Monday, December 31, 2012

Injustice Continues Despite British Complicity in Anti-social and Criminal Activities

Orgreave: Mounted police attack the striking miners

It will not surprise communists, socialists and other Morning Star and Peoples' World readers that the British state operated death squads in northern Ireland, fitted up the miners at Orgreave and held innocent working class Liverpool football fans responsible for the deaths at Hillsborough.

Now, despite out of court hush money paid to at least 17 victims so far, more is coming to light about British complicity in the kidnapping, transportation, torture and incarceration of British and other citizens as part of the bogus "war on terror". However, the British government refuses to admit liability. No names of guilty British officials and agents are exposed. Nobody is put on trial or even demoted—nor were they in the Birmingham Six, Guildford Four and countless other cases, just as those who organized and prosecuted the illegal Iraq war have escaped justice.

Hillsborough: Liverpool fans crushed and dying against the retaining fence

Sunday, December 16, 2012

The State of Israel—The First 25 Years

US Supplies Israel with Every Modern Weapon it Needs to Oppress the Arabs

Zionists Choose Palestine

To establish a Jewish state, territory was needed, but where? It worried the Zionists from the start, but they did not think only of Palestine. L Pinsker, a Zionist ideologist, wrote:

We do not have to settle at the very place where our statehood was crushed and wiped out… We want nothing but a tract of land that would be our property… We shall carry there the Holy of Holies rescued during the fall of our ancient homland—the concept of God and the Bible, for it was they, and not Jordan or Jerusalem, that made our mother country a holy land.

At the 6th Zionist Congress, in 1903, Theodor Herzl said the British government had offered Uganda as a Jewish state to be called New Palestine. British imperialism then aimed to use Jewish settlers for the colonial development of east Africa. Chaim Weizmann notes in his memoirs Jewish business circles approved of the plan, showing they did not care then that a new “mew national home for the Jews” would have no connexion with the “ancient homeland”. A Jewish national home could have been just as well established in Argentina, or Kenya, or on the Sinai—wherever imperialists wanted. But the rabbis were keen on Palestine, and, at the 7th Zionist Congress, in 1905, Palestine was chosen as the site of the Zionist Jewish state.

Since 1517 AD, Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire. Rulers of Jewish communities there had long solicited the Sultan for the land of Palestine, offering to pay a part of Turkey’s national debts, to help finance the building of a modern Turkish fleet, and to support the Sultan in international affairs. They failed. Giving up on the Sultan, they decided to suck up to the imperialist powers with an active colonial policy in the Middle East. Since then the Zionists offered their services to every colonial power, hoping to be rewarded with possession of Palestine. Not one of these imperialist powers failed to use Zionism in its colonial interests.

Before the First World War Zionist leaders relied mainly on Berlin where they were supported and financed by the banking house of Oskar Wassermann. The aggressiveness with which German imperialists were trying to get into the Middle East encouraged them more. Zionists revised their policy during the war as the prospects of a German victory dimmed with every year, pinning their hopes on Britain. Although in 1916, Berlin secured Turkey’s consent to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine under a German protectorate, it failed to sway the Zionists whose political sympathies by then were with the Entente.

The Balfour Declaration

On 2 November, 1917, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, announced in a letter to Rothschild, the banker, that His Majesty’s government regarded with favour plans for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, and was prepared to take every measure to facilitate the attainment of that goal.


Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's government, the following declaration of sympathy. with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by the Cabinet:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status erjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Your sincerely
Arthur James Balfour


Jews were in a minority at that time in Palestine, vastly outnumbered by Arab Christians and Moslems.

Anticipating victory and an opportunity to seize Palestine, British imperialists were preparing to use Zionists for their colonialist aims. Soon after “the Jewish national home” was established in the Promised Land with the help of British imperialists and Rothschild’s money the Zionists began working to turn it into an independent Jewish state. To attain that goal they were ready to remain at the service of British imperialists, to become their outpost in the Middle East. Max Nordau, a Zionist leader in the 1920s, told the British:

We know what you expect of us. You want us to guard the Suez Canal, your route to India through the Middle East. All right, we are ready to fulfil that difficult mission. But you’ve got to help us to become a force capable of carrying out our duty to you.

Nahum Goldman, sometime president of the World Zionist Organization, repeatedly stressed:

The Zionists are ready to grant Great Britain the exclusive right to set up military bases in Palestine, including naval and air bases, on condition that Great Britain gives her consent to the establishment of a Jewish state on 65 percent of Palestinian territory.

A similar proposal was also made to the United States, if it would support and defend the Jewish state.

Divide and Rule

However, London did not intend to go too far in its “friendship” with the Zionists. When the war ended and Britain received the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, ministers began financially and politically sponsoring the emigration of Jews to the Promised Land, with the aim of using the principle of “divide and rule” on which British colonial management was based—that is, using systematic provocation of religious, intertribal and racial discord to maintain colonial domination. The British imperialist government was least of all motivated by their commitments to the Jews.

To apply their tested method in Palestine, the British had to take as many Jews as possible there and set them against the native Arab population, causing enmity between them. They gave every encouragement to Jewish settlers to buy land from ruined Arab landlords, whereupon lease holding peasants were driven off their plots. They gave opportunities to the settlers in trade, money lending and small scale industries. Thus the Jewish settlers had the money to set up enterprises and employ the impoverished Arabs, creating class antagonism between the exploters and the exploited, but they were interpreted and became national antagonisms between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous Arab poor deliberately created by the British. Thus British policy provoked acute enmity between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, which grew into armed conflict.

British colonialists were quite satisfied to let Arab-Jewish enmity help them to suppress both the Jews and the Arabs. They were all the more interested in preserving such a state of affairs, since the stepped-up expansion of US capital in the Middle East and the growing influence of the pro American group among the Zionists worried the British seriously and made them anxious lest a sovereign Jewish state should become US oriented. The anxiety that the British felt turned out to be was well founded.

As the Anglo-American imperialist struggle for world supremacy grew more and more intense, the US monopolies were becoming increasingly interested in the rich Middle East which was also strategically important. Meanwhile, the Zionist leaders continued in vain to persuade Britain to let them establish a Jewish state on the territory of mandated Palestine. Their weightiest argument in favour of such a plan was their willingness to turn this state into a bulwark of the imperialists’ antisoviet policy. Ben-Gurion even proposed an agreement under which Britain would give her consent to the establishment of a Jewish state on a part of Palestinian territory, and the leaders of the new state would guarantee to make it a base of operations against Russia.

The British, however, were in no hurry to make concessions. They considered that a rapid growth of the Jewish population in Palestine would complicate continuance of their policy of balancing on the edge of an Arab-Jewish conflict, impede their resistance to the establishment of a Jewish state, and give the Americans an excuse for interfering in Palestinian affairs. Therefore, the British government began gradually to limit Jewish emigration to Palestine. Finally, in 1939 it decided, contrary to its previous commitments and in opposition to the Zionists’ efforts, to stop the resettlement of Jews in the Promised Land.

US Involvement

Back in 1919, US President Wilson had sent an unofficial mission to Palestine. On returning to Washington the mission recommended that the US government work towards the establishment in the Middle East of a state that would incorporate Palestine and the Lebanon, and that would be called United Syria. It was expected that the new state would be under American, and not British, control.

A member of the mission, William Yale, who represented the interests of Standard Oil, advanced a different plan. It envisaged the separation of Palestine from Syria and the establishment of an independent “national home” there for the Jews. He maintained that a Jewish state would inevitably be drawn under the control of US Jews who would bring into its life American ideals and American civilization, and that a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine would become a US outpost in the Middle East.

The Second World War weakened considerably Britain’s positions in the Middle East. This enabled the United States, as early as April 1941, to institute the American Palestine Committee which included 68 Senators and over 200 members of the House of Hepresentatives. The Committee openly called for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. In March 1944, President Roosevelt declared that the American government had always disagreed with the British policy of obstructing the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Two months later the US Senate and the House of Hepresentatives drafted a joint resolution concerning America’s readiness to cooperate in the adoption of pertinent measures to ensure the unrestricted emigration of Jews to Palestine and to establish there a “free and democratic Jewish state”.

During the 1944 Presidential election campaign the Zionists’ demands upheld by big Jewish capitalists found their way into the campaign policy programmes of both the Republican and the Democratic parties. These demands, which concerned mostly the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, fully accorded with the interests of US monopoly capital and, therefore, enjoyed the support of the White House.

In August 1945, President Truman requested the British government to let 100,000 Jewish emigrants into Palestine without delay. It was becoming impossible for Britain to dominate Palestine by the old methods in the face of US policy. The British government had to maintain US lease-lend to rebuild wartime damage and so had to yield to US pressure. As a consequence, in April 1947, it referred the Palestinian problem to the United Nations. In doing so, London hoped that the UN would not find a solution acceptable to both the Arabs and the Jews, and that as a result Britain would be able to consolidate her positions with regard to Palestine.

