Second Life Blog

The Establishment of the Jewish State on the Land of Palestine
“Roots of an Ongoing  Problem”





Prepared by
Fatima Rebhi





School of International Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi




November 2005

Introduction
The standard Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine in the late 19th century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, presumably stemming from the Arabs’ inherent anti-Semitism (who themselves are Semites). The Zionists were then forced to defend themselves and, in one form or another, this same situation continues up to today.
The problem with this explanation is that it is simply not true, as the documentary evidence in this study will show. What really happened was that the Zionist movement, from the beginning, looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state, or as much as was possible. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Palestinians (a situation which continues to the present).
The Palestinian community, as it became increasingly aware of the Zionists’ intentions, strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Palestinian society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of the British. The vast majority of the population of Palestine, by the way, had been Arabic since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)
In short, Zionism was based on a faulty, colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn’t matter. The Arabs’ opposition to Zionism wasn’t based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of their people.
One further point, the position presented here is critical of Zionism but is in no way anti-Semitic. I do not believe that the Jews acted worse than any other group might have acted in their situation. The Zionists (who were a distinct minority of the Jewish people until after WWII) had an understandable desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate, given the bleak history of Jewish oppression. Especially as the danger to European Jewry crystalized in the late 1930′s and after, the actions of the Zionists were propelled by real desperation.
But so were the actions of the Arabs. The mythic “land without people for a people without land” was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919. This is the root of the problem.



The Ottomans  Rule
In 1517 the Mamelukes were defeated by the Ottomans, who ruled Palestine for the next four hundred years, until the winter of 1917-18. Under Ottoman rule, the country was divided into districts which were administered by native Palestinians. The Christian and Jewish communities were allowed a large measure of control and Palestine flourished as the Ottomans flourished and declined as the Ottoman Empire began the slow and ponderous progress toward its end. Palestine’s decline in trade, agriculture and population continued until the 19th century. As European powers sought raw materials, new markets and expanded strategic interests, they inevitably came to the Middle East. This in turn stimulated economic and social development. In the 1830s, Mohammed Ali, the viceroy of Egypt, extended his control to Palestine where he modified the existing feudal order, increased agricultural production and improved the system of education. In 1840, the Ottomans once again took control of Palestine and set in motion reforms of their own.
During the Turkish rule, Palestine was divided into several districts, most of which were administered by Palestinians, who were descendants of the Canaanites. However, the Christian and Jewish communities were allowed a large measure of autonomy. Palestine shared in the glory of the Ottoman Empire during its rise in 16th century, but declined accordingly in the 17th century when the empire began to decline. The decline of Palestine in trade, agriculture and population continued until the 19th century. Muhammad Ali, the Viceroy of Egypt, extended his rule to Palestine between 1831 and 1840; his policies modified the then prevailing feudal system, increased agriculture and improved education.
Under the Ottoman Turks, Palestine continued to be linked administratively to Damascus until 1830, when it was placed under Sidon, then under Acre, then once again under Damascus until 1887–88, at which time the administrative divisions of the Ottoman Empire were settled for the last time. Palestine was divided into the districts of Nabulus and Acre, both of which were linked with the province of Beirut and the autonomous district of Jerusalem, which dealt directly with Istanbul. With varying fortunes often accompanied by revolts, massacres, and wars, the first three centuries of Ottoman rule isolated Palestine from most outside influences. The prosperity of 16th-century Ottoman Palestine was followed by an economic and political decline in the 17th century. Ottoman control in the 18th century was indirect. Dahir al-’Umar (1737–75) dominated the political life of northern Palestine for nearly 40 years. Ahmad al-Jazzar, the Ottoman governor of Acre, had control of most of Palestine, and in 1799, with English and Ottoman help, he successfully defended Acre against Napoleon I. Both Dahir and al-Jazzar presided over a tightly controlled Palestine, where trade with Europe as well as taxation were growing. They used their new wealth from these sources to gain influence in Istanbul, which allowed them to gain local autonomy and even intermittent control of many areas outside Palestine.
This period came to an end with Napoleon’s abortive attempt (1798–1801) to carve for himself a Middle Eastern empire. Egypt, always a determining factor in the fortunes of Palestine, was placed, after the French withdrawal, under the rule of the viceroy Muhammad Ali, who soon embarked on a program of expansion at the expense of his Ottoman overlord. In 1831 his armies occupied Palestine, and for nine years he and his son Ibrahim gave it a centralizing and modernizing administration. Their rule increasingly opened the country to Western influences and enabled Christian missionaries to establish many schools; at the same time, however, taxes were increased, and urban rebellions broke out against the harshness of the regime. When in 1840 the British, the Austrians, and the Russians came to the aid of the Ottomans, the Egyptians were forced to withdraw, and Palestine reverted to the Ottoman Empire. Increased European interest, however, led the powers to establish consulates in Jerusalem and in Palestine’s port cities.
After 1840 the reforms the sultan promulgated gradually took effect in Palestine. Increased security in the countryside and the Ottoman Land Law of 1858 encouraged the development of private property, agricultural production for the world market, the decline of tribal social organization, growth of the population, and the enrichment of the notable families. As the Ottomans extended the central government’s new military, municipal, judicial, and educational systems to Palestine, the country also witnessed a marked increase in foreign settlements and colonies—French, Russian, and German. By far the most important, in spite of their initial numerical insignificance, were the Jewish agricultural settlements, which foreshadowed later Zionist endeavours to establish a Jewish national home and still later a Jewish state (Israel) in Palestine. The earliest of these settlements was founded by Russian Jews in 1882. In 1896 Theodor Herzl issued a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and advocated an autonomous Jewish state, preferably in Palestine. Two years later he himself went to Palestine to investigate its possibilities and, possibly, to seek the help of the German emperor William II, who was then making a spectacular pilgrimage to the Holy Land.The rise of European nationalism in the 19th century, and especially the intensification of anti-Semitism during the 1880s, encouraged European Jews to seek haven in what they viewed as their “promised land”, Palestine. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased as a result of the so-called “solution of the Jewish problem” mentioned in Theodor Herzl’s  “The Jewish State” and propagated after the establishment of the World Zionist Organization” in 1897. In 1880, Arab Palestinians constituted about 95% of the total population (450,000). The increasing Jewish immigration, Jewish claims and land purchase were strongly objected to by Palestinian leaders who saw increasing Jewish immigrations as a threat to the Palestinians’ rights.
Early History of the Region
Before the Hebrews first migrated there around 1800 B.C., the land of Canaan was occupied by Canaanites. Between 3000 and 1100 B.C., Canaanite civilization covered what is today Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon and much of Syria and Jordan.Those who remained in the Jerusalem hills after the Romans expelled the Jews (in the second century A.D.) were a potpourri: farmers and vineyard growers, pagans and converts to Christianity, descendants of the Arabs, Persians, Samaritans, Greeks and old Canaanite tribes. “But all these (different peoples who had come to Canaan) were additions, sprigs grafted onto the parent tree…And that parent tree was Canaanite…(The Arab invaders of the 7th century A.D.) made Moslem converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabized that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”
The Jewish kingdoms were only one of many periods in ancient Palestine.”The extended kingdoms of David and Solomon, on which the Zionists base their territorial demands, endured for only about 73 years…Then it fell apart Even  if we allow independence to the entire life of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David’s conquest of Canaan in 1000 B.C. to the wiping out of Judah in 586 B.C., we arrive at only a 414 year Jewish rule.” Illene Beatty, “Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan.”
“Recent archeological digs have provided evidence that Jerusalem was a big and fortified city already in 1800 BCE. Findings show that the sophisticated water system heretofore attributed to the conquering Israelites pre-dated them by eight centuries and was even more sophisticated than imagined…Dr. Ronny Reich, who directed the excavation along with Eli Shuikrun, said the entire system was built as a single complex by Canaanites in the Middle Bronze Period, around 1800 BCE.” The Jewish Bulletin, July 31st, 1998.
Palestine became a predominately Arab and Islamic country by the end of the seventh century. Almost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics – including its name in Arabic, Filastin – became known to the entire Islamic world, as much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance. In 1516, Palestine became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less Arab or Islamic. Sixty percent of the population was in agriculture; the balance was divided between townspeople and a relatively small nomadic group. All these people believed themselves to belong in a land called Palestine, despite their feelings that they were also members of a large Arab nation. Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Palestinian majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
Concerning land ownership and registration, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 required the registration in the name of individual owners of agricultural land, most of which had never previously been registered and which had formerly been treated according to traditional forms of land tenure, in the hill areas of Palestine generally masha’a, or communal usufruct. The new law meant that for the first time a peasant could be deprived not of title to his land, which he had rarely held before, but rather of the right to live on it, cultivate it and pass it on to his heirs, which had formerly been inalienable. Under the provisions of the 1858 law, communal rights of tenure were often ignored. Instead, members of the upper classes, adept at manipulating or circumventing the legal process, registered large areas of land as theirs. The fellahin (peasants) naturally considered the land to be theirs, and often discovered that they had ceased to be the legal owners only when the land was sold to Jewish settlers by an absentee landlord. Not only was the land being purchased; its Arab cultivators were being dispossessed and replaced by foreigners who had overt political objectives in Palestine.” Rashid Khalidi, “Blaming The Victims,” ed. Said and Hitchens.
The Palestinians’ opposition to the arrival of Zionists was not  based on inherent anti-Semitism  because they themselves are Semites,  but it was a real sense of danger to their community. “The aim of the Jewish National Fund was `to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. As early as 1891, Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am wrote that the Arabs “understood very well what we were doing and what we were aiming at. Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, stated `We shall try to spirit the penniless (Palestinians) population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. At various locations in northern Palestine Arab farmers refused to move from land the Fund purchased from absentee owners, and the Turkish authorities, at the Fund’s request, evicted them.The indigenous Jews of Palestine also reacted negatively to Zionism. They did not see the need for a Jewish state in Palestine and did not want to exacerbate relations with the Arabs.” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
“Before the 20th century, most Jews in Palestine belonged to old Yishuv, or community, that had settled more for religious than for political reasons. There was little if any conflict between them and the Palestinian  population. Tensions began after the first Zionist settlers arrived in the 1880′s…when (they) purchased land from absentee Palestinian owners, leading to dispossession of the peasants who had cultivated it.” Don Peretz, “The Arab-Israeli Dispute.”
“During the Middle Ages, North Africa and the Arab Middle East became places of refuge and a haven for the persecuted Jews of Spain and elsewhere. In the Holy Land, they lived together in relative harmony, a harmony only disrupted when the Zionists began to claim that Palestine was the ‘rightful’ possession of the ‘Jewish people’ to the exclusion of its Moslem and Christian inhabitants.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
Jews attitude towards Arabs when reaching Palestine was awful. “Serfs they (the Jews) were in the lands of the Diaspora, and suddenly they find themselves in freedom (in Palestine); and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Palestinians with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.” Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am, quoted in Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
There were calls and proposals for Palestinian-Jewish Cooperation. An article by Yitzhak Epstein, published in Hashiloah in 1907…called for a new Zionist policy towards the Palestinians after 30 years of settlement activity. Like Ahad-Ha’am in 1891, Epstein claims that no good land is vacant, so Jewish settlement meant Palestinian dispossession. Epstein’s solution to the problem, so that a new “Jewish question” may be avoided, is the creation of a bi-national, non-exclusive program of settlement and development. Purchasing land should not involve the dispossession of poor sharecroppers. It should mean creating a joint farming community, where the Palestinians will enjoy modern technology. Schools, hospitals and libraries should be non-exclusivist and education bilingual. The vision of non-exclusivist, peaceful cooperation to replace the practice of dispossession found few takers. Epstein was maligned and scorned for his faintheartedness. Israeli author, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Original Sins.”
Was Palestine the only destination of Jews facing persecution when the Zionist movement started? “The pogroms forced many Jews to leave Russia. Societies known as ‘Lovers of Zion,’ which were forerunners of the Zionist organization, convinced some of the frightened emigrants to go to Palestine. There, they argued, Jews would rebuild the ancient Jewish Kingdom of David and Solomon. Most Russian Jews ignored their appeal and fled to Europe and the United States. By 1900, almost a million Jews had settled in the United States alone.” “Our Roots Are Still Alive” by The People Press Palestine Book Project.
Following the appearance of anti-Semitism in Europe in 1896, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism tried to find a political solution for the problem in his book, “The Jewish State”. He advocated the creation of a Jewish state in Argentina or Palestine. In 1904, the Zionist Congress decided to establish a national home for Jews in Argentina. In 1906, The Zionist congress decided the Jewish homeland should be Palestine.  
With the outbreak of World War I, Britain promised the independence of Arab lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine, in return for Arab support against Turkey which had entered the war on the side of Germany.  
Britain and France signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916, which divided the Arab region into zones of influence. Lebanon and Syria were assigned to France, Jordan and Iraq to Britain and Palestine was to be internationalized. In 1917, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary sent a letter to the Zionist leader Lord Rothschild which later became known as “The Balfour declaration”. He stated that Britain would use its best endeavors to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. At that time the population of Palestine was 700,000 of which 574,000 were Muslims, 74,000 were Christian, and 56,000 were Jews.


