democracy in the Middle East, where freedom of speech and religion are encouraged, he expressed no moral outrage at other states where people are not only denied those freedoms but put to death for trying to execute them. Aside from the moral issue of a history professor celebrating the murder of innocent American civilians to a classroom of young people who he is supposed to be educating, we need to ask ourselves: "Why too often do the classrooms in certain colleges and universities harbor intellectuals whose minds are closed to those with other views, particularly those who, like me, are proud and patriotic in celebrating the freedom and diversity of America.
You are an evil man, Mr Said (though I doubt you actually posted that yourself.)
So: Said doesn't actually believe what he says he believes? Instead, he believes what you say he believes in your semi-literate charecterization of his views?
History is written by those, like Said, who write well.
History is written by those, like Said, who write well.
The Palestinian National Initiative
by Collective
June 17, 2002
Today a group of Palestinian leaders announced the launching of the Palestinian National Initiative at a press conference in Ramallah, led by Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi and Mr. Ibrahim Dakkak. The main objective of the Initiative is the realization of of Palestinian national rights and of a durable, just peace. Both of these objectives can be best achieved at this juncture through the establishment of a national emergency leadership, the immediate implementation of democratic elections at all levels of the political system, and reform of political, administrative, and other institutional structures in order to meet the needs of the Palestinian people.
Summary of the Statement Distributed at the Press Conference
The Palestinian people have sacrificed a great deal in their struggle to achieve freedom, justice and lasting peace. They will not accept that these sacrifices should have been in vain; on the contrary, they assert that these sacrifices need to be translated into concrete achievements and outcomes. It is imperative that the Palestinians’ resilience and their determination to be freed from 35 years of military occupation be activated and channeled to achieve the collective goals of ending the Israeli occupation of the West bank and Gaza and the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Only then can a just peace be achieved--through the establishment of a sovereign, independent, viable, and democratic Palestinian state on all of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital.
This Initiative calls for the implementation of relevant United Nations resolutions requiring the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza and safeguarding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. At this most critical time, we call upon all concerned parties to prevent the Israeli government from annexing the Palestinian territories and from consolidating its discriminatory policy of cantonization and the creation of an apartheid system in the West Bank and Gaza.
(click here for the remainder)
http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/blankstate.cfm
by Collective
June 17, 2002
Today a group of Palestinian leaders announced the launching of the Palestinian National Initiative at a press conference in Ramallah, led by Dr. Haidar Abdul Shafi, Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi and Mr. Ibrahim Dakkak. The main objective of the Initiative is the realization of of Palestinian national rights and of a durable, just peace. Both of these objectives can be best achieved at this juncture through the establishment of a national emergency leadership, the immediate implementation of democratic elections at all levels of the political system, and reform of political, administrative, and other institutional structures in order to meet the needs of the Palestinian people.
Summary of the Statement Distributed at the Press Conference
The Palestinian people have sacrificed a great deal in their struggle to achieve freedom, justice and lasting peace. They will not accept that these sacrifices should have been in vain; on the contrary, they assert that these sacrifices need to be translated into concrete achievements and outcomes. It is imperative that the Palestinians’ resilience and their determination to be freed from 35 years of military occupation be activated and channeled to achieve the collective goals of ending the Israeli occupation of the West bank and Gaza and the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Only then can a just peace be achieved--through the establishment of a sovereign, independent, viable, and democratic Palestinian state on all of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, with Jerusalem as its capital.
This Initiative calls for the implementation of relevant United Nations resolutions requiring the withdrawal of the Israeli army from the West Bank and Gaza and safeguarding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland. At this most critical time, we call upon all concerned parties to prevent the Israeli government from annexing the Palestinian territories and from consolidating its discriminatory policy of cantonization and the creation of an apartheid system in the West Bank and Gaza.
(click here for the remainder)
http://www.zmag.org/content/Mideast/blankstate.cfm
"safeguarding the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland"
Since that would be the end of Israel, i hardly see it as a viable objective.
Since that would be the end of Israel, i hardly see it as a viable objective.
The State of Israel is defined as "the state of the Jewish people," as affirmed repeatedly by its highest court -- as opposed to the democratic conception of a state, defined as the body of its citizens.
By law, any political party that challenges this definition of the State of Israel, explicitly or implicitly, is barred from participating in elections for the Knesset, the Israeli national legislature. This was used to bar a political party that advocated equal rights for non-Jewish Israelis, on the grounds that the demand for "equal rights" was incompatible with Israel's status as "the state of the Jewish people."
Even within the 1967 borders of Israel, there is extensive, legal segregation. Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy land, or live, in about 90% of Israel. Building permits are difficult to obtain for non-Jewish Israelis, and since 1948, no Arab settlement within Israel has been granted a permit to expand its borders.
Politicians from the Labor party and Likud alike talk about the need to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel. How to annex the Occupied Territories without dramatically changing the ethnic composition of Israel is considered a problem by mainstream Israeli politicians. Hence the open discussion of "transfer," i.e., ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
When racism is overt in discourse, law, and practice, can a state really be democratic?
By law, any political party that challenges this definition of the State of Israel, explicitly or implicitly, is barred from participating in elections for the Knesset, the Israeli national legislature. This was used to bar a political party that advocated equal rights for non-Jewish Israelis, on the grounds that the demand for "equal rights" was incompatible with Israel's status as "the state of the Jewish people."
Even within the 1967 borders of Israel, there is extensive, legal segregation. Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy land, or live, in about 90% of Israel. Building permits are difficult to obtain for non-Jewish Israelis, and since 1948, no Arab settlement within Israel has been granted a permit to expand its borders.
Politicians from the Labor party and Likud alike talk about the need to maintain a Jewish majority in Israel. How to annex the Occupied Territories without dramatically changing the ethnic composition of Israel is considered a problem by mainstream Israeli politicians. Hence the open discussion of "transfer," i.e., ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
When racism is overt in discourse, law, and practice, can a state really be democratic?
