Palestinians will remain steadfast in their determination to remain on what is left of their traditional land.

By Kim Bullimore

Abu Zureyk, Al Abbasiyya, Abu Shusha, Ayan az Zaytun, Awlam, Azz Zema, AHaiqia, Balad ash Sheikh, Bayt Daras, Beer Sheba, Bi’ne, Burayr, al Dawayima, Dayr el Asad, Deir Yassin, Eilbourn, Haifa, Hawwassa, Husayniyya, Ilut, Ijzim, Isdud, Jish, al Kabri, al Khisas, Khibbyza, Lydda, Majd al Kurum, Mansura al Khayt, Nasir ad Din Khribet, Qazaza, Qisarya, Sa’sa, Safsaf, Saliha, Sha’b, Al Samiyya, al Tantoura, al Tira, Tel, Geze, Umm al, Shauf, al Wa’ra al-Sawda, Wadi ‘Ara.

Like the names of the dead, the names of these villages bring heartbreak to all Palestinians. Sixty years ago, last month, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began.

Sixty years ago, up to six weeks before the British mandate of Palestine was terminated and the state of Israeli was even declared, Zionist terror gangs began their forcible expulsion of more than 122 Palestinian villages and began carrying out military assaults on more than 270 other villages [1].

Sixty years ago on April 9, 1948, 254 unarmed Palestinian men, women and children were murdered in the village of Dier Yassin by Zionist terror gangs - the Irgun (aka as Etzel) lead by Menachin Begin (who was to become a later Prime Minister of Israel) and the Stern Gang (aka as the Lehi). More than 40 other Palestinian villages and towns were to suffer the same fate as Dier Yassin.

The massacre that took place at Dier Yassin was just one of many carried out, as part of a co-ordinated effort between the Zionist terror gangs, the Irgun and the Stern Gang and the Haganah (which was the main Jewish underground organisation which later became the present day Israeli Defence Force) to ethnically cleanse indigenous Palestinians from historic Palestine prior to the UN partition in May 1948. “Plan Dalet” as the operation was known, was carried out under the authority and leadership of David Ben Gurion, the future first Prime Minister of Israel. Its aim was to strike fear and terror into the indigenous Palestinian population in order to ethnically cleanse them from the new state of Israel and to gain even more land for the Zionist state than had been designated under the UN partition plan.

According to the operational orders listed under Plan Dalet, Zionist forces were to carry out the “destruction of [Palestinian] villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those populations centres which are difficult to control continuously”. The operational orders went on to state that the Zionist terror forces should mount “search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed forces must be destroyed and the population expelled outside the borders of the state. The villages which are emptied in the manner described above must be included in the fixed defensive system and must be fortified as necessary” [2]

The plan stated “in the absence of resistance, garrison troops will enter the village and take up positions in it or in locations which enable complete tactical control. The officer in command of the unit will confiscate all weapons, wireless devices, and motor vehicles in the village. In addition, he will detain all politically suspect individuals. After consultation with the [Jewish] political authorities, bodies will be appointed consisting of people from the village to administer the internal affairs of the village. In every region, a Jewish] person will be appointed to be responsible for arranging the political and administrative affairs of all [Palestinian Arab] villages and population centers which are occupied within that region”.

The absence of resistance, however, did not save Dier Yassin, just as it did not save dozens of other Palestinian villages and towns. According to Israeli Zionist historian, Benny Morris, the Zionist terror forces carried out at least 24 massacres against Palestinians between April and May 1948 before the declaration of the state of Israel. Palestinians, however, put the number of massacres as being as high as 40.

Morris notes in a 2004 interview with Ha’aretz reporter, Ari Shavit, that “In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves”. Morris goes onto note, that the action took place as a direct result of orders given by David Ben Gurion. According to Morris, “various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres” [3]

Upon hearing of the massacre, which took place at Dier Yassin and other villages, thousands of Palestinians in more than 85 other villages and towns fled their homes in fear of their lives [4]. The Zionist terror forces then wiped Dier Yassin off the map, as it did with hundreds of other Palestinian villages and built new Zionists towns and cities in their place. On the ground where Dier Yassin, once stood, now stands the Israel town of Givat Shul and the settlement of Har Nof.

