Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Today, 58 years ago, the United Nations partition plan for Palestine was officially enacted, despite the opposition of every country in the region, and the first major Arab-Israel war began. Webdiary columnist Roslyn Ross marks the event with this sobering review. Roslyn's last Webdiary piece was There can be no tolerance of torture.

by Roslyn Ross

I remember growing up during the Cold War years, wondering, more often than one would wish, just when the radio-active cloud would roll across the horizon. In those days the likelihood of World War Three seemed very real when probably it wasn’t.

In these days the likelihood of World War Three may not seem so real when probably it is. Not only do we have the bloody mess of our own making which is Iraq but we have George Bush threatening to ‘nuke’ the Iranians.

Now, there’s no denying that the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may sound a little crazy, but then so does George W and unlike the Americans and the Israelis, the Iranians have not actually attacked, let alone bombed anyone, for over a century, without being attacked first, as they were by Iraq, in a war backed by the Americans. But who is going to let the ‘facts’ get in the way of a good story let alone anything approximating truth as more recently published translations of what Ahmadinejad actually said suggest?

It was interesting to spend a couple of months in Russia last year and to discover that what Russians believed about the West during those chilly years of stand-off, was exactly what we were led to believe about Russia. Each side was convinced of its rightness and innocence and each side was convinced about the aggression of the other. Both sides were being told lies.

Interestingly, the ‘lies’ remain, only the names have been changed. The charges levelled against the Russians, are now being made against Muslim/Arab terrorists and movie bad guys are now Islamic extremists instead of evil Russians. Not only are we being lied to now, as we were then, but the lies of today sit upon a dangerous pool of ignorance. If, in the near future, we found ourselves caught up in the nuclear nightmare of World War Three, how many people would know the underlying causes?

Some ‘causes’ are recent; the injustice of invasion, occupation and economic ‘colonisation’ of Iraq with reports showing some 200,000 Iraqis dead and counting three years into the conflict, and taking into account the Gilbert and Burnham report published in the Lancet in 2004 which estimated 100,000 Iraqis dead after just 18 months of war and occupation. And then there are the tens of thousands dead and maimed in Afghanistan because of American ‘retaliation’ for 9/11... an act, committed, not by Afghans but by Saudis!

But one of those ‘causes’, fertile with potential, has been with us for more than half a century; The Great Catastrophe. May 15 marks the 58th anniversary of the dispossession of the Palestinian people and the beginning of their suffering under occupation and colonisation by Israel. In all instances many people are woefully ignorant about what is going on although in the case of the Palestinians, most are completely ignorant about the original injustice of partition and the ongoing human rights abuses the Palestinians have suffered and continue to suffer to this day.

And one major reason for that ignorance is the lack of information provided by the media and our political leaders. The Palestinians, more than any other occupied people, have been buried under a deadly weight of political correctness. In other words, you can’t talk about the human rights abuses, and war crimes, that Israel has carried out and continues to carry out against Palestinians because the anti-semitic ‘flag’ might get waved and we can’t have that. Or can we?

It has long been said that truth is the first casualty of war, perhaps even more so when the war is one of invasion and occupation. The Greek tragic dramatist, Aeschylus (525BC-456BC) is reputed to have been one of the first to say it, and it was probably hardly original even then, but truth has always been a flexible medium in the hands of the powerful. The controversial journalist John Pilger, would argue it is even more so today because of what he calls ‘journalistic censorship,’ which is both imposed from above and by journalists on themselves.

It is not truth, but journalism, which is the first casualty of war, said Pilger, in his address, ‘Reporting War and Empire, at Columbia University, New York.

It is, he says, censorship by omission, whose power is such, that in war, it can mean the difference between life and death for people in faraway countries such as Iraq.

Or Palestine, I would add, a country whose own suffering has been generally ignored because the public is, in the main, ignorant as to why Palestinians are fighting against the State of Israel.

