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by Dan Lieberman
The Middle East crisis has
reached a decisive point. From the entry of a relatively few Zionists
to Palestine, the trajectory of the crisis has monotonically pursued a
direction toward complete Zionist control of former Palestinian lands
and complete disruption of Palestinian life. A startled world wonders
how this happened, while neglecting the social and psychological
manipulations that preceded each stage of the Zionists’ forward
movement. Unaware of this strategy of conditioning, the world fails to
apply necessary countermeasures and halt a more far reaching
conflagration.
Manipulating a world to enhance a nation’s interests
is not unique, and especially easy for a country that is a global
economic and military power. Citizens relish the strength that gives
them respect and advantages, refuse to regard the harm done to others
and are blinded to the eventual retribution. Napoleon and Queen Victoria
convinced their own and colonial subjects, for a while, that their
armies, navies and administrations brought civilization and prosperity
to subdued peoples. Nazi Germany had approval of its nationals and many
peoples from other nations as its Panzers swept across a Europe that
Hitler posed as one to which Germany would bring stability, peace and
cleared of what he defined as the “scourge of liberalism.” The United
States spread its influence with slogans of bringing freedom and
democracy until injured peoples surveyed their dead and wounded and
realized these were dubious phrases.
An expanding Israel is unique. Although not starting
as a global economic and military power, Israel has advanced its
frontiers with its own manipulations - convincing a part of the world
that its development has been defensive, a reaction to events, and
honestly implemented. Can we trust the words of a nation that, for
whatever reason, occupies other people’s lands, has forced out the
native peoples, committed a myriad of proven atrocities, changes daily
the landmarks and artifacts of history to suit its agenda, and has
maintained generations of Palestinians in oppressive and captive
conditions?
The manipulated scenario describes dispersed Jews
seeking a national home, obtaining it after fleeing the World War II
Holocaust and arriving in the land of their ancestors, which, as Israeli
education teaches students, was given to them by a vote from the United
Nations. Because of consistent attacks upon the Yishuv, the Jewish
residents in Palestine and their Israeli descendants were forced to
defend themselves. Conflicts caused turmoil, and a major part of the
Arab population of Palestine became displaced. Continuous wars, forced
upon Israel by adjacent Arab nations, pushed development of a strong
military whose decisive victories captured territory for defensive
purposes. For security reasons, Israel expanded its boundaries and
placed immigrants in strategic locations in the West Bank. Roads and a
security wall, which happened to cut through Palestinian lands, became
necessary in order to prevent terrorists from entering the homeland.
Security measures demanded absolute control of Palestinian movements.
Unfortunately, a poorly directed and recalcitrant Palestinian community
has been responsible for its decline and egregious fate.
Facts create a contradictory scenario, which will
have its detractors. However, any refutation should argue with the facts
and not the overall scenario.
History contradicts the portrayal of Zionism as a
mass movement by the Jewish people. The Zionist message prompted nations
to question the loyalty of their Jewish citizens, served to impede
their advances, and reinforced a race-baiting theory that Jews engaged
in international conspiracies. Proof is shown by the Russian Jews, who
had major problems and did not consider Zionism as a relief for their
difficulties. Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from
Russia - 1.7 million to America, 500,000 to Western Europe, almost
300,000 to other nations, and only 30,000 - 50,000 to Palestine (ED:
15,000 returned to Russia). Plans for establishing a nation on
Palestinian lands occurred long before World War II, and therefore the
World War II Holocaust had no relation to the Zionist concept for the
creation of a state. The settlers, of whom only 180,000 came from
refugee camps, arrived in Palestine with no more verified connection
with the ancient Hebrews than many other ethnicities. Known to
archaeology and accepted history (not Biblical history) as mainly
wandering tribes that established themselves in hilltop areas of Canaan,
the Hebrews never formed a vibrant civilization or a unified nation of
extensive administered territory. Not only is it unproven that the land
to which European Zionists returned was a land of their forefathers, but
the claim is supercilious – in a world of democratic law, legal
qualifications, not self-proclaimed and spurious identifications that
span thousands of years, determine land ownership, and the Zionists had
no legal claims, while Palestinian people had occupied and tilled the
area for generations.
