We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."
—David Ben-Gurion, prime-minister of the provisional government of Israel, speaking before the IMF general staff during the 1948 war
It was to be no longer just our little 'ghetto', growing in a rate proportional to the population growth in Israel - it was a dream of a new world, which we will enter via the neighbors. At first, the Palestinian Authority and its population, and then the entire Middle-Eastern space.
The people who understood that, understood the difference between a market of 6 Million and a market of a 100 Million. Do the math: one bag of 'Bamba' per week for every Palestinian, Jordanian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Syrian child... Dan Propper couldn't ask for much more than that. And, of course, it wasn't just Osem.
This was the making of a Middle-Eastern dream. It wasn't technological, but rather a simple dream of growth potential...
—Moshe Pearl, a Ma'ariv economic commentator, decrying the collapse of the Oslo process
Ok, I guess it's about time I explained what the site title means. If you're a Zionist you'll probably want to skin me alive after this. Oh, well; putting up a website has its risks, I guess.
The 'fertile semi-circle' of ancient times was one of the cradles of human civilization, and saw much scientific, economic and cultural development throughout the centuries.
But how come this corner of the world, which for the last several centuries has not been the glorious bastion of modernity and development it once had, continues to be such a hot-spot when it comes to armed conflict and political intrigue?
Well, besides the usual reasons applicable to the entire 'third world', there's something incredibly valuable in this region, hidden away beneath the sands for millions of years now. Can you guess what it is that I'm talking about?
That's right: Petroleum. Black gold. Better than gold: the world's industrial economies are based on the use of fossil fuels to generate power, not to mention the world's petrochemical industries (all that plastic you're using isn't manna from heaven, you know...)
Naturally, many of the world's powers exert enormous efforts in order to affect the flow of - some trying to control it and hike the price, others to ensure its cheap availability.
Have you ever read Frank Herbert's Dune? Remember what happens when the Fremen are finally able to unite and put their hands on the 'tap' controlling the spice flow to the rest of the galactic empire? That's right: They gain absolute control of it (snipping out the Paul-Atreides-foreign-saviour part).
I am getting a bit ahead of myself. Before the oil age in modern industry came about, this region was controlled (mostly) by the Ottoman empire, based in today's Turkey. It had become politically and economically subservient to Europe, and although the European governments did not attempt massive alterations in the composition of populations, they did establish presences here and passed the time being their meddlesome selves.
(As I side-note: it's not as though it was some pre-Capitalistic idyll. Although the land system here was not feudal - there were no vassals owning land and peasents, but rather village communities with informal common ownership of the land, and tax collectors and/or other appointees of the Ottomans (at least until the point when they started the land taboo, but I'm not an expert on this subject so I won't go into any more details) - I don't think life here was wholly different from European peasant societies of earlier centuries. Somebody aought to draw a comprehensive comparison between the 'normal' expropriation of the Peasantry in the period of industrial Capitalism and that of the Palestinian 'fallah's, expropriated by foreigners rather than locals - without an intermediary period in which the land is parceled into small individually-owned areas.)
This period drew to an end at the turn of the previous century, with European powers beginning to realize what an immense cache of valuable resources the region constitutes, and consequently reasoning that it must be heavily and thoroughly exploited (and there's always the added bonus of oppressed local populace to use as super-cheap labor and receptive markets, but this form of abuse was not as developed then as it is now).
Thus, without any formal declaration, begins the modern-day class war in the Arab East.
With the onset of industrial Capitalism in Europe in the 19th century, the ruling classes took advantage of ethnic divisions in the European population to vent the masses' anger at them, incurred by deteriorating living standards and intensified exploitation. One of the immediate and easiest targets were the Jews, who, due to various factors (not the least of which being religion-inspired separatism, often even xenophobia) had failed, in many areas in Europe, to harmonize themselves with the rest of the population, and many of then had found refuge, for the previous several centuries, under the protection of the nobility and the monarchy, as petit-bourgeois tradesmen, artisans, scribes, lawyers, etc. Now their former benefactors were inciting the more violent non-Jews even to harm Jewish people physically in the infamous 'pogroms' (which were, by the way, not only inspired but often actually organized by the national governments).
So, basically, the Jews had two options: the first, to seek unity with the peasants and the workers, forsaking the landed nobility and the the bourgeoisie; the second, to look to the masters for solutions.
Many Jews opted for something which was a mix of these two - immigration to the more advanced Capitalistic countries: the western European countries and the USA.