It is this ‘weeping sore’ of injustice which has for so long fuelled anger in the Arab and Islamic world. The success of Israeli and Jewish lobbyists in their bid to gain egregiously biased support from the United States for their continued occupation and colonisation of Palestine has turned this anger into rage.

And yet, if the press and politicians are to be believed it is only the Israelis who have a right to be enraged. It is the suicide bombers that we hear about and the suffering of Israelis, not the constant murder, misery and suffering of the Palestinians.

We all heard about the nine Israelis who died in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv last month, but how many heard about the 66 Palestinians killed by the Israeli Army in the past three months? Most of them were civilians and many were women and children. For more than a month Israel has been bombing Gaza with some 200 shells a day.

Yes, this is in ‘retaliation’ for some feeble home-made rockets which the Palestinians fire at their occupiers in a pitiful fight for freedom, and which do little or no damage, but the Israeli over-kill, literally, is considered acceptable when the Palestinian resistance to occupation is not! Hardly fair one would have thought unless you belong to the ‘might is right’ school.

And to make matters worse, in between bombing the Israelis collectively punish the imprisoned population with sonic booms which doctors say cause miscarriages and which terrify adults and completely traumatise children.

One in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in 2000. Many of these children, one as young as four, had been shot in the head by Israeli Army snipers.

Gaza is surrounded by an electric fence and is a huge prison, ‘with a million inmates,’ as described by Israeli film-maker, Ram Loevy. It is a place of collective punishment, and in the purest sense, a ‘concentration camp.’ It may have been one of the first in Palestine but it is not the last.

With the Israeli Apartheid Wall, an enormous rise of concrete where land-grab masquerades as security, snaking through the occupied territories, more and more Palestinians are finding themselves ‘concentrated’ into ‘camps’ controlled by Israeli Army checkpoints.

The wall divides families from each other, farmers from land, people from jobs, children from schools, the sick from hospitals and the occupier from the occupied. And the colonisation continues apace. In the weeks following the pullout of 8,000 illegal settlers from Gaza, about 23,000 Israelis moved to the West Bank.

The Palestinians live under constant harassment from settlers and the Israeli Defence Force. On April 10 Israeli army forces distributed fresh demolition orders in Agaba, a village in the west of the Jordan Valley. They come on top of sixteen previous demolition orders which threaten to destroy the social, economic and cultural institutions of the village. The village is located on a hilltop and therefore of strategic ‘value’ to the occupation forces. During the Oslo period, when colonisation of the Occupied Territories became Israeli Government policy, this area was designated a C zone and slated for more settlement expansion.

The villagers of Agaba, like so many others, continue to fight to hold on to their land. On April 17 IDF forces attacked a school in Anata and injured five children. Since August the Apartheid Wall has run through the middle of the schoolyard. Anata has always been a part of Jerusalem’s urban area, but the Wall and a settler bypass have turned it into a ghetto. There are plans to expand settlements further making life even more of a living hell for the Palestinian community as Israel pursues, what a UN report has termed, its unilateral approach to a ‘solution’.

From the moment that the United Nations and the international community made the decision to partition Palestine, against the will of the majority of the people living there, in order to allow the creation of the State of Israel, the scene was set for bloodshed.

Whatever one may believe about Jewish ‘rights’, whether because of their suffering at the hands of the Nazis, or because thousands of years before, some followers of their religion had lived in this part of the world, the simple fact remains that to dispossess people in order to set up your own State is morally and legally wrong.

The international community and the United Nations simply did not have the right to partition Palestine even though, at the time, the proposal ‘supported’ by the UN amidst accusations of diplomatic intimidation by the Americans, to force the vote, was very different to what the Zionists had in mind and what has come to pass.

Let’s say it was discovered that the Gypsies (Romany), another Stateless people, and equally persecuted as Jews were by the Nazis and others, had once had a homeland in say Australia, and the international community decided they should be allowed to create a new one here... Would Australians support it? Should they support it? Could they be criticised for fighting against it if they opposed it and it was done anyway? That is the reality for the Palestinians.