Identification of Hebrews as Jews happened
principally during the during the fifth century B.C., after Hebrews
returned from exile in Persia with a more complete vision of
monotheistic Judaism, and later in Mesopotamia during the fifth century
A.D., where the center of Rabbinical Judaism composed the main body of
Jewish law, the Babylonian (not the Jerusalem)Talmud.
Skip one thousand five hundred years to the 1948
War, when 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes and Israel refused to
allow them to return to their ancestral lands. During the Palestinian
exodus, known atrocities, forcible evictions and brutal attacks, all
planned to intimidate Palestinian families to leave, have been
documented. Israel destroyed 411 Arab villages, and engaged in several
wars with its neighbors in which the kill ratio overwhelmingly favored
Israel, and by which Israel doubled its original territory. For more
than sixty years, Palestinians have seen their lands appropriated and
their lives controlled by an Israel military authority. The Israeli army
occupies the Jordan valley, and slowly clears it of Palestinian
presence, while Israeli settlers, mostly immigrants from foreign
nations, occupy the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All these endeavors
have been declared illegal by several United Nation resolutions.
President Barack Obama’s recent voyage to Israel
exposes and emphasizes the conditioning of the world community to
acceptance of the Zionist agenda. It is difficult to believe that an
erudite President Obama prepared the speech. Examine some of his
statements.
I’ve borne witness to the ancient history of the Jewish people at the Shrine of the Book,
The Shrine of the Book only houses the Dead Sea
scrolls and the Aleppo codex, which are controversial rewrites of
Biblical scrolls and not historical documents. Touring Jerusalem’s
Rockefeller Archaeological Museum and the Bible Lands Museum, which is
across from the Shrine of the Book, demonstrates that there are few
significant artifacts of an established Hebrew civilization in the
Middle East – no constructions other than those from ninth century B.C.
King Omri era, nor statues, monuments, roads, ships, national commerce,
weapons, treasures, utensils, jewelry, communication, transportation,
and significant documents, other than the Bible, that have survived and
can be attributed to the efforts of the ancient Hebrews before the sixth
century Babylonian invasion of the Levant.
It’s a story of centuries of slavery, and years of
wandering in the desert; a story of perseverance amidst persecution,
and faith in God and the Torah. It’s a story about finding freedom in
your own land. And for the Jewish people, this story is central to who
you’ve become. But it’s also a story that holds within it the universal
human experience, with all of its suffering, but also all of its
salvation.
These are Biblical stories, refuted by Israel’s most
recognized archaeologists and historians, such as Prof. Ze'ev Herzog,
Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho , Ha'aretz Magazine, Oct. 29, 1999.
Although the ancient Egyptians maintained detailed
recordings of their lives and later academics compiled that history, no
historical evidence has been presented of centuries of Hebrew slavery
and their years of wandering in the desert. The Sinai desert has never
exposed the wanderings and the Hebrew language did not exist during the
supposed time. The "exodus" did not free the Jews - just the opposite -
it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a false sense of
history and given them a conscience that sees themselves as eternal
victims, and distracts them from realizing that they may also play a
role in the injustices done to others.
For the Jewish people, the journey to the promise
of the State of Israel wound through countless generations. It involved
centuries of suffering and exile, prejudice and pogroms and even
genocide. Through it all, the Jewish people sustained their unique
identity and traditions, as well as a longing to return home. And while
Jews achieved extraordinary success in many parts of the world, the
dream of true freedom finally found its full expression in the Zionist
idea — to be a free people in your homeland. That’s why I believe that
Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition, but also in a simple
and profound idea — the idea that people deserve to be free in a land
of their own.