"This was used to bar a political party that advocated equal rights for non-Jewish Israelis"
Non-Jews have the same rights, as Jews in Israel, including voting and running for office. There is an Arab minister in the Israeli cabinet and several Arab representatives in the Knesset. There are many non-Jews serving in the IDF including several high-ranking officers. Please name Jews in position of power in Arab countries, I’m afraid you won't find any, and it's not because there aren't Jews in Arab countries, mind you.
"The State of Israel is defined as 'the state of the Jewish people'..."
That is no secret; the state of Israel was established as a safe haven for Jews after WW2. It is still a democratic state since it grants all rights equally to all its citizens.
"Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy land, or live, in about 90% of Israel"
Where did you get that? Non-Jews can live everywhere in Israel, and buy land, have you ever heard of the Orient House?
However, the penalty in the Palestinian Authority for selling land to Jews is death. 6 land dealers were executed in '99 after being convicted.
Non-Jews have the same rights, as Jews in Israel, including voting and running for office. There is an Arab minister in the Israeli cabinet and several Arab representatives in the Knesset. There are many non-Jews serving in the IDF including several high-ranking officers. Please name Jews in position of power in Arab countries, I’m afraid you won't find any, and it's not because there aren't Jews in Arab countries, mind you.
"The State of Israel is defined as 'the state of the Jewish people'..."
That is no secret; the state of Israel was established as a safe haven for Jews after WW2. It is still a democratic state since it grants all rights equally to all its citizens.
"Non-Jewish Israelis cannot buy land, or live, in about 90% of Israel"
Where did you get that? Non-Jews can live everywhere in Israel, and buy land, have you ever heard of the Orient House?
However, the penalty in the Palestinian Authority for selling land to Jews is death. 6 land dealers were executed in '99 after being convicted.
No; I'm not saying Said doesn't believe what he says he believes.
I'm just pointing out some of the things that he believes in that I find abhorrent and evil : celebrating the murder of innocent civilians, etc.
The IDF doesn't murder innocent civilians. Some Islamists might get caught in their crossfire, but since most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action.
Murder and accidental killing aren't morally equivalent.
I'm just pointing out some of the things that he believes in that I find abhorrent and evil : celebrating the murder of innocent civilians, etc.
The IDF doesn't murder innocent civilians. Some Islamists might get caught in their crossfire, but since most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action.
Murder and accidental killing aren't morally equivalent.
"The IDF doesn't murder innocent civilians"
You obviously do not know the history of the IDF and especailly when Sharon was the head of it. There is a plethora of information on Sharon being a war criminal, who allowed the genocide of up to two thousand refugees in a two night span. But start first here for a bio of Sharon:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/190257.stm
Then you can find plenty of other information, about the problems with the IDF.
You obviously do not know the history of the IDF and especailly when Sharon was the head of it. There is a plethora of information on Sharon being a war criminal, who allowed the genocide of up to two thousand refugees in a two night span. But start first here for a bio of Sharon:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/190257.stm
Then you can find plenty of other information, about the problems with the IDF.
Bullshit...
I aparrently have to repeat one of the things I said, since you didn't get them the first time.
"Most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action. "
So who's the war criminal? Not Arafat, who allows all the suicide bombers to be indoctrinated, recruited, packed with explosives and sent to murder people on their way to a promised paradise of virgins, etc?
Calling the killing of 2000 people genocide is a dispicable comment. 2000 people being killed is certainly horriffic, but it's not genocide, not to mention that it was hundreds killed, not thousands, even according to the anti-Israel article you linked to, and they weren't civilians. 9/11 pales in significance when compared to the only nearly successful true genocide : the Holocaust. But I suppose if killing over 6 million Jews (plus many homosexuals and gypsies) is your idea of a successful battle, then it's not horriffic at all.
I know the history of the IDF. It's you who make up lies about it. Sharon is no war criminal. Your claim of a plethora of information is just misleading half truths and libel: http://www.adl.org/presrele/islme%5F62/4119%5F62.asp Case closed. There was a massacre, but it wasn't by Israeli, or IDF-allied forces, but by Lebanese forces! That's the best smoking gun you can find?
I aparrently have to repeat one of the things I said, since you didn't get them the first time.
"Most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action. "
So who's the war criminal? Not Arafat, who allows all the suicide bombers to be indoctrinated, recruited, packed with explosives and sent to murder people on their way to a promised paradise of virgins, etc?
Calling the killing of 2000 people genocide is a dispicable comment. 2000 people being killed is certainly horriffic, but it's not genocide, not to mention that it was hundreds killed, not thousands, even according to the anti-Israel article you linked to, and they weren't civilians. 9/11 pales in significance when compared to the only nearly successful true genocide : the Holocaust. But I suppose if killing over 6 million Jews (plus many homosexuals and gypsies) is your idea of a successful battle, then it's not horriffic at all.
I know the history of the IDF. It's you who make up lies about it. Sharon is no war criminal. Your claim of a plethora of information is just misleading half truths and libel: http://www.adl.org/presrele/islme%5F62/4119%5F62.asp Case closed. There was a massacre, but it wasn't by Israeli, or IDF-allied forces, but by Lebanese forces! That's the best smoking gun you can find?
I cited the BBC Bill, if that is not a reliable source I would like to know what is. Its not like I got my resources from the KKK now is it?
Sharon was found responsible for the massacre, this is true. You know who found him "indirectly responsible though? An Israeli governmental investigation. It would be pretty tough to claim that their findings were due to anti-Israeli sentiment now wouldn't it.
There was never a trial though, do you know why?
It is because the US used its vetoeing power on the security council to get them out of this mess. But the massive demonstrations by Israelis themselves forced the war pig to resign.
