The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea

The Coming Collapse of Zionism

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON

Former CIA Analyst

Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?

Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?

Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.

In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.

The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.

Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.

In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.

Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.

In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month's time -- killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.

Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."

And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?

Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in violation of all purported enlightenment values."

Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish communities.

The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.

In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East -- has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."

Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.

Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.

Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."

Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway ­ along with many others -- sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."

This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.

Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.

We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

Awesome article, thanks for posting

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They'll bash arabs and jack of to pro-israel pro-US bullshit all day long with ya.

Good we agree. I have no use for the mainstream media and their apologies for U.S. and Israeli state sponsored terror.

Did you check out the LGF site? That is perfect for dumbasses like you, Yid.

Just like if we want to hear goose-stepping idiot version all we have to do is step out the door and walk down Any Street, USA.

Thing is, blustering moron, this isn't an Arab talking. This is the voice of red-blooded American self-interest, which thank the stars is finally waking up to itself. "The Coming Collapse of Zionism?" That's the best news I've heard in years. It's always a joy to hear that Justice is about to be realized

But who cares- at least them Joos will be gone.

They should be gone from Lebanon, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Gaza - that is for sure. They (and they should actually be referred to as Israelis) should return to their pre-1967 borders and either accept the Right of Return or pay huge reparations to the families from whom they stole land in 1948 or 1967. And they will have to accept the fact that some day Arabs are going to be the majority even in Israel itself and start instituting a secular state if they don't want to see an Islamic state take the place of the Zionist one.

Probably one of the most important books for both Jews and Arabs to read is called The Rape of Palestine first published in 1938 by William Ziff by Argus Books in the US. The cover says nothing about who William Ziff is.

The book documents the difference between the overall pro-Jewish sentiments of the British political elite who saw a strong Jewish presence in Palestine as being good for the British empire, and the group of high level anti-Jewish British officials who believed that the Jews would become so powerful (if Britain let them) that they would no longer have to accede to British demands.

The latter group was entirely right. A strong Jewish presence in Palestine meant Jewish national independence which wouldn't serve the British masters the way the Arab puppets did. Arab tribal leaders were corruptible and this was the only way those running Britain's colonial policies could control them. They realized that controlling the Jews was not going to be so as easy. So they placed obstacle after obstacle before any attempts to settle large numbers of Jews in Palestine. The official reason for restricting Jewish immigration was that the economic capacity of the land could not support more than a million people. This was a lie, but few challenged the British when they proclaimed it in their various government commissions.

The book also documents how one-sided the British were in doling out public funds. As the Jews in Palestine increased in number the economy boomed and in l935, the Yishuv, even though only comprising one-third of the residents, were paying 75% of the taxes to the British occupiers. Yet little of that money found its way back into roads or schools serving Jewish towns. Ziff must have gone through nearly every British government archive to document his claims that had the British left Palestine in the late 20's or early 30's, the Jews would have had a state before l948 and which would possibly have been established around (and thriving) before Hitler came to power thus saving the bulk of European Jewry. While no historian has ever blamed the British for the destruction of European Jewry, Ziff's book documents that claim.

Ziff's book (which was published first in l938 but probably took three or four years of research to write) documents how the British created the opposition to Zionism and that up until these so-called radical Arab leaders came into the picture, most Arab residents of Palestine wanted nothing more than to live in peace and prosperity with the Jews which they believed was their good fortune.

The Moslem religious leaders, the Mufti, was openly friendly. Throughout Arabia, the chiefs were for the most part distinctly pro-Zionist: and in Palestine the peasantry were delighted at every prospect of Jewish settlement near their villages. Commercial intercourse between Arab and Jew was constant and steady. pp.13

The Arab National Movement was hated by the huge Levantine population who continued to regard themselves simply as Ottoman subjects, looked to the strong, influential Zionist Organization for sympathy and assistance.

Hussein of the Hejaz looked to the Zionists for the financial and scientific experience of which the projected Arab state would standly badly in need. In May 1918, Dr. Chaim Weizmann and Hussein of the Hejaz met in Cairo where the latter spoke of mutual cooperation between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. In early 1919 a Treaty of Friendship was signed to provide for the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab state and the coming Jewish Commonwealth of Palestine. On March 3, l9l9, another Arab leader, Feisal, son of Sherif, wrote: We wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.