Israel Founded

On 29 November, 1947, the UN General Assembly decided, by a two thirds majority vote, that thc British mandate in Palestine should be terminated and that two independent states—Arab and Jewish—should be established on Palestinian territory.

  • The Arab state, with a population of 735,000, including 10,000 Jews, was to get an area of 11,100 sq km, or 42 percent of Palestine’s territory.
  • The Jewish state, with a population of 905,000, including 407,000 Arabs, was to get an area of 14,100 sq km, or 56 percent of Palestinian territory.

Two internationally administrated enclaves, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, were to be set up on the remaining two percent of the territory.

People all over the world hoped that Israel would take the road of peace and cooperation with its neighbours. Believing that this would be so and willing to respect the right of nations to self-determination, the Soviet Union also recognized the state of Israel. Zionist leaders, however, took a different road. They exploited the intense desire for independence that many Jews felt after the war, particularly immigrants from capitalist countries, to further their own political aims. They saw in the establishment of a Jewish state an opportunity to implement their far reaching expansionist plans. And so they set about turning the country into an openly militarist state pursuing a policy of annexation with the aim of creating “Greater Israel”. The Zionists made extensive use of the fact that the then reactionary Arab rulers, subservient to the imperialists, prevented the Arab people of Palestine from exercising their right to self-determination and establishing their own state on Palestinian territory in accordance with the UN decision.

To ensure their complete domination over the two prospective states, Britain and the United States provoked, in December 1947, an Arab-Jewish armed clash which grew, in early 1948, into a serious military conflict. This gave the Anglo-American imperialists the desired occasion to show “concern” and to intervene.

On 13 May, 1948, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, was received by President Truman and secured his consent to the immediate proclamation of a Jewish state. The Zionists were prompt. The next day was the last of the British Mandate, and that same day, the Israelis proclaimed their independence, and announced the state of Israel. Before leaving the United States, Chaim Weizmann, now President of the newly born state, again visited Truman and secured more specific promises of economic and political aid which Israel would require in the first critical months. The US President guaranteed to Israel large deliveries of arms and loans for military purposes.

The outcome of the first Israeli-Arab war, which lasted up to the summer of 1949, was that Israel seized 6,600 sq km of the area meant for the Arab state in Palestine, including a part of Jerusalem (the New City). The other part of Jerusalem (the Old City) was occupied by Jordanian troops.

Thus, the decision of the UN General Assembly was never carried out.

Israel’s territory proved almost 50 percent larger than envisaged, totalling 20,700 sq km, the Arab state in Palestine was not established, and the international enclaves, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, were never formed.

During the hostilities and Zionist terror, over 900,000 people—more than 70 percent of Palestine’s Arab population—were forced to flee from their native land and become refugees. In subsequent years, Israel persistently refused to comply with the UN resolution concerning the return of the refugees to their homelands. This gave rise to the problem of Palestinian refugees and further aggravated the tense situation. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion was asked how he would deal with the Palestinians. They would be no trouble because…

…the old will die and the new generations will forget.
How Palestine has dwindled as it has been increasingly grabbed by Israel from its Arab Owners

It was not so easy. The Palestinians did not forget. Constant oppression is a good way of reminding people of injustice. And where were the Arabs scared from their ancestral farms to go? They filled up huge refugee camps like the Jabalia camp in Gaza which housed 35,000 displaced Arabs in about half a square mile after the Arab-Israeli war, but today has 200,000 refugees in it! The refugees had no water other than that shipped in by the UN, and had to queue to use unsanitary communal toilets. A succession of wars and uprisings followed in the years since then—the Sinai War of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur war ending in 1974, the intifada of 1987, and a further intifada in 2006.

US-Israel Mutual Assistance

From the very outset Israel’s foreign policy was directed by Washington. The United States used Israel as a sword held over the Arab world, as a weapon for struggle against the establishment of progressive regimes in some Arab countries. Since Israel was the US strategic springboard in the Middle East, the United States was lavish in its aid and support to its Zionist prot&eaute;gé. The Tel Aviv government reciprocated by flinging wide open the door to US monopolies and military establishment.

On 13 June, 1950, the United States and Israel signed an agreement under which the US Air Force was permitted to use Israeli territory. The first loans that Israel received from the United States were used to build up the Haifa harbour, to expand the Lydda air base, and to construct strategic railways. In December 1951, May 1952 and November 1953 the two countries signed agreements on US economic aid to Israel which, in return, assumed the obligation to defend together with the United States the region of the world of which Israel is a part, and to participate in measures aimed at maintaining international security. These and a number of accompanying agreements determined the diplomatic, political, economic and military cooperation between the United States and Israel by which either side tried to profit as much as it could.

Zionist leaders cynically admit that Israel is a US outpost. The leader of the Zionist Liberal Party of Israel, S Abramov, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reports was outspoken on this score, saying:

Israel is fighting not only to defend itself but also to defend the vital interests of the West… Israeli soldiers at the Suez Canal spare the United States the need to send its own troops to that region.

It would be wrong to think that Zionism has become the cat’s-paw of US imperialism and that the Zionists have placed their entire policy and the state of Israel at its service. They uphold US interests only as long as American imperialism supports them.

Six million Jews live in the United States, a similar number to the Jewish population of Israel. Almost half of American Jews live in New York, constituting a large proportion of its population. Neither Democratic nor Republican party can afford to ignore Jewish voters, about 75 percent of whom reside in the large cities of six states which under the two-stage electoral system of the United States provide 178 electoral votes.

Relations with other Western Powers

Although Britain recognized the state of Israel only in March 1950, it had valued Israel as a partner earlier in the struggle against the national liberation movement of the peoples of the Middle East. The Anglo-Israeli rapprochement which began in connexion with the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company by Egypt soon grew into a close alliance. France had similar motives in her sympathies towards Israel, as well as Israel’s support of French anti-Arab policy in the United Nations.

Relations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany date from 10 September, 1952, when Israel and Federal Germany signed an agreement on reparations to Israel. Nahum Goldman, President of the World Zionist Organization, played an important role in establishing negotiations with Federal Germany, and was the man through whom the German Chancellor, Dr Adenauer, transmitted to Tel Aviv his proposal to start negotiations. After the Nazi era, Federal Germany needed respectability in the eyes of the world.

From the value of the life of a victim of Nazi genocide multiplied by the number of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the Zionist rulers of Israel, who had arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of all Jews, agreed that the government of Federal Germany would deliver to Israel $822 million worth of commodities and extend various services over a period of 12 years. It was also agreed that Israel reserved for its citizens of Jewish nationality the right to claim individual restitution from Federal Germany. By 1965 these restitutions totalled $1,000,000,000.

Thus Federal Germany strove to achieve her moral rehabilitation, and with it to gain access to NATO membership. As for Israel, the mercenary considerations of its leaders prevailed over the moral ones. As the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, rightly noted, Zionist leaders in favour of restitutions had forgotten that German industry had made soap from their fathers' fat. The agreement on reparations and restitutions opened prospects of closer cooperation between Israel’s rulers and neo-Nazi, revanchist circles in West Germany which were then rather influential. In Federal Germany, Israel got a diplomatic supporter and a source of finance and supplies.

Israeli Aggression and Annexation

By establishing close ties with the United States and friendly relations with other imperialist countries, the Zionists could begin implementing new plans for annexation. In the summer of 1954, Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, visited the United States to discuss US military aid to Israel. In August 1954, Abba Eban, Israel’s Ambassador in the United States and then Foreign Minister, began talks with the State Department about Israel’s military obligations to the United States, and US guarantees of Israel’s security. These talks lasted eighteen months.

Relying on those guarantees, Zionist fanatics decided, in early 1955, to escalate Israeli-Arab border clashes to large scale military operations. In the spring of 1956, speaking at the Knesset Ben Gurion declared that war against the Arab states was inevitable. Israel had been prepared, with the help of the United States and other imperialist powers, for a war of aggression, and in the autumn of 1956 the Zionist rulers took advantage of the joint Anglo-French action against Egypt to attack that country.

Joint Anglo-Franco-Israeli aggression against Egypt began on 29 October, 1956 following nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian government. The aggression was marked by exceptional cruelty towards the peaceful Egyptian population. The United Nations and the world progressive forces resolutely condemned the aggression. Under the pressure of world public opinion and owing to the firm stand on that question taken by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, the Zionist invaders were forced to obey the UN Security Council resolution and on 7 March, 1957 withdrew their troops from the Gaza strip.

Encouraged by the imperialist powers and actively supporting their aggressive policies in the Middle East, Israel was responsible for the mounting tension in that part of the world. In the autumn of that year, Israel was ready to take part in the armed intervention the United States had planned against Syria with the use of Turkish and Israeli armed forces. And Israel had a hand in the Anglo-American armed intervention against the Lebanon and Jordan in the summer of 1958.

