By Dr. Elias Akleh

Every 15th of May Palestinians; old and young, all over the world, within Zionist occupied Palestine, in every Palestinian refugee camp, and in every exile country, commemorate the Palestinian Nakba; Arabic for national catastrophe. Palestinians contemplate their stolen homeland, the genocide of hundreds of thousands of their Palestinian and Arab brothers and sisters, the total destruction of hundreds of their towns, the wiping off Palestine of the map and the sub-planting to the terrorist state of Israel in its place.

National catastrophe is the proper description of the Palestinian plight caused by the Zionist Jewish occupation of Palestine and the creation of a terrorist state called Israel. Israel is the invention of Zionism, which is a colonial expansionist terrorist movement based on an extremist ethnocentric supremacist Judaic religious discriminative concept of God’s chosen people in God’s promised land. Its primary objective is the establishment of a Jewish only super power state in the heart of the Arab World to control its most needed natural resource of oil in order to control the economy of the whole world and to become the masters of the world as prescribed by their own Judaic religion. To accomplish this Zionist Jews sought to annihilate Palestinians, raze their towns, wipe off their homeland of the map, and erase their culture from history, for an independent Palestinian state negates Israel’s so-called right of existence.

The Zionist occupation of Palestine is a historically unprecedented unique form of occupation. While traditional military occupations take place when a colonial military power occupies another country to control its people, their natural resources, and their government, the Zionist Jewish occupation, on the other hand, is a religiously-racist genocidal obliterating occupation, whose primary goal is the complete annihilation of all indigenous Palestinian inhabitants, the complete destruction of their towns, the wiping off of their culture and history, the creation of an alien state, and the sub-planting of aggressive terrorist alien groups, with different citizenships of various countries, in the area.

Zionist Jewish leaders had openly and shamelessly declared this genocidal goal as their policy. Ardent Zionist Ukrainian Jew Yosef Weitz, the director of Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund, had formed the “Transfer Committee”, whose primary function was the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the destruction of their villages and the forestation of these villages to cover the Israeli crimes. He confined to his diary on December 20th 1940:

“It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people … the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries … Not one village must be left, not even one Bedouin tribe.”

On June 22nd, 1941 he also wrote:

“The land of Israel is not small at all, if only the Arabs were removed, and its frontiers enlarged a little, to the north up to the Litani (river in Lebanon), and to the east including the Golan Heights … with the Arabs transferred to northern Syria and Iraq … Today we have no other alternative … We will not live here with Arabs.” (Benny Morris “Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem”)

Russian Jew Chaim Weizmann, born in Belarus; part of Russian Empire at the time, who was president of the Zionist Organization and the first president of Israel, saw no room for Palestinians in Palestine. He wrote in his autobiography “Trial and Error”:

“Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English.”

The Polish born David Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister and chief architect of the state of Israel declared openly:

“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population … Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they (the Palestinians) defend themselves … The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country.”

Moshe Dayan, the Israeli Defense Minister during the 1950’s, gave a lecture at the Technion University in Haifa in March 19th, 1969. The Israeli daily Haaratz of April 4th 1969 quoted him saying:

“We came here to a country that was populated by Arabs and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state. Instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of the Arab villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is not a single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab village. You do not know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist also the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gv’at in the place of Jobta, Kibbutz Sared in the place of Huneifis, and Kfar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

Zionist Jewish Israeli leaders had always tried to negate, falsify and wipe off every aspect of Palestinian existence to a point where their ex Prime Minister Russian Golda Meir, born Golda Mabovitz, stated in 1969: “There is no such thing as Palestinians; they never existed.” Golda Meir was echoing the lie created by Jewish British Lord Shaftesbury and the originally Russian Jewish writer Israel Zangwill. In July 1853 Shaftesbury wrote to Foreign Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was:

“… a country without a nation in need of a nation without a country … Is there such a thing? To be sure there is; the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!”

Shaftesbury also wrote in his diary:

“… these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to someone or to another … There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country.”

Israel Zangwill, a Jewish writer, whose nickname was “the Dickens of the Ghetto”, had also claimed in 1901 that Palestine had no nation. In his book “Land of Israel” he described the Zionist colonial plan in Palestine by using the slogan of “Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land.”

Today, after 65 years of brutal genocidal Zionist Jewish Israeli colonization of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the Polish born Israeli President Shimon Peres, despite the steadfastness of about 4 million Palestinians still living in occupied Palestine, continues the myth of “land without people” and keeps on denying the existence of Palestinians by flagrantly stating:

“I remember how it all began. The whole state of Israel is a millimeter of the whole Middle East. A statistical error, barren and disappointing land, swamps in the north, desert in the south, two lakes, one dead sea and an overrated river. No natural resource apart from malaria. There was nothing here. And we now have the best agriculture in the world. This is a miracle: a land built by people.” (Maariv, 14 April 2013)

Even before the end of WWII Zionist leaders formed terrorist groups from the same Jewish elements trained by the British army in North Africa, who were an adjunct to the British WWII effort against the Nazis. These Jewish terrorist groups became known as the Hagana, the Lehi (Stern) and the Irgun (Etzel), later joined to form the Israeli army. These Jewish terrorist groups were the first to introduce terrorist attacks in Palestine. They attacked British as well as Palestinian targets; the bombing of King David Hotel, the assassination of Lord Folke Bernadotte, attacks against British troops, and bombing of Palestinian buses and markets.