If Ziff's words are accurate, there was no Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine at least as far back as l919.

Ziff writes:

With conscious design the Administration fostered hostility between Arab and Jews. It directly advised the amazed Arabs of Palestine and Egypt to abstain from any concessions to the Jews. It formed the Moslem-Christian Association and used it as a weapon against the Zionists. It instructed astonished Arab young-bloods to the technique and tents (sic) of modern nationalism, in order to resist Jewish 'pretenses.'

And in London it contacted reliable anti-Jewish elements to form a liason which has endured to this day. The Arabs were not only instigated and advised, but supplied with funds, and their arguments ghost-written by Englishmen in high places. They proved a good investment.

Matters came to a head in l920 when Feisal staged a revolt against the French in Damascus, with money and ammunition supplied by the British General Headquarters. He had been proclaimed King by a 'Syrian Congress' which included Palestinians, and which asserted the principle that Palestine was a part of Syria and couldn't be cut off from it.

Almost simultaneously, in order to show how impossible it was to implement the Balfour Declaration in the face of native hostility, the Generals arranged a pogrom in Jerusalem.

Ziff believed that the stage was set charging that the riots of April l920 was perfectly timed. He reveals how Arab agitators ran through the Moslem crowds gathered for the Nebi Moussa festival in Jerusalem, urging 'death to the Jews' and that 'the government is with us.'

Ziff discovered that all Jewish policemen had been relieved from duty in the Old City.

He says that such planned riots occured again in April l921 in Jerusalem. Ziff charges that the British Commandant of Police was conveniently out of the country. The few Jews on the police force had been mysteriously taken off duty for the day. The Arab mob shouted: Bolshevki! Bolseviki! The Zionists are flooding the country with Bolsheviki! pp. 20

While many students of the Arab-Israeli conflict have heard the name the Mufti of Jerusalem most don't know how the Mufti became the Mufti. Ziff writes:

Implicated in the disturbances was a political adventurer named Haj Amin al Husseini. Haj Amin, was sentenced by a British court to fifteen years hard labor. Coveniently allowed to escape by the police, he was a fugitive in Syria. Shortly after, the British then allowed him to return to Palestine where, despite the opposition of the Moslem High Council who regarded him as a hoodlum, Haj Amin was appointed by the British High Commissioner as Grand Mufi of Jerusalem for life. pp. 22

Regarding the Arab pogroms of l929, Alif Beh, an Arab newspaper in Damascus, wrote: the uprising was the result of British intrigue...the English were looking for an excuse to reject the demands of the Jewish Agency to participate in the administration of the country, and encouraged the Arabs to teach the Jews a lesson.

Regarding Arab views towards Jewish immigration, Ziff quotes Count Carlos Sforza in his books, 'Europe and Europeans': Syrians of all classes, who had been watching Palestine's development with envious yes, were anxious to have something of the same phenomena duplicated in their country.

This desire is written in the clamorous petition sent to the French in l935 by the inhabitants of Lebanon, begging them to encourage Jewish immigration as that would bring prosperity. Said the Damascus newspaper, Iissan Alkhar: We ought to demand Jewish immigration, for through it our situation will be saved.

Sensing that some crude agenda was being played out with their collective destiny, in May l930, the Jerusalem-based Arab newspaper 'Al Iqdam' in wrote: We are led by a group of men who bargain us away, buying and selling us like cattle. The Arab people have not yet said their last word on the Arab-Jewish question. When this word has been said, it will not be one of hatred, but one of peace and brotherhood, as is suitable for two people who live in one country.

During a seminar of leading Moslems and Christians of Nazareth in March l934, as statement given to the press read: On behalf of the majority of the property-owners and consumers, we declare that we would welcome Jewish immigration and trust that the enlightened Jews with their financial commercial associations bring.

Ziff is suggesting that the opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine by Arabs was not nearly as widespread as conventional wisdom and standard history books on the subject has led us to believe. By the time the Peel Commission was in full swing in l937, Arab desires for rapprochment began appearing, there had begun appearing in the press Arab desires for rapprochment with the Jews. From the New York Times of August 5th, l937, we read: For the first time in the twenty years since the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs openly censured the Palestine Government for never having attempted to bring the two peoples together.