The Balfour Declaration

Dear Lord Rithchild,
With trust in Almighty God, we set our hand to this Declaration, at this Session of the Provisional State Council, on this Sabbath eve, the fifth of Iyar, 5708, the fourteenth day of May, 1948.
(Signed: Arthur James Balfour in 2nd Nov.,1917)
The British Mandate Period 1920-1948
The Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917 by the British Government…was made a) by a European power, b) about a non-European territory, c) in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory. As Balfour himself wrote in 1919, ‘The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant (the Anglo French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of the former Ottoman colonies that as a reward for supporting the Allies they could have their independence) is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land,’” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
But Wasn’t Palestine a wasteland before the Jews started immigrating there? Britain’s high commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor, recommended total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchase to protect Palestinian agriculture. He said “all cultivable land was occupied; that no cultivable land now in possession of the indigenous population could be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators”. The Colonial Office rejected the recommendation. John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
In 1919, the American King-Crane Commission spent six weeks in Syria and Palestine, interviewing delegations and reading petitions. Their report stated, “The commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase…
“If  the principle of self-determination is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted. No British officers, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program. The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered.” Quoted in “The Israel-Arab Reader” ed. Laquer and Rubin.
Zionist land policy was incorporated in the Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine…’land is to be acquired as Jewish property and  the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to the end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people.’ The provision goes to stipulate that the Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labor. The effect of this Zionist colonization policy on the Arabs was that land acquired by Jews became extra-territorialized. It ceased to be land from which the Palestinians could ever hope to gain any advantage…
“The Zionists made no secret of their intentions, for as early as 1921, Dr. Eder, a member of the Zionist Commission, boldly told the Court of Inquiry, “there can be only one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased.” He then asked that only Jews should be allowed to bear arms.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
Clearly, the last thing the Zionists really wanted was that all the inhabitants of Palestine should have an equal say in running the country. Chaim Weizmann had impressed on Churchill that representative government would have spelled the end of the  Jewish National Home in Palestine. Churchill declared,  ”The present form of government will continue for many years. Step by step we shall develop representative institutions leading to full self-government, but our children’s children will have passed away before that is accomplished.” David Hirst, “The Gun and the Olive Branch.”
Zionism denied of the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. “Even if nobody lost their land, the (Zionist) program was unjust in principle because it denied majority political rights. Zionism, in principle, could not allow the natives to exercise their political rights because it would mean the end of the Zionist enterprise.” Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Original Sins.”
In 1936-9, the Palestinians attempted a nationalist revolt. David Ben-Gurion, recognized its nature. In internal discussion, he noted that “in our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us,” but he urged, “let us not ignore the truth among ourselves.” The truth was that  politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside“. The revolt was crushed by the British, with considerable brutality.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
Gandhi on the Palestine conflict – 1938
“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. If they (the Jews) must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs. As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.” Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in “A Land of Two Peoples” ed. Mendes-Flohr.
“In 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine. After 1940, when the mandatory authority restricted Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside Palestine, there continued to be illegal buying (and selling) within the 65 percent of the total area restricted to Arabs.
Thus when the partition plan was announced in 1947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was incorporated as a fait accompli inside the borders of the Jewish state. And after Israel announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws legally assimilated huge tracts of Palestinian land (whose proprietors had become refugees, and were pronounced “absentee landlords” in order to expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any circumstances).” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
The UN Partition of Palestine
Why did the UN recommend the plan partitioning Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state? “By this time (November 1947),  the United States had emerged as the most aggressive proponent of partition The United States got the General Assembly to delay a vote “to gain time to bring certain Latin American republics into line with its own views.” .Some delegates charged U.S. officials with ‘diplomatic intimidation.’ Without ‘terrific pressure’ from the United States on ‘governments which cannot afford to risk American reprisals,’ said an anonymous editorial writer, the resolution ‘would never have passed.’” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
The position of US president Truman  was based on his internal politics:  ”I am sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.” President Harry Truman, quoted in “Anti Zionism”, ed. by Teikener, Abed-Rabbo & Mezvinsky.
The partition  plan was not fair. “Arab rejection was based on the fact that, while the population of the Jewish state was to be only half Jewish with the Jews owning less than 10% of the Jewish state land area, the Jews were to be established as the ruling body – a settlement which no self-respecting people would accept without protest, to say the least. The action of the United Nations conflicted with the basic principles for which the world organization was established, namely, to uphold the right of all peoples to self-determination. By denying the Palestine Arabs, who formed the two-thirds majority of the country, the right to decide for themselves, the United Nations had violated its own charter.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
The Arabs were not the only party to refuse the plan. “While the Yishuv’s leadership formally accepted the 1947 Partition Resolution, large sections of Israel’s society – including Ben-Gurion – were opposed to or extremely unhappy with partition and from early on viewed the war as an ideal opportunity to expand the new state’s borders beyond the UN earmarked partition boundaries and at the expense of the Palestinians.” Israeli historian, Benny Morris, in “Tikkun”, March/April 1998.
“In internal discussion in 1938 , David Ben-Gurion  stated that: “after we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine” In 1948, Menachem Begin declared that: “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognized. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
The war begins
“In December 1947, the British announced that they would withdraw from Palestine by May 15, 1948. Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa called a general strike against the partition. Fighting broke out in Jerusalem’s streets almost immediately. Violent incidents mushroomed into all-out war. During that fateful April of 1948, eight out of thirteen major Zionist military attacks on Palestinians occurred in the territory granted to the Arab state.” “Our Roots Are Still Alive” by the People Press Palestine Book Project.
“Before the end of the mandate and, therefore before any possible intervention by Arab states, the Jews, taking advantage of their superior military preparation and organization, had occupied most of the Arab cities in Palestine before May 15, 1948. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, 1948, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14, 1948. In contrast, the Palestine Arabs did not seize any of the territories reserved for the Jewish state under the partition resolution.” British author, Henry Cattan, “Palestine, The Arabs and Israel.”
Zionist terrorists were responsible for escalation of fighting benefiting from their sophisticated weapon and good training and preparation. “Menahem Begin, the Leader of the Irgun, tells how in Jerusalem, as elsewhere, we were the first to pass from the defensive to the offensive. Arabs began to flee in terror. Hagana was carrying out successful attacks on other fronts, while all the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Israelis now allege that the Palestine war began with the entry of the Arab armies into Palestine after 15 May 1948. But that was the second phase of the war; they overlook the massacres, expulsions and dispossessions which took place prior to that date and which necessitated Arab states’ intervention.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
The Deir Yassin Massacre of Palestinians was committed by Jewish soldiers.”For the entire day of April 9, 1948, Irgun and LEHI soldiers carried out the slaughter in a cold and premeditated fashion. The attackers  lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them. The ruthlessness of the attack on Deir Yassin shocked Jewish and world opinion alike, drove fear and panic into the Palestinian  population, and led to the flight of unarmed civilians from their homes all over the country.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
But Deir Yassin was not the only massacre by the terrorist Jews who became later prime ministers (Menahem Begin and Yitzhaq Shamir). “By 1948, the Jew was not only able to “defend himself”  but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, “in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes”. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that “every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs”. ” Norman Finkelstein, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
MASSACRES
Immediately after the vote of the UN Partition Plan of 1947, the Zionists aimed at confirming Jewish dominance over the 50% Arab living in the proposed Jewish state, and to expand those limits so as to include the greatest possible area, if not all Palestine, before Britain withdrew from the country on May 14, 1948. (Bitter Haevest, by Sami Hadawi,p.85). The Zionist plan of intention was disclosed during a conversation in December 1947 between a British officer of the Jordan Arab Legion and a Palestinian Government Jewish official. The former is reported to have asked the latter, “whether the new Jewish state would not have many internal trouble in view of the fact that the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish state would be equal in number to the Jews.” The Jewish official is reported to have replied, “oh no! That will be fixed. A few massacres will get rid of them.” Glubb, op. cit, p.81)
To the outside world,  the Zionists have often tried to excuse crimes as “isolated incidents,” “unpremeditated incidents,” “acts of ultra-extremists,” and other whitewashes that have misled the world public opinion.
In fact all Zionist war crimes and crimes against humanity are planned in advance and executed for a desired effect, with malice, aforethought and full knowledge of the consequences involved in order to serve the Zionist objective, namely, the annihilation of the Palestinian people and the establishment of the Jewish State.(Encyclopedia of Palestine, p.269)
The Zionists claimed that 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, but the Zionists killed more than 100,000 Palestinians and committed genocide by destroying the existence of Palestinians as a nation and made Palestinians refugees living in exile. Massacres are massacres, whether six million or one hundred thousand. (Encyclopedia of Palestine, p.269)
THE KING DAVID MASSACRE:
Many massacres were first aimed at dislodging the British from Palestine. A major one was the King David Hotel massacre. According to Yitshaq Ben Ami, a Palestinian Jew who spent 30 years in exile after the establishment of Israel, investigating the crimes of the ‘ruthless clique heading the international Zionist Movement,’ “The Irgun had conceived a plan for the King David attack early in 1946, but the green light was given only on July first. According to Dr. Sneh, the operation was personally approved by Ben-Gurion, from his self-exile in Europe. Sadeh, the operation officer of the Haganah, and Giddy Paglin, the head of the Irgun operation under Menachem Begin agreed that thirty-five minutes advance notice would give the British time enough to evacuate the wing, without enabling them to disarm the Explosion. (Yitshaq Ben Ami, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory, 1982,p.377)[Enc. of Palestine  p.269]
The King David Hotel explosion of July 22, 1946, resulted in the death of 92 Britons, Palestinians and Jews, and in the wounding of 58, was not just an “extremist act” of “Jewish extremists,” but a premeditated massacre conducted by the Irgun in agreement with the highest political authorities in Palestine, the Jewish Agency and its head David Ben Gurion. The Jewish Agency motive was to destroy all evidence the British had gathered proving that the terrorist crime waves in Palestine were not merely the actions of “fringe” groups such as the Irgun and Stern Gang, but were committed in collision with the Haganah and Palmach groups and under the Jewish Agency itself.
The following is a statement made in the House of Commons by then British Prime Minister Clement Attlee:
“On July 22, 1946, one of the most dastardly and cowardly crimes in recorded history took place. We refer to the blowing up of King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Ninety-two persons lost their lives in that stealthy attack, and 45 were injured, among whom there were many high officials, junior officers and office personnel, both men and women. The King David Hotel was used as an office housing the Secretariat of Palestine Government and British Army Headquarters. The attack was made on 22 July at about 12 o’clock noon when officers are usually in full swing. The attackers, disguised as milkmen, carried the explosives in milk containers, placed them in the basement of the hotel and ran away.”(Enc.of Palestine,p.267-8)
THE SEMIRAMIS HOTEL MASSACRE:
The Jewish Agency escalated their terror campaign against Palestinian Arabs. They decided to perpetrate a wholesale massacre by bombing the Seniramis Hotel in the Katamon section of Jerusalem, in order to drive out the Palestinians from Jerusalem. The massacre on January 5, 1948, was a direct responsibility of the Jewish Agency leader David Ben Gurion and the Haganah leaders Moshe Sneh and Yesrael Galili.
A description of the Semiramis Hotel from the UN documents reveals: “5 January 1948, Haganah terrorists made a most barbarous attack at one o’clock in the early morning of Monday, 5 January 1948, at Semiramis Hotel in the Katamon section of Jerusalem killing innocent people and wounding many. The Jewish terrorist forces blasted the entrance to the hotel by a small bomb and then placed bombs in the basement of the building. As a result of the explosion the whole building collapsed with its residents. As the terrorists withdrew, they started shooting at the houses in the neighborhood.” Those killed were 19, beside 16 more were wounded, among them women and children. (UN Security Council official Records, Supplements 1948, Doc. S /740.(Encyclopedia of Palestine,p.270)
DEIR YASSIN MASSACRE:
The first major most notorious massacre in the 1948 War was the massacre of Deir Yassin, a small village near Jerusalem, on April 9/10, 1948. It was designed to spread terror and panic among the Palestinian population in every city and village of Palestine in order to frighten the defenseless people into fleeing their homes out of fear for their lives, so that their homes and land could be confiscated for the use of Jewish colonialist settlers.
Two hundred and fifty people were slaughtered. Mutilating the bodies, even before death, the culprits cut off parts and opened the bellies of others. Nursing babies were butchered on the bosoms of helpless mothers. Of those 250 people, twenty-five pregnant women were bayoneted in their abdomens while still alive. Fifty-two children were maimed under the eyes of their own mothers, then slain and their heads cut off. Their mothers were in turn massacred and their bodies mutilated. About sixty other women and girls were also killed and their bodies mutilated. Such are the historical facts concerning the horrible crime perpetrated against the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin.(Encyclopedia of Palestine, Vol.I,.p.271).
The marauders were not satisfied with what they had committed. They gathered the women and girls who were still alive and after removing all their clothes, they put them in open cars, driving them naked through the streets of the Jewish section of Jerusalem, where the onlookers were cheering and jeering. Many even took pictures as souvenirs. Jon Kimche, author and correspondent who was in Jerusalem at the time, described the attack as “the darkest stain on the Jewish record” He added, “…it is historically important because it was to become the beginning of a second legend with which the terrorists sought to serve their cause and justify their deeds. Just as they claimed credit for the British decision to leave Palestine as being the result of terrorists’ attack on British troops, so later they justify the massacre of Deir Yasin because it led to the panic flight of the remaining Arabs in the Jewish state and so lessened the Jewish casualties.” (The Seven Pillars, [New York Times: F.A. Praeger, 1953] p.228, quoted in Bitter Harvest by Sami Hadawi,p.85.)
Dov Joseph, one-time Governor of the Israeli sector of Jerusalem and later Minister of Justice, called it a “deliberate and unprovoked attack,”(The Faithful City: The Seige of Jerusalem, 1948(NYT:Simon and Schuster,1960)p.71. Meanwhile British historian Arnold Toynbee described it as “comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis.” (A study of History,[London, Oxford University Press, 1953-54, Vol. VIII, p.290.) Quoted in Sami Hadawi’s Bitter Harvest,p.85)
Yet the great perpetrator of this massacre, Menahem Begin who in the 70s became Prime Minister of Israel, glorified the act saying, “The massacre was not only justified, but there would not have been a state without the victory of Deir Yassin.” (Jewish Newsletter, October 3, 1960) quoted in Sami Hadawi’s Bitter Harvest,p.85)
Other unpublished massacres similar to the massacre of Deir Yassin, later came to light through an article written by Ariel Yitzhaqi, historian and researcher, published by Yediot Aharanot in its issue of April 14, 1972, in which the writer accuses the Palmach of similar operations that he states were not restricted to ETZEL and LEHI. “If we assemble the facts,” writes Yitzhaqi, “we realize that, to a great extent, the battle followed the familiar pattern of the occupation of an Arab village in 1948. In the first months of the War of Independence, Haganah and Palmach troops carried out dozens of operations of this (Deir Yassin) kind, the method adopted being to raid an enemy village and blow up as many houses as possible in in. In the course of these operations, Yitzhaqi then listed the Arab villages raide and the number of Arabs killed as follows:
1. The village of Balad Esh-Sheikh was attacked. “In this operation, more than 60 of the enemy, most of them non-combatants, were killed in their houses.”
2. The village of Sa’sa’ was attacked.. “In this operation, which was for many years to be regarded as a model raid because of the high standard of its execution, 20 houses were blown up over their inhabitants, and some 60 Arabs were killed, most of them were women and children.”
3. In the battle for Kattamon Quarter of Jerusalem, “Arab women working in the St. Simon Monestry as servants were killed.”
4. In Lydda town, the Palmach claim that “the local population rose in revolt, and to suppress the revolt, orders were given to fire on anyone seen in the streets. Yeftah troops opened fire on all passers-by and suppress the revolt mercilessly in a few hours, going from house to house and firing at every moving target. According to the commander’s report 250 Arabs were killed in the fighting.”(Sami Hadawi, p.88. The Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol.I, No.4, Summer 1972, pp.142-46)
Another massacre of Arab civilians occured in October 1948 in the Lebanese-border village of Hula, and only recently came to light as a result of the appointment of Shamuel Lahis as the new Secretary-General of the Jewish Agency who had been convicted for his part in the crime.
According to a report by Dov Yirmaya, “there had been no resistance in the village, that there was no enemy activity in the area, and that about a hundred people were in the village. They had surrendered and had requested to be allowed to stay.”
The men--some fifty of them ranging between the ages of 15-60 years-- were kept in one house. When asked by the troop commander if he should send them away to follow the rest of the villagers, Yermaya states that he ordered Lahis to keep them and made sure that they had whatever they needed until he had asked the brigade what to do with them.
Yermaya goes on to say that, “when I returned to the village the following morning with an order to send the villagers away, I found that while I was away, two of the troops’ officers had killed all the captives who were in the house with a sub-machine gun, and had then blown up the house on top of them to be their grave.” (R. Barkanin Al-Hamshmar, quoted from Journal of Palestine Study, Vol.VIII, No.4, Summer 1978) 18 p.89.)  
THE MASSACRE OF DAWAYMA:
Another unpublished massacre that took place on October 29, 1948. The following is a testimony of a soldier who partisipated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Dawayma(in Haifa sub-district) on October 29, 1948 is only the most recently disclosed item in a long chain of evidence:
“...They killed between eighty to one hundred Arab men, women, and children. To kill the children, they (soldiers) fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without corpses. The men and women of the village were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite them.
One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a building he was about to blow up...Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman and her baby was made to clean up the place for a couple of days, then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered “good guys”...became base murderers, and this is not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better.”[Davar, June 9, 1979]. Encyclopedia of Palestine, p.272; and in Bitter Harvest by Sami Hadawi, p.89. Sami Hadawi says there were 200 people ages between 70 and 90 years who could not make it to the borders and took refuge in the village mosque were murdered and the building blown over them to be their grave.