The Zionist reign of terror against the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948, however, did not end with Dier Yassin. On April 18, Zionist gangs stormed the Palestinian city of Tiberias in the Galilee, ethnically expelling more than 5,500 Palestinians from their homes. Four days later, 70,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes in the port city of Haifa [5]. In the months prior to the assault, the Zionist terror gangs had carried out a series of bombings against Haifa’s Palestinian residents [6]. On December 30, the previous year, a Zionist bomb planted in a Palestinian residential neighbourhood killed 6 and injured 41 others. The Zionist bombing sparked riots amongst Palestinian workers at a nearby oil refinery and resulted in the killing of 41 Jewish workers. The Haganah and the Irgun (Etzel) planted a second bomb the following evening resulting what became known as the New Years Massacre at Balad al Shayk, killing more than 60 people. Two months later in February 1948, the Irgun (Etzel) rolled barrels packed with gasoline and explosives down Haifa’s hills into the Palestinian al’ Abasayah Arab neighbourhood. The barrels exploded in an inferno of flames, destroying most of the residential area, causing its residents to flee in terror. One month later on March 22, ten weeks before the state of Israel was declared, the Zionist terror gangs disguised as British officers planted a car bomb, killing 36 Palestinians, the majority of whom were women and children. The bomb blast was so intense it destroyed several public buildings.

Not satisfied with only ethnically cleansing indigenous Palestinians from the land designated as part of a new Jewish state under the UN Partition plan, the Zionist forces moved to begin ethnically cleansing Palestinians from towns and cities which UN had deemed part of a Palestinian state under partition. On April 25, the Irgun (Etzel) began a three week bombing campaign of the “Bride of Palestine”, the port city of Jaffa, which was supposed to be part of a UN sanctioned Palestinian state. Jaffa, which was often referred to as the “centre of heaven” by its residents because of its beauty and location half way between Haifa and Gaza, was the most populous centre in British Mandate Palestine: home to 90,000 Palestinians. With the advent of the Zionist terror campaign, however, the city was to fall from heaven. The assault was so fierce that in the Manshiyyeh quarter, every single building except one was obliterated (the one building left partly standing has since been turned into a museum to glorify the military prowess of the Irgun/Etzel). As the bombing continued, more than 55,000 people fled in terror.

Over the next weeks, more and more villages and towns were to “fall from heaven”. In addition to Dier Yassin, Tiberas, Haifa and Jaffa, more than 400 other Palestinian villages and townships were ethnically cleansed during Plan Dalet and the subsequent war which took place. More than 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes, never allowed to return.

Today, as Israel celebrates “60 years of independence”, the Al Nakba of the Palestinian people continues. On May 5, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz published a report which noted that since the creation of the Israeli state 60 years ago, there have been 1,634 Israeli civilians killed and 14,000 injured by “acts of terror” [7]. What the article did not mention, however, was that in the much shorter period of 7.5 years (from September 2000 to March 2008 since the beginning of the Al Aqsa intifada) that more than 3615 Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israeli state “acts of terror” and 25,650 Palestinian civilians had been wounded [8]

The Haaretz article, also failed to mention that since its creation 60 years ago, the Israeli state has continued the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people via a war of attrition and in the name of “security”. The illegal Israeli occupation which is now in its 40th year, along with all its manifestations – the checkpoints, the wall, the illegal settlements, the illegal confiscation of land, the restriction of freedom of movement, arbitary arrest and administrative detention, target assassinations, aerial bombing, the siege of Gaza – while all aimed at controlling the Palestinian population is also aimed at systematically driving the Palestinian people off their land.

Since the beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada, Israel has destroyed more than 13% of Gaza’s agricultural land alone. During the same period the Israeli state, via its occupation forces, has demolished completely more than 2932 Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip alone, while a further 2848 were partially demolished [9]. These acts of terror against a Palestinian civilian population were carried out as illegal and punitive collective punishment or in order to make way for the illegal expansion of illegal Israeli settlements and the infrastructure needed to serve these colonies. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights, house demolitions have resulted in more than 13,000 Palestinians being left homeless [10]. In addition, through out the Occupied West Bank, dozens of dozens of Palestinian villages remained “unrecognised” and deemed illegal by the Israeli occupier, although they have existed for decades and even hundreds of years prior to the establishment of the Israeli state. The Israeli state’s refusal to recognise these villages is designed to legitimise the ongoing, systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the traditional homes and lands by its occupation forces and its “civil administration” in the OPT.

Israel continues its policy of ethnic cleansing by also regularly restricts the freedom of movement of Palestinians. Israel’s policy while carried out in the name of “security” is designed to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population through “quite transfer” by making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will “voluntarily” leave. According to B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the OPT, “the restrictions of movement that Israel has imposed on the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories over the past five years are unprecedented in the history of the Israeli occupation in their scope, durations and in the severity of damage that they have caused to the three and half million Palestinians who reside there” [11].

Today, Israel will ‘celebrate’ its creation and as we hear the fire works the illegal settlements around us, the Palestinian people will remember their dead, their imprisoned and their loved ones in refugee camps through out the Middle East and their family and friends who make up the 7 million strong Palestinian Diaspora around the world. Today, as Israel baths itself in vulgar nationalism and the glorification of its military prowess, the Palestinian people will recall the Nakba and the ethnic cleansing of their home land. And today, as the Israel celebrates the ethnic cleansing of another people in order to create “a homeland for the Jews”, the Palestinian people will remain in a state of sumoud (steadfastness) in their determination to remain on what is left of their traditional land and to be a free people once again.

