The Palestinians: Help! (by Latuff)

Here is a link to a British online new service ...http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,720353,00.html Here you can see, who the land realy belongs to, this is not Anti simetics, it's the facts

The study of history is the study of how we got here. Nothing in the modern world can be understood without a full knowledge of the evolution of causes and effects that produced it, or without a working theory of human nature and society. Let us consider the situation of the people of the Middle East, Muslim, Christian, and Jew.

Why weren’t the people of the region simply granted the independence they were promised? Why did the Western powers have to carve up the Arab world and place it under their domination? Zionism, the belief that Jews could not and should not live happily in the various countries where they were born, but should return to Palestine and there create a Jewish state, had arisen among many East European Jews in the late nineteenth century. It was a tribalistic, racist doctrine akin to Hitler’s belief the Germany should be an Aryan nation free of Jews, gypsies, and slavs. Most Jews in the world, including those in Palestine and America, wanted nothing to do with Zionism because they could anticipate the immense antipathy it would create between Jew and gentile—as it has done.

There was a very simple problem with the British-American plan. The Jews were a small minority among the 700,000 Christians and Muslims in Palestine and owned only 3% of the land. There was no way that a Jewish state could be established there if Britain and America’s other promises and principles were to be upheld. The British and French divided and ruled the Arab-speaking world. Greater Syria, including Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and part of Iraq, was arbitrarily divided into little countries each controlled under a British or French “mandate”. They imported “rulers” from the Hashemite kingdom of Mecca, thinking that since they were supposed descendants of Mohammed, they would have some authority even though chosen by the Western overlords. From that time until now, these states have been creatures of the West and have had the rulers that the West wanted or allowed them to have. Britain’s Mandate over Palestine provided the necessary cover for the mass importation of Jews and their acquisition of land and arms—all against the wishes of the population of Palestine and the surrounding countries. Knowing full well that the Zionist Jews meant to dispossess and control them, the Palestinian people revolted at times, but were suppressed by British soldiers and Zionist irregulars. President Wilson’s King-Crane commission, in 1919, reported that “The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine...the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a “right” to Palestine, based on an occupation of two thousand years ago, can hardly be considered.”

In the 1930s, the British allowed a mass immigration of Jews and there were many terrorist attacks against non-Jews by armed Jewish gangs. In 1934, the British proposed that Palestine be ruled by a legislative council of 28 members on which the Arabs (both Christian and Muslim) would have fourteen seats and the Jews eight. The Arabs were willing to consider it, but the Jews and the British House of Commons rejected it, and this sparked off the Arab rebellion of 1936. The British, having some conscience, decided in 1939 that they had done enough to establish the “Jewish national home” and started to curb Jewish immigration. Enraged, Zionist terrorists proceeded to attack and kill British soldiers and officials so that the Brits began to withdraw and turned the problem over to the United Nations. At the opening of the London Conference on January 27, 1947, a statement was read by Jamal El-Husseini, vice-chairman of the Arab Higher Committee. It deserves to be quoted at length as a snapshot of this momentous time and as evidence that they Arab people knew then, as they know now, what was being done to them, and why:

"During the last 25 years, however, Palestine had been denied the right to self-government, in violation of those rights and pledges as well as the covenant of the League of Nations. An autocratic administration was set up with the primary aim of assisting the Jews in their invasion of Palestine. The Balfour Declaration on which this policy was based was a vague and one-sided encouragement made by Great Britain to alien Jews in the absence and complete ignorance of the Arab owners of the country.

Since 1918 the Jewish elements in Palestine had increased by enforced migration from 7 per cent to 33 per cent of the entire population...

During this period Jewish political claims had inflated from a modest spiritual home to the establishment of a Jewish state which they sought to enforce by the present campaign of terrorism. This had driven the Arabs to the point of exasperation, for they beheld that all the apprehensions they had expressed 25 years ago were being rapidly fulfilled.

Certain quarters had proposed that justice might be done if the country were partitioned between Arabs and Jews. The Arabs believed that such a proposal was an easy pretext for evading the difficulties of a problem that had been created by a gross injustice. The creation of an alien Jewish state in Palestine would mean a running sore that would undoubtedly become a permanent source of trouble in the Middle East, and would mean the destruction of Arab continuity and territorial sovereignty."

As quoted in The Palestine Diary by Robert John and Sami Hadawi (New World Press, NY, 1970)

Here in 2002, this running sore is getting ever more inflamed for the simple reason that radical Zionists insist on expanding the Jewish state into the West Bank and eventually expanding racist Israel to include all of mandatory Palestine.

Under pressure from the US, the UN, in 1948, decided to partition Palestine and create the new Jewish state of Israel. Jews, who still owned only 7% of Palestine, were given 55% of the land, but the Zionists wanted more land and less Palestinians. They planned and executed a vast ethnic cleansing operation under the cover of the 1947-49 war. The surrounding Arab states attacked only after and because the Zionists forced 300,000 people from their homes. Having lived under Turkish and then Western occupation, the Arabs had no significant military forces. The Zionists, on the other hand, had been preparing for war for decades and were well equipped and trained. Outnumbering all Arab soldiers by three to one, they proceeded to terrorize the Palestinian population, forcing 750,000 people from their homes and enlarging their state beyond the UN Mandate. They shelled towns and villages and committed many massacres of civilians including woman and children. Mass killings like the slaughter at Deir Yassin frightened many Palestinians into running away when they knew that the Jews were coming for them. The Zionists ended up with 78% of Palestine.

Britain and the United States carried out their promise to the Jews, but completely failed to honor their pledge to protect the rights of "Christians and all other non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” The Arabs tried to get the International Court of Justice to rule on the right of the UN to partition a country against the will of its people but were voted down—so much for Western promises and Arab rights, then as today. Today, over 80 years later, the West is still waging war against the non-Jewish people of Palestine and of the entire region.

The state of Israel, racist, illegitimate, and criminal as it was, may have been able to live in peace with the surrounding countries. However, the Israelis were not content with only part of ancient Greater Israel. They wanted it all. So in 1967, through a series of calculated provocations, they pushed the Egyptian leader Nassar into taking diplomatic steps that they could use as a pretext to take over more territory. They attacked and grabbed the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Sinai from Egypt. Knowing that they could never compete militarily with Israel, the Palestinians and Arab governments offered peace in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from these areas beginning in 1973. Sadat offered peace with Israel under generous terms in 1971 if only Israel would leave the Sinai. Israel refused and built more settlements there. Sadat knew they understood only one language, so he attacked the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in the Sinai with the limited purpose of forcing Israel to withdraw. It worked. When the PLO accepted a two-state solution in the mid 1970s, and UN resolutions demanded its implementation, Israel responded to this “peace offensive” by invading Lebanon in 1982 with the purpose of destroying the PLO. Israel killed 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese people, mostly civilians—just to avoid having to relinquish the West Bank. By 1988, the Palestinians realized that there was no international salvation for them. They started the largely non-violent Intifada I. Israel responded with brutal repression—but the first Intifida stimulated the talks that led to the Oslo accords. In Oslo, Israel tried to legitimize its apartheid model for dealing with the unwanted Palestinians. It offered the corrupt Arafat and his cronies all the perks of statehood if they would agree to run an orderly bantustan state-within-a-state. Israel promised the Palestinians that they would eventually have a state based on 242, but instead used the cover of the Oslo accords to double the settlement population in the West Bank, from 200,000 to 400,000. The Palestinians, initially hopeful for peace and a state in the ’67 borders, eventually realized that Oslo was just another Israeli ruse intended to forever deny them their basic human rights and forever imprison them in an Israeli-controlled collection of bantustans. Barak’s "generous offer" didn’t meet the minimum requirements for a viable solution as attested by no less than former president Jimmy Carter. To make matters worse, the Israelis elected a psychopath and war criminal, who himself purposefully triggered the second Intifada, to suppress Intifida II with ever greater violence. The recent Saudi offer, which added new concessions to UN Resolution 242, was ignored by the US and Israel—and Israel responded with more “targeted assassinations” in order to inflame the situation and stop another Arab “peace offensive”. When Palestinian terrorist groups, in consultation with European diplomats, decided suspend their attacks within Israel, Ariel Sharon responded by dropping a one-ton bomb in a densely populated neighborhood of Gaza, killing 16 people and 9 children.

I hope you get the point—Israel is not now, nor has ever been willing to trade any land for peace. It has instead used its considerable military might to destroy and chance for a peaceful, workable, two-state solution to this horrible conflict. Now that radicalized Muslims have decided to take this war to Israel’s Enabler—the USA, we in American and the rest of the world can no longer sit on the sidelines and hope for a good outcome from this 55 year Crusade and 35-year military ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Every human being has the moral responsibility to judge what has happened in Palestine, what is happening now, and how to create a just and lasting solution to this conflict.

As partisans love to attack the messenger, let me tell you who I am. I’m an American of English/German/Danish descent and Protestant upbringing. As a physician and a philosopher, my goal is to diagnose and eradicate moral/social pathology. I take the largest possible view of human social evolution and morality. I do not blame individuals for their actions, nor do I favor one group of persons over another. I seek to expose the false and pernicious ideas that produce violence and suffering, I do not hate or blame the victims whose brains they infect—no matter how evil their actions. I oppose all racism, religionism, culturism, and nationalism. We are not primarily Jews, Arabs, Israelis, Christians, Muslims, or Americans. We are all human beings, members of the same species living together on this planet Earth. Only false ideas separate us and put us in conflict. Like most Americans, I was raised to worship Israel as a bastion of freedom and moral superiority in a sea of evil Jew-hating, freedom-hating Arabs. However, my views slowly changed after living in the Middle East for 12 years and studying the history of the region. I came to realize that the root of the conflict there was Zionism. Zionism is plainly a form of racism. It is the doctrine that a certain racial/religious group, the Jews, have a right to create, protect, and expand a racist/religious “Jewish” state in Palestine by any means necessary. In practice, Zionism created the Jewish supremacist state called “Israel” accompanied by the ethnic cleansing of non-Jews, 55 years of war against the non-Jews of the surrounding countries, and a 35-year military occupation and slow ethnic cleansing of the Golan, West Bank and Gaza. America’s support of Zionism has put the lie to America’s image as an enlightened nation and international protector of human rights, and placed it in a state of war against all Muslims and Arabs. America’s religious prejudices and the tremendous influence of Jewry in America have drawn it into and now force it to continue this Ninth Crusade against the Islamic world.

Ask yourselves, Americans, why did you support the violent creation of the state of Israel, by Jews and for Jews, with no regard for the rights of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine? Why did you support the Zionists as they killed, terrorized and expelled 750,000 non-Jewish civilians from their homes in 1947 to 1949? Why did you support the Israeli invasion of Syria, Egypt, and the West Bank in 1967, the expulsion of another 500,000 non-Jews from these territories, and the 35-year military occupation? Why did you support the invasion of Lebanon and the murder of 20,000 people when the PLO had accepted UN Resolution 242 and agreed to end all violent action against the state of Israel? Why have you supported this Zionist/Israeli war against the people of Palestine and the surrounding countries for 55 years? If you are where I once was, you think that you know the answers to these questions--the same answers trumpeted in the media every day by American politicians, journalists, academics, and clergyman. I ask you to consider the possibility that you have been grossly misled. After all, the first casualty of war is truth, and the victors write the history. If you want to know the truth, you must look beyond your media and read revisionist (objective) histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. You must talk to Palestinians and other Arabs. You must open your eyes to the blatant racism of the “Jewish state”. You must open your eyes to the devastation Israel has wrought in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. If you have not done these things, then your knowledge consists only of the various pro-Israeli, pro-Western myths designed to support this Crusade against the infidels. In fact, I know that you don’t dare to investigate this matter, because you know, deep down, that what you will discover will shake your faith in America and its values to their very core.