Assassination of U.N. Peacekeeper Count Folke Bernadotte
It Sept.17, 1948, Jewish terrorists assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden as he sought to bring peace to the Middle East. His three-car convoy had been stopped at a small improvised roadblock in Jewish-controlled West Jerusalem when two gunmen began shooting out the tires of the cars and a third gunman thrust a Schmeisser automatic pistol through the open back window of Bernadotte’s Chrysler. The 54-year-old diplomat, sitting on the right in the back, was hit by six bullets and died instantly. A French officer sitting next to Bernadotte was killed accidentally.
The assassins were members of Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel—Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), better known as the Stern Gang. Its three leaders had decided a week earlier to have Bernadotte killed because they believed he was partial to the Palestinians. One of those leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, who in 1983 would become prime minister of Israel.
Bernadotte had been chosen the United Nations mediator for Palestine four months earlier in what was the U.N.’s first serious attempt at peacemaking in the post-World War II world. As a hero of the war, when his mediation efforts on behalf of the International Red Cross saved 20,000 persons, including thousands of Jews, from Nazi concentration camps, Bernadotte seemed a natural choice for the post. The terms of the mediator’s mandate were to “promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation in Palestine” and to allow him to mediate beyond the terms of the Partition Plan.
It had been only on Nov. 29, 1947 that the U.N. General Assembly had voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. Yet, as had been widely predicted, that action had led to war. Fighting intensified after elements of five Arab armies moved into Palestine the day after Israel proclaimed its establishment on May 14, 1948. Bernadotte’s first action had been to arrange a truce, which lasted from June 11 to July 9.
During the lull, Bernadotte had put forward his first proposal for solving the conflict. Instead, it was to seal his fate. Bernadotte’s transgression, in the view of Jewish zealots, was to include in his June 28 proposal the suggestion that Jerusalem be placed under Jordanian rule, since all the area around the city was designated for the Arab state.
The U.N. partition plan had declared Jerusalem an international city that was to be ruled by neither Arab nor Jew. But the Jewish terrorists, including Shamir and Menahem Begin, the leader of the largest terrorist group, Irgun Zvai Leumi—National Military Organization, also known by the Hebrew acronym “Etzel”, had rejected partition and claimed all of Palestine and Jordan for the Jewish state. These Jewish extremists were horrified at Bernadotte’s suggestion.
By July Sternists were already threatening Bernadotte’s assassination. New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger reported meeting with two Stern members on July 24, who stated: “We intend to kill Bernadotte and any other uniformed United Nations observers who come to Jerusalem.” Asked why, “They replied that their organization was determined to seize all of Jerusalem for the state of Israel and would brook no interference by any national or international body.”
Since Bernadotte’s first set of proposals had caused criticism from all parties, he spent the rest of the summer working up new proposals, which he finally finished on Sept. 16. Unknown publicly was the fact that in his new suggestions Bernadotte dropped his idea of turning over Jerusalem to Jordan and instead reverted to the partition plan’s designation of it as an international city. Thus when Shamir’s gunmen cut down Bernadotte the next day, they were unaware that he no longer was advocating giving Jerusalem to the Arabs.
The assassination brought an official condemnation from the Israeli government and promises of quick arrests. However, no one was ever brought to trial nor was there any nationwide outcry against the assassination. None of Lehi’s leaders or the actual gunmen were ever caught, although they were early known to Israel’s leaders.
Israel’s obvious reluctance to prosecute the assassins brought the first U.N. Security Council criticism of the new country. On Oct. 19, 1948, the council unanimously passed a resolution expressing its “concern” that Israel had “to date submitted no report to the Security Council or the Acting Mediator regarding the progress of the investigation into the assassination.” An official inquiry by Sweden produced a report in 1950 that charged Israel’s investigation had been so negligent that “doubt must exist as to whether the Israeli authorities really tried to bring the inquiry to a positive result.”
Israel later admitted the laxity of its investigation and in 1950 paid the United Nations $54,628 in indemnity for Bernadotte’s murder.
The assassination and Israel’s failure to punish the culprits struck a hard blow against the fledgling United Nations. The first secretary-general, Trygve Lie, said: “If the Great Powers accepted that this situation in the Middle East could best be settled by leaving the forces concerned to fight it out amongst themselves, it was quite clear that they would be tacitly admitting that the Security Council and the United Nations was a useless instrument in attempting to preserve peace.”  To Secretary of State George Marshall, Lie had written on May 15, 1948 that Egypt had warned him it was about to send troops beyond its borders and against the Jewish state in Palestine, saying: “My primary concern is for the future usefulness of the United Nations and its Security Council…I must do everything to prevent this, otherwise the Security Council will have…created a precedent for any nation to take aggressive action in direct contravention to the Charter of the United Nations.”
But, as author Kati Marton has observed: “If the United Nations spoke with ‘considerable authority’ early that summer, by fall its voice was barely above a whisper in Palestine. Unwilling or unable to enforce its own decisions, the U.N. became for many Israelis in Ben- Gurion’s memorable putdown, ‘UNO, schmuno.’” She also observed: “So muted was the world body’s reaction, so lacking in any real sanctions against the Jewish state for its failure to pursue the murderers of the United Nations’ mediator, that for Israel, ‘world opinion’ became an empty phrase.”

The Emergence of Israel
The State of Israel was proclaimed by the Jews on 14 May 1948 on the eve of the termination of the British mandate over Palestine. The declaration was made by the “members of the People’ s council, representative of the Jewish community of Eretz-Israel and the Zionist movement” who by the virtue of their “natural and historic right and on the strength of the resolution of the United Nations General Assembly, hereby declare the establishment of A Jewish State in Eretz Israel, to be Known as the State of Israel.
The declaration of the establishment of Israel calls for the following comments:
-Incompetence of the parties issuing the proclamation:
First, the parties which issued the declaration, whether they were the Jews of Palestine- who in their majority were alien immigrants and were neither indigenous nor citizens of the country or whether they the representatives of  the World Zionist Movement- a foreign political organization- possessed no competence or capacity to proclaim a Jewish State in Palestine.
-Grounds invoked for the proclamation:
The declaration invoked two grounds for the proclamation of the State of Israel: a so-called ‘historic right’ and the UN partition resolution. The Jewish ‘historic right ‘ to Palestine was not accepted by the Paris Peace Conference and was rejected by the British Government when it formulated with the Zionists the terms of Palestine mandate. Hence, one of the grounds for the declaration of Israel’s independence was without foundation.
As to the other ground, apart from its doubtful validity and legality, it was not, in fact respected because the state which was emerged did not conform to the UN partition resolution in which purported to be based, either demographically or territorially. Demographically, in advance of the proclamation, the Jews had evicted several hundred thousands Palestinians who lived in the territory of the Jewish State as defined by the UN. Territorially, the newly proclaimed state ignored the boundaries fixed for it by the UN. In this regard, one may observe that the proclamation omitted any reference to the boundaries of the Jewish state. Such omission was in no way an oversight. Any doubt that may exist regarding the significance of the omission to mention Israel’s boundaries is removed by the publication  in 1978 of Israel’s national archives for the year 1948. these reveal that the question of boundaries was discussed at the time but that Ben Gurion opposed their delimitation in the proclamation claiming that ‘the war will determine the dimensions of the Jewish state’. It is clear  then that the proclamation of the state of Israel relied more on war than on a UN resolution.


