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Greta Thunberg is sailing to Gaza again in her third attempt to "break the seige". To "end the genocide". This time Israel's going to chuck her in a terrorist cell and right-wingers are salivating at the thought. Okay, Greta's made herself ridiculous over 'climate change' but the world made itself ridiculous by panicking too, just the way she wanted.
Now Greta's converted to Palestine, perhaps because her activist parents or handlers at Davos Inc realise climate change is a has-been (and rightly so) and she's too valuable by now to waste on a lost cause. So this weaponized media darling is sailing to Gaza to promote global socialism.
But at the risk of sounding like a lefty or a Jew-hater, Greta has far more reason to hang out with Hamas than she had to scare the wits out of the world with 'climate change'. The facts of history are that an amnesiac, Zionist Israel - itself recently a victim of genocide - has with the complicity of Western media, made financial and political capital out of its Holocaust and is intent on creating another, in Gaza, by liquidating its indigenous Arab people.
There are no excuses for terrorism, but there are reasons. Read on.
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| Greta being handled in more ways than one |
The following article from The Remnant Newspaper is of 'War and Peace' dimensions, but even merely reading the highlights should serve to correct any pro-Israeli bias the reader might have acquired from US-aligned media in the West.
Since 1948, the historicity of the canonical narrative of the Zionist movement, as its aspirations were reified in the founding of the modern state of Israel, has been uncritically accepted, to say the least, in both the United States (whose mainstream media, and political and cultural institutions have been ventriloquized by the propaganda of the Israel Lobby for at least sixty years), and in a post-war Europe perennially struggling to dispel the miasma of the Holocaust.
That narrative has largely reckoned without the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. (As Golda Meir once put it, with self-blinding hauteur, “There was no such thing as Palestinians.”)
According to one version of the Zionist fable, the 19th and early-20th century Jewish immigrants fleeing persecution in Tsarist Russia, Poland, and Romania, or seeking sanctuary from the Nazi killing machine, arrived in a Palestine more or less empty of inhabitants, until the Jews “made the desert bloom,” by bringing Western modernization to a land populated, if at all, by peasant farmers or other “backward” nomadic tribes, whose ancient customs and religious traditions represented an obstacle to “progress.”
Since its founding, as Ilan Pappé has described it, “Israel’s self-image” has become one of a “modern Western entity in the midst of an Arab wilderness.”
Self-congratulatory sloganeering of that sort, along with such cognate rhetorical flourishes as “Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land,” should have long ago alerted us to the fact that they were incubated in the laboratories of colonialist cant. The earliest immigrants from eastern Europe compared themselves, in fact, to the valiant pioneers who ventured into and settled the vast and supposedly unpopulated open spaces of the American Northwest.
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| The horrific destruction Israeli forces unleashed on Gaza City. |
A somewhat more credible alternative to this propagandistic mirage recounts the purchase of village homes and farms by Jewish immigrants from willing Arab sellers, who thereupon voluntarily departed. Where the narrative acknowledges resistance by the indigenous Arabs to the colonization of their ancient homeland by late-coming Jewish settlers, it describes the Arab coalition forces as a Goliath fighting against an overmatched Jewish David, or recalls the rebellion of Bar Kokhba against the Romans and the heroism of Judas Maccabeus in his unlikely victory over imperial Seleucid hosts.
Accordingly, what the Arabs remember as the Nakba (the “Catastrophe”) of 1947 to 1948, the Jews celebrate as a valorous “War of Independence” against their British overlords and the hostile Arab powers by which they were precariously encircled and outnumbered.
And though the systematic militarization of the Jewish state within a state had by the early 1940s made it the Sparta of the Middle East, the history of Jewish persecution, culminating in the Shoah, ensured that the non-Arab world’s enduring perception would be that of the Jews’ own expedient perception of themselves, as a nation of victims, of innocent lambs being led to slaughter, a people perennially on the brink of extinction from the ineradicable global malignancy of antisemitism.
Indeed, from the commencement of the Jewish campaign of intimidation and Arab expulsion in 1947, Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, knew privately, and lamented to his inner circle, that the Palestinians remained inconveniently passive and hopeful of a return to normalcy—thus depriving his militias of a pretext for retaliation—and that the Arab nations were militarily impotent, disunited, and geopolitically compromised.