While perpetrating acts of aggression and planning new annexation of Arab territory, Zionist organizations in Israel and elsewhere conducted a broad propaganda campaign to justify their actions. Addressing Israeli servicemen in October 1958, the member of the Knesset, Menachem Begin, leader of the fascistic Herut party of the most reactionary Zionist circles, said:

You are Israelites, and you should have no pangs about killing your enemy. You should have no sympathy for them until we have destroyed the so-called Arab culture. On its ruins we shall build our own civilization.

Following fascistic traditions he declared:

We shall have no opportunity for development until we have settled our territorial problems from positions of strength. We shall make the Arabs obey us completely.

Addressing students, one of the chief Zionist ideologues and former Prime Minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion, said:

The map of Israel is not the map of our homeland. We have a different map which you pupils and students of Jewish schools must put into life. The Israeli nation must expand its territory to include the area from the Euphrates to the Nile.

That this is not just a casual remark but a statement of government policy is shown by the inscription on the stone wall over the entrance to the Knesset, which read:

Jews, your homeland stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.

The Zionist fanatics thus presented the people of Israel with the clear goal of territorial expansion. The methods of attaining this goal were spelled out by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist leader, long before the state of Israel was established:

Palestine must belong to the Jews. The use of appropriate methods for establishing a national Jewish state will be a necessary and ever present element of our policy. The Arabs already know what we must do to them and what we demand of them. We must create a situation of accomplished facts, and explain to the Arabs that they must leave our territory and get out to the desert.

The poisonous seeds of Zionist propaganda soon sprouted. They were one of the main causes of the Middle East “six day war”, Israel’s military action in 1967. The “six day war” had ended, but Israeli tanks, leaving a wake of destruction and death, had broken through to the Suez Canal, stood along the entire western bank of the Jordan and held the Golan Heights. The Zionists were faced with a new task—to retain the spoils of victory. Tel Aviv intended to compel the Arab states, victims of aggression, to agree to peace negotiations which, it hoped, would perpetuate the results of the aggression and leave Israel with its new territory, expanded at the expense of its neighbours. However, despite military setbacks, the Arab peoples did not capitulate and did not agree to negotiations while Israel held a part of their territory.

The imperialist plot against the people of the Middle East had failed. Yes, the aggressor’s troops were stationed on Arab soil, but they had failed either to overthrow the governments of Egypt and Syria, or to break the will of the Arab peoples to resist aggression.

Having attained success on the battlefield, the Zionists continued to rely on the force of arms for exerting political pressure. They began bombing and shelling the positions of Arab troops along the cease-fire line and on the border with the Lebanon, and making barbarous air raids deep into Syria, Egypt and Jordan. The brutal assault by the Israeli air force on the Jordanian village of Kufr Asad, the victims of which included old men, women and children, was but one instance of the Zionist policy of “pressuring” the intransigent Arabs. One after another such criminal air raids were made against towns and villages in the Arab countries, especially Egypt which the Zionist fanatics regarded as the chief obstacle to the implementation of their plans. In early February 1970, General Bar-Lev, the Israeli Chief of General Staff, boasted that, since the end of the “six day war”, the Israeli air force had carried out nearly 3,000 air raids over Egyptian territory.

In an attempt to provoke another war, Israel sent its bombers deeper and deeper into Arab countries and raided inhabited localities near Cairo, Damascus and Amman. There was even a commando raid carried out by Israeli paratroopers against the transformer substation in Nag Hammadi, south of Cairo. The raid was repeated in April 1969.

By late 1969, Israeli bombing and shelling were responsible for 1,200 casualties. In their speeches Zionist leaders began referring to a “permanent war”. Carried away by a burst of warlike frenzy Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, declared to the angry, indignant world that the air raids would continue until the “above stated aims were attained”. The aims of the Israeli fanatics consisted in provoking Arab retaliation to get an excuse for starting another war, but there were Israelis who continued to oppose the Zionists.

January 1970 saw more Israeli aggression, Zionist strategists stepping up the bombing of Arab territories, in contravention of the UN Security Council resolutions. On 6 February, Israeli pilots flew over thirty combat missions, raiding Tel el Kebir, the Red Sea ports of Hurghada and Safaga, and some densely populated areas. The Zionist fanatics counted on a psychological effect. They wanted to produce panic among the population, to demoralize it and force it to capitulate. It has remained their main purpose, but the Arabs are showing they are not that easily panicked.

On 12 February the world was shocked to learn about a brutal raid over a non-military enterprise, a metal-working plant, in Abu Zaabal, a suburb of Cairo. At a moment when work shifts were changing, Israeli pilots bombed and strafed the plant, killing over 80 people and wounding nearly one hundred. The air raid, absolutely senseless from the military viewpoint, was part of Israel’s psychological warfare.

In two and a half years after the “six day war”, besides the mass air raids, there were about 4,000 armed clashes on the cease-fire line between Israel and Egypt, over 3,000—on Israel’s border with Jordan, and over 300—on its border with Syria.

Attacks on Syria and Lebanon

On 8 September, 1972, numbers of Israeli Skyhawks and Phantoms raided the settlements of Palestinian refugees in Syria and the Lebanon. Flying at low level, Israeli pilots strafed women and children who rushed about panic-stricken. The air raid was repeated the next day. Ten areas in Syria and the Lebanon and one Jordanian village were bombed. In just two days there were over 400 casualties among peaceful civilians. A week later, on 16 September, Israeli mechanized and armoured units supported by aircraft invaded the Lebanon in the south. For about 36 hours the Israeli troops rampaged through captured towns and villages, and only after the arrival of a large number of Lebanese forces were they forced to retreat. Over 40 Arabs were killed and 100 wounded and 130 houses were destroyed during that raid.

Tel Aviv explained this barbarous raid as retaliation for actions by Arab extremists of the Black September terrorist organization. However, Zionist rulers did not even try to justify their next assault, on Sunday, 15 October, 1972. That day over 20 Israeli bombers attacked with bombs and rockets the suburbs of Saida, in the Lebanon, and the neighbouring villages. Simultaneously, an air strike was delivered against the city of Masyaf and its environs. In an interview with an American news agency, the Israeli command said that the raids should be regarded as an indication of Israeli’s readiness to attack whenever and wherever it wanted to.

Another demonstration of this readiness came on 30 October, 1972, when a new raid was made against several Syrian villages. The Israeli aircraft dropped many large delayed-action bombs, which made rescue operations exceedingly hazardous. According to France Press, about one hundred people were killed during the air raid. Many peasant houses and farm structures were destroyed, and many head of cattle were killed.

Before dawn on 21 February, 1973, following many instances of border violation and intrusion into the air space of Syria and the Lebanon, the Israeli aggressor landed airborne troops on Lebanese territory and attacked Palestinian refugee camps 180 km from the cease-fire line. Also on that day, Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan air-liner near the Suez Canal. The passengers, of whom there were over one hundred, and the crew were kiIled.

On 10 April, 1973, an Israeli terrorist group infiltrated into Beirut. They blew up several buildings and killed three of the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and two Lebanese army officers. The terrorists kiIled or wounded 40 people. These armed clashes did not result in casualties only on the Arab side. Israeli troops also suffered considerable losses both in manpower and materiel. But this did not bother Zionist leaders too much. Recruitment among the Jewish population in the diaspora, and the sympathetic attitude of the imperialist powers ensured Israel replenishment both in manpower and weapons.

Vast sums were spent for the building of a powerful defence system along the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. The system was named the “Bar-Lev Line” after the Chief of the Israeli General Staff who directed the building of the defences. The necessary funds for all this were provided by Zionist organizations and governments of imperialist countries.

While evading a peaceful settlement with the Arab countries and preserving a “neither war, nor peace” situation in the Middle East, the Zionist rulers of Israel insist on continuing their annexationist policy “for the sake of security”. They assert that Egypt refuses to recognize Israel’s sovereignty and to let it use international waterways. In early 1971, in reply to an inquiry by Gunnar Jarring, special representative of the UN Secretary General, the Egyptian government stated that Egypt was ready to guarantee Israel’s sovereignty, provided both sides keep to the frontiers which existed prior to the Israeli aggression of June 1967, and that Egypt guarantee freedom of international shipping along the Gulf of Tiran.

Furthermore, upon the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, Egypt guaranteed to keep the canal open for the next six months to all ships, including Israeli ones. The Egyptian government did not object to the stationing of international control organizations at Sharm el Sheikh.

The United Arab Republic announced its acceptance of the proposal put forward by the UN special representative, Dr Gunnar Jarring, and readiness to conclude a peace agreement with Israel once the Israeli troops had withdrawn from the occupied Arab territories. The UAR has also proposed steps to resume navigation along the Suez Canal in the near future. The attitude of the Arab side provided a real basis for settling the crisis in the Middle East. The Israeli Government’s rejection of all these proposals, and Tel Aviv’s openly brazen claims to Arab lands showed who was blocking the way to peace in the Middle East, and who was to blame for the dangerous hotbed of war being maintained in that area.