-Kim Bullimore is currently living the Occupied West Bank, where she is a human rights volunteer with the International Women’s Peace Service (www.iwps.info). She has a blog www.livefromoccupiedpalestine.blogspot.com and is a regular writer on Palestine-Israel issues. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Notes:

[1] Palestine 1948: Map of towns and villages depopulated by Zionist Invasion
Prepared by Salman Abu-Sitta, 1998. Produced by Palestine Land Society.

[2] Sefer Toldot Hahaganah [History of the Haganah], vol. 3, ed, by Yehuda Slutsky (TelAviv: Zionist Library, 1972), Appendix 48, pp 1955-60.

[3] Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, 16 January 2004

[4] Palestine 1948: Map of towns and villages depopulated by Zionist Invasion
Prepared by Salman Abu-Sitta, 1998. Produced by Palestine Land Society.

[5] Neff, D., (1994) Arab Jaffa Seized Before Israel’s Creation in 1948 in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

[6] Haifa Refinery Riots, Middle East Web

[7] Haaretz, 5 May, 2008, 16 Israeli civilians killed this year in terror acts, 1,634 since May, ‘48

[8] and [9] Palestinian Centre for Human Rights www.pchrgaza.org/PCHR/statistics.html

[10] and [11] B’Tselem: Israeli information centre for human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories www.btselem.org/English/

McCain criticises Carter’s meeting with Hamas, calling it ‘a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader.’ (Photo: Reuters)

By Stuart Littlewood

I don’t know about you, but Hillary Rodham Clinton scares the pants off me.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I am president, we will attack Iran,” she ranted when asked what she’d do if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. Not only that, she’ll “totally obliterate them”… 70 million people.

Jeepers… what kind of lunatic would drag us all into World War 3 to defend a lawless, racist regime like Israel?
I see the Council on Foreign Relations helps keep tabs on the stooge-for-Israel inclinations of each presidential candidate, so how’s Hillary doing? “Clinton co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006,” says the CFR. “She also sponsored a Senate resolution in 2007 calling for the immediate and unconditional release of soldiers of Israel held captive by Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Was she concerned about the 9,000 Palestinians, including women and children, abducted from their homes and held in Israeli jails? Apparently not.

Since taking office in 2000, Clinton has regularly supported military and financial aid packages to Israel. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) she spouted the now-compulsory mantra: Hamas should not be recognised “until it renounces violence and terror and recognises Israel’s right to exist.”

She supports Israel’s ‘security wall’ and its declared purpose of preventing terrorist attacks. Does she support the wall’s undeclared purpose - which has nothing to do with security - and the way it bites deep into Palestinian territory?

Barack Obama has said the United States must isolate Hamas. He also co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 and called on the Palestinian leadership to “recognise Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region”. OK, why don’t America and Israel get serious about implementing the dozens of UN resolutions on the subject? He doesn’t say.

He called Carter’s meeting with Hamas leaders “a bad idea”, so what’s his pledge to talk with US adversaries without preconditions worth? If elected, Obama will insist on fully funding military assistance to Israel. Does this mean paying them even more billions of US tax dollars so that they can fire even more high-tech munitions at Gaza, vaporize more women and kids and knock out more infrastructure that Britain and the EU paid for?

John Sidney McCain the Third says he’s “proudly pro-Israel” and argues that there can be no peace process “until the Palestinians recognise Israel, forswear forever the use of violence, recognise their previous agreements…” Has he asked Israel to do the same? No.

He criticises Carter’s meeting with Hamas, calling it “a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader”. And he wants the United States to continue providing Israel with whatever military equipment and technology it needs. If elected McCain would “work to further isolate the enemies of Israel”. Surely his time would be better spent worrying about why half the world hates the US.

McCain even thinks Israel’s military action in Lebanon in 2006 was justified. He’s willing to use military force against Iran if it acquires a nuclear weapon and poses a “real threat” to Israel. Well, we know from past experience what “real threats” boil down to. And guess what: he too co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006.

What is this Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act they all so desperately wanted? It doesn’t make nice reading. The idea is to heap misery on any Palestinian government in which Hamas has a hand, ignoring the fact that the resistance movement is democratically elected and shows no sign of running away. The Act demands everything from the Palestinians and nothing from Israel, which can do no wrong in Washington’s eyes but, as everyone outside America knows, is the biggest terror organisation and law-breaker in the region.