In public, by contrast, whenever the Israeli forces suffered minor casualties in their offensives, his dire message to the world was that the Jews (as he said in a speech in 1948) were the “victims of a second Holocaust.”
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| Mariam Dagga, killed by Israel last week, documented the genocide |
In the 1980s, however, the canonical narrative was once and for all exposed as a self-exculpatory prettification when Israeli state and military archives were made accessible to such Jewish-Israeli scholars as the aforementioned Pappé, Baruch Kimmerling, Benny Morris, and Avi Shlaim, the so-called “New Historians” who have since convincingly demonstrated that the original Zionist enterprise had as its objective the forcible expulsion and/or complete annihilation of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine, both Muslim and Christian, and the establishment of an ethnically pure Jewish state—a velleity that, having possessed the imagination of such recent victims of a genocide inspired by the psychotic dream of Aryan purity, is scarcely believable.
Since the work of the “New Historians,” the tragedy of the incremental and deliberate ethnic cleansing of Palestine has been the subject of innumerable books and essays by other eminent authorities. Anything more than an epitome of their findings is entirely beyond the scope of what follows.
Since their counter-narrative has been fastidiously ignored or suppressed in the West, even the barest outline of it might be revealing to those whose fidelity to the canonical foundational myth of modern Israel has only become more entrenched since 9/11, by the relentless fear-mongering according to which we are in a “war against Islamic terror,” a “clash of civilizations”: that progressive Western “liberal-democratic values” are under threat from the Muslim world upon whom we have a moral duty to impose them.
The mere fact that the Nakba is a term that few have even heard of—though it burns in the memory of millions of Palestinian Arab refugees as intensely as the Holocaust burns in the memory of the Jews—is an index of the undiminished power of the Israel Lobby, the calculated perpetuation of both secular and Christian Holocaust guilt by Zionists around the world, and the never-ending anti-Islamic vigilance and bellicosity of Western hegemonists, especially the United States, whose foreign policy has been in thrall to neocon agents of “regime change” since the end of the Cold War.
On March 2, it should be noted, Netanyahu unilaterally broke the terms of the first phase of the cease-fire he agreed to, by imposing a total blockade against Gaza of water, fuel, electricity, food, medicine, and humanitarian aid, which should have placed beyond doubt—if doubt is still possible—that his intent since October 8 of 2023 has been the complete liquidation of the Gazan population. (At this point, the only question is whether the instrumentality of the Gazan genocide will be incineration or mass starvation.)
Moreover, since March 18, the IDF commenced bombing refugee camps in the West Bank, launched incursions into southern Lebanon, and annexed Syria’s Golan Heights. Airstrikes in Gaza have also resumed, having killed (as I write) 700 civilians, including 200 children and 100 women, and demolishing Gaza’s only cancer hospital.
Less than a week after the Israeli airstrikes, on March 23, 8 medics from the Palestinian Red Crescent, as well as 7 other rescue workers including one from the U.N., were executed by the IDF, one by one, and buried in a mass grave in southern Gaza.
I recount the IDF’s ongoing atrocities only to underscore (as should become obvious in what follows) that Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians is only the most recent phase in the “Greater Israel” project of Zionism as conceived from its beginnings, and that the massacres suffered by the Gazans for the past eighteen months will likely be recalled—assuming it won’t have been erased by another memoricide (to use Pappé’s evocative neologism) like the first—as a second Nakba.
Zionist Origins: the Demographic Obstacle
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine began as the embryonic project of the original Zionist leaders and immigrants of the 19th century. Long before the time of Theodor Herzl (the Viennese Jew revered as the founder of modern Zionism), the reinvention had already begun of the religious conception of Judaism as a community of “priests and witnesses” into a nationalist ideology which drew its inspiration from the Old Testament accounts of the Conquest of Canaan, the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and the last Jewish republic of the Hasmoneans. (As Herzl wrote in his Der Judenstaat, “The Maccabeans will rise again.”)
According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the original intent of Zionism was the dispossession of the indigenous Arab population and the consolidation of an inalienable Jewish majority throughout Palestine by means of the strategic acquisition of Arab land, purchased by Jewish immigrants most often from absentee landlords, whose tenant farmers were then evicted without compensation for the forfeiture of the usufruct upon which they had depended for their livelihood.
For centuries, Palestine had been an agricultural society, and traditionally, whenever the ownership of farms or even entire villages changed hands, the new landlords retained the old tenants to cultivate their lands.