Clearing the Pollution of Arab Inhabitation

At first, to make more room around the Wailing Wall, bulldozers cleared away the Arab dwellings that stood near it. But they did not stop there. Whole blocks of Arab houses were pulled down and replaced with so-called Israeli units, according to the Ministry of Housing Construction, to house 65,000 more Jews in the eastern part of Jerusalem. This was in line with the general policy of ousting Arabs from the city. Their expulsion was accompanied by barbarous destruction of historical monuments and other objects of Arab culture. Zionists, who proclaimed Jerusalem Israel’s capital back in January 1950, planned to bring the Jewish population of the city up to 900,000. Then the whole world, and not only the Arabs, will be faced with an accomplished fact—the turning of that city into the religious, administrative and political centre of the Zionist state.

Housing for Jews and agricultural settlements are being built on land from which Arabs have been driven off. As captured land is developed, some of the fortified settlements are being transformed into agricultural enterprises. Young workers would carry a carbine or a submachine gun with them to the field, emphasizing the “accomplished fact” of their intention to stay on the land.

Until the end of 1970, the Israeli government did not recommend that businessmen engage in capital construction at Sharm el Sheikh, but then it encouraged them in every way to do so. As a result, hotels, tourist camps, cafes and restaurants, car repair shops and filling stations multiplied rapidly. The invaders were also active on the Gaza strip. In just two months, July and August, in 1972, they pulled down 7,729 dwellings there, and drove 16,000 people from their homes. Several schools in the area were turned into army barracks.

In constantly encouraging Tel Aviv in its policy of aggression, the US protectors of Zionism relied on the more adventurous elements among Israel’s ruling circles. When, in December 1969, a new Cabinet was formed in Israel, three generals became its members. This was an unprecedented thing, and it had been brought off with Washington’s assistance. The three generals were Yigal Allon, former commander of Israel’s striking forces, Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, and Ezer Weizmann, the founder of the Israeli air force. Together with two militant nationalists, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, they formed an extreme Right group in the government, on which Prime Minister, Golda Meir, relied for support. It is noteworthy that as soon as the names of the new Cabinet members became known many political commentators abroad dubbed it a “War Cabinet”.

William Rogers Exacerbates US Lawlessness

When the Cabinet was being formed, Israeli Zionists took their instructions from the speech of William Rogers, US Secretary of State, at a conference of educators in Washington. At a time when candidates for ministerial posts and the government’s future policies were dicussed in Tel Aviv, Rogers declared that before it became possible to begin solving the problem of Israeli troop withdrawal from occupied territories, the Arab countries had to convince Israel that they desired a lasting peace in the Middle East. According to the State Secretary’s logic, the victim of aggression had to convince the aggressor of his peaceableness. This was unprecedented in world diplomacy and international law practice. Moreover, Rogers declared that Jerusalem must become a unified city, which conflicted with the UN General Assembly resolution on restoring the city’s prewar status. Equally revealing was his avoidance of the question of the occupied regions of Syria and Jordan, and the Palestinian refugees problem.

In Tel Aviv, Rogers’ speech was taken as a direct incitement to anti-Arab actions and consequently as instructions on how to select candidates to ministerial posts. The ability to follow Washington’s recommendations, especially with regard to the composition of the Israeli government, proved to be dependent on the size of US aid to Tel Aviv. Such influential Zionist leaders in the United States as Senator Jacob Javits and Max Fisher, special consultant to the White House, were systematically pressing the US government for new deliveries of Phantom and Skyhawk aircraft, tanks, missiles and electronic equipment to Israel. Active indeed were Zionist lobbyists in Congress where they conduct a carefully planned political campaign of persuading the government to unequivocally support Israel. Nothing changes.

Zionist Millionaires

The Israeli authorities demonstratively held Zionist conferences in Jerusalem. Some of these were the international conferences of Jewish millionaires, which demonstrated the support given the Israeli fanatics’ expansionist policy by the Zionist financial magnates of the world.

The international ties of Zionist financiers enable them to coordinate financial aid extended to the Israeli military by US millionaires and their opposite numbers in other countries. The participants in the three “conferences of millionaires” held in Israel after the “six day war” included:

  • the British and French Rothschilds
  • Charles Clore, the chairman or a director of 14 companies and banks in England
  • Zigmund Warburg, a prominent London banker
  • Isaak Wolfson, owner of large department stores in England
  • Israel Calbin, the chairman or a director of 116 banks and companies in Brazil.

When it came to meeting Zionism’s needs, they all quickly and easily came to terms. The first of these conferences met in August 1967. It was attended by 60 Zionist capitalists, including 38 delegates from the United States. They approved Israel’s acts of aggression, and expressed readiness to advance the required sums immediately.

The second and more representative conference was convened in April 1968. It was attended by 500 important businessmen and 300 economic advisors. A discussion of the aggressor’s needs took place. At Wolfson’s suggestion, it was decided to set up a big Israeli insurance company. The conference also settled the problem of financing the construction of an oil pipeline from Elath, a port in the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea, to the port of Ashod on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The West German firms Thyssen and Mannesmann undertook to supply the steel for the pipeline.

A third conference of Zionist financial tycoons met in June 1969. Its delegates included 300 bankers, industrialists and businessmen. The conference was keynoted by openly expansionist plans. Besides the next allocation for armament, the delegates discussed capital investment in occupied Arab territories, particularly in the Gaza strip and in western Jordan. For “security reasons” the details of the new Israeli plans, which required large sums, were kept secret and not discussed at the conference. However, the Israeli Minister of Finance assured the delegates that their capital investments were absolutely safe, no matter what turn events in the Middle East might take.

Besides foreign investments, loans and credits, donations by Zionists play an important part in Israel’s economy. In less than a quarter of a century they turned Israel from a sparsely populated, economically backward country into a developed, industrial state. Without all this financial and economic assistance the Zionist offspring would have long gone bankrupt unable to cope with the material difficulties generated by its adventuristic policy and the continual wars it wages. In 1970 alone, Israel received, in various forms of payment and various currencies, almost 500,000,000 dollars, which nearly halved its balance of payments deficit.

The Zionists have a wide network of organizations which levy “taxes on the Diaspora”. The chief of them is the Jewish Agency with its centre in Jerusalem. The banking operations in transferring the money collected are in the charge of Keren Ha Yesod (Palestine Foundation Fund), an organization which is subordinate to the Jewish Agency and which has branches in 34 countries.

About 80 percent of its monetary gifts and credits Israel receives from the United States with its Jewish population of six million. In no other Jewish community do Zionists collect money on such a scale and with such proficiency as in the United States. The United Jewish Appeal, the US branch of Keren Ha Yesod, had its offices on the 29th floor of the Sperry Rand Building. It employed a large staff of paid and voluntary fund raisers. The UJA offices maintain direct teletype contact with nearly 300 Jewish communities in the United States. Golda Meir’s visit to the United States as long ago as 1973 netted Israel a free grant of $50,000,000. Now it is billions.

Zionist organizations in other capitalist countries are just as ready to fleece Jews. They are active in France. Once Rothschild, the French millionaire, appealed to the half-a-million French Jews to donate 10 percent of their incomes to Israel.

In Britain, the English branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty and other Zionist capitalists aid Israel with large sums. Possessing vast funds, Zionist organizations in Britain are able to press for donations through advertisements published not only in their own press but also in newspapers belonging to English capitalists.

By extensive fund-raising, steady streams of money flowed into Tel Aviv from over 50 of the main countries of the world. The total sum of donations which Zionists collected from the diaspora in the first 22 years from the establishment of Israel was over four billion dollars. Zionist leaders joked they had bred a fund raising cross between a cow and a giraffe—it feeds abroad but gives its yield in Israel.

Proceeding from the maxim that money does not smell, Zionists are not averse to collecting from known gangsters, owners of gambling houses and other dens of iniquity. In early 1971, the Israeli press jubilantly reported that Meir Lansky, a 69 year old gang leader, had become a citizen of Israel.

Lansky’s application for citizenship was prompted not only by his desire to avail himself of the advantages which the state conceived by Theodor Herzl offers to a rich man. It was also due to the fact that Lansky’s activities had attracted the attention of the American public to such an extent that even the eminently bribable US police could not easily overlook them. Fearing exposure and scandal, the aged gangster decided to take refuge in Israel, since he had repeatedly rendered invaluable services to the Zionists and shared his unsavory profits with them.

Lansky’s calculations were accurate. Both Israeli and American Zionist leaders, at whose requests he and his men had terrorized those who opposed the racialist ideology of Zionism and national discord in the United States, could not ignore the fact that the inveterate criminal possessed compromising documents and receipts signed by Zionist fund raisers to whom he contributed regularly. Thus, Zionists were bound to hold the gates to the Holy Land wide open for Lansky and his capital.