-US position on Israel’s boundaries:
Although the Jews  carefully avoided any reference to the boundaries in proclaiming the State of Israel, they were unable to avoid the issue when it came to securing recognition from the US government. President Truman was pressed by some of his advisers to promise recognition to Israel and by others to wait. According to Under-Secretary of State Lovett ‘the president had decided to do something  about recognizing the new state if it was set up but that he would agree to wait until the request had been made  and until there was some definitions of boundaries. Hence, assurances on those two points were furnished by the new state in the letter addressed on 14 May 1948 by Eliahu Eptein, agent of the Provisional Government of Israel to president Truman requesting recognition of Israel. The letter notified the president that:
“The State of Israel has been proclaimed as an independent republic  within frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations  in its resolution of November 29, 1947, and that a provisional government  has been charged to assume the rights and duties of government for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel….”
No sooner did President Truman receive the letter than he recognized Israel within minutes, even though the Question of Palestine was still being considered by the General assembly. Such recognition which was made in ‘indecent haste’ almost precipitated the US delegation at the UN to resign ‘en masse’.
-Israel is bound by Partition Resolution:
Despite the omission to fix boundaries, Israel’s reliance in the proclamation of independence on the UN partition resolution 181 obligates it to observe the provisions of the resolution in all respects, including boundaries. Moreover, the proclamation stated that…’ the State of Israel is prepared to cooperate with the agencies and representatives of the United Nations in implementing the resolution of the General Assembly of the 29th November 1947′. However, Israel did not cooperate in any way to implement the Resolution , but, on the contrary, occupied and usurped most of the territory of the Palestinian state which was to emerge side by side with it, as well as modern Jerusalem, thus belying its commitment in its proclamation of independence to implement the partition resolution. Legally, however, Israel’s inobservance of the boundaries of the UN partition resolution doesn’t discharge it from its obligations to respect and to implement the resolution and to withdraw  from all territories it seized in excess of its provisions.
-Relationship between the state of Israel and Judaism:
The state of Israel doesn’t possess a genuine relationship with Judaism. The Zionist Jews who founded Israel possessed no racial links with the biblical Jews. The concept of a Jewish state which was preached by Herzl had no direct link with Judaism and was planned for nationalistic reasons by European Jews in order to escape discrimination or persecution in Easter Europe. They exploited the Bible and Judaism to secure support for their ambition to form a Jewish State and they succeeded in deceiving the World.
This explain why we find today that the majority (65 per cent) of  the Israelis are secular Jews. Moreover, National Religious Party, Shas, Yahodat Hatorah and others  form small minority in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament). The two main dominant parties which control the administration, i.e.  Labour and Likud, are secular but because neither can form a government alone, they need the support of one or more of the religious parties.
-Condemnation of the state of Israel by Orthodox Jews:
In addition to the secular and national religious Jews in Israel, there exist a number of Orthodox Jews who are opposed on religious grounds to political Zionism and to the State of Israel. An important group of anti-Zionist Jews are members of the Naturei Karta. This group which comprises a numbered of learned rabbis is active in Jerusalem and in New York. In a statement published in the New York Times (21 April 1980), the American Naturei Karta declared… ” The establishment of a ‘Jewish’ pre-messianic State  is  a most serious aberration and blasphemous act that has been condemned by the leading Talmidei Chachomin (Torah sages) of the past generation and of our own time.  
The same group stated in New York Times (26 April 1985):
“Zionism in its nature is the very enemy of the Jews and Judaism….According to the Jewish law, the Jews are forbidden to have their own state before the coming of the Messiah…it is not the ambition of the Jewish people to have a strong navy or air force and in our opinion the defense of the State of Israel is neither practicable nor desirable. For the name of Israel was usurped by the Zionists to mislead the Jews and the nations of the World….”
Developments after the proclamation of the Jewish State:
“The armies of the Arab states entered the war immediately after the State of Israel was founded in May (1948). Fighting continued, almost all of it within the territory assigned to the Palestinian state. About 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled in the 1948 conflict.” Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“The Arab League hastily called for its member countries to send regular army troops into Palestine. They were ordered to secure only the sections of Palestine given to the Arabs under the partition plan. But these regular armies were ill equipped and lacked any central command to coordinate their efforts. Jordan’s King Abdullah  promised  the Israelis and the British  that his troops, the Arab Legion, the only real fighting force among the Arab armies, would avoid fighting with Jewish settlements. Yet Western historians record this as the moment when the young state of Israel fought off “the overwhelming hordes’ of five Arab countries. In reality, the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians intensified.” “Our Roots Are Still Alive,” by the Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.

Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine
“Joseph Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund. On December 19, 1940, he wrote: ‘It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country. The Zionist enterprise so far…has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land buying’ – but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’. There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
“Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream (Zionist) leader was able to conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples – achievable only by transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and agitators. But this was merely a public pose. Ben Gurion summed up: ‘With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)…I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it,’” Israel historian, Benny Morris, Righteous   Victims”  
“Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October [1948. But no [general] expulsion policy was ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals ‘understand’ what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the ‘great expeller’ and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy…But while there was no ‘expulsion policy’, the July and October [1948] offensives were characterized by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards Arab civilians than the first half of the war.” Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949″
“Israeli propaganda has largely relinquished the claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was ‘self-inspired’. Official circles implicitly concede that the Palestinian population fled as a result of Israeli action – whether directly, as in the case of Lydda and Ramleh, or indirectly, due to the panic that and similar actions (the Deir Yassin massacre) inspired in Palestinian population centers throughout Palestine. However, even though the historical record has been grudgingly set straight, the Israeli establishment still refused to accept moral or political responsibility for the refugee problem it- or its predecessors – actively created.” Peretz Kidron, quoted in “Blaming the Victims,” ed. Said and Hitchens.
“That Ben-Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Palestinian population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted, if only from the variety of means he employed to achieve his purpose…most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants…even if they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth of Israel.”
“During May 1948, ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim. Even earlier, On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha… The village was destroyed that night… Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on 20 April… Abu Zureiq was completely demolished… Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya, to the southeast, were also leveled. . .By mid-1949, the majority of [the 350 depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and uninhabitable.” Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.
“The first UN General Assembly resolution–Number 194- affirming the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property, was passed on December 11, 1948. It has been repassed no less than twenty-eight times since that first date. Whereas the moral and political right of a person to return to his place of uninterrupted residence is acknowledged everywhere, Israel has negated the possibility of return… and systematically and juridically made it impossible, on any grounds whatever, for the Palestinian to return, be compensated for his property, or live in Israel as a citizen equal before the law with a Jewish Israeli.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”
“The fact that the Arabs fled in terror, because of real fear of a repetition of the 1948 Zionist massacres, is no reason for denying them their homes, fields and livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area of military activity generally panic. But they have always been able to return to their homes when the danger subsides. Military conquest does not abolish private rights to property; nor does it entitle the victor to confiscate the homes, property and personal belongings of the noncombatant civilian population. The seizure of Arab property by the Israelis was an outrage.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
Negotiations after the 1948-1949 wars
“At Lausanne, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians were trying to save by negotiations what they had lost in the war–a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israel, however, preferred tenuous armistice agreements to a definite peace that would involve territorial concessions and the repatriation of even a token number of refugees. The refusal to recognize the Palestinians’ right to self-determination and statehood proved over the years to be the main source of the turbulence, violence, and bloodshed that came to pass.” Israeli author, Simha Flapan, “The Birth Of Israel.”
“The  Lausanne  conference officially opened on 27 April 1949. On 12 May the UN’s  Palestine Conciliation ,Committee reaped its only success when it induced the parties to sign a joint protocol on the framework for a comprehensive peace. Israel for the first time accepted the principle of repatriation of the Palestinian refugees and the internationalization of Jerusalem. But they did so as a mere exercise in public relations aimed at strengthening Israel’s international image. Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation  stated…’My main purpose was to begin to undermine the protocol of 12 May, which we had signed only under duress of our struggle for admission to the U.N. Refusal to sign would…have immediately been reported to the Secretary-General and the various governments.’” Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, “The Making of the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-1951.”
“The Preamble of this resolution of admission included a safeguarding clause as follows: ‘Recalling its resolution of 29 November 1947 (on partition) and 11 December 1948 (on reparation and compensation), and taking note of the declarations and explanations made by the representative of the Government of Israel before the ad hoc Political Committee in respect of the implementation of the said resolutions, the General Assembly…decides to admit Israel into membership in the United Nations.’
“Here, it must be observed, is a condition and an undertaking to implement the resolutions mentioned. There was no question of such implementation being conditioned on the conclusion of peace on Israeli terms as the Israelis later claimed to justify their non-compliance.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”
The creation of Israel has created a tragedy for Palestinians
“The winter of 1949, the first winter of exile for more than seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians, was cold and hard. Families huddled in caves, abandoned huts, or makeshift tents. Many of the starving were only miles away from their own vegetable gardens and orchards in occupied Palestine – the new state of Israel. At the end of 1949 the United Nations finally acted. It set up the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) to take over sixty refugee camps from voluntary agencies. It managed to keep people alive, but only barely.” “Our Roots Are Still Alive” by The Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.
The 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza
Who started the 1967 war, Egyptians as Israel originally claimed or the Israelis?
“The former Commander of the Air Force, General Ezer Weitzman, regarded as a hawk, stated that there was ‘no threat of destruction’ but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could ‘exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.’. Menahem Begin had the following remarks to make: ‘In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.’ “Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.” Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in 1967, in Le Monde, 2/28/68
“Moshe Dayan, the celebrated commander who, as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan said  ’many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights did so less for security than for the farmland’. He added ‘They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land…We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was. The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.’” The New York Times, May 11, 1997
The history of Israeli expansionism
“The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Trans-Jordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.” David Ben-Gurion, in 1936, quoted in Noam Chomsky, “The Fateful Triangle.”
“The main danger which Israel, as a ‘Jewish state’, poses to its own people, to other Jews and to its neighbors, is its ideologically motivated pursuit of territorial expansion and the inevitable series of wars resulting from this aim No Zionist politician has ever repudiated Ben-Gurion’s idea that Israeli policies must be based (within the limits of practical considerations) on the restoration of Biblical borders as the borders of the Jewish state.” Israeli professor, Israel Shahak, “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3000 Years.”
In Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharatt’s personal diaries, there is an excerpt from May of 1955 in which he quotes Moshe Dayan as follows: “Israel must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no – it must – invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge…And above all – let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.” Quoted in Livia Rokach, “Israel’s Sacred Terrorism.”
Was the occupation of Arab lands necessary to protect Israel’s security?
“Senator J.William Fulbright  proposed in 1970 that America should guarantee Israel’s security in a formal treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel would retire to the borders of 1967. The UN Security Council would guarantee this arrangement, and thereby bring the Soviet Union – then a supplier of arms and political aid to the Arabs – into compliance. As Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel.
“The plan drew favorable editorial support in the United States. The proposal, however, was flatly rejected by Israel. ‘The whole affair disgusted Fulbright,’ writes (his biographer Randall) Woods. ‘The Israelis were not even willing to act in their own self-interest.’” Allan Brownfield in “Issues of the American Council for Judaism.” Fall 1997.(Ed.-This was one of many such proposals)
After the 1967 war
“In violation of international law, Israel has confiscated over 52 percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip for military use or for settlement by Jewish civilians. From 1967 to 1982, Israel’s military government demolished 1,338 Palestinian homes on the West Bank. Over this period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were detained without trial for various periods by Israeli security forces.” Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising Against Israeli Occupation,” ed. Lockman and Beinin.
World opinion on the legality of Israeli control of the West Bank and Gaza.
“Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other states to Israel’s occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that even if Israel’s action was defensive, its retention of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not. The UN General Assembly characterized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a denial of self determination and hence a ‘serious and increasing threat to international peace and security.’ ” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories occupied in the 1967 war are a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed.
“The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the territory. This prohibition is found in the convention’s Article 49, which states, ‘The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
Jerusalem – Eternal, Indivisible Capital of Israel
“Writing in The Jerusalem Report (Feb. 28, 2000), Leslie Susser points out that the current boundaries were drawn after the Six-Day War. Responsibility for drawing those lines fell to Central Command Chief Rehavan Ze’evi. The line he drew ‘took in not only the five square kilometers of Arab East Jerusalem – but also 65 square kilometers of surrounding open country and villages, most of which never had any municipal link to Jerusalem. Overnight they became part of Israel’s eternal and indivisible capital.’” Allan Brownfield in The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, May 2000.
Main goal of Zionism
“In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
“It was summed up in the meeting of the Jewish Agency’s Executive on June 26, 1938  that the Zionist thing to do ‘is belittle the  Evian  Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing. We are particularly worried that it would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts’. Ben-Gurion’s statement at the same meeting: ‘No rationalization can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible.’” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
“Ben-Gurion stated… ‘If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second  because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.’ In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that ‘the human conscience’ might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: ‘Zionism is in danger.’” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, “The Seventh Million.”
“Even David Ben-Gurion’s sympathetic biographer acknowledges that Ben-Gurion did nothing practical for rescue, devoting his energies to post-war prospects. He delegated rescue work to Yitzak Gruenbaum, who stated…’They will say that I am anti-Semitic, that I don’t want to save the Exile, that I don’t have a varm Yiddish hartz…Let them say what they want. I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.’
“Zionists in America took the same position. At a May 1943 meeting of the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Nahum Goldmann argued, ‘If a drive is opened against the White Paper (the British policy of restricting Jewish immigrants to Palestine) the mass meetings of protest against the murder of European Jewry will have to be dropped. We do not have sufficient manpower for both campaigns.’” Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life.”
“The Zionist movement interfered with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian, was at variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them, even when these might be helpful to Jews, even when it was a question of life and death. Beit Zvi documents the Zionist leadership’s indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace except in cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine…e.g. the readiness of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand refugees and the sabotaging of this idea – as well as others, like proposals to settle the Jews in Alaska and the Philippines – by the Zionist movement.
“The obtuseness of the Zionist movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not prevent it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole world for its indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or from pressing material, political, and moral demands on the world because of that indifference.” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
“I have already gone exhaustively into the reason for our being here, reasons that I as a pioneer of 1906 can affirm have nothing to do with the Nazis!. We are here because the land is ours. And we are here because we have again made it ours in this time with the work we have put into it. Nazism and our history of martyrdom abroad do not concern our presence in Israel directly.” David Ben-Gurion, “Memoirs.”
In hindsight, it is easy to say that the millions of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust could have been saved if Palestine had been available for unlimited immigration. The history of this period is not so simple, however. First, keep in mind that other realistic resettlement plans were proposed but actively opposed by the Zionist movement. Second, the great majority of Jews in Europe were not Zionists and did not try to emigrate to Palestine before 1939. Third, after the start of the war, as the Nazis occupied various countries, they refused to let the Jews leave, making emigration virtually impossible. And Palestine was already occupied; the indigenous Arabs had more valid reasons than any other country for wanting to limit Jewish immigration.
Emigration to Palestine before World War II
“In 1936, the Social Democratic Bund won a sweeping victory in Jewish kehilla elections in Poland. Its main hallmarks included ‘an unyielding hostility to Zionism’ and to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish emigration from Poland to Palestine. The Bund wished Polish Jews to fight anti-semitism in Poland by remaining there. The Zionist goal was also opposed, as a matter of principle, by all the major parties and movements among pre-1939 Polish Jewry…”Elsewhere in eastern Europe…Zionist strength was weaker still.” Prof. William Rubinstein, “The Myth ofRescue.”
“In fact, Zionism suffered its own defeat in the Holocaust; as a movement, it failed. It had not, after all, persuaded the majority of Jews to leave Europe for Palestine while it was still possible to do so.” Israeli historian, Tom Segev, “The Seventh Million.”
Emigration during World War II
“With the start of the war, Nazi edicts forbidding emigration followed in all countries under direct Nazi control: after 1940-1 it was in effect impossible for Jews legally to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe to places of safety. The doors were firmly shut: by the Nazis, it must be emphasized.” Prof William D. Rubinstein, “The Myth of Rescue.
Palestine was not Britain’s to give away; it was already occupied. “We came to this country which was already populated by Palestinians, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here. Jewish villages were built in the place of Palestinian villages. There is not a single community in the country that did not have a former Palestinian population.” Israeli leader, Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s “Original Sins.”
“One can imagine an argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a peaceful minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. Yet, the latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement.” Norman Finkelstein, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
The use of the Holocaust for political gain
“In 1947, the U.N. appointed a special body, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), to make the decision over Palestine and UNSCOP members were asked to visit the camps of Holocaust survivors. Many of these survivors wanted to emigrate to the United States, a wish that undermined the Zionist claims that the fate of European Jewry was connected to that of the Jewish community in Palestine. When UNSCOP representatives arrived at the camps, they were unaware that backstage manipulations were limiting their contacts solely to survivors who wished to emigrate to Palestine,” Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe in “The Link,” January March 1998.
“Inside the DP (displaced persons) camps, emissaries from the Yishuv organized survivor activity – crucially, the testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they wished to go. The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that they had been successful in preventing the appearance of ‘undesirable’ witnesses at the hearings. One wrote his girlfriend in Palestine that ‘we have to change our style and handwriting constantly so that they will think that the questionnaires  were filled in by the refugees.’”Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life.”
Roosevelt’s advisor writes on why Jewish refugees were not offered sanctuary in the U.S. after WWII. “What if Canada, Australia, South America, England and the United States were all to open a door to some migration? Even today (written in 1947), it is my judgment, and I have been in Germany since the war, that only a minority of the Jewish DP’s  would choose Palestine…
“Roosevelt proposed a world budget for the easy migration of the 500,000 beaten people of Europe. Each nation should open its doors for some thousands of refugees. So he suggested that during my trips for him to England during the war I sound out in a general, unofficial manner the leaders of British public opinion, in and out of the government. The simple answer: Great Britain will match the United States, man for man, in admissions from Europe…It seemed all settled. With the rest of the world probably ready to give haven to 200,000, there was a sound reason for the President to press Congress to take in at least 150,000 immigrants after the war…
“It would free us from the hypocrisy of closing our own doors while making sanctimonious demands on the Arabs. But it did not work out. The failure of the leading Jewish organizations to support with zeal this immigration programme may have caused the President not to push forward with it at that time…
“I talked to many people active in Jewish organizations. I suggested the plan…I was amazed and even felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered, and then attacked me as if I were a traitor…I think I know the reason for much of the opposition. There is a deep, genuine, often fanatical emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian movement (Zionism). Men like Ben Hecht are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.” Jewish attorney and friend of President Roosevelt, Morris Ernst, “So Far, So Good.”
Victimology
“Jewish proponents of the ‘victim’ card are aware not only of its social effectiveness but of its usefulness as a means of insuring Jewish solidarity and, hence, survival. If we were forever hated by all and are doomed to be forever hated by all, then we’d best stick together and make the best of it…Personally, I have never found this view of the eternally-hating gentile to have any resemblance with reality. It seems a myth, pure and simple, and an ugly one at that.
“Is it a good means of social control? Perhaps, but at what cost? It strips the faith and history of Jew and gentile alike of all but their months of antagonism. It wallows in evil imagery and postulates a forever morally superior Jew, victimized by the forever morally inferior ‘goy’..I have spent most of my adult life among Hasidic Jews, almost all of whom were Holocaust survivors, and I’ve heard almost nothing of the of the relentless harping on victimology and our need to forever memorialize it…(Victimology) allows Jews to bypass their own faith and offers the national allegiance of Holocaust/Israel in its place.” Rabbi Mayer Schiller, quoted in “Issues of the American Council for Judaism,” Summer 1998.
Why doesn’t Israel, “the only democracy in the Middle East,” have a constitution?
“The abstention from formulating a constitution was no accident. The massive expropriation of lands and other properties from those Palestinians who fled the country as a result of the War in 1948 and of those who remained but were declared absent, as well as the confiscation of large tracts of land from Palestinian villages who did not flee, and the laws passed to legalize those acts – all this would have necessarily been declared unconstitutional, null and void, by the Supreme Court, being expressly discriminatory against one part of the citizenry, whereas a democratic constitution obliges the state to treat all of its citizens equally.” Israeli author, Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
“The 1989 Israel High Court decision that any political party advocating full equality between Arab and Jew can be barred from fielding candidates in an election…(means) that the Israeli state is the state of the Jews…not their (the Arabs’) state.” Professor Norman Finkelstein, “Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict.”
Jewish Fundamentalism In Israel
The fundamentalist wing of the Jewish religion, while certainly not representative of Judaism as a whole, is influential in Israel, and is the ideological basis of the settler movement in the West Bank and Gaza (except for “Greater Jerusalem” where many secular Jews have moved because of cheap, subsidized housing) The following quotes show the racism inherent in this world-view and why its influence should be opposed by all rational people.
Ideological basis of racism in Israel
“The Talmud states that…two contrary types of souls exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from the Satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness…Rabbi Kook, the Elder, the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism said, “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews…is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.’ “Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky’s “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”
“Gush Emunim rabbis have continually reiterated that Jews who killed Arabs should not be punished, e.g. Relying on the Code of Maimonides and the Halacha, Rabbi Ariel stated, ‘A Jew who killed a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the religious prohibition of murder’.. The significance here is most striking when the broad support, both direct and indirect, for Gush Emunim is considered. About one-half of Israel’s Jewish population supports Gush Emunim.” “Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky’s “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”
Jewish fundamentalist rationale for seizing Arab land
“They argue that what appears to be confiscation of Arab owned land for subsequent settlement by Jews is in reality not an act of stealing but one of sanctification. From their perspective the land is being redeemed by being transferred from the satanic to the divine sphere. To further this process, the use of force is permitted whenever necessary…Halacha permits Jews to rob non-Jews in those locales wherein Jews are stronger than non-Jews.” “Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky’s “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”