The Italians (Romans) invaded England and established London (Londinium) and yet few would argue that they had a ‘right’ to reclaim any of it. And yet this was the argument put forward for the establishment of Israel where the ancient Hebrews had invaded Canaan (Palestine) and established Jerusalem. How do we know that the Palestinians who were dispossessed by the creation of Israel were not descendants of the original Canaanites and therefore with far greater right to the land? We don’t!

And, as the Palestinians point out, why should their country be divided to create a homeland for Jews because they had suffered at the hands of the Nazis? Surely if justice were done it would have been Germany that was divided?

The ‘war’ to establish the State of Israel was based on lies. Just as the English said Australia was ‘terra nullius’ to justify colonisation, so the Zionist catchcry was: ‘A land without people for a people without a land.’

The Jewish writer, Ahad ha-Am, otherwise known as Asher Ginsberg, who became the central figure in the movement for Cultural or Spiritual Zionism, in 1891, voiced opposition to the political Zionist agenda of settlement in Palestine and said: "From abroad, we are accustomed to believe that Eretz Israel is presently almost totally desolate, an uncultivated desert, and that anyone wishing to buy land there can come and buy all he wants. But in truth this is not so. In the entire land, it is hard to find a tillable land that is not already tilled."

The establishment of the State of Israel involved mass ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, mass transfer resulting in the depopulation of nearly 85 percent of the native indigenous Arab population resident in the territories that came under Israeli control. They were dispossessed of their vast rural and urban real estate and financial properties and some three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs (today numbering over four million) were stripped of their right to citizenship in Israel.

Joseph Weitz, "one of the architects of the Zionist settlement’ said: ‘Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in the country for both peoples together ... The only solution is Eretz Israel, at least the west part of Eretz Israel, without Arabs ... and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain..."

Not surprisingly, the Palestinians, having had their protests and their rights unilaterally dismissed, and had their people dispossessed, if not killed, at the hands of Zionist gangs using the sorts of tactics we now classify as ‘terrorist’ decided, with the help of their allies to fight back. The irony is that people who cannot find justification for the Palestinian fight against occupation and colonisation would give full support to French partisans for instance, in their fight against occupation. Or, one might add, to the British, if Hitler had succeeded in his invasion plan.

During the 1948-49 war and throughout the 1950’s some 500 Arab villages and cities were destroyed and almost all were razed to the ground by the Israeli Army. One of the worst massacres of Arabs took place at Deir Yasin in April 1948 and it is on this land that the official State of Israel holocaust memorial, Yad va-Shem, now stands as well as the City of Jerusalem cemetery. There’s something seriously tasteless, or sublimely arrogant, about building a memorial to the suffering of your own people on land where you have committed a war crime!

Moshe Dayan, the Israeli military leader and politician said in a speech in 1969, "You even do not know the names of these (Arab) villages and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist. Not only the books, but also the villages no longer exist. There is not a single settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village."

When the Palestinians and their allies lost the war of 67, Israel became the occupier of all of Palestine. Not only has Israel become increasingly brutal as an occupying force over the past decades, it has instituted a colonisation plan which makes a viable Palestinian State impossible, and given the malicious cruelty involved in its application, a plan which, one can only assume, seeks to make life so impossible for any remaining Palestinians that they will leave.

That colonisation ‘plan’ has involved dispossession, demolition of homes and destruction of orchards and vineyards, (many of them ancient although there are now accusations that some of those removed are sold to Israelis.) Israel’s response to the Palestinian fight for freedom has been bombs, bullets, wilful destruction of schools, hospitals and government infrastructure, assassination, imprisonment without trial, torture and collective punishment. Since the latest intifada began more than three times as many Palestinians than Israelis have been killed including large numbers of children.

And all the while Israeli settlers, living illegally on Palestinian land, look down from the well-watered lawns and their neat streets, or travel on their Israeli-only roads which cut through the heart and hearth of Palestine, far removed from the carnage which is carried out in their name. But one thing which the Israelis have overlooked in their colonisation plan is the fact that when people have nothing left to lose but their lives, then they will choose to ‘lose’ their life willingly in the fight for freedom.