All of this ended with the arrival of the first Jewish settlers. In Jewish possession, moreover, the land could neither be sold, leased to, nor worked by non-Jews. According to American professor of political science, Jerome Slater, "From the outset of the Zionist movement all the major leaders wanted as few Arabs as possible in a Jewish state.”
The implications of this policy required, at times, a certain tactical reticence. As Herzl acknowledged in his Diary, “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country…. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly.”
From its beginnings, the Zionist ambition to Judaize Palestine ran into a significant demographic impediment. In 1850, when Palestine was ruled by the Ottomans, there were a mere 13,000 Jewish residents, by comparison to 27,000 Christians and 300,000 Muslims, which in itself severely qualifies, if not completely invidiates, the Zionist claim that Jews had constituted a significant presence in Eretz Israel since biblical times, the basis of the concomitant argument for their “historical right” to the land.
In 1890, even after the first Aliyah (i.e., wave of immigration), the Jews, at about 40,000, represented a tiny minority by comparison to a total population of about 540,000, comprised of 60,000 Christians and 440,000 Muslims. As Ilan Pappé observes, "Already in the late nineteenth century Zionism had identified the 'population problem' as the major obstacle for the fulfillment of its dream." And as another Israeli historian, Yosef Gorny, reiterates, “the desire for a Jewish majority was the key issue in the implementation of Zionism.… The significance of this demand, and of the untiring endeavour to realize it in various ways, lay in the annulling of the majority standing of the Arabs of Palestine."
Meanwhile, as the pogroms in Russia and eastern Europe continued, from 1870 to 1914, the Jews in western and central Europe had emerged from the fringes of society to achieve the full rights and protections of citizenship and, in the urban centers especially, risen to influence and prominence in the intellectual and professional life of the nations to which they expressed their primary political allegiance.
Jewish “assimilation” was thus regarded as an ominous threat to the Zionist imperative, indeed, an abrogation of the Old Testament imperative imposed by God upon his Chosen People to remain “separate and apart” from the Gentiles. But for late-19th century Zionist ideologues such as Leo Pinsker, assimilation could never solve the problem of a pervasive and autonomous antisemitism.
At the very same time, ironically enough, Zionist leaders such as Herzl attempted to redefine Judaism in terms, not only of nationalism, but of racial identity, in order to demonstrate the common genetic descent of Diaspora Jews from their biblical Israelite progenitors. I say ironically, of course, since it was the same scurrilous racial theory of Jewishness that was merchandised in the 1930s and ‘40s to justify the Nazi genocide.
The Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate
By 1919, and well after the second Aliya of 1904, the Arabs continued to represent an overwhelming majority (approximately 90 percent) of the population of Palestine, while the Jewish population of approximately 60,000 owned a mere 2.5 percent of the land.
With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Jewish immigration began to increase, while the strategy of Arab depopulation by land purchase was expanded to include terrorist intimidation, forcible expropriation, and expulsion.
The Declaration, published November 2, 1917 in the form of a letter to the World Zionist Organization, became the policy of the British Mandate over Palestine from its official inception in 1922, and was clearly the fruit of pro-Zionist sentiment within the corridors of power in London, fostered in part by the intense lobbying of the British government by the Rothschild family and Chaim Weitzmann, the Zionist movement’s leader at the time, and (in 1948) Israel’s first President.
As Avi Shlaim describes him, Weizmann advocated for an elected council to govern Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be equally represented (notwithstanding the overwhelming Arab majority); moreover, he insisted that negotiations over the fate of Palestine be conducted exclusively between Britain and the Jews on the basis of the “moral superiority” of the Jewish right to the land.
The text of the Declaration was in any case carefully hedged:
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…
The stipulation about the civil and religious rights of “non-Jews” was never recognized by the Jews themselves in their “national home,” nor enforced by the Mandate’s High Commissioners. In fact, though Arab Muslims continued to constitute the predominate culture of Palestine and an overwhelming majority of the population, when the Declaration was incorporated into the charter of the British Mandate in 1922, the Palestinian Arabs were not even consulted.
As a UN paper on “The Palestine Question” (published in 1980) describes the Declaration of 1917, “[The Arabs’] land had been promised to another people by a foreign government which, at that time, held no sovereign rights over Palestine.”