Conclusion
Is the state of Israel a sovereign, independent and democratic state, or is Israel a Jewish state? Is the state of Israel governed by and for all its citizens, or is Israel governed by and for all Jews throughout the world? Is the Israeli government accountable to all its nationals, Arabs and Jews, or is the Israeli government accountable only to Jews both inside and outside the land of Palestine, whether they are Israeli nationals or not ? These are not new questions in Israeli political discourse for they have accompanied the process of the establishment of the state of Israel since its earliest days.
The state of Israel was established by unilateral declaration on 15 May 1948. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel – popularly and wrongly known as ‘Israel’s Declaration of Independence’ – does not declare Israel an independent state, nor does it declare Israel a sovereign state; rather it declares Israel a Jewish state:
We, the members of the National Council representing the Jewish people in Palestine and the Zionist Movement, are met together in solemn assembly today, the day of termination of the British Mandate for Palestine, and by virtue of the natural and historic right of the Jewish people and of the Resolution of the General Assembly of the United Nations, we hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Medinat Yisrael (the state of Israel) (Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 15 May 1948, henceforth Declaration II 1948) (original Hebrew)
What may seem to an uninformed outside observer a minor technical quibble was in fact the object of explicit discussion and controversy at the meeting of the People’s Council on 14 May 1948, the eve of the announcement of the establishment of the state of Israel. Meir Vilner, then as today a leading member of the Communist Party and a signatory of the Declaration, pointed out as follows:
Members of the Council: we are all united today in recognition of the significance of this great day for the Yishuv [pre-state Jewish community in Palestine] and the Jewish people, the day of the abolition of the Mandate and the declaration of the independent Jewish state….The Eretz Israel Communist Party (sic) supports the proposed resolution of the declaration of the Jewish state, has reservations on a number of issues, and proposes a few amendments and additions….We propose, in accordance with the resolutions of the United Nations [General] Assembly, to add the following paragraph:
‘The Council declares that a fundamental principle of its policy is that of the right of both peoples to self-determination and to independent states of their own’
In section 9, where it says, ‘Calling for the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel’, we propose to add the word ‘ independent’, namely: ‘Calling for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Eretz Israel’.
…At the end of section 11 it says: ‘We…hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel’. We propose to add the words ‘sovereign independent’, thus ‘the establishment of a sovereign, independent Jewish state…’ (State of Israel, Protocols of Debates, vol. I, pp.13-14, Hebrew)
Vilner’s proposal were not accepted. The debate, however, highlights the fact that those who formulated the draft consciously avoided the words that would have specified the sovereignty and independence of the proposed state, emphasizing its Jewishness.
Thus, the state of Israel was above all declared a Jewish state: ‘We hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine to be called Medinat Yisrael’ [the state of Israel, namely, the state of the Jewish people] (Declaration, 1948). Significantly, the borders of the new state were intentionally left undefined. The relevant discussion was summarized by David Ben Gurion in the same debate as follows:
There was a discussion of this matter in the People’s Executive. There was a proposal to determine the borders, and there was opposition to this proposal. We decided to evade (and I choose this word intentionally) the matter for a simple reason: If the UN fulfils all its resolutions and undertakings and maintains the peace and prevents bombardments and uses its powers to execute its own resolutions, then we on our part (and I express the opinion of the people) will honour all the resolutions in their entirety. So far the UN has not done so….therefore, we are not bound by anything, and we have left this matter open. We did not say no UN borders, but neither did we say the opposite. We have left this matter open for developments. (Declaration, 1948, p.19)
Over the first five decades of the twentieth century, the infrastructure for the Jewish state were laid out through the Zionist colonial effort in Palestine as institutionalized in the various departments and offices of the Jewish Agency for the Land of Israel, the executive arm of the World Zionist Organization and its affiliated companies: the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Foundation Fund, Hemnutah, etc. It is interesting that in their capacity as voluntary confessional associations, the success of the various Zionist agencies in Palestine was fairly limited. The JNF, for instance, since the year of its incorporation in London in 1907 and throughout the period of its activity under the Ottoman and the British regimes until 1948, had failed to purchase more than 936,000 dunums of land, at the most, namely, some 3.5 percent of the 1922 Mandate Palestine or some 5 percent of the pre-1967 Israeli territory.
Following the establishment of the state of Israel, however, and the introduction of the legislation detailed below into the body of Israeli law, the legal situation governing the activities of the World Zionist Organization, the Jewish Agency, the Jewish National Fund, the Histadrut, the Workers’ Company, and their various subsidiaries radically altered. Their respective restrictive constitutions, which were legally binding on what were, until 1948, technically voluntary organisations, are now incorporated into the legal foundations and the body of law of the state of Israel, thereby establishing a situation of radical legal apartheid of Jew versus non-Jew.
By the conclusion of the 1948-9 Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement which brought to an end armed conflict in Palestine, Israel has achieved a significant territorial expansion from 57 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, as allocated to the Jewish state by the 1947 UN Partition Plan, to 68 percent (20,600 km.sq.). Of the remaining area, the West Bank (6,400 km.sq.) was annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950, and the Gaza Strip (362 km.sq.) came under Egyptian military administration.
In the territories thus coming under Israeli rule lived some 900,000 Palestinian Arabs. They inhabited approximately 500 villages as well as all major cities: Tiberias, Safad, Nazareth, Shafa ‘Amr, Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh, Jerusalem, Majdal (Ashqelon), Isdud (Ashdod), and Beer Sheba. Of these people, only some 150,000 remained under Israeli rule inside Israeli armistice boundaries (the ‘Green line’). The majority of the Palestinian Arab population either fled during the hostilities, or was forcibly expelled by the Israeli army and has never been permitted by Israel to return; nor has Israel ever acknowledged the right of these people to return.
Having expelled the majority of the people, the Israeli authorities then pursued the systematic destruction of their homes. Of the 500 or so Palestinian Arab villages, some 400 (385 according to the list compiled by the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights; below) were razed to the ground by the Israeli army during the 1948-9 war and throughout the 1950s.
As noted above, the state of Israel has consistently denied the right of return to the erstwhile Palestinian Arab inhabitants of the land, and violated UN General Assembly resolutions recognizing their right to return and calling for their repatriation. In fact, all 1948 Palestinian Arab displaced persons and refugees were subsequently legislated as ‘absentees’ through the Absentee Property Law (1950). Thus, they were alienated from all rights to Israeli citizenship, to their lands, and to their properties in Israel. The enormity of this nation-wide, systematic practice of war crimes is indicated in the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights’ list of destroyed Palestinian Arab villages. The list refers to Arab villages destroyed in pre-1967 Israel alone.
It is worth noting that official statistics list only 103 Arab localities (101 villages and the two towns of Nazareth and Shafa ‘Amr) and 44 Bedouin tribes (22 in the Northern and Central regions and 22 in the Southern region). The Arab population of the cities of Tiberias, Safad, Majdal, Isdud and Beer Sheba was expelled in its entirety. In Lydda, Ramleh, Jaffa, Haifa and Acre, the surviving Arab population was confined to ghettoes.
The vast properties defined under the Absentee Property Law (1950) as ‘absentee property’ can be further assessed if one recalls that, until 1947, individual or corporate Jewish land ownership in Palestine did not exceed 7 percent, or 10 percent of the territories that came under Israeli rule and occupation following the 1948-9 war. Of the remainder, according to the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property, almost 70 percent of the territory of pre-1967 Israel consists of land classified as ‘absentee property’:
The Custodian of Absentee Property does not choose to discuss politics. But when asked how much of the land of the state of Israel might potentially have two claimants – an Arab and a Jew holding respectively a British Mandate and an Israeli deed to the same property – Mr. Manor (the Custodian in 1980) believes that ‘about 70 percent’ might fall into that category.
Jewish National Fund estimates, on the other hand, set the figure as high as close to 90 percent: Of the entire area of the state of Israel only about 300,000-400,000 dunums …are state domain which the Israeli government took over from the mandatory regime (2 percen)]. The JNF and private Jewish owners possess under two million dunum (10 percent). Almost all the rest (i.e. 88 percent of the 20,225,000 dunums within the 1949 armistice line)  belongs at law to Arab owners, many of whom have left the country. Consider, for instance, the following outline by Don Peretz (estimates of the value of the abandoned property of Palestinian Arabs vested with the Israeli Custodian of Absentee Property): Much information concerning the use, amounts and distribution of abandoned Palestinian property and the government’s policy toward it was secret. Records and most reports of the Custodian of Absentee Property were secret. Sessions of the Knesset’s Finance Committee, when it discussed the problem, were closed. Even the United Nations, in spite of frequent requests, was unable to obtain adequate information about Israel’s disposition of Arab property. In its Fifteenth Progress Report of October 4, 1956, the CCP [UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine] stated that its representatives had still received no reply to a request submitted to the Israel Government the previous February for information concerning the administration of Arab refugee property or the measures taken to protect it, safeguard its identity, an provide restitution to the refugee owners. Therefore much information in this Chapter and Chapter IX concerning absentee property necessarily came from indirect sources.
The CCP Refugee Office estimated that although only a little more than a quarter was considered cultivable, more than 80 percent of Israel’s total area of 20,850 km.sq. represented land abandoned by the Arab refugees. Three-quarters of the former Arab land was sub-marginal land or semi-desert in the Negeb. Evaluation of the property varied from that of the United Nations – 120 million pounds sterling – to the Arab League’s estimate of over than ten times that amount.
Abandoned property was one of the greatest contributions toward making Israel a viable state. The extent of its area and the fact that most of the regions along the border consisted of absentee property made it strategically significant. Of the 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and the beginning of 1953, 350 were on absentee property. In 1954, more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of the new immigrants (250,000 people) settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs. They left whole cities like Jaffa, Acre, Lydda, Ramleh, Baysan (Bisan), Majdal (Ashqelon); 388 towns and villages and large parts of 94 other cities and town, containing nearly a quarter of all the buildings in Israel. Ten thousand shops, businesses and stores were left in Jewish hands. At the end of the Mandate, citrus holdings in the area of Israel totalled about 240,000 dunums of which half were Arab owned. Most of the Arab groves were taken over by the Israel Custodian of Absentee Property. But only 34,000 dunums were cultivated by the end of 1953. By 1956 73,000 dunums were either cultivated or fit for cultivation. In 1951-2, former Arab groves produced one-and-a-quarter million boxes of fruit, of which 400,000 were exported. Arab fruit sent abroad provided nearly 10 per cent of the country’s foreign currency earnings from export in 1951. In 1949 the olive produce from abandoned Arab groves was Israel’s third largest export, ranking after citrus and diamonds. The relative economic importance of Arab property was largest from 1948 until 1953, during the period of greatest immigration and need. After that, as the immigrants became more productive, national dependence upon abandoned Arab property declined relatively.
The CCP estimated that the amount of Israel’s cultivable abandoned Arab land was nearly two and half times the total area of Jewish-owned property at the end of the mandate. The Israel Custodian of Absentee Property estimated that only two and half million of the four million dunums of Arab land held by him were cultivated. No account was given for the discrepancy between the amount of cultivable area cited by the CCP (4,574,000 dunums) and the cultivated area held by the Custodian. Neither was the difference between the total of four million dunums of absentee property held by the Custodian and the CCP’s total of 16,324,000 dunums clearly explained…
In 1951 abandoned cultivable land included nearly 95 per cent of all Israel’s olive groves, 40 thousand dunums of vineyards, and at least 10 thousand dunums of other orchards excluding citrus.
Twenty thousand dunums of absentee property were leased by the Custodian in 1952 for industrial purposes. A third of Israel’s stone production was supplied by 52 Arab quarries under his jurisdiction.
The amount and value of movable Arab property was never accurately determined. In the chaotic war conditions which prevailed after the Arab flight most of their property was destroyed, looted or lost. More than four million pounds worth of movable property was in the warehouses of the Custodian in 1951. The CCP’s Refugee Office estimated that the approximate value of all movable Arab refugee property was about 20 million Palestine pounds.
By all accounts, the massive properties vested in the Custodian of Absentee Property following the 1948-9 war constituted the primary rural and urban resources for post-1948 Israeli, exclusively Jewish, settlements projects, cultivation and development. As Moshe Dayan noted in his famous speech before students at the Israeli Institute of Technology (Techniyon) in 1969:
Jews came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and they are building here a Hebrew, Jewish state. In a considerable portion of localities we purchased the land from the Palestinians. Instead of the Arab villages Jewish villages were established. People even do not know the name of the villages and I do not blame them, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages no longer exist. Nahalal was established in the place of Mahalul, Gevat in the place of Jibta, Sarid in the place of Hanifas and Kefar Yehoshu’a in the place of Tel Shaham. There is not a single settlement that was not established in the place of a former Palestinian village (Dayan, 19 March 1969; as quoted in Haaretz, 4 April 1969 ) .