The Arab newspaper 'Falastin,' claimed in an editorial that, despite British allegations of an unbreachable enmity between Jews and Arabs, we cannot recall a single instance since the British occupation here when they made the slightest effort to bring the Arabs and Jews together. Pre-war Jewish residents lived here peacefully with Arabs for hundreds of years. To this day these Jews, in addition to the Arabs, maintain that if it were not for British policy of divide and rule the Arabs and Jews would again live in Palestine in peace and harmony.

On November 15th, l937 the Arab daily 'Ad-Difaa' asserted that the British Government had categorically rejected all proposals for a round-table discussion between Jews, Arabs and British, through the Jews and Arabs alike were anxious for such a meeting. After talking toall sections of the Arab population, the Near East correspondent for the New York Times reported on November 21st, that their unnaminous cry was we've suffered enough and we don't wish to have any more trouble. May Allah curse them and cut off the lives of these intruders from the outside who are disturbing our existence.

Pamphlets were distributed in Arab villages throughout Palestine violently attacking Great Britain as being the cause of their ruin. (pp.104)

Dr. Gustavo Gutierrez, former President of Cuba's Chamber of Deputies, stated after his visit to the Holy Land in late l936, that he saw no evidence of friction or disagreement between the Arab and Jewish people in Palestine, and that if Arabs and Jews were let to their own councils they could settle the Palestine problem wisely and permanently.

Contrary to what history books tell us, there was Arab opposition to British rule - and a genuine desire to live in peace with the Jews - even as late as l937.

Describing the Arab predictment, which has not changed in the six decades since he wrote his book, in the epilogue Ziff states: The Arabs are compelled to free themselves from the present despotic and feudal regimes under which all the Arab peoples suffer. In Arab countries, despite the paper constitutions, which exist in several of them, there is little in the way of liberty. Poverty and ignorance are endemic.

What is important about Ziff's book is that it was written close to when the events were taking place. It is a version of history that few of us who believe ourselves to be students of the Arab-Israeli conflict have ever come across. It is the first revisionist historical account of the role the British played in the modern Middle East in general, and in the Arab-Israeli conflict in specific. Its main premise, that the Arab-Israeli conflict was created and stoked by the British, and isn't the result of ethnic hatred of the participants, is in a sense a revolutionary new perspective in Zionist history.

If nothing more, Ziff's book should encourage the Israeli government to establish a body that aims to change all of the street names in the country that are named after British Mandate personalities. The British government was the reason why it took Israel until l948 to reach independence. Considering the state of the Yishuv's economy in l937, independence then was possible. Had the British not ruled Palestine, by l930 unrestricted Jewish immigration and the hard work and creativity of the new Jewish immigrants would have created an economy twice as large as it was at the time. in 1930. The Arabs themselves acknowledge that they would have participated fully in this unprecedented economic boom.

Instead, the British government created phony Arab radicals like Haj Amin, to stoke the conflict. The British government was also to blame for corrupting Arab leaders and conspiring to keep all Arabs poor and their economy undeveloped.

Just as French collaborators and Nazis are still brought before tribunals and charged with crimes against humanity so too should members of the British colonial office who directed the overall policy in Mandated Palestine to pit the Jews and the Arabs against each other. As this policy kept the Jews from being able to help their brothers fleeing from Nazi Germany, the crime is also of Genocide.

"Voluntary Agreement Not Possible.

There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.

My readers have a general idea of the history of colonisation in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent."

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Hmm

If it's zionazi spam, we know its Schtarker Yid, the raving looney troll who's a prove idiot and fucktard.

Thanks for confirming what we already knew: Schtarker Yid is an irrelevant one-line mono-brow ape who has meltdowns and threatens IMC posters when they won't conform to his right wing pro-israel religious supremist propaganda...

You are a laughingstock.

Can a zio-Nazi like you even manage, just once, to say one smart thing?

Just like clockwork, poke the stick at the zio-tard and you get the same predictable response.

Why are mono-brow zio-tards so dense?

(Maybe that's another study for another day...)

Poor Schtarker....

LMFAO!

Great cartoon. Being Pro-israel is not being pro-peace. It is being pro-baby murdering...

keep em comin'. Like meat on a conveyor belt into a dog food plant. It's fun setting up these manifest destiny assholes to choke to death on their own bullshit