"to the only nearly successful true genocide : the Holocaust."
Bill, I really really wish this were true, but of course its not. History Bill read up, you are sounding stupid now, the Holocaust in all its horror paled in comparison to other cases of genocide in the 20th century, if you take your claim further back you will seriously have a lot more difficulty. But Stalin for example killed 30 million people. That is five times the amount of people killed by Hitler.
I believe all together during that whole Lebanon mess 20,000 people were killed. Not too bad though for something so public. Oh yeah and most of them were civilians Bill.
Arafat, however, shady he is, is just that shady. War criminals like Sharon are not shady any more they are beyond that. Sharon is an enemy of peace, Arafat at worst could possibly not be ALL for peace. Although we know he has publically called for it time and time again. Arafat did sign the camp David accords, which oif course is a much bigger step in the direction of peace than anythign that Sharon has done.
"Most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action. "
They regard the terrorists as the people fighting for them against their oppressors. I am sure you know that since the military incursions into the west bank and Gaza which effectively undermined the PNA making them look powerless, the people have rallied to support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Thank Sharon for that, Destroying water manes, houses, civic buildings, dropping bombs on populated areas, blocking ambulances and medical aid, stealing funds, the list goes on and on bill. If you were in their shoes what would you think?
Sharon was found responsible for the massacre, this is true. You know who found him "indirectly responsible though? An Israeli governmental investigation. It would be pretty tough to claim that their findings were due to anti-Israeli sentiment now wouldn't it.
There was never a trial though, do you know why?
It is because the US used its vetoeing power on the security council to get them out of this mess. But the massive demonstrations by Israelis themselves forced the war pig to resign.
"to the only nearly successful true genocide : the Holocaust."
Bill, I really really wish this were true, but of course its not. History Bill read up, you are sounding stupid now, the Holocaust in all its horror paled in comparison to other cases of genocide in the 20th century, if you take your claim further back you will seriously have a lot more difficulty. But Stalin for example killed 30 million people. That is five times the amount of people killed by Hitler.
I believe all together during that whole Lebanon mess 20,000 people were killed. Not too bad though for something so public. Oh yeah and most of them were civilians Bill.
Arafat, however, shady he is, is just that shady. War criminals like Sharon are not shady any more they are beyond that. Sharon is an enemy of peace, Arafat at worst could possibly not be ALL for peace. Although we know he has publically called for it time and time again. Arafat did sign the camp David accords, which oif course is a much bigger step in the direction of peace than anythign that Sharon has done.
"Most of the Arabs in the disputed territories support the terrorists, expecially those areas where the suicide bombers come from that are the targets for IDF action. "
They regard the terrorists as the people fighting for them against their oppressors. I am sure you know that since the military incursions into the west bank and Gaza which effectively undermined the PNA making them look powerless, the people have rallied to support Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Thank Sharon for that, Destroying water manes, houses, civic buildings, dropping bombs on populated areas, blocking ambulances and medical aid, stealing funds, the list goes on and on bill. If you were in their shoes what would you think?
"I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian Childs existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do."
[ariel sharon, current Prime Minister, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956]
[ariel sharon, current Prime Minister, In an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956]
This supposed quote has been floating around the internet for some time. It is simply not true.
Where's your source? Where's this supposed audio tape?
Where's your source? Where's this supposed audio tape?
Zionism and the Jews
If the colonization of Palestine has been characterized by a series of depredations, we should take a moment to examine the attitude of the Zionist movement not only toward its Palestinian victims (to which we shall return), but toward the Jews themselves.
Herzl himself wrote of the Jews in the following fashion: ''I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism."[76] The youth organization of the Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair (young Guard) published the following: "A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline."[77] "The Jewish people," wrote Jabotinsky in the same vein, "is a very bad people; its neighbors hate it and rightly so ... its only salvation lies in a general immigration to the land of Israel."[78] The founders of Zionism despaired of combatting anti-Semitism and, paradoxically, regarded the anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived. Step by step, they assimilated the values of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, as the Zionist movement came to regard the anti-Semites themselves as their most reliable sponsors and protectors.
Theodor Herzl approached none other than Count Von Plehve, the author of the worst pogroms in Russia - the pogroms of Kishinev with the following proposition: "Help me to reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end."[79] Von Plehve agreed, and he undertook to finance the Zionist movement. He was later to complain to Herzl: 'The Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We were sympathetic to your Zionist movement as long as it worked toward emigration. You don't have to justify the movement to me. You are preaching to a convert."[80] Herzl and Weizmann offered to help guarantee Czarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those "noxious and subversive Anarcho- Bolshevik Jews."
As we have noted, the same appeal was made by the Zionists to the Sultan of Turkey, the Kaiser in Germany, to French imperialism and to the British Raj.
Zionism and Fascism
The history of Zionism - largely suppressed - is sordid.
Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his own Fascist bands.
When Menachem Begin became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies - at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.
Simon Petilura was a Ukranian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petilura's forces in their counter- revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution - a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters of the revolution.
Collaborating with the Nazis
This strategy of enlisting Europe's virulent Jew-haters, and of aligning with the most vicious movements and regimes as financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine, did not exclude the Nazis.
The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the Federation noted:
"...a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish national group.
"On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible...."[81] Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.
During this very Congress, Hitler announced a trade agreement with the WZO's Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking, thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist Organization broke the Jewish boycott and became the principal distributor of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the Ha'avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to receive monies from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very substantial quantity.
Embracing the S.S.
Consequently, the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the S.S. Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the S.S. Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into "two categories." The Jews he favored were the Zionists: "Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them."[82] In 1937, the Labor "socialist" Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the S.S. Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah.
Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann:
"Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs."[83] The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What can account for this incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe? The entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.
The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe's Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe's Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.
