Within years of its creation, the United Nations, under the influence of the USA, staged a dance of death, which does not seem anywhere ending. It created the state of Israel.
For centuries, Jews were victims of racial discrimination throughout Europe and were pushed from country to country. Influenced by the plight of his community, an Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl, who was living at that time in Switzerland, organized a movement to find a home for his people. Towards the end of the last century, a congress was held in Basle, Switzerland, where the creed of Zionism was born.
As the biblical origins of Judaism happened to be in Palestine, Zionists encouraged their followers to migrate and settle there. Herzl made contacts with a Russian minister, Plehve, in a bid to use the influence of the Russian monarch on the Ottomans (who were ruling Palestine at the time) to allow migration of Jews from Europe to Palestine. Plehve was behind the pogrom of Jews in Kishenev, but that did not inhibit Herzl from approaching him. This was the start of cooperation between Zionists, and anti-Semites which was to cost the Palestinians their homeland.
Palestine at that time was inhabited by Muslim and Christian Arabs who resisted this immigration from Europe. This was temporarily stopped, but then Turkey lost the war and its empire was disbanded. The British became the new rulers.
When Herzl offered to pay off the debts of the Ottomans in exchange for the latter allowing the settlement of Jews in Palestine, the Sultan Abdul Hamid replied in a poignant message to him: “The Jews may spare their millions. When my empire is divided, perhaps they will get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse can be divided. I will never consent to a vivisection”. It was a prophetic pronouncement.
The first recorded protest against the settlement of Jews came from Yusif Dia al-Khalidi, who was a liberal member of the Ottoman parliament. He wrote: “Zionism was, in theory, a just idea, and Palestine belonged to the Jews in the biblical age but in reality Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman empire and is venerated by millions of non-Jews. By what right the Jews want it for themselves?” He said wealth could not purchase it; it could be taken only by force. He also predicted a popular movement against the Jews which the Ottomans would not be able to control. “For the sake of God,” he said, “leave Palestine in peace.”
Herzl sent two rabbis to explore the possibilities of Jews settling in Palestine who sent the telegram: “The bride is beautiful but is married.”
At the end of the war, there were only 56,000 Jews in Palestine. During the war the British had already promised a homeland to the Jews in Palestine. Jewish migration started again and when Arabs protested, they started coming into the country illegally, with the connivance of the colonial administration. A fund was created by rich European and American Jews to buy land from poor Arabs. This further enhanced tension between the Arab and Jewish communities. Palestinians revolted against the colonial administration. The British tried to pacify the Arabs by taking a few thousand German Jewish children into England. Ben-Gurion opposed this. He wanted them to be brought to Palestine to increase its population. He was not bothered if the children perished in Germany. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a leading Zionist in USA, also adopted the same attitude to the question of Jewish children entering the United States.
During the Second World War, six million Jews were sent to gas chambers and concentration camps, which wiped out a third of their population. After the war, Jewish refugees were not welcome to settle in Western Europe or the USA, so they were dumped in Palestine. The British tried to restrict their entry but were threatened by Truman with the stoppage of all US aid to Britain. England was too poor after the war to resist the Americans.
Thus, American neo-colonialism, British imperialism and Zionism contributed to destroy the Palestinian people. The Holocaust gave birth to the catastrophe of Naqba. Theodor Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, who was colonizing the African lands at the time, and sought the latter’s help. Wiezman later contacted Balfour, which resulted in the Balfour Declaration by the British government. Balfour wrote in 1919, in a confidential memorandum: “In Palestine we do propose to even go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants.... The four powers are committed to Zionism.” He was behind the British Alien Act which stopped Jews from immigrating into England from Eastern Europe, yet his conscience was not pricked when he sent them to Palestine.
After the Second World War, the Zionists cultivated the US. The Americans wanted to control oil in the Middle East and became the biggest collaborators in the Zionist conspiracy. The state of Israel came into existence by the expulsion of 600,000 Palestinians from their homes, where they had been living for a thousand years. Largescale colonization of Palestine started which has not come to an end even 50 years later. The rulers of Israel are following their spiritual father Herzl who wrote, on June 12, 1885: “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 own country.”
Some of the Jews who were living in Arab countries and came to the ‘promised land’ ended up as second-class citizens. There were Jewish communities living throughout the Middle East comfortably for centuries. They were either pushed out after the war at the time of the creation of Israel or left on their own because of the riots which followed between Arabs and Jews. The notorious riot which took place in Baghdad was engineered by the Zionists who used every method to uproot Jews from Arab countries and bring them to boost the Jewish population in Palestine.
After the riots in Baghdad, almost all Iraqi Jews reached the ‘promised land’. There was a primitive Jewish community living in Yemen. It was brought to Israel through a scheme called “Operation Magic Carpet”. When they arrived, their children were stolen from them and given to wealthy European Jews who had lost their own in concentration camps. Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, leader of Mishkan Oahlim, an organization representing the Jews of Yemeni descent, is still seeking out the stolen children.
The BBC recently showed a documentary which highlighted an event called the “Lavon Affair”. Lavon was defence minister of Israel before the Suez War. Under his instructions, Israeli intelligence recruited Egyptian Jews to make bombs and blow up buildings to destabilize the Gemnal Nasser regime. They were caught and the fate of the whole community of Jews in Egypt was sealed. They migrated to Israel to join its underclass, which was needed to serve the Ashkenazi immigrants who were not prepared to do any menial work.
Even before Israel came into existence, the Zionists practised apartheid and no Arab was employed by the new arrivals who settled on their lands. Tony Cliff, a leading figure among the anti-Zionist Jews and the founder of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, once said that though he was born in Palestine, he met his first Arab in Ireland. Such was the segregation of society imposed by the Jewish settlers. In one of his pamphlets Cliff also wrote that the Zionist trade union federation, Histadrut, did not allow its members to have anything to do with Arab workers or their products. He also mentioned an incident in 1945, when a cafe was attacked because of a rumour that an Arab was working in its kitchen. Cliff was a student between 1936 and 1939 at Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he saw repeated demonstrations against the vice-chancellor because he was a liberal Jew and he was living as a tenant in a house owned by an Arab.
If one looks at the events which have taken place in Israel since its creation or even earlier, one reaches the conclusion that a timetable had already been decided by the US and its allies at the very beginning. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, Wiezman wrote: “Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should (they) encourage Jewish settlement... (we could) develop the country, bring back civilization and form an effective guard for the Suez Canal”.
So far as Israel being an agent of Western imperialism in the Middle East is concerned, the following quote from the Israeli paper Ha’aretz of September 30, 1951, is sufficiently revealing: “Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But if for any reasons western powers should sometime prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighbouring states whose discourtesy to the west went beyond the bounds permissible.”
During the invasion of Lebanon, an Israeli, Dr Shlomo Shmelzman, who survived the Nazi concentration camps announced a hunger strike and wrote to the press: “In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw Ghetto, through labour camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the technocratic cruelty of the bombing, destroying and killing of human beings. I hear too many familiar sounds today. I hear dirty Arabs and I remember dirty Jews. I hear about closed areas, I remember ghettos and camps. I hear two-legged beasts and I remember Untermenschen (subhumans). I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder.... Too many things in Israel remind me of too many things from my childhood.”
People like Dr Shmelzman are a minority in their country, but there is a hope that some day they will succeed, provided western imperialism withdraws its backing of chauvinist and expansionist elements in Israel and gives up its greed to benefit from Middle East oil.