If you’ve read this far, my arguments and assertions about this conflict have shocked you, and you've been tempted to dismiss me as anti-Semitic racist. In fact, I have, by personal experience and great personal effort, deprogrammed myself from Zionist propaganda sufficiently to grasp our society's own unacknowledged Zionism: our pro-Israeli—anti-Arab racism. As African-Americans know all too well, suppressed racism is all the more powerful and controlling because those infected with it are unaware of it—they therefore act on these irrational feelings against their conscious intentions and principles. This is the case with Americans’ suppressed Zionism. In America, anti-Arab racism spews from the mouths of countless commentators and politicians. So hear me out. If you want peace on Earth, you’ve got to start by being completely honest with yourself and making sure that you have your facts straight. If you don't want to lose your own illusions about this conflict, don't read any further, for in this case, the facts are indisputable, clear, and compelling. The establishment and enlargement of the State of Israel was one of the greatest crimes against humanity of the twentieth century. This original aggression initiated 50 years of war in the Middle East that has distorted and impoverished the lives of all non-Jewish people in Palestine and the surrounding states. Various wars fought by Arabs to reverse this aggression, return hundreds of thousands of refugees to their homes, and retake stolen land have failed due to the overwhelming military might of Israel—supplied and supported by the United States of America. The forceful establishment of this fanatical Jewish state, along with America's pro-Israeli interventions in the region have been the dominant factor in the political evolution of the region; and the direct or indirect, necessary or sufficient cause of all the subsequent violent conflicts in the region, from the Iranian Revolution and the civil war in Lebanon to the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf War, and Al-Qaeda’s attacks against America. If there had been no Zionist-American Crusade, America could have nurtured democracy and prosperity in the emerging Arab states of the region, instead of warring against them.

We must take the long view—the historical perspective. For centuries, the Christian West has sought to wrest control of the Holy Land from the Arabs and Turks. In the early 20th century, the Arab world was just emerging from centuries of Turkish domination when the Western powers thrust a racist, expansionist Jewish state into its heart. The consequences could have been predicted. Fanatical Islam, slow to develop at first, is a completely understandable reaction to fanatical Zionism and its pitiless, unending victimization of the Palestinians and surrounding Arab countries. The Arab people, Christian and Muslim, became progressively more humiliated and angry as, with every passing year, the United States continued to support Israeli ethnic cleansing, expansionism, and occupation. The U.S. used its diplomatic strength in the UN to veto every attempt by the rest of the world to reign in the Israeli state. The U.S. gave, and still gives Arabs the

Contrary to popular mythology, it has been Israel, not the Arabs, that has evaded all attempts at a peaceful and just settlement, preferring always to expand its boundaries by creating facts on the ground and grinding down the Palestinians and other Arabs until they will agree to its terms. Israel has killed over 100,000 Arabs, mostly civlian, while losing 20,000 of its own, mostly soldiers. Israel continues, on a daily basis, to talk peace while building settlements between Palestinian communities in the West Bank and using all violent means that are politically feasible to drive the Palestinians out. The international community, bullied by the U.S., sits by silently as one of the century's most horrific episodes of ethnic cleansing continues with an unparalleled military occupation that imprisons millions of Palestinians in a violent racist nightmare and makes their lives unbearable. The hysterical pro-Israeli propaganda that assaults us from our televisions and newspapers is a necessary part of the cover-up of this ongoing crime against humanity.

That’s right. Americans have been fed a constant diet of lies and propaganda so long that they cannot even see reality when it stares them in the face. Zionists, whether American or Israeli, justify Israel’s ongoing violence against and military control over 4.5 million Palestinians with many rationalizations and lies. They claim that Arabs are inherently violent and anti-semitic. They claim that Arabs want to kill all Jews. These claims are partially true—but only because of the violence that Israel has committed and continues to commit. Zionists claim that Israel must retain _____ (fill in the Sinai, Southern Lebanon, Golan, West Bank, Gaza strip, etc.) for its own "security". In fact, Israel has enjoyed overwhelming military superiority since before 1947. It now has one of the world’s strongest armies and nuclear arsenals and the full backing of the United States of America. It has no security problem except its vulnerability to suicide attacks—which are the predictable and understandable result of its criminal 35-year occupation, humiliation, and ethnic cleansing of the inhabitants of Palestine. Notice that our press glosses over the reasons for the Arabs' hatred of the racist Israeli state and the U.S. government that supports it, preferring to dismiss it as irrational and uncaused, or by claiming that Arabs hate “freedom and democracy”. Lies are piled upon lies to in order to cover up and to justify Israel's crimes. Yet in spite of what Israel is and what it has done, every Arab country and every Palestinian group, including Hamas, has said that it will accept the existence of Israel, even as a racist Jewish state, if it will completely withdraw from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan and come to terms with the refugee problem it created. This is, after all, what UN Security Council Resolution 242 requires. That is precisely the outcome that Israel has been fighting to avoid for the last 35 years. Whenever the pressure to withdraw becomes too great, the Israelis strike out at the Palestinians of surrounding countries, thus assuring that a state of war continues to exist. The Arab League recently repeated its call for a withdrawal to the 1967 borders in exchange for peace and full diplomatic relations. But like all peace proposals to Israel, it has been swept aside. Israel wants land, not peace. In fact, Israel has never withdrawn from any land it conquered until forced to do so by violent opposition. Where Israel has been forced to withdraw, as with the Sinai and Lebanon, it has been rewarded with peace with those countries. It is obvious to all objective observers that Israel can achieve peace and security now only by withdrawing from all the territories it occupied in 1967. Israel should jump at the opportunity to obtain legitimacy in this way; for as long as the occupation continues, it remains a criminal state in a state of war with its neighbors. But, as Israel has demonstrated over and over again, it does not want peace; it wants land, it wants Greater Israel. Consider this: all the conflict in Palestine, all the terrorism and all the deaths since 1967 have been caused by Israel's attempts to hang onto East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan heights. It’s that simple. Israeli racism, belligerence, and military occupation are the problems in the Middle East today. The war in the Middle East continues because Israel and America want it to continue. They can put an end to the conflict today if they choose to do so by withdrawing completely and unconditionally to the 1967 borders. The war today is all about the Jewish settlements in the West Bank!

Had America taken a balanced, humanitarian view of the situation from the beginning, we wouldn’t be at war with the Arab world now. But against its own best interests, America has chosen war and has made Israel what it is—a shameless, belligerent, racist, mono-religious, criminal state—of the kind not generally accepted in this day and age. Just imagine the reaction if certain groups in America got their way, declared our country to be a Christian state, and killed or expelled most non-Christians? Of course, you’ve been told over and over that Israel is a democracy and therefore worthy of our support. Think about this and do some research. Is killing or expelling the undesirable majority of non-Jews to create a majority of Jews any way to found a democracy? Do you know the odds of a non-Jew immigrating to Israel? Try zero. In fact, the state of Israel has a law specifying that the non-Jewish population of Israel must never be more than a certain percentage! Arab citizens of Israel can vote, but they do not have full citizenship rights. Take a look at the gross double standard that exists for Jews vs. non-Jews in Israel. Non-Jews are not allowed to buy any property from Jews—as this would return "redeemed" land back to the goyim. Seventy thousand non-Jews live in 100 villages within Israel but not recognized by the Israeli state. They pay taxes but get no services, and all building is illegal. Non-Jews are not even allowed to live in many areas of Israel. Non-Jews are segregated for schooling, in schools with far inferior funding. Non-Jews have to adhere to a great number of Jewish religious laws. Non-Jews must all carry cards specifying their religion and ethnic origin. Everywhere you look in Israeli law and society you find this double standard. This is the democracy we’re supposed to love and support? This is apartheid, not democracy. How you have been fooled, America! Lastly, Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza effectively makes these areas part of the Israeli state. The difference in the treatment afforded to Jews (settlers) and non-Jews in these areas hardly needs to be mentioned. If we consider the West Bank as occupied territory instead of a part of the Jewish state, then we have the fact that the Israelis are violating nearly every rule in the Geneva Convention concerning the treatment of civilians in occupied territories! To believe that this racist and criminal state is OK because it is a “democracy” is not only wrong, but pernicious and dangerous. Shouldn’t we demand that Israel outlaw racism and discrimination as the U.S. has? Why not? Why don’t we shudder when we hear Israelis invoking the need to maintain the “Jewish character” of the state of Israel?

Why is it that e Americans, blinded by false information and religious/racial prejudice, have granted this Jewish racial state a moral carte blanche to discriminate against non-Jews and commit any atrocity. Like a psychopath who finds he can get away with anything, Israel has responded by acting with increasing recklessness, flaunting international law and abusing the Palestinians and people of the surrounding states as if they are not human beings. It killed 20,000 civilians in Lebanon, it slaughtered thousands of Egyptian prisoners of war, it attacked the USS Liberty, it tortures Arab prisoners, it has turned the West Bank into a concentration camp and a death camp. Yet Americans don’t care! The American media doesn’t even tell us what is happening! Not only has America never been an honest broker in the Middle East, it has been the superpower partner of Israel—using all its economic and military power to force the Palestinians to renounce their human rights and allow Israel to enjoy the fruits of its violence in peace. Without American support, Israel would be forced to make peace with its neighbors. WHY?? Why has America helped the victims of Nazism to become like Nazis? Why is America the primary impediment to any just and lasting peace in the Middle East? Why are Americans so blind?

The current state of affairs is not only terrible for Arabs, but also for Jews and for all sensitive human beings. What damage has been done to the cause of human rights and international morality by Western support for ethnic cleansing, military occupation, and apartheid in the Holy Land? What damage has been done to Jews and Jewish culture by the actions of Israel! In fact, large portions of orthodox and secular Jewry outside Israel are absolutely opposed to the Israeli state and its actions. Israel itself is split by conflict. America’s support for racist oppression in the Middle East is a huge gaping wound in our moral consciousness. What message does America's support for Israel send to all the oppressed people of the world? It puts the lie to everything America says about truth, justice and democracy! I ask all Americans, all Jews, and all citizens of Israel: Is the dream of a Greater Israel worth the price of perpetual war? Do you really want to incite the hatred of all Arabs and all Muslims forever? Do you want to continue feeding religious radicalism in every country of the Islamic World? Do you want to keep killing Arabs until the entire world turns against you?

Given the situation, how can a lasting peace be obtained? It is clearly dishonest, prejudicial, and futile to expect the Palestinians to stop attacking Israel and negotiate a peace with Israel when Israel occupies all Palestinian land, exercises complete control over them, and offers them no hope that it will allow them to have a viable state. Morally, this is tantamount to demanding that concentration camp inmates stop attacking their guards and negotiate a peace that requires them to ignore the past, give up their rights, and agree to stay forever in the camp. We didn’t ask the Kuwaitis to negotiate an Iraqi withdrawal with Saddam Hussein, did we? In fact, the Palestinians have every right to attack Israel and Israelis in every way possible as long as they are under military occupation. We must end the occupation, not merely condemn acts of violence on both sides.

There are two possible solutions at this point—one more attainable in the short term, the other the best long-term solution. Right, now, the immediately possible solution is to create a small Palestinian state next to Israel using the1967 borders as a guide. The American government must force the Israeli government to announce that it accepts UN Resolution 242 and the Saudi/Arab League proposal and will withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within a certain time. The US and UN must broker an agreement on the nature and the timing of such a withdrawal. They must involve all parties including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Al-Aqsa Brigades, and the international community. Israel must be pressured as needed to agree to a reasonable plan to end this occupation quickly—on the basis of UN Resolution 242. This plan must then be properly supported by the US and UN, including the money needed to make it work and international troops to patrol the new border.

However, we must realize that this two state solution has been rejected by Israel since 1967 because Zionist fanatics are committed to a Greater Jewish Israel. So is there a better way? I believe that there is, although I may be looking decades into the future. The best solution is for Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank to form a new, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-lingual state with a new constitution. This has, in fact, been the state goal of the PLO all along, and even some Zionist Israelis are now calling for this. Isn't such a state the generally avowed aim of the U.S. and U.N. in other regions of the world? Israelis could thus have their Greater Israel, if only they will give up their racism! This solution has the great advantages of morality and simplicity. It also would not require the evacuation and movement of all settlers from the West Bank. It would allow Jews to live in a state encompassing most of what they consider their historic home. It would solve the many internal tensions in Israel between the orthodox and secular Jews, between the Ashkenazi, the Sephardim, and the Russians. It’s so simple. Instead of creating a second state, simply remove the Green Line that separates the West Bank from the rest of Israel/Palestine. Give Jews, Christians and Muslims—all human beings—equal rights before the law in a non-racist secular state. Offer citizenship to all Palestinians, including the refugees. Return all property to its rightful owners or compensate them appropriately. Write a new constitution to create a liberal democratic state with no government intervention in religion or education. Hold “Truth and Reconciliation” hearings as was done in South Africa. Let the healing commence. Non-Jews would certainly constitute the majority in this state, but that itself is not a problem for Jews IF the constitution fully protects individual rights. What to call this new state? Let them negotiate it. I believe that the Palestinians would accept the name “Israel”. A Zionist Israeli has suggested “Holyland”, but I prefer that it should keep its traditional non-racial, non-religious name of “Palestine”. Maybe someday.