Indeed, the Covenant of the League of Nations (under which the Mandate system was conceived and erected by the victorious powers) codified as its express goal the shepherding of the subject peoples of the defeated Ottoman, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires towards self-determination.
But while Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan all achieved independence by 1946, the nationalist aspirations of the Arab population in Palestine were incompatible with the British commitment to a Jewish homeland and, accordingly, buried in the sands of oblivion—thereby sowing the bitter seeds of the conflict that has endured to this day.
Notably, Arab fears about the implications of Britain’s Zionist priorities were shared outside of the Middle East. A Commission insisted upon by US President Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 concluded that “making Palestine a distinctly Jewish State” would be “a serious injustice,” and that the Zionist claim that the Jews “have a ‘right’ to Palestine, based on their occupation of two thousand years… can hardly be seriously considered.”
Even Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, admonished that the term “national home” meant that Palestine would effectively become “a Jewish State,” in which the Arabs would be second-class citizens, declaring “the entire concept wrong.”
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| Nazism and Zionism - two faces of the same thing |
As the aforementioned U.N. paper characterised the Mandate’s charter, “Remarkably, the Mandate did not once use the term ‘Arab’. Although the Palestinian Arabs constituted nine-tenths of the population at that time, they were referred to in the document only as the ‘non-Jewish communities of Palestine’,” which is in the order of referring to the nearly 90 percent native Anglo-Saxon majority in 1920 as the “non-immigrant communities of England.”
Finally, referring to a White Paper issued by the British Government on July 1 of 1922, Winston Churchill later admitted that its intention was “to make it clear that the establishment of self-governing institutions in Palestine was to be subordinated to the paramount pledge and obligation of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine.”
Indeed, in setting up the local civil government in Palestine, the first British High Commissioner, the Jewish Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel, recruited a higher proportion of Jews than Muslims in spite of the vast demographic disparity.
As Pappé (in his History of Modern Palestine) describes this further insult to the indigenous Arab majority, “They represented 90 per cent of the inhabitants, who were treated as if they constituted only 50 per cent. Had the Mandate sponsored democratic elections for local government and parliament, as it had in Egypt and Iraq, the Arab-Palestinian character of the land would never have been in doubt.”
Instead, the Mandate not only facilitated Jewish immigration and land acquisition but officially recognized the Jewish Agency, the principal political organ of the Zionist movement, as a kind of parallel government within Palestine. Through the Jewish Agency, according to Palestinian-American historian, Rashid Khalidi, the Mandate bestowed upon the Jewish population significant economic advantages, such as social security, employment benefits, occupational training, and job security, none of which were vouchsafed to the Arab majority.
Inevitably, the Jewish Agency evolved into a completely segregated “state within a state,” with its own institutions, including independent courts, a separate and self-sufficient economic infrastructure with its own bank and exclusively Jewish labour force, an education system designed to indoctrinate new Jewish immigrants in the orthodox Zionist historical narrative, and its own army, the Haganah, founded in 1920, and uniquely amongst the subject peoples of a great imperial power, not only tolerated by their overlords in London, but, remarkably enough, trained by the British soldiers who had been stationed in Palestine for the very purpose of deterring armed resistance to foreign rule.
But above all, as Pappé observes, “The key interest, almost an obsession, was land. The constant worry about having enough land” required that 40 percent of the Agency’s overall expenditure and 75 percent of investments from Zionists abroad were devoted to “land purchase and agricultural colonization.” For the Jewish Agency, this remained the principal engine of “the concentrated effort towards grasping as much as Palestine had to offer” and incrementally reducing—by means of the eviction of tenants whose families had worked the land for centuries—the pauperized Arab majority.
Zionist Military Preparations
Despite these evictions, even by 1929, the Arabs retained an 83 percent majority population. The Zionists accordingly concluded that their dream of an ethnically pure Jewish state could not be realized through land acquisition alone, and required a formidable military apparatus.
Ironically, it was enthusiastic Zionist British soldiers stationed in Mandatory Palestine who transformed the Haganah into the invincible fighting force that eventually fulfilled the Agency’s plans for the ouster of their British colonial rulers as well as the wholesale conquest of Palestine and the expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants.