Sacrificing Europe's Jews
The correlative to the acts of collaboration with the Nazis throughout the 1930's was that when attempts to change the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe were contemplated in order to provide token refuge for persecuted Jews of Europe, it was the Zionists who actively organized to stop these efforts.
Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."[84] This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect select manpower to Palestine would be impeded. From 1933 to 1935, the WZO turned down two-thirds of all the German Jews who applied for immigration certificates.
Berel Katznelson, editor of the Labor Zionist Davar, described the "cruel criteria of Zionism:" German Jews were too old to bear children in Palestine, lacked trades for building a Zionist colony, didn't speak Hebrew and weren't Zionists. In place of these Jews facing extermination the WZO brought to Palestine 6,000 trained young Zionists from the United States, Britain and other safe countries. Worse than this, the WZO not merely failed to seek any alternative for the Jews facing the Holocaust, the Zionist leadership opposed belligerently all efforts to find refuge for fleeing Jews.
As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.
This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in U.S. immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge. He stated:
"It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. ... It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws."[85]
Fighting Asylum
The entire Zionist establishment made its position unmistakable in its response to a motion by 227 British members of Parliament calling on the government to provide asylum in British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was prepared was as follows:
"His Majesty's Government issued some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits in favor of threatened Jewish families."[86] But even this token measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being pursued by over one hundred members of Parliament, a spokesperson for the Zionists announced that they opposed this motion because it did not contain preparations for the colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance.
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:
"The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No.' ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world. ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it."[87] Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition of European Jews, said:
"When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no!"[88]
Betraying the Resistance
In July 1944, the Slovakian Jewish leader Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel in a letter to Zionist officials charged with these "rescue organizations," proposed a series of measures to save the Jews scheduled for liquidation at Auschwitz. He offered exact mappings of the railways and urged the bombing of the tracks on which the Hungarian Jews were being transported to the crematoria.
He appealed for the bombing of the furnaces at Auschwitz, for the parachuting of ammunition to 80,000 prisoners, for the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up all the means of annihilation and thus end the cremation of 13,000 Jews every day.
Should the Allies refuse the organized and public demand by the "rescue organizations," Weissmandel proposed that the Zionists, who had funds and organization, obtain airplanes, recruit Jewish volunteers and carry out the sabotage.
Weissmandel was not alone. Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of allied Govemments - only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.
Here is the cri-de-coeur of Rabbi Weissmandel. Writing to the Zionists in July 1944 he asked incredulously.
"Why have you done nothing until now? Who is guilty of this frightful negligence? Are you not guilty, our Jewish brothers: you who have the greatest good fortune in the world - liberty?" "We send you," Rabbi Weissmandel wrote again - "this special message: to inform you that yesterday the Germans began the deportation of Jews from Hungary. ... The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end:
"Twelve thousand Jews - men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily.
" And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder?
"Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty.
"Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the coldbloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour.
"You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don't you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money? Murderers! Madmen! Who is it that gives charity: you who toss a few pennies from your safe homes, or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?"[90] No Zionist leader supported his request, nor did the Western capitalist regimes bomb a single concentration camp.
A Pact Against Hungary's Jews
The culmination of Zionist betrayal was the sacrifice of Hungary's Jews in a series of agreements between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany which first became known in 1953. Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a secret pact with Adolf Eichmann to "settle the Jewish question" in Hungary. This took place in 1944. The pact sealed the fate of 800,000 Jews.
It was to be revealed later that Kastner was under the direction of the Zionist leaders abroad when he made his agreement with Eichmann. The agreement entailed the saving of six hundred prominent Jews on the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of Hungarian Jewry.
When a survivor, Malchiel Greenwald, exposed the pact and denounced Kastner as a Nazi collaborator whose "deeds in Budapest cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews,"[91] Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders had drawn up the terms of the Kastner pact.
The Israeli Court came to the following conclusion:
"The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand."[92] The court declared that the imperative condition of this pact was that neither Kastner nor the Zionist leaders would interfere in the action of the Nazis against the Jews. These leaders undertook not only to eschew interference, but they agreed they would not, in the words of the Israeli court, "hamper them in the extermination." "Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna.
Kastner's duties were part and parcel of the S.S. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner."[93]
Saving Nazis, Not Jews
It is not surprising that it was to be revealed that Kastner intervened to save S.S. General Kurt Becher from being tried for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of the deal with the Zionists in 1944. He was also an S.S. Major in Poland, a member of the Death Corps "that worked around the clock killing Jews." "Becher distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia."[94] He was appointed Commissar of all Nazi concentration camps by Heinrich Himmler.
What happened to him? He became president of many corporations and headed up the sale of wheat to Israel. His corporation, the Cologne-Handel Gesselschaft, did extensive business with the Israeli government.
A Military Pact with Nazism
On January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern proposed a formal military pact between the National Military Organization (NMO), of which Yitzhak Shamir, the current Prime Minister of Israel, was a prominent leader, and the Nazi Third Reich. This proposal became known as the Ankara document, having been discovered after the war in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. It states the following:
"The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries. ...
"The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
"1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
"2. Cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible and
"3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
"Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition that the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side."[95]
Zionism's Perfidy
Zionism's perfidy - the betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust - was the culmination of their attempt to identify the interests of the Jews with those of the established order. Today, the Zionists join their state to the enforcement arm of U.S. imperialism - from the death squads of Latin America to the covert operations of the C.I.A. on four continents.
This sordid history is rooted in the demoralization of the founders of Zionism, who rejected the possibility of overcoming anti- Semitism through popular struggle and social revolution. Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann chose the wrong side of the barricades - that of state power, class domination and exploitative rule. They propounded a putative disjunction between emancipation from persecution and the necessity of social change. They fully understood that the cultivation of anti- Semitism and the persecution of the Jews were the work of the very ruling class from whom they curried favor.