The Arabs are a pragmatic people. They want and need peace as much or more than the Israelis do. The Arabs and all Muslims could live in peace with Jews in the Middle East if only Israel would comply with international law, and either withdraw from the West Bank or reconstitute itself as a secular democracy. Peace in the Middle East will bring happiness and prosperity to all. The Arabs and Jews are, after all, far more alike than different. They are both Semitic, Levantine peoples who share a common lifestyle. Personally, I have no doubt that with a just settlement age-old grudges would be soon forgotten and these mercantile people would return to doing what they do best, buying, selling, and enjoying life in their own unique way. Religious fanaticism on both sides would dissipate. The end of the 55-year Crusade would permit the gradual democratization and liberalization of all governments in the area. Libertarian democracies would be able to open their borders to their neighbors. Arabs and Jews would be freed from their respective national and ideological prisons and would be able to travel freely throughout the Middle East! Imagine a free trade and free movement zone encompassing the entire region! The different peoples would get to know each other and discover just how much they have to offer each other. Prosperity and peace would replace poverty and war throughout the Middle East. The Middle East could become a vibrant and prosperous region, like the European Community but with Sun, sand, tabbouleh, and a unique flair for life! The American and Israeli people can make it happen with a simple choice. They must stop living in the past and begin to envision fair and attainable end to this conflict.

If America and Israel end the occupation and create a just settlement for the Palestinians, the root cause of Arab-American hostility will be removed. It will then be a relatively simple matter to resolve the American-Iraqi and general American/Muslim conflict. American troops could be removed from Saudi Arabia (as is being done now anyway) and the embargo against Iraq could be lifted. We need not fear weapons of mass destruction if we make peace with our enemies. With the resolution of these three issues, the demands of Al-Qaeda would be met, it’s raison d’etre would vanish, the Ninth Crusade would end, America would no longer be threatened, and the American people could regain their sense of security and their civil liberties.

The choice lies with you, the American people. You can continue to wage war against “evil” and “terrorism” forever, or you can admit your moral failures, remove the causes of the Arab’s grievances, and bring peace and prosperity to the region.

It’s up to you.

Is it just a coincidence that when Americans (who are immersed in Israeli propaganda daily), go to the Middle East and see the reality there for themselves, that they somehow are able to extricate themselves from their pro-Israeli programming.

This is not a conflict between equals, nor are both sides equally to blame. The reason this conflict has gone on so long is because we here in the US have been duped into supporting the aggressors. If we were neutral at the very least (instead of blindly pro-Israel), this conflict would have resolved itself long ago and the Palestinians might have some justice. But because of the constant barrage of pro-Israeli propaganda, most Americans don't have a clue how to solve this conflict when it is so simple -- stop aiding the aggressors, the Israelis.

Your ignorant comments lead me to believe that you imagine this problem magically occured 2 years ago, and therefore you place blame on Israel. You seem to fail to understand that BEFORE Israel "occupied" land in 1967, arabs and palestinian leaders were trying to destroy israel, DURING the "occupation" palestinian leaders CONTINUED to seek israel's destruction, and FINALLY, after FOURTY YEARS, the palestinian leadership FINALLY agreed that israel should be left alone and that they supported a 2-state solution (it took them from 1948 to the 1990's before agreeing to this), yet palestinian terrorists CONTINUED to attack israel. And 2.5 years ago, after all the crap that had gone on, palestinians had a great chance to further negotiation the offer barak gave them, but instead they began "intifada 2."

Just because the two sides are not equal in military power right now doesn't mean the lesser power are the "good guys." In this situation, the leaders and lead organizations of the poor, downtrodden palestinians have always cared more about destroying israel than being civilized and calm.

People who go to israel/palestine today and "see how things are" are obviously going to feel sorry for palestinians, since israel has clamped down on them. But this is a RESPONSE, you fools. YOU DON"T GET IT. Israel's goal all this time had been to CONTINUE TO EXIST. Arab nations in 1948 - 1967 repeatedly tried to make israel CEASE to exist. The PLO, "palestinian liberation organization," was formed THREE YEARS BEFORE THE "OCCUPATION." They sought to "liberate" the ENTIRE REGION and kill jews until muslims could rule everything. Arafat's public goal was to destroy israel in the 60's, 70's, 80's. FINALLY, in the 1990's, arafat quit saying that and "claimed" that he just wanted peace and fairness (after decades of failing to achieve his goal). But what happened? As arafat stopped leading terrorist attacks, hamas, hezzbollah, islamic jihad and other palestinian organizations continued the attacks.

Palestinians may want a 2-state solution and fairness, but palestinian LEADERS and TOP ORGANIZATIONS have always sought Israel's death first and foremost, THAT is what kept this problem going all this time.

Israel clamping down "excessively" on palestinians right now is a REACTION. Is it an excessive reaction? Maybe. Israel has the power to kill tens of thousands a day. THey aren't doing that. They never have. They want to be left alone, and after decades of being fucked with, I guess they're a bit pissed off right now.

When egypt and jordan made peace agreements with israel, real agreements, israel WITHDREW from the Sinai, which, if any of you know anything, is a LOT of land. That was a few decades ago, when palestinian leadership was still denying that israel should not die.

Occupations don't end when the leaders of the occupied people won't stop trying to kill you.

Another thing. There were hundreds of thousands of arab refugees after the wars, but tehre were also hundreds of thousands of jews living in arab countries who had to flee and were refugees as well. But israel ACCEPTEd jewish refugees. THat's why there was no "jewish refugee problem." But arab countries REJECTED the vast majority of arab refugees, and kept them living in refugee camps while continuing their dream of killing israel off. THey failed. So they eventually stopped attacking. But palestinian leadership and terrorist groups kept it going.

Those of you who judge the entire situation by what's happening righ tnow need to get a clue and learn about the events that are DIRECTLY RELEVANT to what goes on now.

Israel's leaders #1 goal all this time (most of the last 50 years) has been to keep israel alive.
palestinians #1 goal all this time (most of the last 50 years) has mostly been to destroy israel.

There's your problem.

Regular average Palestinians who are not terrorists are caught in the middle. Though, they seem to support hamas as much or more than they support the current P.A., which is unfortunate since hamas considers ALL the region to be "occupied" and feel they need to get rid of every last jew until ALL of the land is taken over, regardless of who deserves to own it or not.

Read that 50 times until you adjust your thinking. It's accurate.

By the way, "Henry H. Lindner"'s OPINIONS above are full of crap. He did a nice job trying to paint a long, drawn-out picture that pretends to be reasonable. I like how he didn't mention a single bad thing about anyone on the arab side. THe PLO? They just want justice. Hamas, etc.? He made no mention of their goals. How did arab states treat jews who had nothing to do with israel? He managed to leave that out. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish people who had to flee their homes thanks to discrimination against them simply because they were the same religion as people who were founding israel? Henry H. Lindner managed to leave that out, too. Repeated wars made against Israel? Henry H. Lindner says they're all israel's fault, of course. The PLO denying israel's right to exist? Henry H. Lindner lied about that, claiming all they wanted is one nice state for everyone. Calling Israel racist? What "race" is being discriminate against? Jews and arabs of semitic origin are the same race, and there are just as many semitic jews as european/caucasian jews. So, how can it be "racism" if a huge portion of both sides are the same race? Henry H. Lindner basically either leaves out every fact that he doesn't like, or just lies about it. But he wrote his CRAP in a very professional manner. The average person who barely knows anything about this other than that right now israel are the big mean guys might eat up his crap. Guess what folks? Crap should EXIT you, not enter you.

By the way, Henry H. Linder's garbage article has made it's way onto a website that denies the holocaust and BLATANTLY accuses jews around the world of horrible stuff, a website that is 100% anti-semitic, it doesn't even beat around the bush:
RePortersNoteBook.com
... Cognomen, 4, Apr 20, 2002. The One State Solution--The only thing that Israelis
have to give up is their racism, Henry H. Lindner, MD, 8, Apr 21, 2002. ...
http://www.network54.com/Hide/Forum/145962?it=304 - 62k -

I went to the above site you mentioned (reporternotebook). It looks to me like a Zionist site which tries to link anti-Zionist material with anti-Semitic material. I could be wrong, but anyway, that's my impression of it -- some sort of smear site which smears everyone from Palestinians to leftists.

--"Like most Americans, I was raised to worship Israel as a bastion of freedom and moral superiority in a sea of evil Jew-hating, freedom-hating Arabs. However, my views slowly changed after living in the Middle East for 12 years and studying the history of the region. I came to realize that the root of the conflict there was Zionism. Zionism is plainly a form of racism. It is the doctrine that a certain racial/religious group, the Jews, have a right to create, protect, and expand a racist/religious “Jewish” state in Palestine by any means necessary."
-Henry H. Lindner, MD from above
home.earthlink.net/~hhlindner/Writings/middleeast.htm

Another excellent resource to learn the truth about what has happened in the Middle East is Noam Chomsky's "Fateful Triangle."

I checked out the above link which one of the above defenders of Israel sited. He claimed that it contained one of Henry Lindler's articles and other anti-Semitic writings.

First, I didn't see Lindler's article there.

Second, assuming the site is a real anti-Semitic site (as opposed to a Zionist site trying to link anti-Zionist material to anti-Semitic material), how does an inclusion of anyone's article make that writer somehow complicit in that site? I mean, it's not too difficult to include people's articles without their consent.

In the end, the attempts above to call Henry H. Lindner an "anti-Semite" is just the same old smear to try to discredit what he has to say. To see what he says, check out his article above.

--"Like most Americans, I was raised to worship Israel as a bastion of freedom and moral superiority in a sea of evil Jew-hating, freedom-hating Arabs. However, my views slowly changed after living in the Middle East for 12 years and studying the history of the region. I came to realize that the root of the conflict there was Zionism. Zionism is plainly a form of racism. It is the doctrine that a certain racial/religious group, the Jews, have a right to create, protect, and expand a racist/religious “Jewish” state in Palestine by any means necessary."
-Henry H. Lindner, MD from the article above

To see this article in its entirety, click on the link below:

First of all, reportersnotebook.com is a true anti-semitic site, the guy behind it was recently made famous in new york because he also runs a roommate-finding service. He's not jewish and a genuine holocaust-denying asshole.

And you are an asshole for seeing an anti-semitic site and immediately assuming that jews were behind it. Newsflash, asshole, there ARE a lot of jerky jew-hating freaks on this planet.

Another thing - you have now plugged that stupid article multiple times in this thread. Just beacuse you repeat it over and over doesn't mean it's no longer CRAP.

"Henry H. Lindner"'s OPINIONS above are full of crap. He did a
nice job trying to paint a long, drawn-out picture that pretends to be
reasonable. I like how he didn't mention a single bad thing about anyone on
the arab side. THe PLO? They just want justice. Hamas, etc.? He made no
mention of their goals. How did arab states treat jews who had nothing to do
with israel? He managed to leave that out. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish
people who had to flee their homes thanks to discrimination against them
simply because they were the same religion as people who were founding
israel? Henry H. Lindner managed to leave that out, too. Repeated wars made
against Israel? Henry H. Lindner says they're all israel's fault, of course.
The PLO denying israel's right to exist? Henry H. Lindner lied about that,
claiming all they wanted is one nice state for everyone. Calling Israel
racist? What "race" is being discriminate against? Jews and arabs of semitic
origin are the same race, and there are just as many semitic jews as
european/caucasian jews. So, how can it be "racism" if a huge portion of
both sides are the same race? Henry H. Lindner basically either leaves out
every fact that he doesn't like, or just lies about it. But he wrote his
CRAP in a very professional manner. The average person who barely knows
anything about this other than that right now israel are the big mean guys
might eat up his crap. Guess what folks? Crap should EXIT you, not enter
you.