In March 1948, before the end of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion launched extensive military genocidal campaigns to cleanse Palestine from its indigenous inhabitants and to destroy as much of their towns as possible. Within 6 months, Zionist terrorist organizations, not just Irgun and Lehi as Israelis want to blame but also the Hagana, went on a rampage massacring and expelling Palestinians and destroying their homes and villages. According to the archives of the history of the Palmach (the assassinating striking force of the Hagana) released in full in 1972, more than 13 underground military operations were carried out by Jewish terrorist organizations against Palestinian targets. Some have heard of the infamous plan Dalet, yet there are also the less publicized other terrorist plans such as Hiram, Kadish, Nachson, Gideon, Barak, Yoram, Ben Ami, Ben Nun, Qilshon, Dani, Lot, and Assaf.

These Jewish terrorist attacks caused the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe; 78% of Palestine was occupied, a total of 530 Palestinian villages and towns were depopulated and razed off the ground (Walid Khalidi’s “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948”), almost 800 thousand Palestinians became refugees (now more than 8 millions), and 70 confirmed and documented massacres were perpetrated against Palestinian civilians. The Deir Yassin massacre is very well known because it was intentionally publicized by Jewish terrorist groups to scare Palestinians into flight. Other savage massacres also include Al-Qastal, Beit Mahsir, Deir al-Hawa, Beit Jibrin, Burqa, Kafr Saba, Kafr Qasim, Ein Ghazal, Abu Shusha, and many more other massacres where Palestinians; men, women, and children, were savagely murdered in cold blood.

The Israelis did not halt their atrocities at the end of 1948 war, but adopted aggressive policies of wiping off everything Palestinian. The Israeli Transfer Committee hastened to supervise the destruction of all abandoned Arab villages and repopulating them with recent Jewish immigrants. Ben-Gurion formed a special committee of experts in history, geology, and Torah study, and assigned them the task of distorting Palestinian culture and substituting the name of Palestinian cities with Jewish names. Thus Tel al-Rabi’ became Tel Aviv, Al-Quds became Yerushalayim, Um-Rashrash became Eilat, Shu’fat became Nevi Yacub, Beit-Jala became Gilo, Beit Mahsir became Beit Ma’ir, Qualandia became Atarot, and so on. Even the names of the streets were changed from Palestinian to Jewish names.

Successive Israeli governments adopted the harshest oppressive policies against the Palestinians in an attempt to push them out of the country. They deprived Palestinians from the simplest human rights, denied them education, health, and work opportunities, imposed special heavy taxes on them, confiscated their land and homes, jailed and tortured many of them, and forcefully transferred many of them to the neighboring Arab countries. To legalize their oppressive measures the Israeli governments did not hesitate to use the oppressive old Ottoman laws, the Jordanian laws, their own Israeli laws, and many time they would improvise new laws to be used on the spot against Palestinians.

The illegal creation of terrorist Zionist state of Israel is the primary cause for the Palestinian catastrophe and the cause for all the wars and conflicts that is tearing apart the Middle Eastern region. To sustain and to expand the Zionist Israeli project Israeli Jews needed to avoid all peace agreements that would designate fixed borders for Israel, and to wage many wars against steadfast internal Palestinians and against its Arab neighboring countries. This was expressed by Aron Soffer, head of research and lecturer at the Israeli Forces National Defense College addressing the issue of Palestinians in Gaza strip, where he said on May 21st, 2004:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day … every day.” (Jerusalem Post; 10/10/2007)

Thus, successive Israeli governments had rejected, and still reject, all peace agreements including the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative that could have ended Arab/Israel conflict. Their rude belligerent response to Arab Peace Initiative came from “bulldozer” Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Prime Minister, who drove Israeli tanks into every major Palestinian city murdering civilians, destroying infrastructures, and besieging Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah’s headquarter.

Since the 1948 Palestinian Nakba Israeli governments continued their terrorist expansionist wars in the region not just against Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza Strip, but also against Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and their terrorist attacks reached Tunisia, Libya, Sudan, Qatar, Syria, Iraq and Iran. All of Israel’s wars were waged on the expense of European and American tax money, military technology and weapons, and political support. After exhausting their Israeli army the Zionist leaders were successful in getting NATO and American troops to fight their wars in proxy; the Lebanon war, wars against Iraq (once very closed friend to US), wars against Afghanistan, the division of Sudan, the war against Libya (close friend to Italy and France), arming and supporting Syrian terrorists, and economic sanctions against Iran with the future plan of pushing an alliance of US/Gulf states to wage war on Iran.

Zionism is just the latest Judaic façade based on Jewish ethnocentric divine superiority complex and the complete denial of the humanity and rights of all other nations; Goyims without any exception. This leaves no room for peace with such an ideology, not just with the Zionist terrorist state of Israel in Palestine but in any other place in this world. Supremacist Jews keep on planting more seeds of hatred among nations, and as in the past they will reap only hatred. Jewish history repeats itself.

-###-

By Dr. Elias Akleh