In seeking the sponsorship of the anti-Semites themselves, they revealed several motives: the worship of power with which they associated strength; a desire to end Jewish "weakness" and vulnerability, ceasing to be perpetual outsiders.
This sensibility was a short step to assimilating the values and ideas of the Jew-haters themselves. The Jews, the Zionists wrote, were indeed an undisciplined, subversive, dissident people, worthy of the scorn they had earned. The Zionists catered shamelessly to racist Jew-hatred. Worshipping power, they appealed to the anti-Semitic desire of the von Plehves and the Himmlers to be rid of a victim people long radicalized by persecution, a people who filled the ranks of revolutionary movements and whose suffering drew their best minds to intellectual ferment offensive to established values.
The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes which menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the enterprise.
But European Jewry had never manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe movement among the Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their birth free of discrimination or to escape persecution by emigrating to bourgeois democracies perceived as more tolerant.
Zionism, therefore, could never answer the needs or aspirations of the Jews. The moment of truth came when persecution gave way to physical extermination. Put to the ultimate and sole test of their real relationship to Jewish survival, the Zionists did not merely fail to lead resistance or defend the Jews, they actively sabotaged Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi economy. They sought, even then, the sponsorship of the mass murderers themselves, not merely because the Third Reich appeared powerful enough to impose a Zionist colony, but because the Nazi practices were consonant with Zionist assumptions.
There was a common ground between the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal of Shamir's National Military Organization to form a state in Palestine on a "national totalitarian basis." Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his last work, "The Jewish War Front," (l940) wrote of his plans for the Palestinian people:
"Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer."[96]
Jabotinsky's remarkable declaration in "The Jewish War Front" synthesizes Zionist thought and its moral bankruptcy. The slaughter of the Jews gave Zionism "great moral authority" - For what? "For calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs.' The lesson of Nazi destruction of the Jews was that it was permissible now for Zionists to visit the same fate upon the entire Palestinian population.
Seven years later, the Zionists emulated the Nazis, whose backing they sought and even at times achieved, and they covered bleeding Palestine in multiple Lidices,[97] driving 800,000 people into exile.
The Zionists approached the Nazis in the same spirit they had Von Plehve, acting on the perverse notion that Jew-hatred was useful. Their purpose was not rescue, but forced conscription of the select few - the rest to be consigned to their agonizing fate.
Zionism sought bodies with which to colonize Palestine and preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any rescue that might settle Jews elsewhere.
If ever a people could be expected to grasp the meaning of persecution, the pain of being perpetual refugees and the humiliation of slander, it ought to have been the Jews.
In place of compassion, the Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new genocide against the Palestinian people, cloaking themselves, with savage irony, in the collective shroud of the Holocaust.
NOTES
76-Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 6. Cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983) p. 6.
77-From "Our Shomer 'Weltanschauung,"' Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936. Originally published in 1917, Brenner, Zionism, p. 22.
78-Brenner, The Iron Wall.
79-lbid., p. 14.
80-lbid.
81-Brenner, Zionism, p. 48.
82-lbid., p. 85.
83-lbid., p. 99.
84-lbid., p. 149.
85-lbid.
86-Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain's chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.
87-Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission in London, July 1937. Cited in Yahya, p. 55.
88- Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. Ibid., p. 56.
89-lbid., p. 53.
90-lbid., pp. 59-60.
91-lbid., p. 58.
92-Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem. Ibid., p. 58.
93-Ibid. p. 59.
94-Ben Hecht, Perfidy, (New York: 1961), pp. 58-59. Ibid., p. 60.
95-"Proposal of the National Military Organization - Irgun Zvai Leumi - Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the N.M.O. in the War on the side of Germany." Original text found in David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics. 1889-1945. (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1974), pp. 315-317, Brenner. Zionism, p. 267.
96-Brenner, The Iron Wall, p. 107.
97-Lidice was a Czech village razed to the ground by the S.S. It became a symbol of Nazi brutality and was singled out as a war crime during the Nuremberg Trials.
If the colonization of Palestine has been characterized by a series of depredations, we should take a moment to examine the attitude of the Zionist movement not only toward its Palestinian victims (to which we shall return), but toward the Jews themselves.
Herzl himself wrote of the Jews in the following fashion: ''I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to 'combat' anti-Semitism."[76] The youth organization of the Zionists, Hashomer Hatzair (young Guard) published the following: "A Jew is a caricature of a normal, natural human being, both physically and spiritually. As an individual in society he revolts and throws off the harness of social obligations, knows no order nor discipline."[77] "The Jewish people," wrote Jabotinsky in the same vein, "is a very bad people; its neighbors hate it and rightly so ... its only salvation lies in a general immigration to the land of Israel."[78] The founders of Zionism despaired of combatting anti-Semitism and, paradoxically, regarded the anti-Semites themselves as allies, because of a shared desire to remove the Jews from the countries in which they lived. Step by step, they assimilated the values of Jew-hatred and anti-Semitism, as the Zionist movement came to regard the anti-Semites themselves as their most reliable sponsors and protectors.
Theodor Herzl approached none other than Count Von Plehve, the author of the worst pogroms in Russia - the pogroms of Kishinev with the following proposition: "Help me to reach the land [Palestine] sooner and the revolt [against Czarist rule] will end."[79] Von Plehve agreed, and he undertook to finance the Zionist movement. He was later to complain to Herzl: 'The Jews have been joining the revolutionary parties. We were sympathetic to your Zionist movement as long as it worked toward emigration. You don't have to justify the movement to me. You are preaching to a convert."[80] Herzl and Weizmann offered to help guarantee Czarist interests in Palestine and to rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those "noxious and subversive Anarcho- Bolshevik Jews."