Further Help for Israeli Militarization

However great the services done for Israel by international Zionist organizations or the collected donations, they would have not been sufficient in themselves to enable Israel to carry on its adventuristic policy of aggression and plunder fo so many years. It was made possible by the imperialist countries which brought Israel into the world and have supported it ever since.

Already by 1973, according to US press sources, Israel had a regular army of 80,000 consisting of 20 brigades and equipped with 1,200 tanks, 300 self-propelled guns (105mm and 155mm calibre), 1,500 armoured cars and personnel carriers, and other equipment. The Israeli air force numbered 500 combat planes, including Mirage, Phantom and Skyhawk aircraft. During that year the force was expanded with burgeoning deliveries from the United States.

The draft age for men in Israel was from 18 to 29 years. There were also unmarried women aged 18 to 26, serving in the guard units, headquarters and logistical units of the Israeli army. Women’s detachments were guarding the government and the diplomatic corps. The Israeli armed forces personnel included 3,500 mercenary soldiers from 12 countries—mostly from the United States, Britain, Canada, South Africa and Australia—who have not become naturalized, and 10,000 Jews with dual citizenship—Israeli and of the country whence they came.

Golda Meir reported after her visit to Washington in the spring of 1973 that the United States showed a better understanding of Israel’s position than ever before. Evidence of this were the new credits and loans to Israel to the tune of $515,000,000, $300,000,000 of which was earmarked for the purchase of 48 Phantom aircraft, dozens of motor boats, a number of Skyhawks, laser beam guided bombs, and other modern fighting equipment. Tel Aviv allocates $100,000,000 for “housing construction”, which means for the “development” of occupied Arab territories. By this means, US tax dollars are converted into profits for US arms manufacturers

Although in connexion with the “six day war” Bonn announced its strict neutrality, Federal Germany never stopped aiding the aggressor. The Israeli Ambassador in Bonn, Asher Ben-Nathan, and State Secretary Lar of the West German Ministry for Foreign Affairs signed a contract on the granting of a 160,000,000 mark credit to Israel to cover a period of 25 years. In addition, the Deutsche Bank, a large West German bank, shared in the banking credit extended to Tel Aviv by an international banking consortium of seven countries to the amount of 15,000,000 marks.

Together with Israel, Federal Germany was conducting research on the use of atomic energy for military purposes. Over 70 West German physicists were involved in this work which was conducted by the Weizmann Institute and financed, among others, by the Fritz Thyssen and Volkswagen foundations.

The first official visit of an Israeli government delegation to Bonn took place in February 1970. The delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Eban. The talks which the delegation had with the West German President, the Chancellor, and the Foreign Minister were strictly confidential.

Besides Federal Germany, Eban visited Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg where he met with representatives of local Zionist organizations and urged them to intensify the raising of funds for Israel. In Brussels, he had a talk with representatives of the European Economic Community during which he discussed cooperation between Israel and the Common Market countries. Zionist organizations in these countries acted as mediators in negotiating an agreement between the European Economic Community and Israel, in which the latter is vitally interested.

The conflict in the Middle East in October 1973 giving rise to tension in international situation was caused by Israel’s seizure of Arab territory and her stubborn unwillingness to fulfil the Security Council resolution of 22 November, 1967 and withdraw her troops from the occupied Arab lands. Military actions took place on Egyptian and Syrian land, and nobody can question the right of the Arab peoples to fight for the liberation of this land. While defending this right the Arab peoples are for normalization of the situation in the Middle East which would create the conditions for extending the detente to this area.


  • I Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate, 2011
  • R Brodsky, The Truth about Zionism, 1974
  • S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Tax the Rich: a True Fairy Tale

Tax the rich: An animated fairy tale, is narrated by Ed Asner, with animation by Mike Konopacki.

Written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers—an 8 minute video about how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren't so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land!

For more info, www.cft.org. © 2012 California Federation of Teachers

Published on Dec 5, 2012

Friday, December 7, 2012

Explaining Zionism: Jewish Nationalism

Many Jews reject Ziobism for religious reasons

Palestinian Oppression

Palestinian refugees were driven off their land by Zionist invaders, who made it their own. Devoid of their homes, hundreds of thousands of Arabs barely managed to keep alive with the help of charitable organizations. Their children, wholly absorbed in getting hold of a crust of bread, did not attend school and knew none of the joys of youth. A whole generation of Arabs have been born and brought up in exile never having known their original homeland.

Four major wars and many lesser ones and uprisings flared up in the Middle East since 1948. Overrunning Arab settlements, Israeli troops left ruin and ashes in their wake. Anguish and suffering followed them everywhere they went. Mercy is unknown to Zionism.

Zionist Origins

Zionism became a political movement among wealthy Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, when European imperialism encouraged a nationalist ferment to aggravate class antagonism across the continent. It grew among Yiddish speaking Jews from central to Eastern Europe in the shadow of German nationalism, mimicking the German need for an ideology of identity as part of the last phase of European nationalist enthusiasm. Its proponents were German Jews, Theodor Herze, Moses Hess, and Max Nordau, and it was peculiar among German Yiddish speakers in comparison with Jews elsewhere that there was a growing modern secular culture ready to enter the European ferment of nationalist movements.

The term “Zionism” was first introduced in 1893 by Nathan Birmbaum, an Austrian Jew, but the spiritual father of the movement was Theodor Herze, another Austrian Jew, then on the editorial staff of the Neue Freie Presse, a Vienna newspaper. Born in the family of a rich emancipated Budapest merchant, he became completely assimilated, changing his Jewish name to an Austrian one—Theodor Herzl. Although he knew no Hebrew, nor Jewish history, Herzl became the ideologue of Jewish nationalism.

Capitalizing on a favourable situation which had developed after the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a captain in the French General Staff who was unjustly accused by antisemites of spying for Germany and who in 1894 was sentenced to penal servitude for life, Herzl was recognized as the founder of the Zionist ideology when he published his book, The Jewish State (1895), where he declared that the cure for antisemitism was the establishment of a Jewish state. As he saw it, the best place to establish this state was in Palestine. He called on the Jews not to sit and wait for the Messiah to come, but to quickly resettle “the land promised to them by God”, and establish a Jewish national state there. Despite his efforts, however, by 1914, ten years after his death, only 2 percent of German Jews were Zionists.

Herzl’s view was eagerly grabbed and upheld by his followers. Chaim Weizmann, then a chemistry professor at Manchester university in the UK, maintained that antisemitism is a bacillus which every man carries with him everywhere, regardless of his assurances to the contrary. Following mainstream Zionist rejection of that proposal, Weizmann was credited later with persuading Balfour, then the GB Foreign Minister, for British support to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the original Zionist demand. Weizmann famously said:

There is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish people, and it has no country.

Palestine certainly did have a people—the Palestinians—but they were ruled for hundreds of years by the Ottomons. Apparently, because they did not rule themselves, Weizmann and his fellow Zionists could not see them. Yet the Jews had not ruled themselves since the time of Pompey, the Roman general in the first century BC! Neverthless, this slogan, “a country without a people for a people without a country” was used to recruit Jewish immigrants to Palestine. Weizmann also described the Palestinian people, “the rocks of Judea, as obstacles that had to be cleared on a difficult path”. In the 1920s, with Zionism still unpopular among Jews, Weizmann wrote:

I trembled lest the British Government would call me and ask: “Tell us, what is this Zionist Organization? Where are they, your Zionists?”… The Jews, they knew, were against us [the Zionists].

Weizmann eventually became president of the Zionist Organization (ZO). Founded in 1897, Herzl’s followers and supporters met at their first international congress in Basel, Switzerland, giving birth to the Zionist Organization. Mount Zion is a hill at the edge of Jerusalem, on which, according to the bible, king David, the mythical ruler of Judah, once lived. The Temple of Jerusalem, which became the centre of Judaism, was built there during the reign of David’s equally mythical son, King Solomon… allegedly!

The ZO became the WZO, the World Zionist Organization, which accepted no individuals as members, but united various political groups and parties—from the fascist-type Berut to self-styled labour and socialist ones like MAPAI and MAPAM. The WZO’s supreme body was the periodically convened Zionist Congress, delegates to which were appointed by the leaders of Zionist organizations in different countries. Originally, congresses were held every year, but later the intervals between them grew longer, until it became once every four years. The Congress elects the World Zionist Council which forms the executive committee with representatives in New York and Jerusalem. The WZO has branches in many countries consisting of the World Zionist Unions, international Zionist Federations, and international organizations calling themselves Zionist, such as WIZO, Hadassah, Bnai-Brith, Maccabi, the International Sephardic Federation, and the three streams of world Judaism—Orthodox, Conservative, Reform.