A Historical  Chronology

From Earliest Times Until 1949
B.C.
600,000-10,000 B.C.Paleolithic and Mesolithic period. Earliest human remains in the area, found south of Lake Tiberias, dated to circa 600,000 B.C.10,000-5,000 B.C.Neolithic period. Establishment of settled agricultural communities.5,000-3,000 B.C.Chalcolithic period. Copper and stone tools and artifacts. Remains from this period found near Jericho, Beersheba, and the Dead Sea.3,000-2,000 B.C.Early Bronze Age. Arrival and settlement of Canaanites (3,000-2,500 B.C.). ca. 1,250 B.C.Israelite conquest of Canaan.965-928 B.C.King Solomon. Construction of the temple in Jerusalem.928 B.C.Division of Israelite state into the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.721 B.C.Assyrian conquest of the kingdom of Israel.586 B.C.Judah defeated by Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar. Deportation of its population to Babylon; destruction of the temple.539 B.C.Persians conquer Babylonia. Some Jews allowed to return. Construction of a new temple.333 B.C.Conquest of Persia by Alexander the Great brings Palestine under Greek rule.323 B.C.Death of Alexander leads to alternate rule by Ptolemies of Egypt and Seleucids of Syria.165 B.C.Maccabees revolt against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes and go on to establish independent Jewish state.63 B.C.Incorporation of Palestine into the Roman Empire.