As we have noted, the same appeal was made by the Zionists to the Sultan of Turkey, the Kaiser in Germany, to French imperialism and to the British Raj.
Zionism and Fascism
The history of Zionism - largely suppressed - is sordid.
Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his own Fascist bands.
When Menachem Begin became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies - at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.
Simon Petilura was a Ukranian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky negotiated an alliance with Petilura, proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petilura's forces in their counter- revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution - a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters of the revolution.
Collaborating with the Nazis
This strategy of enlisting Europe's virulent Jew-haters, and of aligning with the most vicious movements and regimes as financial and military patrons of a Zionist colony in Palestine, did not exclude the Nazis.
The Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933. In it the Federation noted:
"...a rebirth of national life such as is occurring in German life ... must also take place in the Jewish national group.
"On the foundation of the new [Nazi] state which has established the principle of race, we wish so to fit our community into the total structure so that for us, too, in the sphere assigned to us, fruitful activity for the Fatherland is possible...."[81] Far from repudiating this policy, the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.
During this very Congress, Hitler announced a trade agreement with the WZO's Anglo-Palestine Bank, breaking, thereby, the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime at a time when the German economy was extremely vulnerable. It was the height of the Depression and people were wheeling barrels full of worthless German Marks. The World Zionist Organization broke the Jewish boycott and became the principal distributor of Nazi goods throughout the Middle East and Northern Europe. They established the Ha'avara, which was a bank in Palestine designed to receive monies from the German-Jewish bourgeoisie, with which sums Nazi goods were purchased in very substantial quantity.
Embracing the S.S.
Consequently, the Zionists brought Baron Von Mildenstein of the S.S. Security Service to Palestine for a six-month visit in support of Zionism. This visit led to a twelve-part report by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, in Der Angriff (The Assault) in 1934 praising Zionism. Goebbels ordered a medallion struck with the Swastika on one side, and on the other, the Zionist Star of David. In May 1935, Reinhardt Heydrich, the chief of the S.S. Security Service, wrote an article in which he separated Jews into "two categories." The Jews he favored were the Zionists: "Our good wishes together with our official good will go with them."[82] In 1937, the Labor "socialist" Zionist militia, the Haganah (founded by Jabotinsky) sent an agent (Feivel Polkes) to Berlin offering to spy for the S.S. Security Service in exchange for the release of Jewish wealth for Zionist colonization. Adolf Eichmann was invited to Palestine as the guest of the Haganah.
Feivel Polkes informed Eichmann:
"Jewish nationalist circles were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs."[83] The list of acts of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis goes on and on. What can account for this incredible willingness of Zionist leaders to betray the Jews of Europe? The entire rationale for the state of Israel offered by its apologists has been that it was intended to be the refuge of Jews facing persecution.
The Zionists, to the contrary, saw any effort to rescue Europe's Jews not as the fulfilment of their political purpose but as a threat to their entire movement. If Europe's Jews were saved, they would wish to go elsewhere and the rescue operation would have nothing to do with the Zionist project of conquering Palestine.
Sacrificing Europe's Jews
The correlative to the acts of collaboration with the Nazis throughout the 1930's was that when attempts to change the immigration laws of the United States and Western Europe were contemplated in order to provide token refuge for persecuted Jews of Europe, it was the Zionists who actively organized to stop these efforts.
Ben Gurion informed a meeting of Labor Zionists in Great Britain in 1938: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative."[84] This obsession with colonizing Palestine and overwhelming the Arabs led the Zionist movement to oppose any rescue of the Jews facing extermination, because the ability to deflect select manpower to Palestine would be impeded. From 1933 to 1935, the WZO turned down two-thirds of all the German Jews who applied for immigration certificates.
Berel Katznelson, editor of the Labor Zionist Davar, described the "cruel criteria of Zionism:" German Jews were too old to bear children in Palestine, lacked trades for building a Zionist colony, didn't speak Hebrew and weren't Zionists. In place of these Jews facing extermination the WZO brought to Palestine 6,000 trained young Zionists from the United States, Britain and other safe countries. Worse than this, the WZO not merely failed to seek any alternative for the Jews facing the Holocaust, the Zionist leadership opposed belligerently all efforts to find refuge for fleeing Jews.
As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in their millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to "study" the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine.
This is the same Rabbi Wise who, in 1938, in his capacity as leader of the American Jewish Congress, wrote a letter in which he opposed any change in U.S. immigration laws which would enable Jews to find refuge. He stated:
"It may interest you to know that some weeks ago the representatives of all the leading Jewish organizations met in conference. ... It was decided that no Jewish organization would, at this time, sponsor a bill which would in any way alter the immigration laws."[85]
Fighting Asylum
The entire Zionist establishment made its position unmistakable in its response to a motion by 227 British members of Parliament calling on the government to provide asylum in British territories for persecuted Jews. The meager undertaking which was prepared was as follows:
"His Majesty's Government issued some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits in favor of threatened Jewish families."[86] But even this token measure was opposed by the Zionist leaders. At a Parliamentary meeting on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being pursued by over one hundred members of Parliament, a spokesperson for the Zionists announced that they opposed this motion because it did not contain preparations for the colonization of Palestine. This was a consistent stance.
Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who had arranged the Balfour Declaration and was to become the first president of Israel, made this Zionist policy very explicit:
"The hopes of Europe's six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked: 'Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?' I replied, 'No.' ... From the depths of the tragedy I want to save ... young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world. ... Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it."[87] Yitzhak Gruenbaum, the chairperson of the committee set up by the Zionists, nominally to investigate the condition of European Jews, said:
"When they come to us with two plans - the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land - I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land. The more said about the slaughter of our people, the greater the minimization of our efforts to strengthen and promote the Hebraisation of the land. If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Karen Hayesod [United Jewish Appeal] to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No. And once again no!"[88]
Betraying the Resistance
In July 1944, the Slovakian Jewish leader Rabbi Dov Michael Weissmandel in a letter to Zionist officials charged with these "rescue organizations," proposed a series of measures to save the Jews scheduled for liquidation at Auschwitz. He offered exact mappings of the railways and urged the bombing of the tracks on which the Hungarian Jews were being transported to the crematoria.