Judaism as Ideology

From the outset the WZO adopted Judaism, not as its religion—many of the Zionists were secular or actively atheistic—but as its ideology. The myths invented by Judaic priests about the Jews being God’s chosen people, about the Promised Land, the rising from ruins on Mount Sinai of a temple built by people freed from captivity by Cyrus the Persian and destroyed by Romans in 73 AD, and also the determination of the rabbis to preserve the separation of Jewish communities, accorded with the political aims of unscrupulous Zionist leaders. By applying religious dogmata to politics, Zionists seek to sow national discord among people, and extend the Judaic thesis about the Jews being God’s chosen people to claim that the Jews are a “noble race”, and “the purest race among the civilized nations of the world”. Having reconstructed a fourteenth century treatise written by Talmudic sages, they used it for a book of instruction in Israeli schools. It says Jews are “mankind’s elite” and that “people of other nationalities should be slaves to the Jews”.

Zionist propaganda claims that besides the “historical exclusiveness” of the Jewish race, the Jews possess greater ability and enterprise than European, Asian and African peoples. For this reason, goes the Zionist hypothesis, people of other races or nationalities envy the Jews, and fear them because they cannot compete with them, in equal situations. This, Zionists claim, causes the bitter hatred they arouse. Naturally, these ideas are scientifically unverified because they are purely invented. No race can remain pure in the course of many centuries of contact with other peoples. Attempts to prove “racial purity” are absurd, and do not differ from Nazi ideology. Far from being universally hated, Judaism is a culture that most people admire, but that Zionism is successfully undermining.

In their biblical myths, the Jews’ forebears, the Israelites, came to Palestine from the Sinai Desert around 1300 BC, and partly conquered then mixed freely with the indigenous population of Palestine, the Canaanites. In actual history, they were Canaanites who were introduced to a form of diluted Zoroastrianism by their Persian overlords in the fifth century BC. It is from Zoroastrianism that Jews derive their cleanliness taboos, Judaism having no theological explanation for them, whereas Zoroastrianism has.

The Persian colonists, the Judaic priesthood, forbade mixed marriages at that time. Despite that, with the demise of the Persian empire to Alexander’s Macedonians, the priests did marry with the native people, the Am ha Eretz, so “God’s chosen people” from then on were interbred, and they have interbred a good deal more since, for intermixing never stopped despite the ban. Besides that, the Persians allowed and perhaps required, non-Persian subjects to convert to Judaism, which they seem to have been setting up as a new religion for non-Zoroastrians as a stepping stone to conversion. Thus Jews have always been settled in other places in the world besides Palestine.

The Romans did not expel the Jews from Palestine after the Jewish War of 66-73 AD as most people seem to think. Proof enough is the Jewish rising under the messianic claimant, Bar Kochba, in 132-135 AD. If Jews were strong enough to rise against the Romans 70 years after the Jewish War and require several legions to be beaten, they obviously had not been expelled beforehand. Jews were expelled from Jerusalem, but not from Palestine, after this uprising. Hadrian made Jerusalem a city of Goyim, and called it Ælia Capitolina.

Some wealthier Jews—priests were largely the local ruling class, the princes and nobles—will have left Palestine to join the diaspora in the Roman and Persian empires, but most could only retreat to the countryside to live with relatives on smallholdings, like the Arab fellahin, or sell themselves as slaves. These Palestinian Jews differed from most in the diaspora in that the Persians had sent them as the priests of the new Jerusalem temple, and they felt more strongly, as priests, that they had to keep pure. The later diaspora rabbis—in an effort to preserve their influence and income—persistently opposed mixed marriages, and damned the apostates with terrible punishment in the next world, and organized Jewish separation in ghettos, if they failed to completely keep their congregations pure.

Jewish Nationhood

In their effort to prove a lack of distinctions among Jews, and the existence of a world Jewish nation, the Zionists adopted an absurd definition of “nation”. According to them, a nation is a community of people united by struggle against a common enemy. This definition would make all the peoples involved in war against Napoleon’s France or against Nazi Germany a single nation, and it certainly contradicts their own propaganda that there is no Palestinian nation. If there was not, the Zionists have created it.

Equally absurd was the Zionists’ attempt to declare Jews all over the world a single nation on the basis of Judaism, allegedly the common religion of them all. While it is true that the original designation of Jew was a worshipper of Yehouah, the god of the Jews, yet obviously now:

  1. not all Jews believe in Yehouah and profess Judaism,
  2. beliefs and convictions do not determine nationality, otherwise, all Catholics, Lutherans, Orthodox believers, and Buddhists, would have to be considered one nation.

So, there is no world Jewish nation which the Zionists claim to represent, nor was there ever such a nation. In those far-off days when the majority of the Jews lived as more or less compact communities, they, like other ethnic groups, could not become a “world nation”, or even an ordinary one, because there were no stable economic ties between them, which is an important condition for the emergence of a nation. Dispersed all over the world and having no such national characteristics as a common economy, land, language, dress, and common psychological traits, the Jews lacked the necessary requisites for nationhood:

What were the common elements in the ethnographic cultures of a Jew in Kiev and a Jew in Marrakech other than religious belief…?
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009

The only Jewish nation arose originally when the Hasmonaean family of priests in Yehud led a rebellion against their Seleucid Greek rulers, and succeeded in liberating the temple state, and even its subjects were diverse and certainly did not all speak one language. Moreover, most were illiterate. It was notionally a theocracy, although practically it was ruled by the victorious noble family of the Hasmonaean princes. They declared the temple state an independent Jewish state, even though most Jews did not live there and never had done. Soon the Roman general Pompey took over Judah and renamed it Palestine after the earlier tribe whose name, the Philistines, had been given to the coastal land. The Jewish kingdom had lasted about a century.

Antisemitism

Then: Jews victims of German Nationalism. Now: Palestinians victims of Jewish Nationalism

Readers may be shocked to learn that Herzl believed Zionism offered the world a welcome “final solution of the Jewish question”. Thus he, not the Nazis, coined that awful phrase. While claiming the establishment of a “Jewish” state would cure antisemitism, he also thought antisemitism should be used to further his Zionist cause. So the main argument for a mass emigration of Jews to Palestine for Herzl was what he called universal and uncontrollable antisemitism, since he believed that the people among whom the Jews lived were all either openly or secretly antisemitic.

Benny Morris, an Israeli Historian, described how Herzl foresaw that antisemitism could be “harnessed” for the realization of Zionism. He said:

Herzl regarded Zionism’s triumph as inevitable, not only because life in Europe was ever more untenable for Jews, but also because it was in Europe’s interests to rid the Jews and be relieved of antisemitism. The European political establishment would eventually be persuaded to promote Zionism. Herzl recognized that antisemitism would be “harnessed” to his own—Zionist-purposes.
Righteous Victims, 21

Theodor Herzl was one of the first to view antisemitism in a positive light. He said:

It is essential that the sufferings of Jews… become worse… this will assist in realization of our plans… I have an excellent idea… I shall induce antisemites to liquidate Jewish wealth… The antisemites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The antisemites shall be our best friends.
Diaries, 1:16

and:

Anti-Semites will become our surest friends, antisemitic countries our allies.
Diaries, 19

Herzl wrote in his diary:

I’ve come to regard antisemitism more broadly. Historically, I’m beginning to understand and even forgive it. Moreover, I recognize the futility and uselessness of fighting antisemitism. A powerful and rather subconscious force, it is not harmful to the Jews. I consider it a useful factor in the development of Jewish individuality.

Another ideologist of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who founded the ultra-Right Herut party and whom the Zionists idolized after his death, wrote in 1905:

In Zionist propaganda, antisemitism is of course very convenient and useful, especially as a principle.

In keeping with these theories, the followers of Herzl and Jabotinsky have invariably relied on antisemitism as scaremongering propaganda among Jews. They have provoked instances of antisemitism. David Ben-Gurion, a Zionist leader and Israel’s first Prime Minister, organized, through Zionist agents, the blowing up of a synagogue in Baghdad to provide proof of the persecution of Jews in Iraq and to justify the persecution of Arabs in Israel. He stated cynically that he would like to send specially picked young men to countries of Jewish mass settlement to promote antisemitic campaigns which would be more effective in getting Jews to emigrate to Israel than the call of the “ancient homeland”. Zionists see every Jew as a supporter, eager to return to the “land of his forefathers”. According to the logic of Zionists, and that of the rabid antisemitic pogromists, all Jews are either pro-Zionist or pro-communist.

Despite all lures and persuasion, and the support of capitalist countries, people prepared to seek happiness in a strange land with an unfamiliar climate and hard physical conditions were few. So Jewish emigration to Palestine remained slight and the Jewish population in Palestine grew only slowly. Zionist propagandists did not attain much success with their vivid descriptions of “an earthly paradise” in the “ancient homeland” or appeals to nationalist sentiments and the “call of the blood”.