Of those who did not immigrate, the more progressive Jews (probably the poorer ones, the workers, the peasents, and some of the landless petit-bourgeois) came to adopt a Socialist perspective, understanding that racism and nationalism to be by-products of the Capitalistic class society, and must therefore be resisted by joining forces with the radical forces in combating the exploiters. Many of the influential agitators and organizers struggling for social change in Europe were Jews. And, of course, the 'Algemeiner Yidisher Arbayterbund' cannot go unmentioned here...
The Jews more closely tied to the ruling classes, those who were service-renderers to the rich and powerful and dependent upon their wealth for a living, saw things differently, of course. Theodore Herzl, the 'founding father' of political Zionism, an Austrian playwright, journalist and outspoken admirer of the policies of the Imperialist European governments, decided that what the Jews needed was a nationalistic movement of their own. The idea was not to remove the causes of ethnic strife, but rather find a place where Jews could be the ones holding the economic, military and political power, and therefore the on the attacking side of ethnic confrontations (which, claimed the Zionists, were completely unavoidable, since Jews and non-Jews are 'incompatible').
Zionism was a part of a wider current in European political thought, and it seems to have been inspired by Sorelianism (e.g. purification by violence and nationalist revision of Socialism), de-Man's Planism and other pre-Fascist thinkers. With it, world Imperialism acquired its foremost champion in its unfolding war against the toiling masses of this region.
The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant and the policy of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country, though the American [King-Crane] Commission has been going through the form of asking what they are. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
—British Lord Arthur Balfur, two years after issuing the 'Balfur Declaration' (supportive a 'National Home' for Jews in Palestine)
So imagine you're a prominent Jewish businessman or intellectual in the 1880's. Given the facts that:
You're all buddy-buddies with the political leadership and the economic elite of Europe, which is at the height of its colonialist period
You want 'save the Jewish people' (the same ones you'd do everything to distance yourself from, and didley-squat for their protection from the almost-officially-mandated violence)
What's more natural than to offer up the Jews as harbingers of European rule to the countries of the 'uncivilized barbarians'?
So the Zionists came to the German Kaiser, and the Russian Tsar, the British and other governments (all of them anti-Semitic to some degree or another, obviously) and proposed the following deal: "we'll get all the Jews out of your sight and render you further economic and military services abroad, providing you find us a country in which to settle them all and to rule."
It took a few years of convincing, but the Imperialists couldn't resist an offer of erecting "a bastion of Europe against Asia" (to quote Herzl), not to mention a chance to drive out Millions of members of an ethnic group highly prone to Socialism and other 'destructive' and 'harmful' notions.
"Ok," says Britain (who ended up being the main supported or political Zionism) "How's about you take Uganda?"
"Hmmm... let us think..." say the Zionists. "Naah, we want Palestine. We need the sound basis of crackpot religious myths to bring together diverse religious groups to form a single national entity. We'll call it 'a land without a people for a people without a land'. It'll work out great! ... The only problem is pushing the Turks around some and we're set!"
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because the geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kfar Yehoshua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single site built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.
—Moshe Dayan, addressing the Technion, Haifa (reported in Haaretz, April 4th, 1969)
"But what about the Palestinian Arabs?" you would ask. And so did Max Nordau, another famous Zionist leader. This question brought about (not immediately, but soon enough) the great split in political Zionism - the split between the so-called-left (supposedly-Socialist, to some extent) Zionism - and the more overtly Fascist Zionism.
The 'left' surmised that "for now, we'll just concentrate on getting as many Jews as possible to settle in Palestine and we won't talk about what's to happen eventually - we'll tell everyone we're just trying to evade persecution, or to bring progress to an under-developed region, or to carry out a social experiment, or to create a Jewish worker's society or some other fibs" ; the right-wing, who were less ashamed of their racism and felt no need to identify themselves with the masses struggling for freedom and equality, said openly: "Fuck the Arabs. Not with words but with blood and iron shall a nation be molded - their blood, our Iron. We'll take control of the entire land and they'll either accept us as absolute masters, be driven out or die at our hands."
But such distinctions were hardly relevant when it came to practical action. Once the first world war was over and the British assumed control of the country, wave after wave of Jewish immigrants began flooding Palestine. There was hardly a peasant among them and not too many manual laborers... but they did bring on a steady stream of investment capital, and the technical expertise to use it. The pseudo-feudal, agricultural, semi-theocratic Palestinian society did not stand a chance. It gradually began to fray and eventually disintegrate in an alarming rate, as more and more agricultural land was bought by Jews and an increasing number of Palestinians sought employ with the Jews. Even the local elites, the more powerful 'hamula' structures, where overwhelmed and didn't put up much of a fight.