70 – 1899
A.D.70Destruction of the Second Temple by Roman Emperor Titus.132-135Bar Kokhba revolt suppressed. Jews barred from Jerusalem and Emperor Hadrian builds new pagan city of Aelia Capitolina on its ruins.330-640Palestine under Byzantine rule: Jerusalem and Palestine increasingly Christianized.638Arabs under the Caliph ‘Umar capture Palestine from Byzantines.661-750Umayyad caliphs rule Palestine from Damascus. Dynasty descended from Umayya of Meccan tribe of Quraysh. Construction of Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem by Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik (685-705). Construction of al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by Caliph al-Walid I (705-715).750-1258‘Abbasid caliphs rule Palestine from Iraq. Dynasty, founded by Abu al-’ Abbas al-Saffah, who is descended from’ Abbas, uncle of the Prophet.969Fatimid dynasty, claiming descent from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her cousin ‘Ali, rule Palestine from Egypt. They proclaim themselves caliphs in rivalry to the’ Abbasids.1071Saljuqs, originally from Isfahan, capture Jerusalem and parts of Palestine, which remains officially within the ‘Abbasid Empire.1099-1187Crusaders establish the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.1187Kurdish general Saladin (Salah al-Din who was born in Takrit northern Iraq, the birth place of Saddam Hussein too), son of Ayyub, the sultan of Mosul, defeats Crusaders at Hittin in northern Palestine and recaptures Jerusalem. The Ayyubid dynasty rules Palestine from Cairo.1260Mamluks succeed Ayyubids, ruling Palestine from Cairo; defeat Mongols at Battle of ‘Ayn Jalut near Nazareth.1291Mamluks capture final Crusader strongholds of Acre and Caesarea.1516-1917Palestine incorporated into the Ottoman Empire with its capital in Istanbul.1832-1840Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha of Egypt occupies Palestine. Ottomans subsequently reassert their rule.1876-1877Palestinian deputies from Jerusalem attend the first Ottoman Parliament in Istanbul, elected under a new Ottoman Constitution.1878The first modern Zionist agricultural settlement of Petach Tiqwa established 1882-1903First wave of 25,000 Zionist immigrants enters Palestine, coming mainly from eastern Europe.1882Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris starts financial backing for Jewish settlement in Palestine.1887-1888Palestine divided by Ottomans into the districts (sanjaks) of Jerusalem, Nablus, and Acre. The first was attached directly to Istanbul, the others to the wilayet of Beirut.1896Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist and writer, publishes Der Judenstaat, advocating establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine or elsewhere.1896Jewish Colonization Association, founded in 1891 in London by German Baron Maurice de Hirsch, starts aiding Zionist settlements in Palestine.1897First Zionist Congress in Switzerland issues the Basle Program calling for the establishment of a “home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” It also establishes the World Zionist Organization (WZO) to work to that end.
1900 – 1918
1901Jewish National Fund (JNF) set up by fifth Zionist Congress in Basle to acquire land for WZO; land acquired by JNF to be inalienably Jewish, and exclusively Jewish labor to be employed on it.
1904-1914Second wave of about 40,000 Zionist immigrants increases Jewish population in Palestine to about 6% of total. Since the inception of Zionism it has been claiming that Palestinian was an empty country.
1909Establishment of the first kibbutz, based exclusively on Jewish labor. Tel Aviv founded north of Jaffa.1914World War I starts.191630 JanuaryHusayn-McMahon correspondence between Sharif Husayn of Mecca (leader of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans) and Sir Henry McMahon (British High Commissioner of Egypt) ends in agreement for postwar independence and unity of Arab provinces of Ottoman Empire.16 MaySykes-Picot Agreement secretly signed, dividing Arab provinces of Ottoman Empire between Britain and France. Agreement revealed by Bolsheviks in December 1917.JuneSharif Husayn proclaims Arab independence from Ottomans. Arab Revolt against Istanbul begins.19172 NovemberBalfour Declaration. British Secretary of State Balfour pledges British support for “a Jewish national home in Palestine.”1918SeptemberPalestine occupied by Allied forces under British General Allenby.30 OctoberWorld War I ends.
1919 – 1922
1919-1923Third wave of over 35,000 Zionist immigrants increases Jewish population in Palestine to 12% of total. Registered Jewish landownership (1923) totals 3% of area of country.191927 January-10 FebruaryFirst Palestinian National Congress in Jerusalem sends memoranda to Paris Peace Conference rejecting Balfour Declaration and demanding independence.28 AugustParis Peace Conference sends Commission of Inquiry to Near East, led by U.S. commission members Henry C. King and Charles Crane. England and France decline to participate. Commission recommends “serious modification” of idea of “making Palestine distinctly a Jewish Commonwealth.”1920AprilDisturbances in Palestine; 5 Jews killed, 200 wounded. British appoint Palin Commission of Inquiry .Commission report attributes troubles to none fulfillment of promises of Arab independence and fear of political and economic consequences of Zionism.25 AprilPalestine Mandate assigned to Britain by Supreme Council of San Remo Peace Conference.MayBritish prevent Second Palestinian National Congress from convening.1 JulyHigh Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, an Anglo-Jewish politician, inaugurates British civilian administration.DecemberThird Palestinian National Congress, meeting in Haifa, elects Executive Committee, which remains in control of Palestinian political movement from 1920 to 1935.1921MarchFounding of the Haganah, the Zionists’ illegal underground military organization.1 MayDisturbances in Jaffa protesting large-scale Zionist immigration; 46 Jews killed, 146 wounded. British Haycraft Commission of Inquiry (October) attributes disturbances to fears of Zionist mass immigration.8 MayHaj Amin al-Husayni appointed Multi of Jerusalem.May-JuneFourth Palestinian National Congress, convening in Jerusalem, decides to send a Palestinian delegation to London to explain the Palestinian case against the Balfour Declaration.19223 JuneBritish colonial secretary Winston Churchill issues White Paper excluding Transjordan from scope of Balfour Declaration. Ignoring political criteria, White Paper authorizes Jewish immigration according to “economic absorptive capacity” of the country.24 JulyLeague of Nations Council approves Mandate for Palestine.AugustFifth Palestinian National Congress, meeting in Nablus, agrees to economic boycott of Zionists (see 1901 entry on JNF).OctoberFirst British census of Palestine shows population of 757,182 -78% Muslim Arab, 11% Jewish, 9.6% Christian Arab. It is often claimed that Palestine was empty until Zionist Jews made the Palestinian desert bloom.
1923 – 1931
192329 SeptemberBritish Mandate for Palestine comes officially into force.1924-1928Fourth wave of 67,000 Zionist immigrants, over 50% from Poland, increases Jewish population of Palestine to 16% of total. Registered Jewish landownership (1928) totals 4.2% of area of country.
1925Revisionist Party, founded in Paris by Polish Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, demands establishment of Jewish state in Palestine and Transjordan and stresses military aspects of Zionism.OctoberSixth Palestinian National Congress convenes in Jaffa.1928JuneSeventh Palestinian National Congress convenes in Jerusalem.1929-1939Fifth wave of over 250,000 Zionist immigrants increases Jewish population in Palestine to 30% of total. Registered Jewish landownership (1939) totals 5.7% of area of country.1929AugustRiots arise out of dispute between Jews and Palestinians over claims to Wailing (Western) Wall in Jerusalem, a site holy to Muslims and Jews. In resulting clashes 133 Jews killed and 339 wounded, 116 Palestinians killed and 232 wounded, the latter mainly by British military .OctoberGeneral Palestinian conference meets in Jerusalem to formulate position on Wailing Wall controversy.193014 JanuaryLeague of Nations appoints international commission to investigate legal status of Arabs and Jews at Wailing Wall.MarchBritish Shaw Palestinian Commission of Inquiry attributes 1929 disturbances to Palestinian fears of Jewish immigration “not only as a menace to their livelihood but as a possible overlord of the future.”OctoberBritish Hope-Simpson report on land settlement, immigration, and development in Palestine concludes that there is not sufficient agricultural land for substantially increased numbers of Jewish settlers.British Colonial Secretary , Lord Passfield, issues White Paper which takes note of views of Hope-Simpson and Shaw commissions of inquiry.1931Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization), Irgun or IZL for short, founded by Revisionist groups and dissidents from Haganah, advocates a more militant policy against Palestinians. Valdimir Jabotinsky is commander-in-chief.14 FebruaryBritish prime minister Ramsay MacDonald in a letter to Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann virtually retracts Passfield White Paper.18 NovemberSecond British census of Palestine shows population of 1,035,154-73% Muslim Arab, 16.9% Jewish, 8.6% Christian Arab.DecemberLewis French, British director of development for Palestine, publishes report on “landless Arabs,” caused by Zionist colonization.
1932 – 1938
193314 JulyBritish Secretary of State issues statement on resettlement of Palestinian farmers displaced from land acquired by Zionists.1935OctoberRevisionists quit World Zionist Organization (WZO) to form New Zionist Organization with aim of “liberating” Palestine and Transjordan.NovemberShaykh ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Muslim cleric from Haifa, leader of first Palestinian guerrilla group fighting British policy in Palestine, killed in action against British security forces.193625 AprilLeaders of Palestinian political parties form Higher Arab Committee under Chairman Haj Amin al-Husseini.8 MayConference of Palestinian National Committees in Jerusalem calls for no taxation without representation. Great Rebellion begins.25 AugustLebanese guerrilla leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji enters Palestine leading 150 volunteers from Arab countries to help fight British.11 NovemberRoyal Commission headed by Lord Peel arrives in Palestine.193718 JanuaryRoyal Commission leaves Palestine.AprilIZL/Irgun, linked to Revisionist movement under Ze’ev Jabotinsky, reorganizes and advocates armed attacks on Palestinians.7 JulyRoyal (Peel) Commission report recommends partitioning Palestine into Jewish state comprising 33% of country including Haifa, Galilee, and coastal plain north of Isdud; Arab state in rest of country (to become part of Transjordan); and British mandatory enclaves including Jerusalem. Part of Palestinian population to be forcibly transferred, if necessary, from Jewish state.
23 JulyArab Higher Committee rejects Royal Commission proposal and demands independent unitary Palestine with protection of “legitimate Jewish and other minority rights” and the safeguarding of British interests. Rebellion intensifies.SeptemberArab National Congress at Bludan, Syria, attended by 450 delegates from Arab countries, rejects partition proposal, demands end to Mandate, a stop to Zionist immigration, and prohibition of transfer of Palestinian lands to Zionist ownership.1 OctoberBritish dissolve Arab Higher Committee and all Palestinian political organizations. Five Palestinian leaders deported. Haj Amin al-Husayni escapes to Lebanon.11 NovemberBritish establish military courts to counter Palestinian rebellion.1938April-AugustIZL/Irgun bombings kill 119 Palestinians. Palestinian bombs and mines kill 8 Jews.JuneBritish officer Orde Wingate organizes Special Night Squads of British and Haganah personnel for operations against Palestinian villages.18 OctoberBritish military commanders take over administration from district commissioners to help suppress rebellion. Reinforcements brought from England.19 OctoberBritish recapture Old City of Jerusalem from Palestinian rebels.9 NovemberReport of British Woodhead technical commission of inquiry (January-April 1938) declares impracticability of Royal Commission’s partition proposal. British call for general conference on Palestine in London attended by Arabs, Palestinians, and Zionists.
1939 – 1946
19397 FebruaryLondon Conference starts.27 MarchLondon Conference ends without agreement.22-23 MayBritish House of Commons votes 268 to 179 in favor of White Paper issued by Colonial Secretary of State Malcolm MacDonald. White Paper calls for conditional independence for unitary Palestinian state after ten years; admission of 15,000 Jewish immigrants annually into Palestine for five years, with immigration after that subject to “Arab acquiescence” ; protection of Palestinian land rights against Zionist acquisition. British official estimates of Palestinians killed or executed by British military and police during Arab Rebellion is over 2,000 for 1936 and 1938 alone. Total for all years is estimated at 3,500-4,000. About 500 Jews killed in same period.1 SeptemberWorld War 11 begins.OctoberStern Gang or Lochemay Herut Yisra’el (LEHI; “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”) formed by dissident IZL members led by Avraham Stern.1940-1945Arrival of over 60,000 Zionist immigrants, including 20-25,000 who have entered the country illegally (April 1939-December 1945), increases Jewish population in Palestine to 31% of total. Registered Jewish landownership rises to 6.0% of area of country.194028 FebruaryLand Transfers Regulations, suggested by 1939 White Paper to protect Palestinian land rights against Zionist acquisition, enter into force.1942FebruaryAvraham Stern killed by British police. It should be noted that the Stern gang received extensive financial and military support from the Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to terrorize the British Mandate in Palestine.
MayBiltmore Conference in New York attended by Zionist leaders from U.S. and Palestine, urges that “Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth.“1943NovemberFive-year limit on Jewish immigration (expiring April 1944) extended so all 75,000 visas permitted in 1939 White Paper can be filled.1944JanuaryStern Gang and IZL join to conduct terror campaign against British.6 NovemberStern Gang murders Lord Moyne, British resident minister of state, in Cairo.19458 MayEnd of World War in Europe.SeptemberLarge-scale illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine resumes under Haganah control.13 NovemberBritish foreign secretary Ernest Bevin issues White Paper announcing continued Jewish immigration into Palestine after exhaustion of 1939 White Paper quota.19466 MarchAnglo-American Committee of Inquiry, proposed in 1945 White Paper, arrives in Palestine.MayAnglo-American Committee report estimates size of Jewish armed forces at around 61-69,000 people (Haganah: 58-64,000; IZL: 3-5,000; Stern: 2-300) and declares “private armies” illegal. Recommends admission of 100,000 Jews into Palestine and abolition of Land Transfers Regulations. Palestinians strike in protest.11-12 JuneArab League meeting in Bludan, Syria, adopts secret resolutions warning Britain and U .S. that disregard for Palestinian rights will damage their oil and commercial interests in Arab world.JulyBritish White Paper on terrorism in Palestine accuses Haganah of cooperating with IZL and Stern Gang in acts of sabotage and violence.22 JulyNinety-one British, Palestinian, and Jewish civil servants and visitors killed when IZL blows up wing of King David Hotel in Jerusalem housing British government secretariat.31 JulyAnglo-American Conference in London produces Morrison-Grady Plan proposing federal scheme to solve Palestine problem. Zionist and Palestinian leaders reject the plan.
1947
26 JanuaryLondon Round Table conference reopens.7-10 FebruaryBritish foreign secretary Ernest Bevin proposes variant of Morrison-Grady Plan to London Conference and Jewish Agency. Arab delegates in London and Jewish Agency reject proposal.18 FebruaryBevin announces submission of Palestine problem to UnitedNations.28 April-15 MayUN General Assembly special session on Palestine problem leads to appointment of eleven-member Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP).8 SeptemberPublication of UNSCOP report. Majority of members recommends partition, minority recommends federal solution.16-19 SeptemberArab League denounces UNSCOP partition recommendation, and appoints Technical Military Committee to supervise Palestinian defense needs.26 SeptemberArthur Creech Jones, British colonial secretary, announces Britain’s decision to end Palestine Mandate.29 SeptemberArab Higher Committee rejects partition.2 OctoberJewish Agency accepts partition.7-15 OctoberArab League meets at Aley, Lebanon. Iraqi General Isma’il Safwat, chairman of Technical Committee, warns of dangers posed by Zionism at end of Mandate and urges Arab states to mobilize their utmost force and efforts to counter Zionist intentions.” One million pounds sterling allocated to Technical Military Committee.29 OctoberBritain says it will leave Palestine in six months if no settle-ment reached.27 NovemberReport by Safwat warns of virtual impossibility of overcoming Zionist forces with irregulars; urges prompt Arab action in organizing military force; advocates training Palestinians to defend themselves.29 NovemberUN General Assembly recommends variant of UNSCOP partition plan allocating 56.5% of Palestine to Jewish state and 43% to Arab state with international enclave around Jerusalem; 33 votes for, 13 against, 10 abstentions. Arab representatives walk out .