Reflecting their origins and purpose, the methods used by the Zionists in winning over a considerable part of the Jewish poor are reminiscent of those used by the Nazis who, while upholding the interests of the financial oligarchy, managed, by means of demagogy, deception, and inflated nationalist sentiments, to enlist the mass support of the lower middle class and large sections of the German working people. In both cases antisemitism was used to advantage. The Nazis incited it, and the Zionists exploited the results. In making false promises of an earthly paradise in the Holy Land, they used the bogeyman of antisemitism to intimidate innocent people. They rightly regarded it as one of their chief propaganda cards, and happily capitalized on the slightest manifestations of it. They knew that antisemites strengthened Zionism.

Zionist reliance on antisemitism to further its aims continues still. Without a continued inflow of Jewish immigrants to Israel, within a decade its Jewish population will be the minority. So to maintain a Jewish majority, its leaders “encourage” Jews to leave their homelands and seek “refuge” by promoting antisemitism throughout the world. In some periods, it has worked. Studies of immigration records reflect increased immigration to the Zionist state when antisemitism is rife.

Nazi Collaboration

What the Zionist recruiting agents failed to achieve was done by Nazi terror. Rabid Nazi antisemitism and the wave of pogroms which swept Germany late on 9 November, 1938—ironically, that night was called Crystal Night, because the streets were covered with glass from the windows of Jewish shops and flats—to the Zionists were a blessing. In the first three years Hitler was in power, from 1933 to 1936, the Jews in Palestine increased by 50 percent. When the Second World War began, the influx of Jewish immigrants became particularly large. As the Nazis conquered more and more countries, the number of Jewish refugees grew.

Various Zionist organizations, working in contact with the Nazis, sent the refugees only to Palestine, refusing to cooperate with, and even hindering, those who wished to go to another country. Levi Eshkol—Lev Shkolnik when he was still a Slav—the future Israeli head of government, took an active part in setting up the Palestine Office in Berlin. This office sorted out Jewish refugees to be sent to their “ancient homeland”, selecting first of all Zionist activists, well to do men, and young people.

The departure of old men and women and poor people to Palestine was hindered with a host of pretexts. The extent to which the cynicism of the selectors went can be judged from the reply of the then head of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann, to some British MPs who asked him whether it would be possible to move all the West European Jews to Palestine:

No, old people are out… They are dust, the economic and moral dust of the greater world…

In the face of the threat of physical extermination of the entire Jewish population of Germany, the Zionist “guardians” of the Jews were not concerned about saving the lives of elderly German Jews—they were only interested in expanding the Jewish colony in Palestine. It implies a Nazi holocaust of solely elderly Jews would have been acceptable to Zionist leaders like Weizmann.

They vigorously protested when the US President, Franklin D Roosevelt, expressed readiness to give asylum to half a million Jewish refugees from Europe. They insisted that the US Department of the Interior refuse permission to Jewish refugees from Europe to settle in Alaska, that only one door be open for Jewish emigrants—to Palestine. Thus they zealously saw to it that the victims of Nazi terror would get no other possibility of escape except to the Promised Land. Zionist agents continued just as zealously after WWII to obstruct Jews from going anywhere but Palestine. They persuaded the British authorities to forbid Jewish emigration to Western Australia. They reached agreement with the American and British authorities that Jews in “displaced persons” camps would have only one road to take—to Palestine.

That is how Zionist leaders treat in deeds, and not in words, such conceptions as the unity, brotherhood, and community of interests of the Jews which they spout in their propaganda. As a result of these coercive measures, by 1948 the Jewish community in Palestine numbered over 600,000 or one third of the population. This was also a result of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis, who acted in partnership with Zionists, as well as the use of deception and brute force rather than the appeal of Zionist propaganda.

The Zionists maintained close ties with fascist regimes of Pilsudski in Poland, of Mussolini in Italy, and of Antonescu in Romania. They even reached agreement with the Nazis. According to Julius Mader, a German journalist, the list of Zionists who collaborated with the Nazis consisting of 16 close typed pages. Years later Zionist dealings with the Nazis were revealed by such senior Zionist leaders as:

  • Chaim Weizmann, the first President of Israel
  • Moshe Sharett, his successor
  • David Ben-Gurion, later Prime Minister of Israel
  • Rudolf Kastner, the Hungarian Zionist leader...

Zionists even cooperated with SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann and SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, two of Hitler’s henchmen who organized mass killings of Jews. Early in 1939, long before Hitler planncd his “final solution” of the Jewish question, Zionist leaders made a deal with Eichmann according to which the Nazis were to let a train of Jews leave for Palestine. The passengers on that train had been carefully selected, and included Zionist activists and Jewish capitalists. In return for that favour, Zionist leaders helped Eichmann to select 40,000 people from among the Jewish poor and workers and to send to extermination camps. Eichmann looked favourably on his Zionists friends for making his job easier.

According to the West German magazine, Der Spiegel, the chief of the Jewish Affairs Department of the Nazi intelligence service, von Mindelstein, cooperated with the Zionists in setting up special camps where young Jewish people were trained in farm work before they were sent to Palestine. Von Mindelstein closely followed Zionist propaganda. He even had a map in his department showing the spread of Zionism among the German Jews.

A vivid example of cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis is Rudolf Kastner, the head of the Hungarian branch of the Jewish Agency and permanent delegate to the International Zionist Congress, and his assistants, including Grosz-Bandy Gyórgy, Moshe Schweiger, Moshe Kraus, Joel Brandt and his wife. They arranged with Eichmann and Becher to ransom Zionist activists and rich Jews held captive by the Nazis at 1,000 dollars each. The deal was to be kept secret. Zionist talk of “a lack of class distinctions” among Jews, “racial unity” and “unbreakable brotherhood” was forgotten at oncc. Later Kastner admitted that train accommodation was offered first of all to those who could pay the most in money or valuables!

The deal netted the Nazis $200,000, 200kg of gold, and 750g of platinum, to say nothing of other valuables and currencies. However, Kastner and company paid more than just “filthy lucre” to save the lives of their associates. In those days, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews were concentrated in camps from which they were sent to Auschwitz to be exterminated. The camps were only a few miles away from the Romanian border, and Romania had already capitulated under the pressure of advancing Soviet armed forces. Had the inmates known that they were condemned to die they would have tried to escape, and it is not likely that the small force posted to guard them could have successfully stopped them. Enö Lévai, a Hungarian historian, writes:

Undoubtedly, if the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews had known what fate awaited them, if they had been told about this, the Nazis could not have been able to herd them, like cattle, into the ghettos, and from there, just as easily, into death trains. They had not been informed by anyone. On the contrary, Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Agency, reassured them and urged them to comply with all the requests in order to avoid a greater evil.

This was the price that the Hungarian Zionist leaders willingly paid to rescue the businessmen who financed them and their disciples.

When the state of Israel came into being, Kastner was given a responsible post in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. He was also put in charge of the department of Kol-Israel—the Voice of Israel—broadcasting to Hungary and Romania.

In 1953, Kastner sued a journalist, M Greenwald, “for libel”. In his articles Greenwald had lifted the shroud of secrecy from Kastner’s treacherous activity in Hungary. Examined at a Jerusalem court the case finally backfired against Kastner. The testimony of witnesses and the authentic documents showed him to have been in collusion with the Nazis. At another trial held in Budapest, in May 1955, Kastner was conclusively exposed as a Nazi collaborator. When cornered, he admitted having collaborated with Eichmann, Becher and other killers of Jews. His frankness, however, cost him his life. On May 3, 1957, he was shot at in the street, and died in an Israeli hospital under somewhat obscure circumstances. During investigation of the shooting it was found that two of the three assailants were agents of the Israeli secret police. One of them told the court that he had acted under orders of the Israeli secret service. The Zionist leaders had succeeded in silencing their over-talkative associate.

Kastner was no exception among Zionists. S Mayer, the head of the Zionist branch in Switzerland, also ransomed his associates from the Nazis. He did this through SS Sturmbannführer Hans Eggen. The SS used the large sums turned over to Eggen to buy strategic materials, transport means and military equipment.

Judenrats

A horrible phenomenon was the cooperation of the Zionist Judenrats with the Nazis, helpng them to enforce their orders for lists of people to be taken in the ghettos to be murdered. They made up lists of inmates condemned to death, and they built up “an exchange fund” of persons to be exchanged for Zionist activists whenever the latter were included by the SS in the lists of persons marked for extermination. Hannah Arendt, a celebrated Jewish political thinkers, accused the Judenrats in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Without the Judenräte’s assistance in the registration of the Jews in ghettos, and, later, in the Jews’ deportation to extermination camps, many fewer Jews would have perished. The Germans could not have easily drawn up the lists of Jews they needed. The Nazis entrusted Jewish officials to make these lists, and information about the property they owned. The Judenräte also told the Jewish police to help Germans catch Jews and load them onto trains for concentration camps. Arendt wrote:

To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.

The Lwow Judenrat in the Ukraine included such Jewish capitalists as Heinrich Landsberg, Joseph Parnas, Eineugler, and Adolf Ratfeld. It had an administrative apparatus of about 3,000, and a police force of 750 men armed with rubber clubs. The latter helped the SS to keep discipline in the ghetto and to herd condemned persons into vehicles to be taken out and shot. The Nazis eventually assuming that those who betrayed their own kith and kin could also betray them, abolished the Judenräte and their Jewish police. But that disgraceful collaboration with the Nazi murderers remains one of the more hideous chapters in the history of Zionism.

The story of Dr Alfred Nossig, a veteran of the Zionist movement, was somewhat different from that of the Judenrat leaders. For many years he was a Gestapo informer and together with the Nazis worked out plans for exterminating poor and old Jews. He was 80 years old when he was captured, charged with treason, and executed by Warsaw ghetto militants.

Towards the end of the war, when it became clear that the Nazis would have to soon answer for their crimes, important Zionists readily entered into talks with them concerning their future relations. Gestapo and Nazi security service chiefs began meeting with N Masur, G Storch, the Sternbuch brothers and other Zionist leaders. Himmler received Masur in his office and he tried to ingratiate himself with H Storch, the Stockholm representative of the World Jewish Congress, in the hope of securing his protection in the future. Himmler promised Dr Musy, a former President of Switzerland who mediated between Himmler and the Zionists, to let small groups of Jews go to Switzerland according to lists made up by the Zionists. The transaction was to be paid for in foreign currency. In an effort to minimize the retribution coming to his chief, SS Brigadenführer Walter Schellenberg, one of Himmler’s right-hand men, wrote several articles printed in US newspapers, with the help of the organization of American rabbis, praising the respectability of Heinrich Himmler.

The Zionists did not fail Nazis. Thanks to their Zionist protectors quite a few Nazis escaped the hangman’s noose. For instance, when after the war SS Obergruppenfüher Hans Juttner, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher, SS Obersturmbannführer Hermann Krumey and several other SS führers were tried by the US Nuremberg tribunal, the testimony of witnesses for the defence sent by Zionist organizations saved the lives of these criminals.

Obviously, a key factor here was that, prior to his arrest, Becher turned two trunks with gold and precious stones over to Moshe Schweitzer, who sent them, through the Palestinian representative of the Jewish Agency, Arman, to the Agency’s treasurer, Kaplan. These dealers were not abashed by the fact that the gold and stones had come from the SS account in the Reichsbank and had been supplied by death camps. Auschwitz alone yielded the SS nine tons of gold teeth every year.

It is perhaps a bitter paradox that it was with these funds that the Jad Washem Memorial, whose floor is laid with slabs bearing the names of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Tremblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Babii Yar, and other places where mass extermination of Jews took place, was built on a hill near the western edge of Jerusalem, or that the Forest of Martyrs, consisting of six million trees—the number of Nazi victims—was planted. The men of Zion had too easily and too soon swept clean the record of their collaboration with the Nazis. Guided by the cynical principle that the end justifies the means, to achieve their goal, Zionists were ready to collaborate with absolutely anyone, to bargain with millions of Jewish lives and to betray their own people without compunction.

Racial Purity and Class Division

Jewish history has been developing in accordance with the general laws of historical progression, by class struggle between an exploiting class and those who were exploited. No arguments of a religious, racial or nationalist nature can substantiate the groundless Zionist assertions that the Jews are an exception to the rule, that to them neither property status, class distinctions, nor class struggle are of any consequence:

Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital. They are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite workers.
V I Lenin

In its entire history of over a century, Zionism has never, in any circumstances, put forward or supported slogans calling on the Jewish workers to struggle against the exploitation of the Jewish capitalists. The Zionists have never anywhere raised their voice in defence of Jewish workers against Jewish bankers, merchants and manufacturers. So the class character of Zionism is plain and shows whom it actually serves. Just like the German Nazis, they substituted nationalism for class struggle undermining not only the cause of the liberation of Jewish workers from capitalist oppression, but the workers of the world.

Zionists needed the myth of racial purity to justify their claim that class distinctions were alien to the Jewish nation. According to them, property status makes no difference to Jews. They are all one family within the bounds of one nation. They are all brothers and friends united by common interests. Together they oppose the hostile peoples surrounding them, and together they uphold their common interests.

In the tsarist Russian Empire, according to Zionist logic, it was not the workers of Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and other nationalities who were the friends and brothers of the Jewish workers, but the sugar manufacturer Brodsky, the bankers Ginsburg, Kaminka, and Brothers Polyakov, the tea king Vysotsky, the Franco-British millionaire family of Rothschild, the German capitalist Oskar Wassermann, the US financial magnates Jakob H Schiff, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Deutsch, Otto Warburg, and others who invested capital in Russia’s industry and received tremendous dividends from their profiteering. The idea of a class peace so advantageous to the Jewish middle class was also favourably viewed by the non-Jewish middle class who were no less interested in substituting national antagonisms for class ones.

Leading up to the revolution in Russia, Zionist leaders stood aside, cynically stating in a policy paper that the Russian revolution would not solve the “Jewish problem”. Naturally, the tsar’s police approved. One of its chiefs, Zubatov, urged the police department to support the Zionists in every way. The Zionists actively cooperated with counter revolutionaries. The tsarist Minister of Internal Affairs and organizer of the Jewish pogrom in Kishinev received Herzl in 1903 and had a long and friendly talk with him. He completely approved the Zionists’ desire to set up a legal organization in Russia and promised to secure the “royal approval of the monarch”.

A Zionist activist, a lawyer named Hessen, kept closely in touch with the Monarchists. A political party advocating unlimited autocracy, it included important landowners, government officials, and clergymen. After the October 1917 socialist revolution, he associated with White Guards, the various armed detachments raised by former tsarist army officers to bring about a civil war—a tactic western governments still use, as in Syria today—and fight against the socialist republic, and did his best to justify the Jewish pogroms they organized. During the Civil War, another Zionist leader, Pasmanik, urged Jews to cooperate with the anti-socialist armies. When Soviet power was consolidated, he fled to Paris where he took part in planning external anti-Soviet military plots.

Zionism is an ideological tool of capitalism in the era of imperialism. It is the way Jewish capital cooperates with world capital and the forces of imperialist reaction to achieve their global ends. The Zionist state, Israel, is central to that role.


  • I Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate, 2011
  • R Brodsky, The Truth about Zionism, 1974
  • S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Are Teachers Speaking a Different Language from their Urban Pupils?

Urban School and Comprehension of Language

Poor schooling outcomes disadvantage Indigenous Australians, and Dr Ilana Mushin of Queensland university and Rod Gardner, of Griffith University, want to find out why. They think the way pupils and teachers speak to each other could be part of the problem. Dr Mushin said:

We noticed that although most Indigenous children in Australia do not speak a traditional language, neither do they speak Standard Australian English in their homes and communities. Teachers may assume that their children already know Standard Australian English, even if they are perceived to speak it “badly”, when in fact they are having to learn the curriculum through the medium of another [English] dialect. Coupled with the already well documented challenges faced by Indigenous students, this can lead to real educational disadvantage.

Dr Mushin explained she hoped to show that when Indigenous children started school, they had to learn English through the medium of a second dialect, which adversely affected teaching. She continued:

At present, we are looking at how children try to get teachers’ attention for feedback or clarification, whether or not their strategies are successful, and to what extent language differences may be a factor in what happens. We have noticed that Indigenous children in early years schooling work hard to get a response, suggesting that they are highly engaged in learning, but may get less engaged over time because of the language differences. Often the teachers are from a non-Indigenous background and are not aware of the issues, which suggests the need for better teacher education in language differences and the explicit teaching of Standard Australian English. We will continue to work with the Queensland Department of Education, Training and Employment to run workshops and produce training guides and posters. We believe our findings can be applied to other culturally diverse school environments.

The pair are also producing a sociohistorical account of linguistic variation and development within some Queensland Indigenous communities, to show how vernacular dialects are robust linguistic systems, and not simply “broken English” or “slang”.

One immediately thinks, having read this, whether the vernacular of black and Asian kids in big cities in Europe and the USA is actually creating similar problems of understanding that are setting the kids back. Black urban children often have much poorer educational outcomes even than poor while kids in the same schools and environment. One answer would be to teach the kids in their own vernacular, but it would cause problems later when—given a successful outcome—they wanted to go into higher education. So, as these Australian workers suggest, maybe schools should concentrate as much attention as possible on creative and interesting teaching of English elocution and comprehension. Maybe many of the actively speaking methods of teaching like dramatics and those used for teaching English as a foreign language, rather than merely formal lessons, would bear fruit. What do experience teachers of English think?