Belgium is unfairly singling Ariel Sharon out for killing that a Lebanese Christian militia committed (all parties involved are aware it was the militia, not Sharon or Israel, who did the killing) of 800 or so palestinians back 20 years ago, while ignoring charges people have brought to Belgium's court that are MUCH worse, such as Saddam killing about 50,000 kurds. Belgium is unfairly singling Israel out. But this is the world's favorite hobby.

The massacre of some 800 Palestinians during the Lebanon War was planned and carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalangists. Israel's guilt lay in allowing the Phalangists, its allies, into the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps: The Kahan Commission, which investigated the affair, said Israel should have foreseen the possibility of a massacre and therefore used Israeli rather than Lebanese troops to put down the armed resistance in the camps.

By any normal legal standard, failing to foresee and therefore prevent a massacre constitutes a much lower level of guilt than actually committing one. Yet Belgium has shown no interest whatsoever in prosecuting the Phalangists who were directly responsible: It is only targeting Israelis.

Numerous suits have so far been filed under Belgium's 1993 "universal competence"law, which authorizes Brussels to try crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. The current and former world leaders named in these suits include Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet all of whom are directly responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths, and most of whom stand accused of crimes of far greater magnitude than Sabra and Shatilla such as Saddam's slaughter of more than 50,000 Kurds.

Yet all these suits are languishing in the Belgian prosecutor's office. The only suit the prosecution has seen fit to bring to court is the one against the Israeli defendants, whose responsibility for the crime at issue is at most indirect.

In normal prosecutorial practice, it is the worst offenders who are given top priority.

Sabra and Shatilla is also the only one of the above mentioned cases that has already been subject to legal proceedings. The massacre was investigated by a blue-ribbon judicial commission of inquiry headed by Yitzhak Kahan, then president of Israel's Supreme Court; another of its three members, Aharon Barak, is the current Supreme Court president.

This panel found that Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, bore ministerial but not criminal responsibility; it reached similar conclusions about the officers involved.
Since the ostensible purpose of the Belgian law is to prosecute cases that are being ignored by their own countries' legal systems, there is no legal rationale for giving priority to the one case that already has undergone a thorough judicial examination.

Furthermore, this decision is an unprecedented insult to Israel's legal system. All democratic countries traditionally give full faith and credit to each other's judicial systems: Belgium would never dream of trying a case that France's judiciary had already investigated and dismissed.
For Belgium to decide that Israel alone of all democratic nations is undeserving of this full faith and credit is completely unjustifiable on legal grounds.

When the lower court threw out the case against Sharon on the grounds that Belgium can only try crimes to which it has some connection (the one previous case heard under the 1993 law, which involved the Rwanda massacres, included 10 Belgian peacekeepers among the victims), four senators from different parties promptly introduced an amendment to the "universal competence"law stating that no such connection is necessary.

The amendment also explicitly stated that it would apply retroactively, meaning to the one case already in court. It was backed by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and passed by a large majority of parliament's upper house; the lower house is expected to approve it shortly.

The legislative and executive branches thus sent a clear message to their Supreme Court: If you uphold the lower court's ruling now, we will force you to reverse your own ruling later.

Belgium's parliament is certainly entitled to clarify legislation by amendment but under such circumstances, it requires enormous disingenuousness to claim, as Michel did, that this was a purely judicial decision in which the political system played no part.

Indeed, had Belgium not provided such strong grounds for the conclusion that Israel is its main target, the worldwide indifference to the dangerous precedent its high court set last week would be incomprehensible because if Brussels did use its 1993 law to try the entire world, it would wreak havoc on the international legal system.

Belgium, after all, is no different from any other country; if it can claim universal jurisdiction, so can anyone else. The result would be an international legal nightmare in which any country could claim jurisdiction over any serious crime, with no way to decide which jurisdictional claim takes precedence.

And that, perhaps, is the saddest commentary of all on Belgium's behavior: that its blatantly politicized use of the 1993 law is actually less frightening than the alternative.

Below we publish the first in a three-part series examining Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s role in the war crimes committed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, culminating in the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatilla.

An attempt by Palestinians to bring Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon before a Belgian court on charges of war crimes appears to have been thwarted. On February 14, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that past and present government leaders cannot be tried for war crimes by a foreign state because of their diplomatic immunity and can only be held to account in their own country.

Under a 1993 law, Belgium gave itself the right to try war crimes committed by anyone anywhere at any time. A Belgian judge was due to rule on March 6 whether a case against Sharon should go to trial, but a legal adviser to the Belgian government, Jan Devadder, said that the International Court of Justice “has clearly ruled government leaders and heads of state enjoy total immunity from prosecution. The Sharon case, in my opinion, is closed.”

The court determined that a former or serving government official could not be tried in a foreign court because “throughout the duration of his or her office [the minister], when abroad, enjoys full immunity from criminal jurisdiction”. This was so whether or not the accused was abroad on official business or in a private capacity.

The court stressed that the judgement does not have any bearing on the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, as he is being tried by an international body, the United Nations, and not by a foreign government. But this legal technicality aside, the International Court of Justice has made clear that it wishes to see only those deemed to be acting contrary to the interests of the imperialist powers facing prosecution and not their political allies such as Sharon.

At this point Sharon still faces charges relating to the brutal massacre of 2,000 Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, Beirut, in September 1982. The prosecution, working on behalf of the relatives of some of his victims, alleges that Sharon bore responsibility in his capacity as minister of defence of the occupying power, which under international law was in charge of the overall safety of the population and was party to an agreement to protect the Palestinians. It also holds Sharon responsible for the direct role the Israeli army played both in the massacre and the subsequent internment, torture and disappearance of many of the camps’ inhabitants.

Sharon’s responsibility for Sabra and Shatilla is well known. Following an international and domestic uproar, the Israeli government was forced to hold an inquiry. The resulting Kahan Commission laid direct responsibility on Elie Hobeika, the leader of Lebanon’s fascist Phalange militia that carried out the bloodbath, but said that Sharon bore “personal responsibility”. He was forced to resign from his post in 1983 although he remained in the cabinet.

Sharon has vigorously opposed the attempt to prosecute him and all the main political parties in Israel have rallied to his defence. Israel has put pressure on Belgium to change its laws and levelled accusations of anti-Semitism in an attempt to prevent the case against its prime minister from proceeding.

There are also accusations that Israeli forces carried out the assassination of Hobeika a few weeks ago in order to eliminate a key witness to the events of September 16-18, 1982. With the approval of the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), Hobeika and Major Saad Haddad, of the Southern Lebanon Army, had entered the refugee camp and gone on the rampage for 40 hours. They butchered an estimated 2,000 men, women and children, as the IDF, having sealed off the exits, looked on. Hobeika was blown up just a few days after announcing that he would testify against Sharon.

The case came at a particularly sensitive time. The indictment and trial of a serving Israeli prime minister would transform the status of the Zionist state itself in the eyes of world opinion and severely embarrass Sharon’s main backers, the Bush administration in the United States. The fact that the case has got as far as it has is indicative of the growing divergence between Europe and the US in the Middle East in general and the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular.

There has been growing frustration within Europe’s capitals over Bush’s ever more open support for Sharon’s war mongering, which is threatening to ignite social tensions throughout the Middle East and destabilise the Arab regimes upon whom they depend to police their financial interests. But none of Europe’s governments, including Belgium, were genuinely desirous of parading Sharon before a court and The Hague decision will have come as a relief.

Regardless of what now happens in Belgium, however, anyone wishing to understand the nature of the Zionist regime and the underlying motives of the Likud-Labour government’s renewed military offensive against the Palestinians would do well to examine the events leading up to the Sabra and Shatilla massacre and Sharon’s criminal role in them.


Israel, Lebanon and Zionist expansionism

While public attention has focused on the atrocities at Sabra and Shatilla, the record shows that these were the culmination of 15 years of military action by Israel in Lebanon, much of which constituted war crimes. Israel’s aim was to disperse the Palestinian refugees created by the establishment of the Zionist state and the 1948-9, 1967 and 1973 wars. To this end, Sharon sought to destroy the Palestinians’ emerging political and military organisations, sow divisions between the Palestinians and those countries in which they sought sanctuary, and prevent the unification of the Arab working classes and oppressed masses against Israel and its imperialist backers.

Israel presented its military action in Lebanon and its subsequent invasion in 1982 that led to the bombing and siege of Beirut, the expulsion of the PLO and the atrocities at Sabra and Shatilla, as a defensive reaction to Palestinian raids on her northern towns. But as the historical record shows, in reality, its “Operation Peace for Galilee” flowed inexorably from the logic of Zionist expansionism.

The Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in June 1982 was prepared through numerous provocations against the Palestinians and Lebanon designed to torpedo the 1981 Fahd Peace plan (named after the then Crown Prince and now King of Saudi Arabia). This plan recognised Israel’s right to exist and called for a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Such a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cut across Israel’s plans, only partially implemented in the June 1967 war, to expand its borders.

The Zionists had long had an interest in Lebanon, one of four small states carved out of the Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire by French imperialism in the aftermath of World War I. In 1938, Ben Gurion, who was to become Israel’s first prime minister in 1948, envisaged a state of Israel that would include Southern Lebanon as far as the Litani River—an essential water supply. His perspective included an alliance with Lebanon’s Christian Maronites, one of the many sectional groups encouraged by the French colonial regime to keep the region divided—despite the fact that many supported fascist Germany—as a bulwark against the Muslim Arab masses and Arab nationalism.

In the mid-1950s, the Israeli government considered the break-up of Lebanon, the establishment of a Christian state and the annexation of Southern Lebanon. Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, foreshadowing what was to happen in the late 1970s, argued that this could be achieved by winning over or bribing a military officer who would put himself at the head of the Maronites and provide the pretext for an Israeli invasion.

Israel shelved these plans in deference to France, the power broker in Lebanon, when the two countries joined with Britain in 1956 to invade Egypt and depose President Abdul Nasser, who had nationalised the Suez Canal and other interests belonging to the imperialist powers. Dayan’s plans were to some extent realised in 1979 when Israel, in defiance of the UN, handed over Southern Lebanon, which it had captured after its invasion in 1978, to Major Saad Haddad, a deserter from the Lebanese army.

The June 1967 war was a turning point in Israel’s history. The Zionist entity, one of four small states carved out of the former Syrian province of the Ottoman Empire and surrounded by hostile Arab neighbours, was unviable within its existing boundaries. Though the Labour government never openly declared this as its strategy, it seized the opportunity of a crisis provoked by Egypt to put into practice the armed forces’ long held plans to extend Israel’s borders throughout all of what was once British Mandate Palestine and part of Syria. Such “natural” boundaries would be easier to defend and gave Israel access to the river Jordan and its headwaters.

This “Greater Israel” policy spawned a new social layer—particularly among the Jewish settlers within the Occupied Territories—committed to this expansionist policy both ideologically and materially. For this layer, for whom General Ariel Sharon was later to become the spokesman, Lebanon was unfinished business.

At the same time, the war also created a new generation of Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven out by the IDF. Many went to Lebanon where there were already refugee camps dating back to 1948. Their numbers were further swelled after King Hussein of Jordan’s murderous war against the Palestinians in 1970-71.

The June 1967 war also led to the establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, as a mass movement committed to armed struggle in pursuit of a Palestinian state.

After the expulsion of the PLO leadership from Jordan in 1970, Beirut became not only the political, social and cultural heartland of the Palestinian movement, but also the PLO’s military headquarters. Thus, Beirut also became an enemy stronghold, as far as Israel was concerned.


Israel’s scorched earth policy in Lebanon

While Israel made much of the terrorist attacks on its own population, there was little reporting of its own scorched earth campaign between 1968 and 1974 against Lebanon. This was justified in terms of the need to defend Israel’s northern settlements against Palestinian raids.

