‘¦colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man’¦the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.’
-Aimé Césaire 1
The history of all hitherto existing anti-Palestinian propaganda is the history of outright racism. The Israelis and their political allies have bred and nurtured a malicious beast, kept well-fed on a steady diet of hatred and contempt for the Palestinian people. It bristles with anger at the mention of forced expulsions, military occupation, and excessive use of force. Fangs bare, claws extended, eyes glaring, it aims to scare out the moral consciences of its victims, so as to render them indifferent to the plight of other human beings.
This is a most dangerous affair. For a great number of journalists, newsmen, and writers have already fallen to this beast, their callous commentaries and apathetic articles pockmarked with scars from the attack. Left unchallenged, Israeli propaganda has largely become accepted as self-evident truth by the American public. Therefore, the racist underpinnings of pro-Israeli arguments must be ripped up at their roots and laid in plain sight for all to see.
Displacement and Destruction
The history of Israel and its repercussions for the surrounding Arab community have often been obfuscated. The purpose of debunking myths that surround this issue is not to deny Israel’s right to exist; it is to cut down false notions about how it came into existence, as this factors heavily into pro-Israeli expansionist thinking. The Zionists claim that the entire region of ancient Israel is simply theirs for the taking because of a religious decree handed down by God to Moses himself. The land must be ‘redeemed’ and ‘purified’. The former head rabbi of Israel’s army proclaimed in 1994 that ‘The command to settle the land of Israel is greater than all the commandments put together.’ 2 But what of the people already inhabiting these lands? Here too, the Zionists claim that the land was actually empty.
Yet apparently, this was more than a denial of the objective fact that people inhabited the region, as horrible as that already was-it reflected a sense that the inhabiting population was simply irrelevant. Golda Meir, the Israeli PM of 1969 declared,
‘There was no such thing as a Palestinian people’¦It was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. (added emphasis)’ 3
David Horowitz, a fierce right-winger, recently added, ‘The Arabs were largely nomads who had no distinctive language or culture separate from other Arabs’¦they had made no distinctive independent Palestinian state’¦’.4 The logic here is perverse. Apparently, a people do not ‘exist’ so long as they do not declare themselves members of a modern nation-state, wherever they may be. Since when does the lack of a national flag or a nationally-declared favorite fruit rob a people of the right to their land? Did the Jews, who had no specific homeland and no nation-state for some two thousand years, have no right to their existence or identity for this same absurd ‘reason’? None of us would answer in the affirmative, but sadly the same cannot be said for the Zionist attitude towards the Palestinians.
The fact of the matter is that the people of historical Palestine did exist. Their roots are derived from the ancient Canaanite population and the Muslim and Christian Arab peoples who jointly conquered Palestine from Byzantium in 637 A.D. In 1897, 93% of the inhabitants were Palestinian Arabs: 88% Muslim and 10% Christian.5 When the UN implemented its plan in 1948 to partition the country into Jewish and Arab sections, it allotted an 800% increase in Jewish land (from 7% to 55%), 45% decrease of Palestinian land, and instructed 33% of Palestinians to live under the domination of the new settlers. 6 Naturally, this situation engendered serious instability and anger, the outcome of which was war.
Since the Zionist line depends on the non-existence of an entire people, it became necessary to rectify this ‘minor’ ideological error by trying to remove the inhabitants themselves. That the Zionists had conceived expansionist plans even before Israel’s birth is undeniable. In 1938, Ben-Gurion announced: ‘The state will only be a stage in the realization of Zionism and its purpose is to prepare the grounds for our expansion.’7 This was reinforced in 1940 by Joseph Weitz, a leading Zionist who wrote: ‘There is no room for both peoples together in this country’¦To transfer all [the Arabs]; not one village, not one tribe should be left’.8 The infamous ‘Keonig Report’ puts the icing on this rotten cake with a truly disgusting flavor: ‘We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.’9 This was the true nature of Zionism; this was the face of racism. This was only the beginning.
In 1948, 800,000 Palestinian villagers were forcibly expelled from their homes. Horowitz tells us that the Palestinian Arabs willingly left their homes in anticipation of a victorious Arab assault with the intent to return.10 And once again, history begs to differ. For in reality, the exodus began after a civil war between the Jews and Palestinians alone, which preceded the larger Arab-Israeli war.11 The result of this important first conflict was predetermined by British support of the Jewish settlers. In the 1920s, they trained their militia, provided economic grants, paid them higher wages than they did the Arabs for equal work, and even used the settlers to suppress and ultimately crush the Arab independence movement throughout the 1930s.12 Thusly the Zionist victory of ’48 was not a result of abstract heroism, but support from a major world power. And this ‘heroism’ included a terror campaign against the native population.
On July 12th and 13th of 1948, Ben-Gurion ordered his forces to remove the 50,000 residents of Lydda and Ramle. The inhabitants were stripped of their land, property, and personal belongings. Forced to abandon their livelihood, many died in the 100-degree scorching heat.13 Those who did survive this atrocity lived on only to find themselves in a squalid refugee camp described by a Swedish UN mediator in these terms: ‘I have made the acquaintance of a great many refugee camps, but never have I seen a more ghastly sight than that which met my eyes here at Ramallah.’14 Months later, he was murdered by a Zionist gang headed by future Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzak Shamir.15
Various tactics were used by Zionist militia, including psychological warfare that included radio broadcasts and loudspeakers sounding false warnings about strange epidemics. The illustrious leader Ben-Gurion, who was to become Israel’s first Prime Minister, had his own ideas when it came to expropriating natives. He wrote ‘Deprived of transportation, food, and raw materials, the urban communities underwent a process of disintegration, chaos and hunger.’16 But the list of famous Israeli ‘all-stars’ in the war does not end here. Menachem Begin, another future Prime Minister of Israel, was personally involved in the hideous massacre of the inhabitants of Deir Yassin on April 9th, 1948, where 254 people were ‘deliberately massacred in cold blood’ according to the Red Cross.17 Add to this list the famous IDF military commander, Moshe Dayan, who said in 1969:
‘ We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state. Instead of Arab villages, Jewish villages are established’¦There is not a single [Jewish] settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village.’ 18
Here, in the words of the colonizers themselves, is a mere sampling of their criminal role in displacing the native people. The introductory narration to the film Braveheart announced that ‘History is written by those who have hanged heroes.’ Today, modern Zionists defend Israeli ‘heroes’ by hanging history.
So let us continue to loosen the noose. In 1967, Israel had annexed east Jerusalem in defiance of UN resolutions; 6500 Palestinian families were forced out, their homes and mosques razed to the ground.19 A UN committee sent to assess the damage reported the destruction of 48 Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank, a 1974 committee reported almost 20,000 homes destroyed since 1967, and by 1992, 200 illegal Jewish settlements had been built on stolen Palestinian land there.20 Not an inch of this land is free from Israeli military incursions or outright domination today.
The Brutality of Israeli Occupation
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