In his Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé describes the elaborate preparations undertaken for the military take-over of Palestine in the form of a comprehensive and meticulous reconnaissance operation in which every Arab village and town was registered, rigorously mapped (including locations of springs, access roads, mosques, guards, and weapons—however primitive), analyzed in terms of the fertility of the land, the age and number of male residents, the names of the local muhktars and imams, and other details.
A paramount category was an index of “hostility” to the Zionist project, under which a registry of names (that is, an “enemies target list” which, in some cases, included entire villages) was carefully archived; and when consulted in 1948, as Pappé relates, “these last bits of information fuelled the worst atrocities…, leading to mass executions andtorture.” As Pappé remarks acerbically of the sophisticated aerial photography labs, cartographic studios, and topographical surveys, “these were not academic excises in geography.”
Meanwhile, the Haganah recruited a network of paid infiltrators within Arab towns and villages. By virtue of another cruel irony, the information gathered by these collaborators was practically superfluous, inasmuch as Jewish spies were cordially welcomed by the muhktars of Palestinian villages under the auspices of a sacred and immemorial Arab code of providing hospitality to strangers—indeed, invited into their homes to enjoy dinners with their families, whose innocent generosity was shortly to be repaid by unspeakable acts of violence. As Pappé records:
The final update of the village files took place in 1947. It focused on the creation of lists of ‘wanted’ persons in each village. In 1948 Jewish troops used these lists for the search-and-arrest operations they carried out as soon as they had occupied a village. That is, the men in the village would be lined up…and were often shot on the spot.”
“Criteria for inclusion in these lists” of Zionist enemies were so diffuse that they might include whole villages, some of whose entire populations were, in the coming years, eradicated in mass slaughters.
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| As of 2024, Israel had received funding of $310 billion from the US |
The Militarization of the Jewish State and the Legitimization of Arab “Transfer”
On the eve of World War II, the Arab uprisings of 1936 to 1939, incited by the Mandate’s blatantly pro-Zionist policies, were brutally suppressed by the British forces—whose methods included public hangings and torture—by comparison to the relative leniency with which they responded to such Jewish terrorist attacks as the 1946 bombing by the Irgun of the British Headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. I
n the late 1930s, the relatively pacific Weizmann was superseded by David Ben-Gurion as the leader of the Yishuv (as the de facto Jewish state was then called).
Ben-Gurion proceeded to mould the Yishuv into a military juggernaut, in which the Haganah was supplemented by overtly criminal militias such as the Stern Gang, the Palmach, and Menachem Begin’s Irgun, all of which intensified their terrorist operations not only against the British, but, with the intention of driving as many Arabs out of Palestine as possible, began to launch systematic terrorist assaults on the villages that had been so rigorously reconnoitred in the preceding years.
In reaction to the Arab revolt, the British, in 1937, called for a commission of inquiry (the “Peel Commission”), which recommended the partition of Palestine on terms that continued to be favorable to the Jewish minority.
But this was not the primary reason that Ben-Gurion found it acceptable; rather, it was the Commission’s recommendation of the mass “transfer” (a nice euphemism for ethnic cleansing) of the Arab population from the region designated as the Jewish state. As Benny Morris describes the consensus amongst the Zionist leadership, as epitomized by Ben-Gurion: “With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it."
None of the Zionists, or apparently the British, found “anything immoral” in the notion of expelling the inhabitants of entire villages in which the Palestinians and their ancestors had dwelled without interruption, in some cases, for longer than a millennium.
In 1940, Yossef Weitz (head of settlement for the Jewish National Fund and a later member of Ben-Gurion’s Consultancy), recorded in his diary:
Transfer does not serve only one aim—to reduce the Arab population—it also serves a second purpose…to evict land cultivated by Arabs and to free it for Jewish settlement…. [Therefore] the only solution is to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries. Not a single village or a single tribe must be let off.
In what is perhaps the ultimate irony (hardly disguised in a statement recorded by the Jewish-American historian Norman Finklestein), Vladimir Jabotinsky, longstanding leader of the right wing of the Yishuv, later justified the mass transfer of the Arab population by invoking the currently impermissible “odious comparison” to the Nazis: “The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has almost become fond of them. Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.”
Writing to his son in 1937, Ben-Gurion anticipated Jabotinsky’s prescription: “The Arabs,” he reaffirmed, “will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.” The “opportune moment” arrived with the first departures of British forces from Palestine in 1947.https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/articles/item/7696-the-zionist-prison-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine-from-zionist