A great backlash against this process took place between 1936 and 1939 in the form of a mass strike followed by an armed rebellion, but it was doomed to fail, both because the Palestinian working class was weak in number and the peasantry disorganized (or rather mis-organized), with its leadership fearing the rebellion and aiding its diffusion, and because the British were bringing in massive troop reinforcements (rumor equates the number of British soldiers in Palestine during the rebellion to their numbers in India, but I haven't confirmed that) and did not hesitate to resort to house demolitions, mass arrests, numerous executions and assassinations.
The Zionist leadership, tightly controlling the Jewish workers, teamed up with the colonial ruler to violently suppress the rebelling natives by force.
Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.
—Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, referring to the Palestinian Arabs, Complete Diaries (entry for June 12, 1895)
If I could, I would go into their villages and machine-gun all their children to death.
—Shmuel Rozenberg, my grandfather, a holocaust survivor, referring to the Palestinians
"They're all beasts."
"We have to inflict upon them a holocaust of their own."
—A female corporal and a male private in the Israeli Military Forces, sitting next to me on a bus, on the day of my release from the IMF, referring to the Palestinians
Then came the second world war. Ben-Gurion had already said he'd rather have a larger Yishuv and Millions of dead Jews rather than a failing Yishuv with those Jews alive outside Palestine (in a speech in London in 1938, I believe). So the Zionist organizations did their best to make sure as few Jews as possible were allowed anywhere other than Palestine.
There were opposite opinions on whom to support held by the 'left' and the right Zionists: the former knew the safer bet lay with Britain and the U.S., and the latter following their ideology and semi-supporting the Fascistic axis (well into the 1940's, when it became clear the Nazis were more interested in exterminating the Jews than finding 'creative solutions' to the 'Jewish problem'). This led to a period of deepening factional strife, which saw the formation of the pro-British 'Palmach' and anti-British 'Etzel' (and its more extreme splinter-group, 'Lehi'). These Zionist militias were to expand and later carry out much of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians before being swallowed up by the Israeli Military Forces during the 1948 war period.
When World War II came to an end, with the extent of the Nazi's unspeakable atrocities laid bare, a thought came to Ben-Gurion and Weizmann: "Hey, why don't we turn this whole business to our favor! We can claim to be the 'victims' of the Holocaust and ask for a state as reparations! Let's ride the guilt trip all the way to the Knesset-to-be!"
And so they did. With mild to enthusiastic superpower support, the UN brought up and ratified the partition plan.
It is essential to stress that, perhaps even more than the British mandatory rule over Palestine, this decision was a grave injustice done to the Palestinians (for which reason the Zionist leadership found it very pleasing): at the time the decision was passed, less than 10% of the land in Palestine was owned by Zionists, privately or collectively; numerically, despite 3 decades of intensive colonization, they were still outnumbered 2 to 1 by Palestinian Arabs. The partition was to create a continuous Zionist state on 55% of the territory, with the rest allotted to the Palestinians.
Moreover, since even in the portion of Palestine set aside for a Zionist state, the Arabs would still make up the majority of the Population and own most of the land, it was well-understood by all parties that a state created under such conditions could not hope to combine total political supremacy of Zionist Jews with the semblance of a democracy - and that the Zionists were going to have to 'solve' this problem somehow. In other words, the UN ok'ed a program of ethnic cleansing in Palestine.
With the legal approval on paper, and USSR munitions flowing in through Czechoslovakia (partly courtesy of the Israeli Communist Party, by the way), the Zionist Yishuv prepared for war. The infamous 'Plan Dalet' was put into action (although operations of expropriation of Arab villages had began even before the actual UN assembly decision). On the Palestinian side, loosely organized para-military forces carried out occasional attacks or raids, with the majority of the population remaining relatively passive. The surrounding Arab puppet-regimes were, for their part, feverishly searching for a way to appear to oppose Zionism actively while avoiding actual mobilization of their people which was highly threatening to their governments' stability.
Six months passed, and the Zionist forces were already in control of most of their to-be state (despite the fact that the British had not yet left). As the British left in Early May, a number of military forces entered Palestine, supposedly to liberate it from the Zionist occupation. The facts of their disgraceful state performance and even more disgraceful strategies are detailed in this article by the 'Workers' League'. Basically, the Zionists were the superior force, militarily, and their expansion was only curtailed by the dictates of the telegrams flowing between Tel-Aviv, Washington, London and Amman. Actually, an alternative partition agreement had already been secretly signed by King Abdullah and the Zionist leadership, leaving a share of the Palestinian's partition-plan-assigned land to Israel and the rest of it to Transjordan.
While fighting was going on near the borders, the more important activity was taking place in Israeli-controlled areas: the dislocation of Palestinians from their cities, towns and villages. In a few villages full-scale massacres took place; in others a few randomly (or non-randomly) selected individuals were executed in the village square, and folks got the message; the inhabitants of urban neighborhoods were usually driven out by shelling; in other places people were simply so scared they fled without having to be actively 'encouraged'... and almost none of them would live to return to their land.