Palestinians are perfectly entitled to put up armed resistance against illegal military occupation. Nevertheless the US requires them to end their struggle, get on their knees and publicly kiss their tormentors’ ass. They must re-commit to the Road Map and the two-state solution even though the ‘irreversible facts on the ground’ Israel is hurrying to establish and the impoverished, fragmented leftovers of land the Palestinians will be left with (less than 20% of what was originally theirs) are not a recipe for peace.

The plan is plainly to support Israel’s lust for prime land and strategic resources and end all hope of Palestinian viability and self-determination.

So the three main presidential candidates are singing off the same hymn-sheet and running neck-and-neck for the job of Stooge-in-Chief. Whichever finally makes it into the White House can count on us Brits being equally well prepped, thanks to the Israel lobby’s energetic string-pulling on this side of the Atlantic too.
Israel’s prime minister Olmert says AIPAC is “the greatest supporter and friend that we have in the whole world”. It is certainly busy, claiming that “through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress… AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year… procuring nearly $3 billion in aid critical to Israel’s security.” Lobbyists meet every member of Congress and cover every hearing on Capitol Hill that touches on the US-Israel relationship.

Ariel Sharon is famously quoted as saying: “We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” (1) Had he been available for comment today he’d probably be saying the same about the UK where AIPAC’s little brother, Friends of Israel, has succeeded in embedding itself deep inside British politics and at the heart of government. Its stated aim is to promote Israel’s interests in Parliament and sway policy.

Conservative Friends of Israel, for example, claims 80 percent of Conservative MPs and provides a programme of weekly briefings, events with speakers, and delegations to Israel. It also operates a ‘Fast Track’ for parliamentary candidates fighting target marginals at the next election.

According to senior Conservatives Israel is “a force for good in the world… In the battle for the values that we stand for, for democracy against theocracy, for democratic liberal values against repression - Israel’s enemies are our enemies and this is a battle in which we all stand together”.
Are they mad? We’re talking here about a ruthless ethnocracy with racist policies, an apartheid agenda, advanced skills in state-terrorism and contempt for the UN Charter and international law.

Nevertheless MPs of all parties, and ministers, are basking in Israel’s hospitality, absorbing the propaganda and allowing themselves to be persuaded to push the interest of this foreign military power sometimes at the expense of our own. Such conduct is at odds with the second of the Seven Principles of Public Life, namely Integrity – “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.”

Efforts are being made to have the influence of the Israel lobby investigated, but the people’s watchdog - the Committee on Standards in Public Life - is itself infiltrated and refuses to act.

This week former Serb officers went on trial at The Hague for ethnic cleansing. They face life sentences for murder, persecution, forced deportations and inhuman acts during the 1991-95 Balkan wars. Many people feel it’s time Israelis faced charges for similar crimes during the 60 years of occupation and catastrophe they have inflicted on the Holy Land. The list includes

• torture
• collective punishment
• targeted assassinations
• house demolitions
• wholesale slaughter
• use of indiscriminate and prohibited weapons against civilians
• land theft
• engineering humanitarian disasters
• creating medical and public health crises
• the wanton destruction of key infrastructure and public & private property
• restrictions on movement and trade
• illegal detention
• suppression of education
• denial of basic human rights
• denial of the right of refugees to return
• illegal settlements
• violation of every convention and code of conduct.

Speaking of the Holy Land, are the three stooges aware that Christian communities under Israeli occupation are being oppressed and crushed along with their Muslim neighbours?

It was heartening to read in The Guardian this week a letter signed by more than 100 prominent Jews saying they cannot celebrate the 60th birthday of a state “founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land… and that even now engages in ethnic cleansing.” They’ll celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

So there you have it. Hillary/Barack/John the Third, you would do well to steer a different course in the Arab-Israel conflict. Quit stooging, kick AIPAC into touch, back off and re-think US foreign policy.

How much support do you think you’d get for annihilating 70 million Iranians?

-Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

Johann Hari, The Independent

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to do that.

It will look in the mirror and think — I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I’m still standing. Yet somewhere, it will know it is suppressing an old secret it has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer’s, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes.

But I can’t do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr. Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: “Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn’t act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time…” He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six percent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting “the wrong way”, the Israeli Army is not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Center on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic meters of feces flowing all over Gaza, causing “a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions”.

So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be “a light unto the nations” end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population?

The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the 20th century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons.

They convinced themselves that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land”. I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews. When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else’s country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: “The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”

So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was — as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it — “a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centers”. In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30million stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn’t we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 percent of what we had?

If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal — even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders — tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: If we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: If we don’t have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on?

It seemed like an intractable problem — until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora’s desires. They found that only 10 percent — around 300,000 people — want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl.

Perhaps Hamas’ proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn’t it a good idea to find out? Israel, as it gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years.