To cite but one example, the Palestinian terrorist attack at Ma’alot in May 1974 where 20 teenage youth were killed, was preceded by weeks of sustained Israeli phosphorous and napalm bombing of Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon resulting in the deaths of more than 300 people. Just two days before Ma’alot, an Israeli air attack on the village of El-Kfeir in Lebanon had killed four civilians.

Israel’s campaign was also aimed at undermining popular support for the Palestinians, sowing divisions between the Palestinians and Lebanese, and forcing the Lebanese government to suppress the PLO. Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister from 1966 to 1974, said the government’s policy was predicated upon the “ rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities” (emphasis added).

The Lebanese army recorded over 3,000 violations of Lebanese territory by Israeli armed forces between 1968 and 1974, an average rate of 1.4 incidents per day. In 1974-75, this increased to seven incidents per day. During 1968-74, 880 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed in Israeli attacks. According to UN officials, 3,500 were killed in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan in Israeli air raids. While no separate figures exist for Palestinians, it was assumed that these must be at least twice as high as for the Lebanese.

By 1975, Israel had killed about 10 times as many Palestinians and Lebanese in cross border attacks as the total number of Israelis killed in Palestinian commando raids by 1982. Thousands of Palestinians were wounded and tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes in south Lebanon and move to the relative safety of Beirut and other cities. By the late 1970s, this figure had reached 250,000. The aim was to create a demilitarised zone in the south. To this end, 150 Palestinian camps and villages were virtually razed to the ground and olive groves and crops destroyed.

By the mid-1970s, Arafat’s Fatah party, the dominant faction in the PLO, had adopted a “two state solution”, advocating a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that it hoped could be achieved by negotiations with Israel, and began to turn away from terrorist raids within Israel. This did not stop Israeli attacks on Lebanon, which actually increased. After 30 warplanes bombed and strafed Palestinian refugee camps and nearby villages, killing 57 people in December 1975, Israeli officials claimed their aim had been preventative, not punitive.

These attacks were aimed at torpedoing any attempt at reaching a solution to the long-running conflict that included a Palestinian state. Just two days earlier, despite angry objections by Israel, the UN Security Council had devoted a session to discussing an Arab initiative for a two-state settlement, thus paving the way for the PLO’s participation in talks. The US vetoed the proposal. Far from preventing terrorism, the Israeli attacks were aimed at provoking a retaliatory response from the Palestinians and preventing any possibility of the UN agreeing to a Palestinian state.

The outbreak of the first phase (1975-76) of the Lebanese civil war expressed the unviability of the truncated state, riven as it was with divisions sown and encouraged by French imperialism as a means of preserving its influence and interests. In what was essentially a class war between the Palestinians and their Muslim allies against the reactionary Maronite Christian ruling elite, the Israeli government backed the various rival Christian Maronite militias—the perpetrators of the Tel al Zaatar and Khiyam massacres to name but two—as their proxies against the PLO and their Muslim allies. When it appeared that the Palestinian and Muslim forces might prevail, the Syrian army intervened to preserve the Lebanese state and the Maronite establishment.

In May 1977, Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud party came to power, ending nearly 30 years in which the Labour Party had dominated Israeli political life. Quite explicitly committed to a “Greater Israel” policy, Begin expanded the Israeli relationship with the Maronites, backing Pierre and Bashir Gamayel’s Phalangists against rival parties.

Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, provided the Phalange with canons, mortar, tanks, communications equipment, mines and explosives. Mossad officers were placed within the Christian command, ostensibly to provide help with Israeli weaponry but in reality to provide intelligence about the civil war and launch attacks against Palestinian strongholds in Lebanon. Later operations were to be extended against the Lebanese Shiites in southern Lebanon, who were then allied with the Palestinians. For the next five years, as the civil war waxed and waned in Lebanon with constantly shifting alliances, Israel continued to support the fascist Christian militia, to the tune of $100 million a year.

In 1977, the Palestinians surrendered their heavy armaments under the first phase of the Shtaura agreement whereby the Lebanese government, Syria and the PLO imposed a freeze on cross-border raids by the Palestinians and attempted to resolve the civil war. The Israelis responded to this peace initiative by mounting a provocative and intensive bombing campaign in which 70 people, nearly all Lebanese, were killed. In addition, the Israeli-controlled Haddad militia in southern Lebanon launched an offensive with Israeli support aimed at disrupting the Lebanese government’s plans to deploy its army in the south.

In March 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in retaliation for a terrorist attack by Palestinian commandos, who had reached Israel by sea from Beirut and killed 34 Israelis. The bloody invasion led to the death of more than 2,000 people and drove more than 250,000 people from their homes in the south.

Israeli bombardment continued in 1979. The Lebanese government compiled a list showing the scale of Lebanese casualties alone. Nearly 100 Lebanese were killed or wounded in just one day in April, while nearly 1,000 were killed and 224 wounded between April and August.


Sharon becomes minister of defence

The unexpected re-election of a Likud government with an increased majority in June 1981 brought a change in Prime Minister Begin’s cabinet. General Ariel Sharon became minister of defence. As a young man Sharon had been in the Gadna, a paramilitary youth battalion, prior to joining the Haganah, the underground Jewish Defence Force and forerunner of the IDF.

After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Sharon led commando units that specialised in “behind the line” raids forcing Palestinians to flee their homes. His Unit 101 had attacked and killed 50 refugees in the El-Bureig refugee camp south of Gaza, then under Egyptian rule. Sharon first achieved notoriety in 1953 when, as commander of Unit 101, he invaded Jordan and blew up at least 45 homes in the West Bank village of Qibya, then under Jordanian rule. Unit 101 killed 69 people, half of them women and children.

Sharon led other vicious attacks in Jordan in Gaza, which was then ruled by Egypt, and in Syria. In the early 1970s as head of the army’s southern command he was responsible for the brutal crackdown on Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip.

In the 1973 war Sharon led the Israeli forces that eventually crossed the Suez Canal and defeated the Egyptian army, in a campaign that won him as many enemies as friends, as he disobeyed orders and cease-fire agreements.

In Begin’s first Likud government, Sharon served as minister of agriculture, during which he championed the settlers’ cause. “Grab more hills,” he insisted. “Whatever is seized will be ours. Whatever isn’t seized will end up in their hands”. His goal was to create “facts on the ground” that would make it impossible to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians. Sharon had long espoused an expansionist policy that included Lebanon and his elevation to the cabinet clearly signified that Israel was about to step up the military campaign in Lebanon.

Sharon’s priority, as he was later to explain, was “to solve the problem of Lebanon once and for all”. He wanted Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon, not just out of the south from where they were shelling Israeli settlements, but also out of Beirut. He also wanted the Syrians out of Lebanon. They had been invited into Lebanon in 1976, with the tacit agreement of Israel, to support the right-wing Phalangists and stop the break-up of the country. This was a major error of judgement as far as Sharon was concerned, as it had allowed the Syrians to take control of Lebanon and thus prevent Israel from moving on Damascus via Lebanon. Lastly, he wanted a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon.

According to Uri Avineri, the liberal Israeli journalist, Sharon had told him eight months before the invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 that he wanted to destroy the PLO in Lebanon, put the Phalangists in power, making Lebanon a kind of Christian protectorate, and get the Syrians out of Lebanon. He wanted to push the Palestinians into Syria in the hope that the Syrians would drive them down to Jordan, which would then be turned into a Palestinian state.

Within weeks of becoming minister of defence, Sharon renewed military action in Lebanon after two years of peace. He struck at targets in southern Lebanon, eliciting the retaliation that provided the excuse for extensive Israeli bombing and ultimately the terror bombing of Beirut and other civilian targets on July 17-18, 1981 that left hundreds dead. While the US’s special envoy Philip Habib negotiated a cease-fire, it was clearly only a matter of time before Israel found a pretext to invade Lebanon.

Sharon began his preparations. In November, he brought military rule in the West Bank and Gaza to an end. Far from improving conditions, however, he banned Palestinian political groups and established a new and more brutal regime under his own direction and that of Menachem Milson, the new civilian administrator. In effect, the West Bank and Gaza were being incorporated into a “Greater Israel”. In December, the Golan Heights were also annexed.

The government’s mission was to settle so many Israeli Jews in the West Bank and Gaza that the Occupied Territories could not be given back to the Palestinians. It planned to develop the territories and create an infrastructure for factories, particularly sophisticated scientific industries, in the new settlements.

The key to the integration of the Occupied Territories into Greater Israel was the destruction of the Palestinian leadership, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Sharon’s goal, which was supported by both the Likud and the Labour parties, was to avoid a political settlement with the PLO at all costs. From Begin and Sharon’s perspective Arafat’s success in isolating those PLO factions and states such as Iraq and Libya that advocated Israel’s destruction was a setback. It meant that the PLO would have to be included in any negotiations for the settlement of the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state as proposed under the 1981 Fahd Peace Plan.

The 1978 Camp David Accords paved the way for bilateral peace agreements with Israel’s Arab neighbours. It also provided Israel with the opportunity to annex the Occupied Territories and prepare for the invasion of Lebanon. To this end, Israel had already made peace with Egypt and was in the process of withdrawing from Sinai, as agreed at Camp David in 1978, thereby ensuring the neutrality of the most important Arab country should Israel attack any of her other neighbours.

Between August 1981 and May 1982, the Israel Defence Force (IDF), with Sharon’s authorisation, violated Lebanese airspace 2,125 times and its territorial waters 652 times. Arafat, anxious to gain US support for a deal with Israel, maintained the Habib brokered cease-fire and did not retaliate.

In December 1981, Sharon warned Philip Habib, President Reagan’s special envoy, and Morris Draper, the US special ambassador, that PLO shelling of Israeli settlements was intolerable and that if it continued, he planned to wipe the PLO out completely. The US was concerned at the political repercussions of such a development and Habib made it quite clear that Sharon had no justification for war, saying, “The PLO isn’t carrying out many raids. There is no need for such an Israeli reaction. We are living in the twentieth century.... You can’t just invade a country like that”. Nevertheless, the Pentagon, in the full knowledge of Sharon’s plans to invade, stepped up its supply of military goods to Israel in the first few months of 1982. Deliveries were 50 percent up on the previous year and continued throughout June, the first month of the war.

In January 1982, Sharon flew secretly to Beirut to meet Pierre Gemayel and his son, Bashir, who had murdered all their Christian opponents in order to secure the leadership of the Christian groups. Bashir was seeking to become president of Lebanon in the forthcoming elections. Sharon revealed that Israel intended to invade Lebanon, up to Beirut. He demanded that the Phalangists join the Israelis in the battle to drive the PLO out of Beirut and Lebanon and sign a peace treaty with Israel.

Pierre Gemayel turned down both of these requests. However much he may have wanted the Israelis’ help he could not be seen to be openly collaborating with them.

In May 1982 Sharon he flew to Washington to enlist President Reagan’s support. After Sharon’s meeting with the president, Secretary of State Alexander Haig took Sharon on one side and, as one ex-general to another, gave him a friendly word of advice. He warned him that he needed a casus belli. “Ariel,” he said, “I am telling you this is unsatisfactory.... Nothing should be done in Lebanon without an internationally recognised provocation, and the Israeli reaction should be proportionate to that provocation.” While Sharon questioned what constituted a clear provocation, this was good enough as far as he was concerned. He had told his US paymasters about his plans and they hadn’t objected to their content. Now all he needed was a suitable pretext.

Later Haig tried to deny that he had given the go-ahead for the invasion, but he qualified this by explaining: “The Israelis had made it very clear that their limit of toleration had been exceeded, and that at the next provocation they were going to react. They told us that. The president knew that.” The State Department, when pressed, could not cite a single official statement opposing the invasion apart from the support, quickly withdrawn, for the first UN resolution calling on Israel to terminate its aggression.

Two weeks later, there was a botched attempt on the life of the Israeli ambassador, Shlomo Argov, in London. It was carried out by the Abu Nidal group, which was hostile to Arafat and the PLO and operated out of Iraq with no office in Beirut. This was ignored by Prime Minister Begin, as was the PLO’s insistence that it had nothing to do with the assassination attempt or Abu Nidal. As far as Begin was concerned: “They are all PLO”. In other words, Arafat, as leader of the PLO, was responsible for all the activities of all the Palestinian groups and all Palestinians should be regarded as terrorists to be eliminated. The cabinet gave instructions for Israeli planes to attack PLO positions in and around Beirut. As the meeting dispersed, Begin said, “We should be prepared for the maximum. We will strike and see what happens.”