He appealed for the bombing of the furnaces at Auschwitz, for the parachuting of ammunition to 80,000 prisoners, for the parachuting of saboteurs to blow up all the means of annihilation and thus end the cremation of 13,000 Jews every day.
Should the Allies refuse the organized and public demand by the "rescue organizations," Weissmandel proposed that the Zionists, who had funds and organization, obtain airplanes, recruit Jewish volunteers and carry out the sabotage.
Weissmandel was not alone. Throughout the late thirties and forties, Jewish spokespersons in Europe cried out for help, for public campaigns, for organized resistance, for demonstrations to force the hand of allied Govemments - only to be met not merely by Zionist silence but by active Zionist sabotage of the meager efforts which were proposed or prepared in Great Britain and the United States.
Here is the cri-de-coeur of Rabbi Weissmandel. Writing to the Zionists in July 1944 he asked incredulously.
"Why have you done nothing until now? Who is guilty of this frightful negligence? Are you not guilty, our Jewish brothers: you who have the greatest good fortune in the world - liberty?" "We send you," Rabbi Weissmandel wrote again - "this special message: to inform you that yesterday the Germans began the deportation of Jews from Hungary. ... The deported ones go to Auschwitz to be put to death by cyanide gas. This is the schedule, of Auschwitz from yesterday to the end:
"Twelve thousand Jews - men, women and children, old men, infants, healthy and sick ones, are to be suffocated daily.
" And you, our brothers in Palestine, in all the countries of freedom, and you ministers of all the Kingdoms, how do you keep silent in the face of this great murder?
"Silent while thousands upon thousands, reaching now to six million Jews, are murdered? And silent now, while tens of thousands are still being murdered and waiting to be murdered? Their destroyed hearts cry out to you for help as they bewail your cruelty.
"Brutal, you are and murderers, too, you are, because of the coldbloodedness of the silence in which you watch, because you sit with folded arms and do nothing, although you could stop or delay the murder of Jews at this very hour.
"You, our brothers, sons of Israel, are you insane? Don't you know the hell around us? For whom are you saving your money? Murderers! Madmen! Who is it that gives charity: you who toss a few pennies from your safe homes, or we who give our blood in the depths of hell?"[90] No Zionist leader supported his request, nor did the Western capitalist regimes bomb a single concentration camp.
A Pact Against Hungary's Jews
The culmination of Zionist betrayal was the sacrifice of Hungary's Jews in a series of agreements between the Zionist movement and Nazi Germany which first became known in 1953. Dr. Rudolph Kastner of the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee in Budapest signed a secret pact with Adolf Eichmann to "settle the Jewish question" in Hungary. This took place in 1944. The pact sealed the fate of 800,000 Jews.
It was to be revealed later that Kastner was under the direction of the Zionist leaders abroad when he made his agreement with Eichmann. The agreement entailed the saving of six hundred prominent Jews on the condition that silence was maintained about the fate of Hungarian Jewry.
When a survivor, Malchiel Greenwald, exposed the pact and denounced Kastner as a Nazi collaborator whose "deeds in Budapest cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews,"[91] Greenwald was sued by the Israeli government, whose leaders had drawn up the terms of the Kastner pact.
The Israeli Court came to the following conclusion:
"The sacrifice of the majority of the Jews, in order to rescue the prominents was the basic element in the agreement between Kastner and the Nazis. This agreement fixed the division of the nation into two unequal camps, a small fragment of prominents, whom the Nazis promised Kastner to save, on the one hand, and the great majority of Hungarian Jews whom the Nazis designated for death, on the other hand."[92] The court declared that the imperative condition of this pact was that neither Kastner nor the Zionist leaders would interfere in the action of the Nazis against the Jews. These leaders undertook not only to eschew interference, but they agreed they would not, in the words of the Israeli court, "hamper them in the extermination." "Collaboration between the Jewish Agency Rescue Committee and the exterminators of the Jews was solidified in Budapest and Vienna.
Kastner's duties were part and parcel of the S.S. In addition to its Extermination Department and Looting Department, the Nazi S.S. opened a Rescue Department headed by Kastner."[93]
Saving Nazis, Not Jews
It is not surprising that it was to be revealed that Kastner intervened to save S.S. General Kurt Becher from being tried for war crimes. Becher was one of the leading negotiators of the deal with the Zionists in 1944. He was also an S.S. Major in Poland, a member of the Death Corps "that worked around the clock killing Jews." "Becher distinguished himself as a Jew slaughterer in Poland and Russia."[94] He was appointed Commissar of all Nazi concentration camps by Heinrich Himmler.
What happened to him? He became president of many corporations and headed up the sale of wheat to Israel. His corporation, the Cologne-Handel Gesselschaft, did extensive business with the Israeli government.
A Military Pact with Nazism
On January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern proposed a formal military pact between the National Military Organization (NMO), of which Yitzhak Shamir, the current Prime Minister of Israel, was a prominent leader, and the Nazi Third Reich. This proposal became known as the Ankara document, having been discovered after the war in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. It states the following:
"The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries. ...
"The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
"1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
"2. Cooperation between the new Germany and renewed folkish-national Hebraium would be possible and
"3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
"Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition that the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side."[95]
Zionism's Perfidy
Zionism's perfidy - the betrayal of the victims of the Holocaust - was the culmination of their attempt to identify the interests of the Jews with those of the established order. Today, the Zionists join their state to the enforcement arm of U.S. imperialism - from the death squads of Latin America to the covert operations of the C.I.A. on four continents.
This sordid history is rooted in the demoralization of the founders of Zionism, who rejected the possibility of overcoming anti- Semitism through popular struggle and social revolution. Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann chose the wrong side of the barricades - that of state power, class domination and exploitative rule. They propounded a putative disjunction between emancipation from persecution and the necessity of social change. They fully understood that the cultivation of anti- Semitism and the persecution of the Jews were the work of the very ruling class from whom they curried favor.
In seeking the sponsorship of the anti-Semites themselves, they revealed several motives: the worship of power with which they associated strength; a desire to end Jewish "weakness" and vulnerability, ceasing to be perpetual outsiders.
This sensibility was a short step to assimilating the values and ideas of the Jew-haters themselves. The Jews, the Zionists wrote, were indeed an undisciplined, subversive, dissident people, worthy of the scorn they had earned. The Zionists catered shamelessly to racist Jew-hatred. Worshipping power, they appealed to the anti-Semitic desire of the von Plehves and the Himmlers to be rid of a victim people long radicalized by persecution, a people who filled the ranks of revolutionary movements and whose suffering drew their best minds to intellectual ferment offensive to established values.
The dirty secret of Zionist history is that Zionism was threatened by the Jews themselves. Defending the Jewish people from persecution meant organizing resistance to the regimes which menaced them. But these regimes embodied the imperial order which comprised the only social force willing or able to impose a settler colony on the Palestinian people. Hence, the Zionists needed the persecution of the Jews to persuade Jews to become colonizers afar, and they needed the persecutors to sponsor the enterprise.
But European Jewry had never manifested any interest in colonizing Palestine. Zionism remained a fringe movement among the Jews, who aspired to live in the countries of their birth free of discrimination or to escape persecution by emigrating to bourgeois democracies perceived as more tolerant.
Zionism, therefore, could never answer the needs or aspirations of the Jews. The moment of truth came when persecution gave way to physical extermination. Put to the ultimate and sole test of their real relationship to Jewish survival, the Zionists did not merely fail to lead resistance or defend the Jews, they actively sabotaged Jewish efforts to boycott the Nazi economy. They sought, even then, the sponsorship of the mass murderers themselves, not merely because the Third Reich appeared powerful enough to impose a Zionist colony, but because the Nazi practices were consonant with Zionist assumptions.
There was a common ground between the Nazis and the Zionists, expressed not merely in the proposal of Shamir's National Military Organization to form a state in Palestine on a "national totalitarian basis." Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his last work, "The Jewish War Front," (l940) wrote of his plans for the Palestinian people:
"Since we have this great moral authority for calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. Herr Hitler has recently been enhancing the popularity of population transfer."[96]
Jabotinsky's remarkable declaration in "The Jewish War Front" synthesizes Zionist thought and its moral bankruptcy. The slaughter of the Jews gave Zionism "great moral authority" - For what? "For calmly envisaging the exodus of Arabs.' The lesson of Nazi destruction of the Jews was that it was permissible now for Zionists to visit the same fate upon the entire Palestinian population.
Seven years later, the Zionists emulated the Nazis, whose backing they sought and even at times achieved, and they covered bleeding Palestine in multiple Lidices,[97] driving 800,000 people into exile.
The Zionists approached the Nazis in the same spirit they had Von Plehve, acting on the perverse notion that Jew-hatred was useful. Their purpose was not rescue, but forced conscription of the select few - the rest to be consigned to their agonizing fate.
Zionism sought bodies with which to colonize Palestine and preferred Jewish corpses in their millions to any rescue that might settle Jews elsewhere.
If ever a people could be expected to grasp the meaning of persecution, the pain of being perpetual refugees and the humiliation of slander, it ought to have been the Jews.
In place of compassion, the Zionists celebrated the persecution of others, even as they first betrayed the Jews and then degraded them. They selected a victim people of their own on whom to inflict a conquering design. They aligned the surviving Jews with a new genocide against the Palestinian people, cloaking themselves, with savage irony, in the collective shroud of the Holocaust.
NOTES
76-Marvin Lowenthal, ed., The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, p. 6. Cited in Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1983) p. 6.
77-From "Our Shomer 'Weltanschauung,"' Hashomer Hatzair, December 1936. Originally published in 1917, Brenner, Zionism, p. 22.
78-Brenner, The Iron Wall.
79-lbid., p. 14.
80-lbid.
81-Brenner, Zionism, p. 48.
82-lbid., p. 85.
83-lbid., p. 99.
84-lbid., p. 149.
85-lbid.
86-Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, Britain's chief Rabbi during World War II. Faris Yahya, Zionist Relations with Nazi Germany, (Beirut, Lebanon: Palestine Research Center, January 1978), p. 53.
87-Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his testimony before the Peel Commission in London, July 1937. Cited in Yahya, p. 55.
88- Yitzhak Gruenbaum was chairperson of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee. Excerpted from a speech made in 1943. Ibid., p. 56.
89-lbid., p. 53.
90-lbid., pp. 59-60.
91-lbid., p. 58.
92-Judgment given on June 22, 1955, Protocol of Criminal Case 124/53 in District Court, Jerusalem. Ibid., p. 58.
93-Ibid. p. 59.
94-Ben Hecht, Perfidy, (New York: 1961), pp. 58-59. Ibid., p. 60.
95-"Proposal of the National Military Organization - Irgun Zvai Leumi - Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the N.M.O. in the War on the side of Germany." Original text found in David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics. 1889-1945. (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1974), pp. 315-317, Brenner. Zionism, p. 267.
96-Brenner, The Iron Wall, p. 107.
97-Lidice was a Czech village razed to the ground by the S.S. It became a symbol of Nazi brutality and was singled out as a war crime during the Nuremberg Trials.
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