Mostly true, except for using the concept of a
Jewish people. Two persons make a people, but a people don’t make a
nation. A nation refers to a community of people who share a common
language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and history. The Jews, similar to
the Mennonites, Jehovah Witnesses, Basques, and myriads of other
religious and ethnic groups did not share the attributes of a nation. If
it were otherwise, why has Israel’s thrust been to give its Jews a new
frame of a nation – a common language, culture, descent and history. The
Mizrahi, who came to Israel, were Arabs; the Europeans were Ashkenazi;
the Ethiopians were Falasha and the Yemenites were from the Arabian
peninsula. The differing languages, dialects, music, cultures and
heritage of these ethnicities have been discarded and replaced by unique
and uniform characteristics. With the destruction of each community
went the destruction of centuries old Jewish history and life in
Tunisia, Iraq, Libya and Egypt. All these immigrants became a new Jew,
an Israeli Jew, which unlike the Iraqi Jews, who were probably the
closest relatives to the ancient Jews, had no proven lineage to the
biblical Hebrews.
If Obama is sincere in helping people from their
journey as a people to a nation, he should give attention to the
aspirations of the Kurds, Assyrians and Nubians. Each of these peoples,
who have suffered greatly throughout history, and still suffer today,
especially the three million Assyrians, have all the elements of a
people and were well recognized and established as nations in previous
eras. Maybe a little prejudice and favoritism to others permits them to
be disregarded.
I know Israel has taken risks for peace. Brave
leaders — Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin — reached treaties with two of
your neighbors. You made credible proposals to the Palestinians at
Annapolis. You withdrew from Gaza and Lebanon, and then faced terror and
rockets. Across the region, you’ve extended a hand of friendship and
all too often you’ve been confronted with rejection and, in some cases,
the ugly reality of anti-Semitism. So I believe that the Israeli people
do want peace, and I also understand why too many Israelis — maybe an
increasing number, maybe a lot of young people here today — are
skeptical that it can be achieved.
The two mentioned Israeli leaders could never redeem
themselves for their severe atrocities against the Palestinians. Begin
held office as Prime Minister during the first invasion of Lebanon and
during the attacks on the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and
Shatila. Excerpts from the Kahan Commission report.
On the evening of September 16, 1982, a force of
about 150 Phalangists entered the Sabra and Shatila camps under Israeli
protection. It subsequently developed that instead of restoring order,
the Phalangists perpetrated a massacre in the camps. Estimates of the
number of people killed and missing vary from about 460 (Red Cross
estimates) to 700 (IDF intelligence estimate) to 2,000 (Palestinian
estimates). There is no doubt that the victims included women and
children, as well as unarmed men, and were mostly not Palestinian
fighters killed in the heat of battle.
The Kahan Commission determined that Ariel Sharon
and several others were at least negligent in their duty and should have
known that there was a danger that such massacres might occur. Under
these circumstances they should not have permitted the Phalangists to
enter the camps, or should have at least taken steps to ensure that no
massacres occurred, or should have intervened to investigate and stop
the massacres once suspicious reports began coming out of the camps.
Yitzhak Rabin was responsible for the Palestinian
Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948. Historian Benny Morris wrote in
"Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in
1948", Middle East Journal, 40.
At 13.30 hours on 12 July [1948]…
Lieutenant-Colonel Yitzhak Rabin, operation Dani head Operation, issued
the following order: ’1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled
quickly without attention to age. They should be directed to Beit
Nabala,… Implement Immediately.’ A similar order was issued at the same
time to the Kiryati Brigade concerning the inhabitants of the
neighboring town of Ramle, occupied by Kiryati troops that morning… On
12 and 13 July, the Yaftah brigades carried out their orders, expelling
the 50-60,000 remaining inhabitants of and refugees camped in and around
the two towns….
Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces during
the 1967 war, Yitzhak Rabin, was responsible for expelling about 5,000
inhabitants from three villages in the area between Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem (Emwas, Beit Nuba and Yalou) and having the villages
destroyed. The Jerusalem Post of 24 October 1991, reported that “Rabin
admitted to Canadian TV that he gave the order to destroy the villages.