Israel carried out heavy bombardment of PLO targets including the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla and a hospital. More than 200 people were killed. With Arafat away from Beirut in Amman, Jordan, the Palestinians responded by shelling Israeli settlements in Galilee. Sharon seized on this to announce to the cabinet a few days later that there would be a short operation lasting one or two days called “Operation Peace for Galilee”. It was to be limited to pushing the Palestinians back 40-45 kilometres so that they could not shell northern Israel. Israel would not attack the Syrians in Lebanon unless they took action against Israeli forces. When asked about Beirut, Sharon said, “Beirut is out of the picture. This operation is not designed to capture Beirut”. Every word was a lie.

While some cabinet members were subsequently to claim that Sharon had deceived them, this was disingenuous to say the least. Two months before the war, Begin had told Shimon Peres and the Labour Party about his plans and the rhetoric with which the invasion was to be sold to the public. As veteran military correspondent Ze’ev Schiff, who has close connections with the Israeli military establishment, wrote in Ha’aretz a few weeks before the invasion, “It is not true as we tell the Americans that we do not want to invade Lebanon. There are influential forces, led by the defence minister, which with intelligence and cunning are taking well considered steps to reach a situation that will leave Israel with no choice but to invade Lebanon even if it were to involve a war with Syria.”


Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982

No sooner had Sharon waived his troops over the border into Lebanon on June 6 than they headed north towards Beirut demolishing the Palestinian camps, driving the people north into largely Muslim West Beirut and incarcerating many of the adult male population along the way. Israel used its complete air superiority and firepower to blast everything before it, albeit sometimes dropping leaflets warning inhabitants to leave before the attacks began. It then sent in its ground forces to clean up afterwards. As the Jerusalem Post explained, “With deadly accuracy, the big guns laid waste whole rows of houses and apartment blocks believed to be PLO positions. The fields were pitted with craters.... Israel’s strategy at that point was obvious—to clean away a no-man’s land through which Israeli tanks could advance and prevent any PLO breakout.”

In keeping with Sharon’s larger plan of driving Syria out of Lebanon, on June 9 the IDF made an unprovoked attack on the Syrian forces in the Beka’a valley. After Israel knocked out more than 60 aircraft in one day, Syria avoided any further military confrontation with Israel. Thus, Israel had effectively neutralised Syria for the rest of the campaign.

By the end of June, southern Lebanon was devastated. Ten thousand people had been killed, 350,000-400,000 Palestinians had been dispersed, the Israeli army had taken 15,000 prisoners, and little was left standing. According to one Israeli journalist, “The shocking scenes of the destroyed camps proves that the destruction was systematic”. Many people have never been unaccounted for. Those who remained were left to the tender mercies of the Phalange militia and Haddad’s forces, Israel’s proxy in southern Lebanon.


The bombing and siege of Beirut

On June 13, the eighth day of the war, Begin told the Knesset that the fighting would stop once the army reached the 40-kilometre line. At that very moment, Sharon was with his troops, which had encircled West Beirut, in Ba’abda, overlooking the city that was now home to 500,000 people. The siege that was to follow would last 70 days.

During that time, the city was bombed extensively using both cluster and phosphorous bombs. This was an effort not only to destroy the PLO and its military installations, but also its entire social base and welfare network: its health and educational services, political and social organisations and, above all, the squalid shantytowns that had become the Palestinians’ home in Lebanon.

Not even the hospitals were spared, although they were clearly marked. By August 6, there were 30 beds available in West Beirut out of a previous total of 1,400, according to the Red Cross. The refugee camps were continuously bombarded, causing more than half of the 125,000 inhabitants of Sabra and Shatilla to flee in the first few weeks of the war, even though no heavy artillery or well-fortified positions were found. Palestinians who tried to leave West Beirut were stopped from doing so by the Israeli forces that patrolled the city.

The UN estimated that 13,500 homes had been severely damaged in West Beirut alone and many thousands more elsewhere, excluding the Palestinian camps. Electricity and water supplies were continually interrupted and food and medicines cut off. The international relief agencies were denied access.

The Lebanese police estimated that more than 19,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded between the beginning of June and the end of December. Some 6,775 of these were killed in Beirut and 84 percent were civilians. “But this excluded those who were buried in mass graves where the Lebanese authorities were not informed,” they said. In contrast, 340 IDF soldiers had been killed between June and early September and a further 146 by late November. Of these, 117 were killed in the fighting for Beirut.

The purpose of the siege of Beirut and the accompanying brutality was to put maximum pressure on the Lebanese government to force Arafat and the PLO to leave the country. To this effect, Israel had seized control of the capital city of another country, broken every rule in the war crimes book, and was holding half the people of Beirut (all those in West Beirut) hostage.


The US role in the evacuation of the PLO

The US, far from acting as an honest broker, intervened to organise the evacuation of the PLO on Israel’s behalf. It offered guarantees to protect Palestinian civilians that were absolutely crucial to the PLO’s agreement to leave Beirut. The evidence shows it never honoured these guarantees.

The US sent Habib back to the Middle East to meet Sharon and ascertain his terms for ending the fighting. Habib asked, “Who is to leave Beirut? All the 10,000 [PLO fighters] or just their leaders?” Sharon replied, “All the terrorists. They must all leave. If they refuse, they will be destroyed... Tell them to leave.” When Habib countered, saying, “I think it will be impossible to do what you ask”, Sharon sent in dozens of fighter jets that unloaded hundreds of tons of high explosives onto Sabra and Shatilla and anti-tank cluster bombs on apartment blocks in West Beirut.

With that, Habib pulled out all the stops to get the Lebanese government to put pressure on Arafat to agree to Sharon’s terms. Knowing that Sharon would not accept promises, he even got Arafat to provide a signed guarantee that he would leave with all his fighters.

Habib now had to find Arab states willing to take the Palestinians, but there were few takers. The Arab leaders had all stood by while Lebanon was invaded, even those most verbally vociferous in their opposition to Israel. Few were willing to accept the PLO fighters whom they regarded as troublemakers. Jordan’s King Hussein even demanded that if the armed guerrillas went to Syria, they had to be placed far from the border with Jordan. He did allow some Palestinians with Jordanian passports to enter Jordan. Egypt and Syria refused all PLO fighters, while Tunis, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq and Algeria agreed to take some.

Even after agreement on the PLO evacuation, bombings continued, including the carpet-bombing of Bourj al Barajneh refugee camp. On Saturday, August 21, the first contingent of 12,000 PLO fighters left Beirut by ship. Arafat himself was the last to go on August 30, 1982. The US had arranged with President Bourguiba that he go to Tunis. A further 10,000 PLO fighters remained in eastern and northern Lebanon, in areas under Syrian control.

The protection of Palestinian civilians left behind in Beirut had been central to the agreement under which the PLO had agreed to evacuate the city. A multinational force of US, French and Italians troops in Beirut were to supervise the evacuation and guarantee their safety. In addition, there were bilateral agreements between both the US and Lebanese governments and the PLO and an Israeli promise not to enter Beirut.

According to the text of the agreement, “The US will provide its guarantees on the basis of assurances received from the Government of Israel and the leaders of certain Lebanese groups with which it has been in contact.” Habib later confirmed that he had personally signed the agreement guaranteeing protection to the Palestinians. “I got specific guarantees on this from Bashir and from the Israelis—from Sharon,” he said. Habib personally wrote to the Lebanese prime minister saying, “My government will do its utmost to ensure that these assurances [on the part of Israel] are scrupulously observed”.

Almost immediately, Israel broke its promises. The Lebanese army was supposed to have participated in the security operation, but was prevented from doing so by the Israeli armed forces, in clear breach of their agreement to withdraw from Beirut. This was only the first of many such breaches that the US was to sanction. The Israeli armed forces had Arafat within their sights. They could easily have killed him, but the US had extracted a promise from Sharon that he would guarantee Arafat’s safe exit and passage to Tunis: a promise he has recently bitterly and publicly regretted.

As part of the Habib brokered agreement, the Lebanese national police took control of West Beirut and collected weapons and ammunition from the PLO depots, although some were also handed over to the Mourabitoun Muslim militia.

On August 23, in the middle of the evacuation of the PLO, Israel’s man, Bashir Gemayel, who had the largest private army in Lebanon, won the presidential elections. Israel’s control of much of the country gave protection to the key Assembly delegates with the power to choose the president, and provided helicopters to bring them to vote in East Beirut. Gemayel became president of Lebanon on September 23.

Israel had won the war for the Phalange without the latter having lifted a finger. Indeed, the Phalange had refused to fight, having earlier lost some soldiers when fighting against the Palestinians. While the Israeli government rejoiced at the success of its campaign, the Palestinians and the Lebanese Muslims in Beirut, now left defenceless, were terrified. They were at the mercy of the Phalange, Haddad’s armed militia in southern Lebanon and anyone else whom the Israelis chose to back.

Journalist Robert Fisk commented prophetically in the London Times: “The civilians of West Beirut will have only the Lebanese army to protect them. It is not the sort of army upon which people of the Muslim sector of the city are likely to place much reliance.” In his book Pity the Nation, which provides an eyewitness account of the atrocities in Beirut, Fisk admits that even he did not realise the implications of his own words, or the scale of the carnage that was to follow.

No sooner had Arafat and the last of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) fighters departed Lebanon than Israel’s relations with both its patron and vassal became strained, as their interests diverged.

Firstly, the Americans, with a view to mollifying the Arab regimes anxious about the impact of the war on their own domestic stability launched a new peace initiative, known as the Reagan Plan. This plan explicitly ruled out Israeli annexation, sovereignty or permanent domination of the Occupied Territories. It called for a freeze on expanding existing settlements or building new ones and “self government by the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza in association with Jordan”, otherwise known as the confederation solution. Neither self-government nor the boundaries of such an entity were defined and the PLO was to be excluded, but despite its incoherence and inconsistencies, the plan was more favourable to the Palestinians than anything previously on offer.

However much Israel was reliant on the US, it was not going to accept this and said so quite openly and defiantly. Sharon said, “Not only will Israel not accept it, it will not discuss it.... The United States should have saved itself a lot of embarrassment and frustration” by not proposing it. Israel immediately announced the establishment of new settlements in the West Bank and the Golan Heights.

It should be noted that while conflicts between the US and Israel mounted over the next 12 months, Reagan nevertheless increased military aid to Israel in 1983, and proposed that it be maintained at that level for 1984, while Congress increased aid even further.

Relations with Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel, upon whom Israel was more dependent after the announcement of the Reagan plan, also turned sour. As far as Begin was concerned, it was now pay-back time. He summoned Gemayel to a meeting in Israel and demanded that he sign a peace treaty on September 15.

However much he needed Israeli help, Gemayel was above all a Lebanese nationalist. To retain control of a united Lebanon meant that he had to cut a deal with the Muslim leaders. Signing a deal with Israel, now almost universally perceived as the enemy, would have precipitated the division of Lebanon.

Begin also demanded that Gemayel move into Sabra and Shatilla and clear out the remaining “terrorists”, claiming that Arafat had left behind 2,000 PLO fighters. This was another proposal that Gemayel could not implement directly without destabilising Lebanese political relations. He was also outraged by Begin’s proposal to establish a military presence in a 45-kilometre area in southern Lebanon under the control of another Israeli stooge, Major Saad Haddad.

Israel had served notice that Gemayel would rule Lebanon only at Israel’s behest. At one point in the meeting, Gemayel held out his arms and said to Begin, “Put the hand cuffs on”, before adding, “I am not your vassal.” He threatened to charge Haddad with desertion and flatly refused to sign any treaty or to authorise any move against the camps. In truth, the Phalangists were hopelessly split. Some of the Phalange were hostile to Israel and were now collaborating with the Syrians, who were opposed to Gemayel’s relations with Israel. Gemayel had to balance between them and the myriad of different factional groups within Lebanon.