I spent time in Israel and Palestine a few years back and was struck by not only how little Israelis know about their neighbours but how racist they are in regard to Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general. It may be a defensive mechanism but it is a dangerous one. So too are the myths or lies which Israelis believe about the founding of their State. Most believe there were no Palestinians when Jewish settlers arrived in the 19th century and that at partition the Palestinians left voluntarily. This is despite more recent evidence presented by historians, many of them Israeli, like Dr Ilan Pappe, to the contrary. They believe that the Palestinians came later, which rather makes the fact that countless Palestinian refugees have keys to homes in Israel, all the more remarkable.

They also believe that a Palestinian and an Arab are the same thing and Palestinians should just go to an Arab country because there are so many of them and they have so much more land than Israel. One doubts that an Italian or German would happily give up their homeland because, after all, they are European and there are lots of European countries in which they can live.

Israel, in so many ways, has become what South Africa was in the worst years of apartheid when denial was the ‘drug’ of the day and ignorance may not have been bliss but it was truly comforting.

But there are Israelis who are prepared to not only seek the truth but to talk about it despite being villified. Dr Pappe is a member of a group called the ‘New Historians,’ which revises and challenges the main Israeli version of 1948 and debunks several of the myths surrounding the foundation of Israel.

One other Israeli who does not do the drug of denial is scholar and author, Uri Davis, who believes that Israel is an apartheid and racist state, but in less visible form than South Africa was.

In South Africa, he says, some 87 percent of the territory was reserved under law for white citizens only. In Israel, some 93 percent of the territory (not including the West Bank and Gaza) is reserved under law for Jewish citizens only. Where the distinction in South Africa was between white and non-white, the apartheid distinction in Israel is between Jew and non-Jew.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he says, is essentially a conflict between a settler-colonial state and an indigenous population dispossessed by the colonial project. Where it differs from South Africa is that visitors to South Africa in the apartheid era would have seen it immediately; benches, toilets, parks and transport divided into white and non-white. In Israel the core apartheid is veiled.

Davis says consistent efforts are also made to ‘remove’ any evidence of non-Jewish inhabitants. The Jewish National Fund, for instance, which appears to be an environmentally friendly organisation concerned with ecology is instrumental in planting forests and establishing recreation facilities.

“Well, it is the case,” says Davis “that JNF forests and facilities are open to all, but it is equally the case that most, almost without exception all, of these forests are planted on the ruins of Palestinian Arab villages ethnically cleansed in the 1948-49 war.

The wall today, he says, represents an attempt by the Government of the State of Israel to cap the expulsion of Palestinians with a Bantustan solution for the rest of the country.

“The question of terrorism and the casualties inflicted by terrorism on an innocent civilian population is a very serious question, but the wall is not there to alleviate this crisis of terrorism – the wall is there in the first instance as an attempt to Bantustanise Palestine and to isolate the indigenous population in what are effectively huge concentrations camps,” said Davis.

The media and political ‘silence’ surrounding the original and ongoing injustice suffered by the Palestinian people is said to be sourced in fear. Fear of being thought anti-Israel, of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism and of legitimizing talk of a Jewish ‘conspiracy’ in terms of the power Israel wields in the United States, the one nation which could, if it chose, bring justice, resolution and peace to this ghastly and potentially internationally catastrophic conflict.

Even if the occupation of Iraq ended tomorrow, if America makes peace with Iran and puts its ‘nukes’ back on the shelf and if Israel builds its apartheid wall all the way around its State, puts a roof on top and concretes the country from one end to the other, the occupation and colonisation of Palestine, if not justly resolved, will remain the one ‘match’ which can ignite the region and make the nuclear nightmare of World War Three a hideous reality.

For that reason, if for no other, this is one fight for justice that involves us all.