The inhabitants were not allowed to return nor bury their dead.”
Rabin, as Defense Minister, is also known for the
infamous “break their bones” decree during the first Intifada (1987), a
means to make impotent the Palestinian male population. Reports had
Palestinian youngsters rounded up from their homes, brought to remote
areas, and while soldiers held them, had their bones smashed. Amira Hass
in Haaretz, Nov.04, 2005, described the feelings “when Palestinians
were asked about Rabin.”
… this is what they remember: One thinks of his
hands, scarred by soldiers' beatings; another remembers a friend who
flitted between life and death in the hospital for 12 days, after he was
beaten by soldiers who caught him drawing a slogan on a wall during a
curfew. Yet another remembers the Al-Am’ari refugee camp; during the
first Intifada, all its young men were hopping on crutches or were in
casts because they had thrown stones at soldiers, who in turn chased
after them and carried out Rabin's order.
Prime Ministers Begin and Shamir were known
terrorists during the British Mandate, the former being responsible for
the bombing of the King David hotel and the latter accused of playing a
role in the assassination of UN representative Folke Bernadotte.
Manipulations prevented their trial for criminal efforts. Israel
leadership, except for Moshe Sharret, who was forced to resign the
office due to his conciliatory attitude toward the Palestinians, have
been nationalist hawks, have encroached upon Palestinian lands and
those, after 1967, pursued a policy of constructing West Bank
settlements.
The rest of Obama’s appraisals in the former
paragraph of his speech is subject to interpretation, and it is doubtful
that much of the world would interpret the happenings as he expressed
them.
Here, in this small strip of land that has been
the center of so much of the world’s history, so much triumph and so
much tragedy, Israelis have built something that few could have imagined
65 years ago.
This severe exaggeration is constantly repeated.
Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Emirates, South Africa and
many other countries have shown more dynamic growth since 1950, and,
unlike Israel, achieved the progress without huge aid from the United
States and Germany. Israel’s major cities of Tel Aviv, Haifa and
Jerusalem (except for the Old City) are routine in appearance and
activity. Amman, Jordan, with its engineering marvels of tunnels and
bridges, has much more appeal than Tel Aviv. A trip through Israel does
not reveal any special advancements – some interesting tourist areas,
mostly from Roman and Crusader times, and sterile urban areas, with
pockets of poverty and deterioration. As for making the desert bloom,
bring in irrigation and anything will bloom. Maybe Israel’s irrigation
and desalinization methods are slightly more advanced, but Israel does
not have any proprietary methods that money cannot buy. The Negev is no
more vital than Phoenix, Arizona or the farms that Qatar is building in
the desert. Look at it another way – Israel has used huge quantities of
water in a water deficient area and has destroyed the appearance of the
biblical lands they claim to cherish, and which the Palestinians
preserved for centuries.
At the Paris Peace Conference, the Zionists stated
their mission and Israel has intended to fulfill that mission –
incorporate all of former Palestine, and maybe more, into one Jewish
state, or have nothing – and no Israeli Prime Minister dares to deter
the Zionist state from its ultimate objective. Unlike, much of the
world, the Arab nations are cognizant of Israel’s plans and scramble to
prevent them. Despite the manipulation of rhetoric, the Arab world and
Iran are consigned to an Israeli state, but not this Israeli state, not
to a military state of exclusiveness, which treats Arabs as inferiors
and promotes a singular group.
The world faces two choices – permit Israel to continue its
expansionist polices and destroy the Middle East or bring democratic
changes and level headed government to an Israel that is willing to
share the country with the original landowners. The latter suggestion
removes a major impediment to instability and conflict in the Middle
East. Naturally, a corrupt and manipulated world will accept its own
destruction.
Dan Lieberman is DC based editor of
Alternative Insight, a commentary on foreign policy and politics. He is
author of the book A Third Party Can Succeed in America
http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/25849-manipulating-the-world.html
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