On September 3, Israel deployed its armed forces beyond the ceasefire line previously set in agreement with Habib. Sabra and Shatilla on the outskirts of Beirut had become refugee camps for many Palestinians who fled their homes. They were the main areas of the PLO’s popular support. The Israeli forces cleared landmines there and established observation posts overlooking the camps. Despite the fact that it was in clear breach of the US ceasefire agreement, neither the US nor any other contingent of the international force appears to have demanded that the Israeli armed forces withdraw.

Israel demanded that the Mourabitoun, the largest Muslim paramilitary organisation and the PLO’s staunchest ally in Lebanon, leave Beirut. On September 11, the US pulled out the last of its forces sent in to guarantee the safety of the Palestinians under the Habib agreement, two weeks before its 30-day mandate expired. The US withdrawal triggered the departure of the other international forces. The net result was that the so-called international protectors of the Palestinians had presided over the disarming of the Palestinians and their allies and delivered them into the hands of those they most feared: the Israelis and the Christian militia.


The Sabra and Shatilla massacre

On September 14, Gemayel was assassinated in a massive explosion that demolished the central Phalangist headquarters in Beirut. The Palestinian and Muslim leaders denied any responsibility.

Given that this was the most heavily guarded building in Beirut, the attack must have had insider support. It was never clear which of Gemayel’s enemies had killed him.

As soon as Begin heard about Gemayel’s assassination, he ignored his promise to the US and ordered the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to enter West Beirut. He justified his action to Habib’s deputy, Morris Draper, as necessary “to prevent acts of revenge by the Christians against the Palestinians” and to maintain order and stability after Gemayel’s assassination. A few days later, Sharon let the cat out of the bag. “Our entry into West Beirut was in order to make war against the infrastructure left by the terrorists,” he told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. By this he meant the Palestinian civilians and their Muslim allies.

Sharon ordered Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, later to form the ultra-right-wing party, Tehiya, to let the Phalange militia enter the camps in order to “clean out” the terrorists. The IDF were not to carry the operation. Their proxies could do their dirty work for them. New York Times correspondent David Shipler explained why. He said that as early as mid-June, “Israeli officials were speaking privately of a plan, being considered by Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, to allow the Phalangists to go into West Beirut and the camps against the PLO. The calculation was that the Phalangists, with old scores to settle and detailed information on the Palestinian fighters, would be more ruthless than the Israelis and probably more effective”.

Eitan issued Order Number Six stating that the “refugee camps [Sabra and Shatilla] are not to be entered. Searching and mopping up the camps will be done by the Phalangists and the Lebanese army.” He contacted Elie Hobeika, the murderous Phalangist commander of the Damouri Brigade, and told him what he wanted his men to do.

On September 15, the IDF re-entered Beirut and took control, killing 88 people and wounding 254. It soon surrounded and sealed off Sabra and Shatilla, having attacked smaller camps along the way. At 11:20 a.m. on September 16, Israel admitted that it controlled the camps. An Israeli press statement announced: “The IDF is in control of all the key points in Beirut. Refugee camps harbouring terrorist concentrations remained encircled and enclosed”.

That same day, about 50 Haddad troops that were virtually integrated into the Israeli army and operated entirely under its command were brought to Beirut. Together with about 100 Phalange militia they entered Sabra and Shatilla—a ridiculously small force if there really had been arsenals of weaponry and 2,000 armed guerrillas in the camps, as Sharon had alleged.

There are several journalists, including Robert Fisk, who have written books on the harrowing events in Beirut based upon their own and other eyewitness accounts and on-the-spot interviews with survivors. Other aspects of the story have been pieced together from evidence produced by the Kahan Commission, the Israeli official inquiry into the massacre. But two points need to be stressed: no one ever discovered any arms in the camps and the entry of the Christian militia did not follow any fighting. In other words, the events that followed were a premeditated massacre of innocent civilians. In the next 36 hours, Israel’s proxies, the Christian militia groups, went on a rampage, raping and killing people indiscriminately with knives and guns. People were tortured, including pregnant women, and the bodies of many of the victims were mutilated.

Eyewitnesses attributed most of the killings to Haddad’s forces, but the Phalangists under the command of Elie Hobeika were no less bloodthirsty. A Phalangist asked Hobeika over the radio what should be done with 50 Palestinian women and children. He replied, “This is the last time you are going to ask me a question like that. You know exactly what to do.” The soldier laughed in response.

There were numerous reports that hundreds of men were rounded up during and after the massacre and taken to Israeli detention camps in southern Lebanon. Many of them were never seen again. While the exact number of those killed and injured is not known, Israel estimates suggest that about 800 were killed, although the Palestinian Red Crescent put the number at over 2,000. At least a quarter of these were Lebanese Shiite Muslims.

The atrocities were carried out in full view of the Israeli troops manning observation posts overlooking the camps. By the evening, Lebanese soldiers were already telling the International Red Crescent of atrocities reported to them by Palestinian women in the camps. On the morning of September 17, Ha’aretz journalist Ze’ev Schiff found out what was happening and reported it to the Israeli government, although he did not make it public, despite the fact that foreign journalists were beginning to report the atrocities. Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister, claimed he did not understand the message. But even before then, a Phalange commander had radioed General Yaron to tell him “300 civilians and terrorists had been killed”.

Later that day, Chief of Staff Eitan, Generals Drori and Yaron met the Phalangist command and congratulated them on “having carried out good work” and authorised them to bring in fresh forces and complete their work. By the afternoon, at least 45 Israeli soldiers knew what was going on. The Palestinians were pleading with them to stop the bloodbath. They refused.

US intelligence had also learned of the killings. Morris Draper, the US special envoy, was in no doubt about Israel’s role. On September 17, he demanded of Israel: “You must stop the massacres. They are obscene. I have an officer in the camp counting the bodies. You ought to be ashamed. The situation is rotten and terrible. They are killing children. You are in absolute control of the area and therefore responsible for that area” (emphasis added).

Draper’s words provide confirmation, if any is needed, of Israel’s responsibility in international law and under the terms of the Habib-brokered agreement for the safety of the civilian population in Beirut. He had already warned on the previous evening (September 16) when the massacre was already in full swing of the “horrible results” that would follow if the militia were allowed into the camps. But it was only on September 18, 36 hours after the carnage had begun, that the Israelis ordered the militia out of the camps. General Yaron later testified that they did so not for humanitarian reasons but because of pressure from the Americans, an admission that only serves to highlight the US’s criminal refusal to rein in its client throughout the whole period.

The record shows that by any objective reckoning, Sharon is a war criminal whose history of murderous activities and violations of the rules of war in pursuit of Zionism’s political and economic objectives stretch back for half a century.

The record also shows that not only was the massacre backed by the Israelis, it was only made possible because the US flouted its explicit guarantee upon which the agreement on the PLO evacuation depended. The US never formally lodged a protest about either the invasion of Beirut or what happened at Sabra and Shatilla. Once again, whatever the public show of anger or displeasure, in private Israel got the nod to proceed.


The Kahan Commission

While not one of the Arab regimes lifted a finger to help the Palestinians, it was the Israeli working class that said it was not prepared for its government to organise the elimination of the Palestinians, and called a halt to the pogrom. Sabra and Shatilla provoked sustained worldwide outrage, but more importantly, within Israel itself 400,000 people, one in ten of the population, demonstrated on the streets of Tel Aviv in opposition to the Begin government and demanded an inquiry.

The Kahan Commission was established in an attempt to deflate public anger. Its 1983 report was limited in scope and something of a whitewash. Nevertheless, the evidence it produced confirmed the broad outline of events on September 16-18 and Israel’s role in them. Its conclusions, however, did not flow from the evidence presented.

It limited its remit to the immediate circumstances and ignored the context and the subsequent “disappearance” of Palestinians at the hands of the IDF and its proxies in southern Lebanon. The report’s title ignored any mention of the Palestinians. It excluded any consideration of Israel’s legal responsibilities under international law and its obligations under the agreement to which it was a party by the simple expedient of failing to define Beirut as under the control of an occupying power. It concluded that Israel’s armed forces were not participants in the slaughter, a claim that had never seriously been made. The Commission accepted the government and armed forces’ justification for sending in the Christian militia and concluded that the IDF did not know what was going on in the camps, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary.

While it rejected the accusation that the IDF had “prior knowledge” of the consequences, it did not accept Begin’s contention that the Israeli government had not expected or foreseen the tragic consequences of sending the Christian militia into the camps. The Commission noted that during secret meetings held between Bashir Gemayel and Mossad agents, Israeli officials “heard things from [Bashir] that left no room for doubt that the intention of the Phalange leader was to eliminate the Palestinian problem in Lebanon when he came to power—even if it meant resorting to aberrant methods against the Palestinians.” Furthermore, Israeli generals admitted that they used the Phalange militia because they could give them orders that they could not give to the Lebanese army.

Interestingly, the Commission heaped all the blame for the atrocities on the Phalange led by Hobeika, and denied the “rumours” that Haddad and his forces played any role in the slaughter or were even present, even though numerous eyewitnesses testified to their murderous activities. Yet the Phalange had been closer political allies than Haddad: they had been trained by the Israelis, armed with the same weapons and performed the same services for Israel in Beirut, the Chouf and the Metn regions as Haddad did in the south.

This willingness to point the finger at the Phalange can only be understood in the context of Israel’s plans for the future. As far as the Israelis were concerned, after Gemayel’s assassination the Phalangists had outlived their political shelf life, although they still had their military uses. This meant that Israel was even more reliant on Haddad’s forces to play the key role as its policeman in southern Lebanon. It also explains why Hobeika’s evidence to the Belgian court was expected to be so prejudicial to Sharon. He was prepared to spill the beans, claiming he had video recordings and other evidence that would confirm Sharon’s role in the affair.

The Commission did assign some limited “indirect responsibility” for the massacre on Israel. It condemned Begin, Sharon and the generals with varying degrees of harshness, concluding that Sharon bore “personal responsibility” for what happened in the camps and recommending his removal from office. While Sharon was removed from his post as defence minister, he retained his seat in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.

The Commission made no recommendation about Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan—the man who had expected the massacre, allowed fresh troops in to replace those who had done such a good job, and lied about the IDF’s role—as he was due to retire soon. Eitan went on to become a Knesset member as the founder of an ultra-right-wing party.

General Yaron, who knew about the killings the very first evening and did nothing, was to be suspended for three years. Shortly afterwards he was put in charge of army manpower and training and in 1986 was rewarded with the plum job of military attaché in Washington. The Commission recommended that the director of military intelligence be fired and placed considerable blame on General Drori “without recourse to any further recommendation”.

It has taken nearly 20 years for Ariel Sharon, the man who in 1983 was not fit to be minister of defence, to be deemed fit for the highest office of prime minister. Sabra and Shatilla earned him impeccable credentials as far as the right wing is concerned. The Palestinian policy he has embodied for decades—either genocide or ethnic cleansing—has supplanted the promise of a two state solution embodied in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Now the far right is baying openly for a “population transfer” from the West Bank, an end to “restraint” and the reoccupation of territories seized in the 1967 war, measures that demand a bloodbath that would dwarf Sabra and Shatilla in their savagery.

Concluded

Bibliography:
R. Brynon, Security and Survival: The PLO in Lebanon, Westview Press, 1990.
N. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Pluto Press, 1999.
R. Fisk, Pity the Nation, Oxford University Press, 1990
T. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem, HarperCollins, 1989.
Z. Schiff and E. Ya’ari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 1985.

Part 2:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/sab2-f23.shtml

Part 3:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/feb2002/sab3-f25.shtml

Israel is an expansionist state which is still murdering and ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their own land -- land which Israel is intent on stealing.

Why should anyone look the other way while Israel does this? Worse than looking the other way, we are actually financing it and providing diplomatic cover for it.

Israel's war crimes are the crux of the Middle East problem and peace will never take hold there till we here in the US start to ignore the Zionist racists who believe all that land is theirs and start to act neutrally in this conflict instead of backing every insane thing the Israelis want to do.

--"The Arabs want nothing but the total destruction of Israel."

This is the usual lie. The Arabs have been attempting to make peace with Israel now for decades. Their offers are rebuffed while Israel calls the offers "the destruction of Israel" because it might mean that Israel would have to allow some of the Palestinians expelled to return which would threaten its "Jewish character" -- a racist term that is not unlike saying "White character" of say South Africa. It is Israel that rebuffs peace in order to steal more land.