30 NovemberHaganah calls up Jews in Palestine aged 17-25 to register for military service.DecemberArab League organizes Arab Liberation Army (ALA), a voluntary force of Arab irregulars under guerrilla leader Fawzi al-Qawuqji to help Palestinians resist partition.2 DecemberPalestinians start three-day strike protesting UN Partition Resolution. Intercommunal clashes leave 8 Jews and 6 Palestinians dead.8 DecemberBritain recommends to UN that Palestine Mandate be terminated on 15 May 1948 and independent Jewish and Palestinian states be established two weeks later.8-17 DecemberArab League Political Committee meeting in Cairo declares partition illegal and resolves to provide 10,000 rifles, 3,000 volunteers (including 500 Palestinians) and a further 1,000,000 pounds sterling to Technical Military Committee.15 DecemberBritish announce intention to hand over policing in Tel Aviv-Petach Tiqwa area to Jews and in Jaffa to Palestinians.17 DecemberJewish Agency Executive reports that American Jews will be asked for $250 million to help Jewish community in Palestine.21 December-late March 1948Haganah and IZL attack villages and Bedouin settlements of coastal plain north of Tel Aviv in first coastal “clearing” operation.31 DecemberHaganah and IZL paramilitary gangs perpetrate Balad al-Shaykh (Haifa) massacre, in which more than 60 civilians are murdered.December 1947-January 1948Arab Higher Committee organizes 275 local committees for defense of Palestinian towns and villages.
1948
JanuaryPalestinian guerrilla leader ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni secretly returns to Palestine after ten-year exile to organize resistance to partition.8 JanuaryFirst contingent of 330 ALA volunteers arrives in Palestine.10 JanuaryALA assault on Jewish settlement of Kefar Szold repulsed with help of British.14 JanuaryHaganah concludes arms deal with Czechoslovakia for $12,280,000 worth of arms including 24,500 rifles, 5,000 light machine guns, 200 medium machine guns, 54 million rounds of ammunition, 25 Meserschmitts. By end of Mandate at least 10,740 rifles, 1,200 machine guns, 26 field guns, and 11 million rounds of ammunition arrive in Palestine. Rest of arms arrive by end of May.16 JanuaryBritish report to UN estimates 1,974 people killed or injured in Palestine from 30 November 1947-10 January 1948.20 JanuaryBritish administration announces that predominantly Jewish or Palestinian areas will be gradually handed over to local majority group in every area concerned.21 and 28 JanuarySecond and third contingents of 360 and 400 ALA irregulars arrive in Palestine.January-MarchJNF leaders encourage evictions from villages of Haifa area Haganah attacks villages near Lake al-Hula. Palmach attacks Negev Bedouin.16 FebruaryALA mounts unsuccessful attack on Jewish settlement of Tirat Zvi north of Baysan.18 FebruaryHaganah calls up men and women aged 25-35 for military service.24 FebruaryU.S. delegate to UN says Security Council role should be to keep peace in Palestine, not enforce partition. Syrian delegate suggests appointing committee to explore possible Jewish Agency-Arab Higher Committee agreement.MarchTransjordanian prime minister Tawfiq Abu al-Huda secretly meets British foreign secretary Bevin. They agree that Transjordanian forces will enter Palestine at end of Mandate but will restrict themselves to area of Arab state outlined in partition Plan.
5-7 MarchQawuqji enters Palestine and assumes command of ALA units in Jinin-Nablus-Tulkarm triangle within area allotted to Arab state.6 MarchHaganah declares general mobilization.10 MarchBritish House of Commons votes to end Mandate on 15 May. Plan Dalet finalized by Haganah. Plan provides for military conquest of area allotted by UN Partition Plan to Jewish state and of substantial Palestinian territories beyond this state’s boundaries. Plan contains a series of interlocking operations.18 MarchPresident Truman secretly receives Chaim Weizman and pledges support for declaration of Jewish state on May 15.19-20 MarchU.S. delegate asks UN Security Council to suspend action on partition plan and to convene General Assembly special session to work on a trusteeship plan. Arabs accept limited trusteeship and truce if Jews also accept. Jewish Agency rejects trusteeship.25 MarchPresident Truman calls for immediate truce and says U.S. will share responsibility for temporary trusteeship.30 March-15 MaySecond coastal “clearing” operation carried out by Haganah Alexandroni brigade and other units. Attacks and expulsions drive out almost all Palestinian communities from coastal area from Haifa to Jaffa prior to British withdrawal.1 AprilDelivery of first consignment of Czech arms deal: Ship “Nora” arrives in Haifa from Yugoslavia with 4,500 rifles, 200 light machine guns, 5 million rounds of ammunition. Two hundred rifles, 400 machine guns and further ammunition ferried in by airplane. UN Security Council resolutions call for special session of General Assembly and agree to U.S. proposal for truce to be arranged through Jewish Agency and Arab Higher Committee.4 AprilHaganah launches Plan Dalet.4-15 AprilBattle of Mishmar ha-’Emeq: ALA repulsed by Haganah from Jewish settlement of Mishmar ha-’Emeq. Haganah, Carmeli, Alexandroni, and Palmach units occupy villages in Marj ibn ‘Amir.6-15 AprilOperation Nachshon: In first operation of Plan Dalet Haganah Giv’ati Brigade and other units capture villages along Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road from local Palestinian militia.8 April‘Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, charismatic Palestinian militia commander, Jerusalem district, is killed leading counterattack to recover al-Qastal village.9 AprilIZL and Stern Gangs massacre some 250 inhabitants in village of Dayr Yasin near Jerusalem.12 AprilGeneral Zionist Council decides to establish independent state in Palestine on 16 May.13-20 AprilOperation Har’el under Plan Dalet launched at conclusion of Operation Nachshon. Villages along Jerusalem road attacked and demolished. All subsequent Haganah operations until 15 May 1948 undertaken within framework of Plan Dalet.15 April-25 MayOperation Yiftach: Palmach captures Safad from ALA and local militia (9-10 May). Attacks and psychological warfare used to empty villages of eastern Galilee and Galilee panhandle. Operation Matate (Broom) drives out Bedouin and villagers from area south of Rosh Pinna to Jordan River.16-17 AprilHaganah Golani brigade and Palmach units capture Tiberias as it is evacuated by British. Palestinian inhabitants flee.17 AprilSecurity Council resolution calls for military and politicaltruce.20 AprilU.S. submits Palestine trusteeship plan to UN.21 AprilOperation Misparayim (meaning scissor): British forces suddenly withdraw from Haifa precipitating all-out Haganah dawn offensive against city’s Palestinian population. Offensive accompanied by heavy mortar shelling of Palestinian residential quarters.22 AprilResistance of local Palestinian militia in Haifa collapses. Haifa’s Palestinian population flees under combined Haganah shelling and ground offensives.25 AprilIZL starts massive mortar shelling of Jaffa‘s residential quarters; simultaneously launches ground offensive to cut off northern Manshiyeh quarter from rest of city.26-30 AprilHaganah Har’el and Etzioni brigades launch Operation Yevussi in and around Jerusalem; attack East Jerusalem residential quarter of Shaykh Jarrah but are forced to hand it over to British; capture West Jerusalem residential district of Qatamon from Palestinian irregulars. Flight of Palestinian inhabitants.27 April-5 MayOperation Chametz: Haganah launches major ground offensive against eastern Jaffa suburbs and neighboring villages to cut off city from its hinterland. Some 50,000 civilians flee under combined IZL and Haganah attacks.30 AprilAll Palestinian quarters in West Jerusalem occupied by Haganah and residents driven out.1 MayThe Zionists forces occupied and massacred more than 70 civilians from ‘Ayn al-Zaytun (Safad).3 May175-200,000 Palestinian refugees reported to have fled from areas taken by Zionists.8-16 MayHaganah Har’el and Giv’ati brigades undertake Operation Makkabi. Capture villages on al-Ramla-Latrun road.9 May-1 JuneOperation Barak: Strikes by Haganah Giv’ati and Negev brigades south and West of al-Ramla.10-15 MayGolani brigade occupies Baysan, attacks villages of Baysan Valley south of Lake Tiberias.12-14 MayArrival of second and third Czech arms consignments for Haganah: 5,000 rifles, 1,200 machine guns, 6 million rounds of ammunition.13 MayArab Legion, ALA, and local militia attack and capture Jewish settlements of Etzion bloc, retaliating for attacks on Hebron road. Jaffa formally surrenders to Haganah.13-21 MayOperation Ben-Ami: Carmeli brigade occupies Acre and coastal area north of city .14 MayHaganah launches Operation Qilshon (Pitchfork), occupying strategic areas in Jerusalem evacuated by British and taking Palestinian residential quarters outside Old City from Arab irregulars.Haganah launches Operation Schfifon to take Old City of Jerusalem.State of Israel proclaimed in Tel Aviv at 4:00 P.M. President Truman recognizes state of Israel.15 MayBritish Mandate ends. Declaration of State of Israel comes into effect.15-17 MayLebanese regulars cross border and temporarily retake villages of Malikiyya and Qadas from Haganah, but are forced out of fortress of Nabi Yusha’.15-28 MayTransjordanian Arab Legion troops cross River Jordan and move towards Jerusalem capturing Jewish settlements of Atarot and Newe Ya’aqov north of city (17 May). In Jerusalem, Legion retakes Shaykh Jarrah quarter (16 May), fails to capture stronghold in Notre Dame monastery (17-25 May), and takes control of Jewish Quarter of Old City (28 May).On the 23th of May 1948, al-Tantura was perpetrated against 250 civilians and POWs.15 May-4 JuneIraqi units cross Jordan River, are repulsed from Crusader fortress of Belvoir , and besiege settlement of Gesher for a week. Iraqi regulars move into Nablus-Jinin- Tulkarm triangle 24 May). Haganah advances on Jinin, evicting villagers (28-31 May); it attacks and briefly occupies Jinin before being repulsed (3-4 June).15 May-7 JuneEgyptian regular troops cross border, move up coast to Isdud and capture Jewish settlements of Yad Mordechai (24 May) and Nitzanim (7 June) in Negev. Another column of Egyptian irregulars moves to Bethlehem linking up with Arab Legion. In battle with IDF (21-25 May), Jewish settlement of Ramat Rachel south of Jerusalem changes hands several times and is finally retained by Jews.16 May-10 JuneSyrian columns advance over border and temporarily capture Jewish settlement of Zeniach (18-20 May), are repulsed from twin settlements of Degania (20 May), and capture settlement of Mishmar ha-Yarden (10 June). Syrians, Lebanese, and ALA recapture Malikiyya (6 June).16-30 MayIDF Operation Ben-Nun: Israeli Sheva’ and other brigades fail to capture al-Latrun from Arab Legion in attempt to open Jaffa-Jerusalem road, but occupy villages in vicinity.20 MayUN Security Council appoints Count Folke Bernadotte as its mediator in Palestine.22 MayUN Security Council resolution calls for ceasefire.9-10 JuneIDF Operation Yoram, launched against Arab legion by Har’el and Yiftach brigades, fails to capture al-Latrun.11 June-8 JulyFirst Truce.28-29 JuneCount Bernadotte suggests economic, military, and political union of Transjordan and Palestine containing Arab and Jewish states: Negev and central Palestine to go to Arabs; Western Galilee to Jews; Jerusalem to be part of Arab state with administrative autonomy for Jews; Haifa and Jaffa to be free ports and Lydda free airport. Rejected by both sides.7 JulySecurity Council calls for prolongation of truce.7-18 JulyIDF Operation Dani: Capture of Lydda and al-Ramla from local militia. Population of both cities expelled. Three or four IDF brigades occupy villages along Jerusalem-Jaffa road and cluster of villages east of Jaffa. Yiftach brigade’s assault on Arab Legion in al-Latrun (17 July) ends with Second Truce.8-14 JulyIDF Operation Dekel: Carmeli and Sheva’ brigades push east and south from Acre, capture Nazareth from ALA under Qawuqji and occupy Lower Galilee.8-11 JulyIDF Operation An-Far: Giv’ati brigade, moving against Egyptians, empties villages south of al-Ramla in an arc between Hebron hills and coast.9-18 JulyIDF Carmeli Brigade fails to recapture the Zionist settlement of Mishmar ha-Yarden, south of Lake Tiberias, that had been occupied by Syrian troops.15 JulyUN Security Council resolution calls on governments and authorities concerned to issue indefinite ceasefire orders to their forces in Palestine to take effect within three weeks.17 JulyIDF Operation Qedem against Old City of Jerusalem is repulsed.18 July-15 OctoberSecond Truce.24-26 JulyIDF Operation Shoter: Carmeli, Alexandroni, and Golani brigades attack and capture three villages of Little Triangle south of Haifa.16 August-end of September early October Negev and Yiftach brigades attack and expel Bedouins and inhabitants of villages in Negev.24-28 AugustIDF Operation Nikayon (Cleansing): Giv’ati Brigade occupies coastal area west of Yibna and north of Isdud.16 SeptemberReport by UN mediator Count Bernadotte proposes new partition of Palestine: Arab state to be annexed to Transjordan and to include Negev, al-Ramla and Lydda; Jewish state in all of Galilee; internationalization of Jerusalem; return or compensation of refugees. Rejected by Arab League and Israel.17 SeptemberUN mediator Count Bernadotte murdered in Jerusalem by Stern Gang. Replaced by his American deputy Ralph Bunche.15 October-9 NovemberIDF Operations Yo’av and ha-Har: Negev, Giv’ati, and Yiftach units move against Egyptians to capture Beersheba, Isdud, Majdal, and coastal strip as far as Yad Mordechai, and villages of Hebron Hills. Har’el brigade captures southern Jerusalem corridor.29-31 OctoberIDF Operation Hiram: Upper Galilee pocket, held by Qawuqji’s forces, occupied and emptied by Giv’ati, Oded, and Sheva’ brigade troops. Tens of thousands flee. Israeli forces move into southern Lebanon as far as Litani River. On the 29th of October 1948, the IDF commits the famous Safsaf (Safad) massacre in which more than 60 civilians are murdered.NovemberIDF Har’el Brigade expels several communities in Jerusalem corridor along border with Transjordanian forces. 4 November UN Security Council resolution calls for withdrawal of forces to positions occupied prior to 14 October and establishment of permanent truce lines.Second week November-mid 1949IDF expels inhabitants from villages 5-15 km inside Lebanese border, followed by expulsions from other Galilee villages.22 December-6 January 1949Operation Horev launched to drive Egyptians out of southern coastal strip and Negev. Asluj and al-’Awja captured. Israeli troops move into Sinai until British pressure forces withdrawal. Golani and Har’el brigades attack on Rafah ended by ceasefire (7 January).27 DecemberIDF Alexandroni brigade’s attack on isolated Egyptian forces in Faluja pocket is repulsed.
1949
24 FebruaryIsraeli-Egyptian Armistice: Egypt keeps coastal strip Gaza Rafah and evacuates Faluja pocket; Asluj-al-’Awja area demilitarized.End of FebruaryIDF units intimidate 2-3,000 villagers into leaving Faluja pocket in violation of Israeli-Egyptian Armistice Agreement.MarchIDF Negev and Golani brigades complete occupation of Negev as far as Umm Rashrash/Eilat.23 MarchIsraeli-Lebanese Armistice: Frontier of Mandate Palestine accepted; Israel withdraws from most of Lebanese territory.3 AprilIsraeli-Jordanian Armistice: Jordan takes over Iraqi-held Nablus-Jinin- Tulkarm triangle but is forced to cede area around Wadi ‘Ara; Israel controls Chadera-’Afula road; existing status quo in Jerusalem accepted by IDF and Arab Legion.20 JulySyrian-Israeli Armistice: demilitarized zones established around ‘En Gev and Dardara (including Mishmar ha-Yarden).


References:
-”The Question of Palestin ” :  Edward Said,
-”Arab and Jew in the Land of Canaan” : Illene Beatty.
-”The Fateful Triangle” : Noam Chomsky,
-”Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice” : John Quigley,
-”Encyclopedia of Palestine”,
-United Nations archives,
-”An Apartheid State”: Uri Davis,
-”Israel and the Palestinian Arabs” : Don Peretz,
-”The Land of Palestine”: Robert Fisk,
-”Zionist Land” : Walter lehn,
-”Agrarian Reform and Social Progress in Israel” : Ephraim Orni,
-”The Palestine Question”: Henry Cattan
-”The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict” : Jews for Justice in the Middle East.