A total of circa 750,000 people were driven out of to-be Israel into the not-so-brotherly hands of the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Syrians; about 650,000 remained in Israeli-held land, many of them internally displaced. Zionist land ownership in Palestine went up from about 1.7 Million dunums in 1947 to over 18 Million by 1953 (controlled directly by the 'Jewish National Fund' - not even nominally for the benefit of all citizens, but for that of the Jewish nation).
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood.
But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
—Hermann Georing, Hitler's Designated Successor, Reich Minister for Air, President of the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the Reich, Prime Minister of Prussia, etc. etc. etc.
After 1967 everything continued as before. Social and national ideologies were unchanged. Not everyone benefited from rapid economic growth; on the contrary, growth accentuated social differences. Moreover, the nationalism of "socialist" Zionism remained as it had been when Mapai was founded four decades earlier: radical, tribal, volkisch, steeped in the cult of the heroic past, and convinced of the justice of its claims to the entirety of the ancient land, which was formerly the scene of national independence and greatness. This nationalism, together with its symbols, had always been a common enterprise of the Left and the Right. Katznelson described "socialist" Zionism as an enterprise of conquest; Revisionist Zionism never had any other objective. The two forms of Zionism differed only in their methods.
—Ze'ev Sternha'al, The Founding Myths of Israel
In the last several decades, Israel has been playing the role of a royal pain in the ass in the Arab East. It has assisted, both directly and indirectly, to the establishment and maintenance of oppressive regimes in the surrounding states (Jordan, today's Egypt, Lebanon both North and South, the Shah's Iran...) and in this context has carried out three full-scale wars:
| 1956 | Conquest of Sinai in a joint operation with Britain and France to re-take the Suez Canal. |
| 1967 | Three different operations on the various fronts - conquest of the Golan heights, partly to settle disputes over water with the Syrians; conquest of all the parts of historical Palestine not already held by Israel; second conquest of the Sinai, which Israel was forced to return after the failure of the 1956 operation. |
| 1982 | Beginning of a 19-year invasion of Lebanon in an attempt to establish a client regime and favorable trade relations, as well as crush the PLO and disorganize the Palestinian Diaspora there. |
There was also a war in 1973 in which Syria and Egypt attempted to undo Israel's 1967 gains, but failed.
I could go on about the Mossad-organized terrorist attacks in Egypt, the ceaseless non-'war' incursions into neighboring Arab states' territory, the oppression of the Mizrahi Jews, the flourishing arms trade both with dictatorships the world over and with supposed-enemies in this area, the anti-Palestinian apartheid, the land confiscations, and all the rest of Israel's crimes... but I'm sure you can find better sources for such accounts. Try browsing the links.
Come now, I think it's rather obvious. How can the super-powers assure a constant flow of cheap oil? By having submissive and corrupt regimes in oil-producing countries. How can they establish and maintain such regimes? The direct colonial intervention of the past no longer being an option (well, sometime it is an option, like the Afghanistan campaign in late 2001, but even that ended quickly in the establishment of a puppet local government), they managed to carve up the region so as to create everlasting inter-ethnic and inter-religious friction which focuses the attention of leaderships (and, subsequently, of peoples) on each other's blunders and idiosyncrasies; add to this mixture the explosive ingredient of foreign aggressors such as Israel and Turkey and presto! You can keep on filchin' the crude bubbly with hardly anyone noticing.
There's nothing to do in Israel other than destroy it.
—Anonymous, Tel-Aviv 2001
There's no reason for Israel to continue to exist but for the benefit of its ruling class and its US masters. Self-determination of the Jewish people my ass. This state's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Its crimes are so numerous that it has long outgrown even any sense of shame. The termination of its rule in Palestine is pretty much a precondition for any progressive development in the region.
So what is to replace our little shop of horrors?
If you ask me, I'll advise you to browse back two pages. Obviously we need to dispose of this one state we have here in Palestine right now, and this act will constitute a revolution. But is it really necessary to replace it with another one? Everybody knows there is no state without a ruling class controlling it; the Zionist, American and Arab bourgeois don't like the idea of a unification and would much rather keep the apartheid going; do you really believe the Palestinian-Arab and Jewish proletariat here can build their own state, a 'dictatorship of the proletariat', here? I find that historical experience shows that the Marxist conception of the revolutionary transition period are without basis, and we therefore need not focus any effort on state-building, but rather on creating popular organizations which could form an alternative to state rule.
Why have two states or one state if you can have no state? Let's try something different for a change...