--"They want peace as much as Bush does (In other words...NOT)"

Ironic. It is Israelis in the Bush administration (Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz) who are the most vocal proponents of war against Iraq (and after that, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, etc.).


--"Look at the land mass in the Mideast that is Arab...then look at what little is Israels."

Why should poor nations be forced to absorb refugees which are caused by Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians?


--"Why would the left support a bunch of terrorists instead of the Democracy that is Israel?"

Israel is not a true democracy. If it were, it would not discriminate against its non-Jewish population and attempt to ethnically cleanse them out of the area but would instead give them equal rights. Israel is a racist democracy just like Apartheid white South Africa was a racist democracy (although S. Africa was isolated from the world till it ended its racist laws).


--"The land is Israels and will stay Israels. Direct your hatred at Bush."

Translation: "What we stole through horrific massacres is ours and you should keep paying for our ability to steal more without questioning us."

... thinks the Arab nations are POOR!!!

They're sitting on oceans of oil, have some of the richest mofo's in the world, and ... believes they shouldn't have to bring in Palestinian refugees because they're POOR! (Oh, and because it's the Jews' fault)

Osama bin Laden sure is a piker, isn't he?

Hell, Arafat "only" has $1.3 billion in assets that somehow never makes it to the pockets of his so-called people. (Wait a minute, he's Egyptian, oops, well, we'll overlook that)

And rich little Israel (with no oil) took in 700,000 Jewish refugees who were expelled from the Arab countries.

Was Israel responsible for those Jewish refugees? (Well, you could argue that if they didn't exist, then maybe the Arabs would have generously let their dhimmi stay.... bah)

No. But Israel has something the Arab nations lack.

Concern for their fellows.

--"Was Israel responsible for those Jewish refugees"

Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in peace in the Middle East till Zionists started massacring Palestinians and kicking them out in order to steal their homes.

In fact, Zionists had a direct hand in forcing Jews to immigrate to Israel from Arabic countries as a former Israeli divulges.

Naeim Giladi who is of Jewish descent and an Iraqi-American (former Israeli) documents this in his book "Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews."

---------------------------------------------------------

Excerpts:
David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, told a Zionist Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to "transfer Arab populations out of the area, if possible of their own free will, if not by coercion." After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to look to the Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the resultant cheap labor market. "Emissaries" were smuggled into these countries to "convince" Jews to leave either by trickery or fear.

In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them.

A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a book was published in Iraq, in Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. The author was one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book, he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the emissaries sent by Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all copies just disappeared, even from libraries. The word was that agents of the Israeli Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up all the books and destroyed them. I tried on three different occasions to have one sent to me in Israel, but each time Israeli censors in the post office intercepted it.

In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat, the one mentioned in Venom of the Zionist Viper, to Iraq. One of the first things Ben-Porat did was to approach el-Said and promise him financial incentives to have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi Jews.

Soon after, Zionist and Iraqi representatives began formulating a rough draft of the bill, according to the model dictated by Israel through its agents in Baghdad. The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March 1950. It empowered the government to issue one-time exit visas to Jews wishing to leave the country. In March, the bombings began.

Sixteen years later, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs.

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.

These players, I believe, should be held accountable for their crimes, particularly when they willfully terrorized, dispossessed and killed innocent people on the altar of some ideological imperative.

I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders have a moral responsibility to compensate the victims and their descendants, and to do so not just with reparations, but by setting the historical record straight.

That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel to seek reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to leave behind their property and possessions in Iraq. That is why I joined the Black Panthers in confronting the Israeli government with the grievances of the Jews in Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I have written my book and this article: to set the historical record straight.

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights. -Naeim Giladi (former Israeli now US citizen of Jewish-Iraqi descent)

I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it.
-Naeim Giladi

http://www.ameu.org/printer.asp?iid=36&aid=72

Somehow I don't believe that welcoming Palestinians to their countries or giving aid of any type to them, nor the prospect of participating in the ethnic cleansing of any group of people, is of any concern to any Arab country.

It was a former Israeli who emigrated from Iraq who blew the whistle on Israel's techniques in getting the Jewish populations in Arabic countries to leave.

Those techniques included propaganda depicting Israel as a rich country where they could live comfortably. When that didn't work, they used coercion including planting bombs in Jewish neigborhoods.

This is documented in Naeim Giladi's book and this article:
http://www.ameu.org/printer.asp?iid=36&aid=72

Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 using massacres and then another 500,000 in 1967.

-----------------------------
Ran HaCohen on the two exoduses:
My previous column – "Ethnic Cleansing: Past, Present and Future" – attracted more reactions than any other. Some of them were supportive and encouraging, for which I am grateful. Many were outraged and even offensive, for which I am even more grateful: not just for enriching my English vocabulary in certain semantic fields (I have been called everything from "anti-Semitic renegade" to "stupid dump ass"), but for reassuring me that I am not wasting my time writing for those who agree with me anyway.

Almost all the fire was aimed at my claim regarding the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel in 1948. These copious reactions reaffirm my argument that this is still a taboo in pro-Israeli discourse. Even when protesting the present "quiet" ethnic cleansing in the Occupied Territories or warning of future Israeli intentions is tolerated, saying that Israel owes its existence as a Jewish State to ethnic cleansing is evidently beyond the pale. As I said, fighting the present strangulation of the Palestinians should be the top priority of any peace activity on the ground; but on the level of consciousness, coming to terms with the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is an inevitable precondition for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

In spite of the heated tone of many reactions, not many of them were seriously argumentative. Several readers want me to stop criticising Israel and to focus on Palestinian terrorism instead. I get this advice regularly, as if Palestinian terrorism were a never-heard-of scoop just waiting for me to discover. Sorry, friends: I am convinced that stopping the occupation, the colonisation and the dispossession of the Palestinians is the only way to end both the justified Palestinian resistance and its unjustifiable terrorist actions. Pointing a finger at the Palestinians may serve the Israeli propaganda, the settlements and the gigantic American aid to Israel; but all these make my life in Tel-Aviv neither safer nor more moral.

One reader claims that I "imply that the Palestinian Arabs who fled or were driven out […] are in the same boat as the Jews of Nazi Germany were". I did not imply that at all. The expulsion of the Palestinians took place within what can be termed a civil war (a war crime), whereas Hitler’s war on the Jews was an unprovoked genocide of defenceless civil populations (a crime against humanity). I used the Nazi case just to show that the way from mass-deportation to mass-murder is a dangerously short one, and that every Jew, including those calling for "transfer", should be aware of that.

Another reader claimed that Palestinian nationalism was quite young, and that there was no Palestinian people prior to the twentieth century. Though this is true – Palestinian nationalism is even younger than the relatively young Jewish nationalism (a.k.a. Zionism), and is to some extent a reaction to it – I fail to see why this justifies an ethnic cleansing. Are human rights applicable to nationalists only?

Pavlovian Reaction

One issue, however, was repeated in many reactions: the so-called ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Arab countries. This seems to be the Pavlovian pro-Israeli reply whenever the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is mentioned. It can be traced back to official Israeli State propaganda as early as the 1950s. I say Pavlovian, because it is invoked instinctively and irrationally, just like the saliva of Pavlov’s dog.

The argument of my article was that Israel carried out an ethnic cleansing in 1948, and that it may be prone to repeat it. As a reply, I am told that the Arab countries carried out an ethnic cleansing. What does this have to do with my argument? The assertion that Arab countries may be guilty of a similar crime does not make Israel’s crime any better; it definitely does not disprove that Israel is prone to repeat it. Again, the rhetorical trick here is the same as asking me to talk about Palestinian terrorism: whenever Israel is criticised, simply change the subject and talk about Arab or Palestinian faults instead (luckily for Israel, there are always enough of them). This is demagoguery, not a fair debate.

However, irrelevant as it is to the argument of my previous column, the analogy between the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and the exodus of Jews from Arab countries is worth relating to in its own right.

'Arab Ethnic Cleansing'?

First let us recall the chronology. The ethnic cleansing of 600.000 to 720.000 Palestinians from Israel preceded the Jewish exodus from Arab countries. The exodus of some 125.000 Iraqi Jews to Israel started in 1949; that of about 165.000 North-African Jews took place as late as 1955-1957. It is therefore somewhat awkward to claim that Israel had deported its Arabs because of the exodus of Arab Jews that occurred years later. There is no doubt, however, that the establishment of the State of Israel played a major role in the deplorable deterioration of living conditions for Jews in many Arab countries.

Whereas Jews had been living in the Arab and Muslim world for more than a millennium, for better and for worse but under generally more favourable terms than under Christianity (and with nothing even slightly comparable to the atrocities of the Crusaders or the Holocaust), Israel’s ethnic cleansing coincided with the Jewish State’s birth. And not by chance: the 600.000 Jews living in Palestine in 1948 could not have achieved a solid majority in the areas they occupied without getting rid of a similar number of Arabs. Unlike the Arab countries, that can show a long tradition of coexistence with Jews (notwithstanding discrimination though), and for which getting rid of the Jews had no demographic significance whatsoever, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was both historically and demographically the constitutive event of the Jewish State.

Moreover: even though Jews were indeed harassed (by the people and/or regimes) in Arab countries following the 1948 war, blaming the Arabs of ethnic cleansing is shamefully cynical when it is imputed by the very Zionists who demanded "let my people go", or by the same Israel that did all it could to force those very countries to let their Jews leave. The global Zionist pressure on each and every country, from the Soviet Union to Syria, to let its Jewish citizens go, was part of Israel’s efforts to consolidate its Jewish majority; that is why Israel always urged Western countries not to let those Jewish immigrants in, lest they fail to make Aliya.

So oriental Jews were pushed out of Arab countries as a result of the conflict with Israel, and at the same time pulled by Israel, to consolidate its Jewish majority, and by Zionism, that regarded the Jewish state as the only proper place for Jews to live in. It is a major case of hypocrisy to compare those Jewish immigrants to Palestinians who fled or were driven out of Israel to other countries during a war, people for whom Palestine was their only homeland and who found themselves against their will as refugees in foreign and hostile Arab states, people who were willing but not allowed to return home, and whose property was dispossessed by Israel.

Furthermore, this hypocrisy is symptomatic of the way the Israeli establishment treated the oriental Jewish immigrants. They were lured to come to Israel by promises of equality and welfare. They were zionistically indoctrinated to see Israel as their new homeland, in spite of their systematic discrimination compared to Jewish immigrants from European countries. Those who refused this zionisation were outcasts; those who did become Zionist and consider themselves as people returning home from a long exile, now have to take the insult of being described as foreign refugees, just like Palestinians in Kuwait.

The cynicism of the Israeli establishment reached its highest peak when Israel raised the claim that the property of the Palestinian refugees, confiscated by Israel after 1948, was "balanced" by Jewish property left behind in Arab countries. This is a further development of the same manipulative analogy, in which the oriental immigrants are assigned the role of wretched pawns. The masses of oriental Jews, who lost their home and property as a direct result of the establishment of Israel, and then came to Israel and were housed here in poor slums hired to them by the State, never got any compensation for their lost property; Now they hear that the State that they see as their homeland considers them to be mere refugees, and that their lost property is bargained off by this State against some Palestinian property it confiscated, of which they themselves have not seen a cent.

The State of Israel produces a lot of propaganda which is refuted by the slightest critical analysis. The analogy drawn between the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and the Jews from Arab countries is an especially repulsive example of this. It reveals not only how absurd Israel’s propaganda can be, but how humiliating, scornful and dangerous it is for many Israelis. A State that has been unable to grant its own citizens a day of peace in more than 50 years cannot be expected to treat them any better in its propaganda. Supporting Israel’s propaganda and war machines is definitely not the right way to help both peoples of Israel/Palestine to peaceful coexistence.

I've met Jews who were FORCED out of ARAB Nations.

In your words, ETHNICALLY CLEANSED.

And it was not Israel that made them leave. That's just a le you and those like you made up to assuage Arab guilt.

Go ahead and repeat your lie; it is still not believed, least of all by those who suffered from Arab Anti-Semitism.

And if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Arafat
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow