By Mazin Qumsiyeh
“Palestine was a land without a people for a People without a land” and “Palestinians do not exist” are not just statements made decades ago by Zionist leaders but are made still today (even a US presidential candidate in 2012). The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “… giving his audience (Likud leaders) a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers (Bejamin Netanyahu said): ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.’”
We are all familiar with the incredible PR repeated ad nauseum about Israel. From “security” to “terrorism” to “wanting peace”, we are inundated in corporate media with these images that are divorced from reality. With effort of Zionists, Wikipedia and other internet sites are full of this nonsense. It is not innocuous. Mythologies and lies are used to justify everything from ethnic cleansing to use of white phosphorous on civilians. They are the tools used to keep Jews and people around the world in a state of apathy and to confuse them with things like: Well: these “Arabs” and “Jews” have been fighting and it is almost genetic and nothing can be done to stop it. For an example to the callousness of these lies, see this video and then read the articles and data below that debunks these lies.
This year will mark 64 years since the founding of the state of Israel on the ruins of 540 Palestinian villages and towns. As 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians in the world remain refugees or displaced people denied basic human rights it is more important to debunk myths and lies. I updated this list to now include 64 lies/myths (one for each year). For those who want to further deepen their understanding, I suggest a list of books and documents in my syllabus on human rights and the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Please send me your contributions/additions whether in other lies not mentioned here or in further quotes and data on the listed lies. Email contributions to mazin@qumsiyeh.org. Suggested use for the data as it accumulates is a handy place for finding information to develop your knowledge in a way that can be used in meaningful discussions and for sending to chat rooms, list-serves, editors, politicians and others.
As Nathan Chofshi wrote in the Jewish Newsletter: “We came and turned the native Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we have to slander and malign them, to besmirch their name. Instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did and trying to undo some of the evil we committed… we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them.”(New York, 9 February 1959, cited in Erskine Childers, ‘The Other Exodus’ in Spectator, London, 12 May 1961)
1. Palestine was a land without a people for a people without a land
- Palestine was not empty and inhabited by nomadic people
- Zionism at 100: The Myth of Palestine as “A Land Without People” By Allan C. Brownfeld
- Palestine photos of the 1930s
- The Legal Status of Land in Palestine
-Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Pluto Press 2004. – Chapter 2“People and the Land”
2. Israel made the desert bloom/Palestine was destitute
- Statistical data on Palestine before the Nakba
- Who made the desert bloom?
3. The myths of national origins, chosenness, collective rights for a religion etc
- Archaeology refutes the Bible’s claim to history By Daniel Lazare
- Did Jewish Slaves Build the Pyramids?
- King David Was a Nebbish: ROCKING ISRAEL TO ITS BIBLICAL CORE
- Shattering a ‘national mythology’ By Ofri Ilani
-Israeli Icon under fire
-The Origins of the Jews By Yossi Schwartz
-A mosaic of people: …the DNA evidence by Ellen Levy-Coffman
-Who is a Jew
-Palestine in Wikipedia
-Was there a place called Palestine
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, we did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, we did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999
-more here
-Silberman, Neil Asher and Israel Finkelstein. The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts. Touchstone, 2002.
-Greenberg, Gary. 101 Myths of the Bible: How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History. Sourcebooks, 2002.
Whitelam, Keith W. The invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History. New York, Routledge. 1997
-Raed, Basem. Hidden Histories: Palestine and The Eastern Mediterranean. Pluto Press. 2010.
-Sand, Shlomo (Author), Yael Lotan (Translator). The Invention of the Jewish People. Verso, 2009.
4. Innocent Jews wanting to “return home” were rejected from the start by local Arabs for no good reason
- Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginsberg) wrote the following in 1891: ”In all things it is our custom to learn nothing from the past for the future. There is certainly one thing we could have learned from our past and present history: how careful we must be not to arouse the anger of other people against ourselves by reprehensible conduct. How much more, then, should we be careful, in our conduct toward a foreign people among whom we live once again, to walk together in love and respect, and needless to say in justice and righteousness. And what do our brethren in Eretz Israel do? Quite the opposite! They were slaves in their land of exile, and they suddenly find themselves with unlimited freedom, the kind of wild freedom to be found only in a country like Turkey. This sudden change has engendered in them an impulse to despotism, as always happens when ‘a slave becomes a king,’ (Proverbs 30:22) and behold they walk with the Arabs in hostility and cruelty, unjustly encroaching on them, shamefully beating them for no good reason, and even bragging about what they do, and there is no one to stand in the breach and call a halt to this dangerous and despicable impulse. To be sure our people are correct in saying that the Arab respects only those who demonstrate strength and courage, but this is relevant only when he feels that his rival is acting justly; it is not the case if there is reason to think his rival’s actions are oppressive and unjust. Then, even if he restrains himself and remains silent forever, the rage will remain in his heart and he is unrivaled in ‘taking vengeance and bearing a grudge.’ (Leviticus 19:18)” “Emet Me-Eretz Yisrael” (Truth from the Land of Israel), 29 May 1891, 21 Iyyar 5651 Translated by Alan Dowty.
-Mandel, Neville J. The Arabs and Zionism before World War I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
-Qumsiyeh, Mazin. Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of hope and empowerment. Pluto Press 2010. Chapter 5 on “Popular Resistance During the Ottoman Rule”
5. Ben Gurion (who became Israel’s first Prime Minister) and Zionist leadership before 1948 war had no intention to drive the native Palestinians out.
As early as 1917 (when Palestine was 96% Christian/Muslim and 3% Jewish), Ben Gurion stated “Within the the next twenty years, we must have a Jewish majority in Palestine.” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 43). In 1936 he stated that the future Israel must “become a force, and the Arabs respect force..these days it is not right but might which prevails. It is more important to have force than justice on one’s side” (Shabtai Teveth, p. 191). In 1937 he said “The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had…MORE than a state, government and sovereignty-this is national consolidation in a free homeland.” (Righteous Victims, p. 142). in 1938, he wrote “With compulsory transfer we have vast areas …. I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it. But compulsory transfer could only be carried out by England …. Had its implementation been dependent merely on our proposal I would have proposed; but this would be dangerous to propose when the British government has disassociated itself from compulsory transfer. …. But this question should not be removed from the agenda because it is central question. There are two issues here : 1) sovereignty and 2) the removal of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them.” (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 117). In Feb 1948 “The war will GIVE us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are ONLY CONCEPTS for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning.” (Benny Morris, p. 170 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 180). And in early May 1948, Ben-Gurion approved establishing the “Transfer Committee” to oversee “the cleaning up (nikui in Hebrew) of the Arab settlements, cultivation of fields and their settlement, and the creation of labor battalion to carry out this work.” (Benny Morris, p. 137). Yitzhak Rabin wrote in his diary soon after Lydda’s and Ramla’s occupation on 10th-11th of July 1948: “After attacking Lydda (later called Lod) and then Ramla, …. What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities … What is to be done with the population?, waving his hand in a gesture which said: Drive them out!. ‘Driving out’ is a term with a harsh ring, …. Psychologically, this was on of the most difficult actions we undertook”. (Soldier Of Peace, p. 140-141 & Benny Morris, p. 207) .David Ben Gurion also recognized that “The (upcoming) war will give us the land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are only concepts for peacetime, and during war they lose all their meaning”. In his diaries he said regarding Palestinian refugees “We must do everything to ensure they never do return” and to the Sunday Times “The old will die and the young will forget”. Under Ben Gurion’s direction, Transfer Committee was officially set up to effect ethnic cleansing. I don’t understand your optimism. “Why should the Arabs make Peace? If I was an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural; we have taken their country.” Ben Gurion in 1956 Quoted by Nahum Goldman, former President of World Zionist Congress, in “The Jewish Paradox” Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1978, p99.
6. Palestinians want/ed to drive Jews and Israel into the sea
(variant: Israel was willing to share)
-Israel Pushed Palestinians into the Sea
-Today 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians around the world are refugees or displaced people. Those who remain in Palestine are in shrinking areas that as of 2011 consisted of 8.3% of our historic homeland (they include areas in the Galilee, the triangle, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, teh Negev, and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli population according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics is 7,510,000 of which 5,984,500 are “Jews and others” (presumably the others are Druze, Russian non-Jews, and similar categories) and 1,525,500 Palestinian Arabs (1). The population of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is 4 million allowed to live on areas A & B, small parts of the 22% of Palestine occupied since 1967 (2). The total area allowed for Palestinian use is 2.5% of the area of pre-1967 Israel (3) plus areas A & B of the West Bank . In total this comes to 2.5% of 78% and 29% of the 22% that is the West Bank and Gaza (4). The total geographic access to all remaining Palestinians(5.525 million) is thus 1.95%+6.38%=8.33% while the Jewish and other population (Zionist preferred) consists of 5.5 million with access to the remaining lands comprising 91.67% of historic Palestine. What this means is that the Jewish population (most of it new immigrants) has access to about 9 times more land per person than the remaining native Palestinians. If we add the Palestinian refugees outside the country (total Palestinian population per PCBS is 10.9 million), the disparity only gets more pronounced. When you consider that before the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, 93% of the land was used by Palestinian natives and now only 8.3%, you can see the colossal level of land theft.
References
1) http://www.cbs.gov.il/www/yarhon/b1_e.htm
2) http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=3&id=1746
3) see http://www.indypendent.org/2007/12/09/israeli-democracy-arabs-need-not-apply
4) http://www.poica.org/pal-in-a-century/pal-in-century.php
7. Tiny Israel fended off large Arab armies in 1948
-Click here for detailed answer
8. Land was purchased, Palestinians were not ethnically cleansed
-See this chapter on refugees in my book which analysis all aspects of this including myths about origins of the refugee catastrophe
- Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York, 1987, p. 223, citing Record of the Knesset, vol. 1, 1949, session 43
- Michael Palumbo, The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from their Homeland. London/Boston: 1987, p. 145.
- See also “How refugee land ended up as Jewish National Fund lands” (and it is not “abandoned” it was confiscated illegally and refugees are being prevented from returning to their lands by an illegal and racist apartheid system).
-With all due respect for the ‘blue box’ by Meron Benvenisty in Haaretz. In Hebrew
- THE MYTH that the Arab refugees fled because the Arab radios urged them to do so was analyzed by Erskine B. Childers in the London Spectator May 12, 1961. An examination of British and US radio monitoring records turned up no such appeals; on the contrary there were appeals and “even orders to the civilians of Palestine, to stay put…”
-see also these books
Abu-Sitta, Salman. Google for writings available on the internet
Benvenisti, Meron. Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948. Translated by Maxine Kaufman-Lacusta. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000.
Sami Hadawi. Bitter Harvest: A modern history of Palestine. Olive Branch Press, New York. 1998.
Masalha, Nur. Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
Flapan, Simha. The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: Pantheon, 1987.
Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford, UK: Oneworld, 2006.
Shlaim, Avi. Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Rogan, Eugene L. and Avi Shlaim, eds. The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Segev, Tom. 1949, The First Israelis. New York: Owl Books by Henry Holt, 1998.
9. There was an Exchange of population, Jews came from Arab Countries to Israel in exchange Arabs left Israel
Variant: Jews of Iraq and Arab Countries were persecuted and expelled
-See Jews of Iraq
-and this
-and this dedicated website
(see for example an articulation of this by an AIPAC introduced bill in Congress that demands that “any explicit reference to the required resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue is matched by a similar explicit reference to the resolution of the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries.” (http://www.standwithus.com/website/news_post.asp?NPI=50)
- Detailed answers are in resources listed under myth 8 above. In brief, when Israel was founded, there were 600,000 Jews and 1.6 million Christians and Muslims in Palestine.n 700-800,000 Palestinians were made refugees by a deliberate process. It had nothing to do with the subsequent events in Poland, Morocco or any other country. Israel upon its foundi9ng ofcourse was interested in bringing Jewish immigrants from many countries (these are not called refugees er international law). To achieve this, the Zionist movement and the nascent state of Israel used all sorts of tactics from propaganda to incitement to even violence to scare Jews to leave their countries and come to occupied Palestine
(thwe new state of Israel). See for example what happened in Iraq articulated by Iraqi Jew Naeim Gilad in his book “Ben Gurion’s Scandals” (Mossad put bombs in front of Jewish community centers and even a synagogue to scare Iraqi Jews to leave). Also it was the Zionist movement that lobbied the US congress and other Western governments not to increase quoatas for European Jewish migration to those countries so as to leave only one door open: migration to Palestine.
10. The UN Partitioned Palestine creating a Jewish state, Arabs rejected this and Zionists Accepted
- See The myth of the UN Creation of Israel Detailed analysis
-In 1947, Private land in Palestine was 93% owned by Christian and Muslim Palestinians and only 7% by Jews (and half of those wee not Zionists but native Palestinians). Today many people like to cite one (but only this one) resolution of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 181) which included a RECOMMENDATION of partition. This resolution is not a binding resolution and was never implemented but let us deal with it (there were many others that also were not implemented including the one about the right of refugees to return to their homes and lands).
-The partition resolution was pushed through by the US in violation of the UN Charter and its mandate to allow self-determination of local people. A referendum was suggested but rejected. The nascent Arab states also suggested a form of one state with equality and protection of all minorities but this was also rejected by the Zionists and the Truman administration. Truman reversed Roosevelt’s policies on this issue because he wanted to win electin (favors wth the Zionist lobby, see Myth 39 below for details and sources). But in any case, the Zionist leadership did not accept most of the points in UNGA 181 (they rejected the borders, they rejected internationalization of Jerusalem, they rejected the admonition not to remove Palestinians from the Jewish state, they rejected economic union etc). Since there was no leadership of the Palestinian people (decimated by the British by the end of 1939), it is meaningless to speak of rejecting this UNGA resolution by Palestinians. It is true that the newly independent Arab countries (many of them puppets of Britain and France at the time) rejected it. There was good reason to reject it by all people of good conscience (it divided a country against the wishes of its inhabitants). We must also recall that the recomemndation was to give 55% of Palestine to a Jewish state and 45% to an aRAB STATE
-The Conciliation Commission got the agreement of both Israel and Arab states on an identical document May 12, 1949 called the Lausanne Protocol. It stated:
“The United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, anxious to achieve as quickly as possible the objectives of the General Assembly resolution of 11 December 1948 (UNGA 194), regarding refugees, the respect for their rights and preservation of their property, as well as territorial and other questions, has proposed to the delegation of Israel and to the delegations of the Arab States that the working document attached hereto (UNGA Partition resolution 181 of 1947) be taken as a basis for discussions with the Commission. The interested delegations have accepted this proposal with the understanding that the exchanges of views which will be carried on by the Commission with the two parties will bear upon the territorial adjustments necessary to the above-indicated objectives.” For full link click here Lausanne, 12 May 1949)
-Israel then rejected the partition boundaries and proposed to take over all of Palestine (but leaving the issue of the West Bank for “discussion”). It also rejected implementing its obligations on the issue of Palestinian refugees .
- In his guidelines to the delegation in Lausanne with respect to negotiating peace, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Moshe Sharett, pointed out that “it behooves us to do so not with haste and trepidation but by revealing strength and the ability to exist even without official peace”. According to Sharett, since official peace was not a vital necessity, Israel had nothing to lose from procrastination. (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: 1987, p. 215)
-In 1970 and 1971, Anwar Sadat approached Israel through the US for terms of peace that were more generous than what Israel accepted a few years later. Israel turned it down and it took a war (October 1973) to jolt them into understanding the limits of military power.
11. Israel respects holy sites of other religions
-See history erased by Haaretz
12. Jerusalem “reunification” let people be treated equal regardless of religion
variant: Israel is not Judaizing Jerusalem/Freedom of religion
-SeeFormer Military Jerusalem Governor confirms: Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians Began Right After the Occupation Arnon Regular, Kol Ha’ir Weekly Magazine, July 26, 2001, Western Jerusalem
-See this detail on status of Jerusalem
13. The US is an “honest broker”
-see Book by Naseer Aruri: Dishonest Broker for history of us involvement
-”Israel’s dependence on the United States is far Greater than suggested by the sum of $3 billion. Israel’s physical existence depends on the Americans in both military and political terms. Without the US, we would not be equipped with the latest fighter planes and all other advanced weapons. Without the American veto, we would long have been expelled from every international organization not to speak of the UN, which would have imposed sanctions on us that would have paralysed Israel’s International trade, since we cannot exist without importing raw materials. For the same reason, it is wrong to divide the American money up into military aid of $1.8 billion and civilian aid of $1.2 billion. What we are getting is really unmarked dollar bills…” Nehemia Stressler, Haaretz, May 12, 1989
14. Islam is intent on taking over the world
A good summary of this Zionist pedaled discourse is in the book “Islamic Imperialism” by Efraim Karsh (2007, Yale University Press, New Haven and London) of which thousands were printed and distributed free to clergy and opinion makers around the US (the Zionist group cryptically named “Institute on Religion and Democracy”, Washington, D.C. was distributing it free). Muslims have been victimized by colonial powers for hundreds of years and have no coherent political or military power. Most of the countries with Muslim majority are ruled by puppets of the US which are now being toppled by popular demand. US forces are in over 140 countries (at least two dozen Muslim majority). A lot of the fundamentalist groups that are now used as evidence of this pan-ISlamic desire to take on the world were created or supported by the West. A religion that is the faith and inspiration of 1.6 billion people is like Christianity (2 billion people). Such a large number of people means by nature that some are bad people who use their religion for bad purposes. But in actually, the big wars in the world had nothing to do with religion (WWI and WWII). People use religion occasionally such as happened during the the Crusades and now with Zionist colonization of Palestine.
15. “Israel’s centrality in Jewish life” manifest by the creed developed and advocated by Zionists “Am Yisrael Chai” meaning People of Israel (=Jews) live.
- For this deep psychological pathos that puts Jews above any other humans, see these books
Ellis, Marc, Out of the Ashes.
Braverman, Mark. Fatal Embrace: Christians, Jews, and the Search for Peace in the Holy Land. Austin: Synergy Books, 2010.
Kimmerling, Baruch. The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: Society, Society and the Military. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Meyer, Hajo G. The End of Judaism: An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. G.MeyerBooks, 2007
Nathan, Susan. The Other Side of Israel: My Journey across the Jewish-Arab Divide. New York: Doubleday, 2005.
Reinhart, Tanya. Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948. New York: Seven Stories, 2002.
- also see My one and only Love
- and Response to Rosenfeld
16. Zionism had a positive influence on world affairs
-Bishara Bahbah and Linda Butler, Israel and Latin America: The military Connection, ST Martin’s Press, NY, 1986
Milton Jamail, Margo Gutierrez, It’s no secret: Israel’s military involvement in central America,
Association of Arab-American University Graduates, 1986
-Zionist Terrorists Arrested Inside Mexican Congress
Israel hand seen in Ivorian clash (and other strives around the world)
-”BERN, Switzerland – The Swiss government said today it had caught Israel’s spy agency trying to bug telephones on the outskirts of the Swiss capital. It was the second highly publicized Mossad bungle to embarrass the Israeli government in recent months. The espionage effort was aimed at foreigners living in Switzerland, federal prosecutor Carla del Ponte said, without elaborating. Del Ponte denied Israeli media reports that Iranian diplomats were the target of the alleged spying. She said the targets were not diplomats. Switzerland has demanded an apology from Israel, the Foreign Minstry said. It said it had had no immediate response from Israel. … At a news conference in Bern, del Ponte said five Israeli agents were detained as they tried to plant the bugs a week ago. All but one were released and are believed to have left the country. In Jerusalem today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that an Israeli citizen had been arrested in Switzerland, but declined to comment further. ” Another mess for Mossad: Israeli spy agency accused of bugging Swiss phones. The Associated Press 26 February 1998. by Irene Harnischberg
-”A senior Israeli intelligence officer says that the hit team arrested in Switzerland were on the trail of two businessmen with Hezbollah sympathies. As contacts continued between Israel and Switzerland yesterday to free a Mossad agent detained in Berne last month, a senior Mossad officer said the true purpose of the bungled operation had been assassination and not bugging as claimed. ” March 3 1998. Times of London
- There is some evidence that World War One was expanded instead of ending in peace because Zionists pushed Brits and French to continue promising to get US to enter the war IF THEY gave them Palestine after the war. Samuel Landman, a noted British Zionist, carefully articulated in 1936 the machination of the leading Zionists on this front (http://desip.igc.org/1939sLandman.htm Samuel Landman Great Britain, The Jews and Palestine , 1936 New Zionist Press)
Michael Berkowitz, 2003. Nationalism, Zionism and ethnic mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and beyond. Brill Academic Publishers
Balfour was a reward for the Zionists getting the US to enter the war entry
The Balfour Declaration and the Zimmermann Note By John Cornelius, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 1997, pages 18-20 http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0897/9708018.html
Lord Sydenham of the British House of Deputies replied prophetically to Balfour: “… the harm done by dumping down an alien population upon an Arab country – Arab all around in the hinterland – may never be remedied … what we have done is, by concessions, not to the Jewish people but to a Zionist extreme section, to start a running sore in the East, and no one can tell how far that sore will extend.” (UN: The Origins And Evolution Of Palestine Problem, section IV)
-see also The origin of the Balfour Declaration
-Israel’s industrial and military espionage in the US
17. The 1967 war was a defensive war by Israel against enemies who wanted to destroy it
-Alan Hart on the 1967 propaganda and myth
-http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/06/04/six_day_war/
-Moshe Dayan described kibbutz residents who pressed Israel to take Syria’s Golan Heights in a 1997 New York Times interview: “They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land … We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was … The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.”
-From POLITICIDE, Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, by Baruch Kimmerling, Verso, 2003, pages 57-59):
“In May 1967, Gamal Abd al-Nasser made his biggest political miscalculation. After a long and bloody intervention in the Yemeni civil war, he had lost prestige in the Arab world. In order to regain that prestige and affirm Egyptian sovereignty, he made two spectacular moves: he ordered Egyptian military forces to cross the Suez Canal and, at the same time, demanded the withdrawal of UN forces deployed along the 1957 ceasefire lines. After the Yemeni debacle, the Egyptian army was certainly not ready for a war with Israel, but the Israeli General Staff had planned for many years to destroy the Egyptian military, which had been re-equipped and restructured by the Soviet Union after the 1956 War. Nasser’s move was exploited by the Israeli Government, which depicted it as a causus belli and a real threat to Israel’s security. The Israeli armed forces mobilized their full reserve system. While the two armies were positioned face-to-face, the Israeli Government, headed by Levy Eshkol, hesitated, doubting both the reality of the Egyptian threat and the necessity of resolving it militarily rather than diplomatically. Another consideration was the severe economic hardship and social strain that would result from the prolonged mobilization of almost the entire male labor force. While the government weighed its options, military officers (including Sharon) seized the opportunity to convince the public that Israel faced a genuine threat to its existence. Demonstrations called on Eshkol to quit. The increasing public pressure in addition to the hidden pressure from many on the general staff led to the establishment of a new war-oriented Cabinet that included the hawkish Moshe Dayan as Minister of Defense and, for the first time, members of the ultra-nationalist party Herut, headed by Menachem Begin. The war was so well planned and prepared that at dawn, on June 5, the Israeli military intelligence and air force knew the precise location of every Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian aircraft and destroyed most of them on the ground in several hours. Sharon, in his
autobiography, briefly mentioned that “on the morning of June 5, Israel’s air force was to launch a pre-preemptive attack on Egypt’s airfields.” When Israeli infantry and tank brigades attacked Egyptian military concentrations, fortifications, and bases, they already had almost absolute air superiority. One of the most significant myths rooted in the collective memory of both the Israeli and Western public is that during the 1967 War (or as the Israelis arrogantly called it, “the Six Day War”), Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, a belief that is used to justify the legitimacy of the occupation to this day.
-Both Yitzhak Rabin and Ezer Weizman clearly allude in their autobiographies to the fact that, prior to the attack of June 1967, the Israeli general staff organized a putsch, and barred any and all political solutions to the crisis. Rabin, Chief of Staff, admitted that: “Nasser didn’t want war. The two divisions he sent to Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war He knew it and we knew it.” (Le Monde, February 28, 1968).
Levy Eshkol himself admitted that “the Egyptian layout in Sinai and the general build up there testified to a militarily defensive Egyptian set-up, south of Israel” (Yediot Ahronot, October 16, 1967).
-On August 8, 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, defending the invasion of Lebanon, said: “In June 1967 we again had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”(New York Times, August 21, 1982).”
18. The International Solidarity Movement supports violence
- see Wikepedia, a bit biased but has links
-See The ISM Website
19. The Road map is an international effort for peace in the Middle East and Palestinians reject it
-The road map is 2218 words and lacks four key words: International Law and Human Rights. It was drafted in the State Department supposedly based on the speech Bush gave in 2002 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020624-3.html ). Bush’s speech writers at the time were both Zionists: Michael Gerson and David Frum.
-The writings of Karen Kwiatkowski who retired from the Pentagon clearly documents the stranglehold of Zionist “group think” on US policy. It is claimed by official US sources that the State Department wrote the Road Map. If that is the case, this would fall under the purview of then under secretary for Political Affairs (from 2001 to 2005) Marc Grossman who is also Zionist. Other Zionists who were likely involved or at least had to give their blessings include Elliott Abrams (National Security Council Advisor) and Richard Haass (Director of Policy Planning at the State Department).
-Despite this bias, Arafat and the PNC accepted the road map and the Palestinian Authority obeys it (getting back in line under threat of withholding their tax money occasionally). Sharon said he would accept it with 14 reservations that basically make it meaningless. The Israeli government violated it regularly most conspicuously on the issue of expanding settlements and refusing to keep the territorial integrity of the WB and Gaza: restrictions on movement etc increased even started to build a wall which is contrary to this document.
20. Palestinians militants use human shields and send their kids to be killed for propaganda
-such offensive and racist statements are beneath contempt as no mother or father or human being sacrifices their children or their relatives for public relations
-The reality
21. Arabs only understand the language of force
-Check this
22. Zionists teach peace and democracy, Palestinian Society teaches hate
- Anti-Arab racism and incitement in Israel
- Nathan Brown of George Washington University investigated Palestinian textbooks, his full report is posted here
- see also related Report by Dr. Fouad Moughrabi
- See Education and hate Assay on who teaches what to whom, July 2004. Also published in French as Education et haine
-A study by The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs concluded Israeli textbooks and children’s literature promote racism and hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs. (See http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0999/9909019.html.)
Jewish Settlers’ on the record: racism and bigotry funded by US taxpayers
- see http://www.qumsiyeh.org/nuritpeledelhanan/ speeches and articles
- Former Chief Rabbi advocates genocide (this is not an average Israeli Rabbi, this person carries lots of weight and the position was created based on Israeli state laws)
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6987.shtml
- The myth of incitement in Palestinian schools (this is an oft repeated smear by Zionists trying to distract world attention from continued colonization activities and ethnic cleansing of native Palestinians)
http://www.palestine-pmc.com/details.asp?cat=1&id=911
http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/47093.pdf
http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/pal_children.pdf
http://www.geocities.com/nathanbrown1/CAJE.htm
- http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1180527966693&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull
- Israel is as a Theocratic state whee there is no separation between state and religion, see http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Politics/relig.html
- Yesha Rabbinical Council: “During time of war, enemy has no innocents Ma’ariv 30 July 2006 “The Yesha Rabbinical Council announced in response to an IDF attack in Kfar Qanna that “according to Jewish law, during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as ‘innocents’ of the enemy.” All of the discussions on Christian morality are weakening the spirit of the army and the nation and are costing us in the blood of our soldiers and civilians,” the statement said. (Efrat Weiss) ” http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/1,7340,L-3283720,00.html (Yesha is the name given to the council that oversees the 450,000 settlers in the West Bank)
- See also “Israel’s house of horrors” By Ali Abunimah http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6975.shtml
- Harvard Lawyer Alan Dershowitz’ calls for War crimes
Martin Sherman calls for ending Palestinian rights by giving them money and relocating them all
-”Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.”Benjamin Netanyahu told students at Bar-Ilan University in 1989
- “In the old city of Jerusalem they (Palestinians) are swarming like ants. They should go to hell — and the Messiah will speed them on their way,” Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, leader of the influential Shas party in a weekly sermon broadcast on army radio (Reuters, July 27, 2001).
Ovadia Yosef: “The role of the Gentiles – is to serve the Jews”
-Another investigation by Le Monde Diplomatique concluded the textbooks’ real error was to refute Israel’s version of Palestinian history. (Log onto http://mondediplo.com /2001/07/11textbook.)
-While many Israelis and supporters terrorize Palestinians, they demonize all Palestinians as terrorists. While they teach intolerance and hate, they claim Palestinians teach their kids hate. Human Rights Watch documented the discrimination against Palestinian-Arab children in Israel’s schools. (Log onto http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/israel2/).
-An article by Dr. Peled-Elhanan of the Hebrew University put it this way: “Palestinians, both the lawful citizens of the state and the ones living under occupation, are presented stereotypically, in racist vocabulary and racist visuals, as a demographic threat . . . their discrimination is represented as a national necessity. . . occupied
territories are depicted as part of the state of Israel but their Palestinian inhabitants, cities and cultural sites are missing from maps, photographs and graphs. The books promote the ideal of an Arab-free land as a condition for the existence of the Jewish state.”
- Israel’s education system http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/2507
-Israeli company fires 21 Arab employees at once and gets away with its racism http://972mag.com/israeli-supermarket-fires-21-arab-employees-at-once/
23. Palestinians don’t use nonviolent resistance but instead blow themselves up with innocent civilians
See the detailed in my book Popular Resistance in Palestine
Statement to Israeli public on non-violence
24. Israel takes great care not to harm civilians and never targets civilians; Israeli army most ethical army
- See Targeting Civilians
- “As a young soldier serving in the Israeli army, I was ordered to commit grave human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My platoon meted out collective punishment on Palestinian communities, shot and killed unarmed Palestinian civilians, and enforced prolonged curfews on Palestinian villages. I witnessed the arbitrary destruction of Palestinian houses, property and agricultural land. These acts were not rare occurrences, nor were they the result of overly cruel soldiers. It was part of the norm; a habit that an Occupation soldier gets used to doing. These daily occurrences constituted, as I later understood, war crimes.” http://alawda.rso.wisc.edu/why.htm
- “I participated in the fighting on Temple Mount. I was and also shot at the demonstrations in Umm Al Fahm. But the worst event was the riots in Tiberias. Hundreds of violent Jews closed a main road and also threw firebombs at us. They almost set our car on fire, but luckily we put the fire out on time. There was stone throwing, firecrackers, and glass bottles were thrown and broke between our feet. They crossed all the red lines, my people attacked me with enormous force, and it hurts. The violence there was just like in Umm Al Fahm. According to the open-fire regulations, when firebombs are thrown, there is authorization to shoot. But we handle Jewish riots differently. To a demo like this we know in advance that we come without weapons. These are the orders from above, and we used only gas”. Tal Etlinger, a border police soldier, Yediot Aharonot, 17/11/2000 (translated by Irit Katriel, iritka@internet-zahav.net.il)
- “The Israeli soldiers who volunteers to serve in the occupied territories are considered heroes, while in truth their volunteering can be compared to that of German volunteers who served in the SS” Moshe Zimmerman, at the time Chair of Department of Germanic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, interview Yerushalayim, 4/28/1995. From the “Founding Myths of Modern Israel by Roger Garaudy
- We killed (Palestinian) police for revenge, Israeli soldiers confess By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem, The Independent
Maariv in Hebrew published admissions of Israeli soldiers to committing war crimes
- Palestinians Continue to be used as human shields (Video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tomdEkOgdKU
- Use of Palestinians as human shields
- Amnesty International 2006 report on Israeli violations of Human Rights
- Article by Jonathan Cook on Targeting Civilians http://mostlywater.org/node/8568
- Israeli army forces women to strip at checkpoints http://www.imemc.org/article/49215
- Israel hits center of Red Cross http://whatreallyhappened.com/IMAGES/ambulancehit.jpg
- American NLG Lawyers Findings that Israel Violated International Law, US Domestic Law in Gaza
- Statistics on number of people killed
- Israeli who revealed “medieval-style” torture of Palestinians faces virulent backlash
25. Israel attacks infrastructure only if it is linked to terrorists
- Lebanon war
- Amnesty Report
- Wanton Destruction of Infrastructure and homes
26. The Deir Yassin Massacre (one of hundreds committed during the ethnic cleansing of 1947-1949) was committed by rogue elements and not mainstream Zionists
- What happened in Deir Yassin
- When the Haganah command learned of the plan of the Irgun and Lehi to conquer Deir Yassin, David Shaltiel, Haganah Commander in Jerusalem, asked them to coordinate the timing of the operation with the scheduled renewed assault on Kastel. He dispatched identical letters to Mordechai Raanan (Irgun Commander in Jerusalem) and Yehoshua Zetler (Lehi Commander in Jerusalem), in which he gave their operation his approval:
To: Shapira (code-name of Zetler)
From: District Commander
I have learned that you intend to carry out an operation against Deir Yassin. I would like to call your attention to the fact that the conquest and continued occupation of Deir Yassin is one of the stages in our overall plan. I have no objection to your carrying out the operation on condition that you are capable of holding on to it. If you are incapable of doing so, I caution you against blowing up the village, since this will lead to the flight of the inhabitants and subsequent occupation of the ruins and the abandoned homes by enemy forces. This will make things difficult rather than contributing to the general campaign, and reoccupation of the site will entail heavy casualties for our men. An additional argument I would like to cite is that if enemy forces are drawn to the place, this will disrupt the plan to establish an aerodrome there. Ezel website
27. The massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 in Lebanon was not the responsibility of the Israelis
- Details on website indict Sharon
- Robert Fisk explains
- Qumsiyeh Review of book on subject
28. The lies and distortions about the Lavon affair
- From Mideastweb files
- Israel’s second Prime Minister Sharret had interesting admissions in his diary including about the Lavon affair, in which Israeli provocateurs exploded bombs in U.S. cultural centers and diplomatic establishments in Cairo and Alexandria in 1954 after being told “to break the West’s confidence in the existing (Nasser) regime… The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origins should be totally covered.” The idea was to provoke mayhem, increase Jewish immigration and with other acts eventually provoke a war to acquire more territory (which happened in 1967). As retired US foreign service officer Richard Curtis wrote in the WRMEA (March 18, 1985): “When the provocateurs (young Egyptian-born Jews trained in Israel and returned to their homeland) were caught and tried, Sharett publicly denied Israeli complicity and accused the Egyptians of ‘vicious hostility to… the Jewish people.’” But in his diaries Sharett not only admitted the affair but lamented Israel’s “unleashing of the basest instincts of hate and revenge…” In another part of the diary we see this interesting tidbit: “Ben Gurion reported to the cabinet … how our four youngsters (Israeli paratrooper reservists) captured the Beduin boys one by one, how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one after the other… When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer… came to tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion.”
29. Martin Luther King Jr supported Israel and Zionism and equated criticism of Zionism with anti-Semitism
See Martin Luther King
30. Israel was trying to save Arab Jews
- Details on Arab Jews
See also the Lavon Affair (up)
31. Palestinians and other Arabs largely rejoiced after 9/11 attacks/Variant is that Muslims do not denounce terrorism
- See Arabs and Palestinians on September 11]
- 9/11 statements
32. Barak Made a generous offer at Camp David, Arafat rejected it and went back and started a bloody intifada
- See Robert Malley’s Fictions About the Failure at Camp David
- Uri Avnery on 12 conventional lies [http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Palestine-Remembered/Story658.html]
- Gush Shalom data
- EI myth 5
- Electronic Intifada
- Cactus 1948
- IAP
- Mideast Facts
- Gush Shalom
- Pal Remembered
- Ottawa summary
- Aaron David Miller, a senior negotiator on the Clinton team at Camp David and an Orthodox Jew revealed that rather than serve as a true mediator in peace negotiations, successive U.S. administrations including Clinton’s have acted as “Israel’s attorney.” Kathleen Christison, “Anatomy of A Frame-Up: Camp David Redux, Counterpunch, August 15, 2005. On line here
- Press release showing that the sides were really close to hammering out an agreement at Taba which was a continuation of the negotiations until Israel withdrew (not Palestinians)
- “The pre-eminent obstacle to peace is Israel’s colonization of Palestine. There were just a few hundred settlers in the West Bank and Gaza when I became president, but the Likud government expanded settlement activity after I left office. President Ronald Reagan condemned this policy, and reaffirmed that Resolution 242 remained “the foundation stone of America’s Middle East peace effort.” President George H.W. Bush even threatened to reduce American aid to Israel. Although President Bill Clinton made strong efforts to promote peace, a massive increase of settlers occurred during his administration, to 225,000, mostly while Ehud Barak was prime minister. Their best official offer to the Palestinians was to withdraw 20 percent of them, leaving 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 5 percent of the occupied land.” President Jimmy Carter
-”The narrative blaming Yasser Arafat now joins a whole string of myths: the Tel Hai myth, the myth of the runaway refugees in 1948, the myth of the War of Independence as a defensive war that broke out because of an invasion by Arab armies, the myth of the few against the many, and the myth of the liberation of the homeland from the British boot – just to mention a few of the many myths that have been created here to deal with the reality that gave birth to many crises and second thoughts about the situation.” Challenging the Camp David myth, By Meron Benvenisti. Ha’aretz, Thursday, August 02, 2001
33. Christians, Jews and others should support Israel because of the Promised land/Bible issues.
-See Web site on Christian Zionism
- Hagee preaches support for Israel
- see also these Links of Palestinian Christian and others who truly follow Christ’s teachings
34. The people of the West Bank benefited from Israeli rule
- In September 1967 Moshe Dayan told senior staff in the Israeli Occupation Army in the West Bank that some 200,000 Palestinian Arabs had left the West Bank and Gaza Strip: “we must understand the motives and causes of the continued emigration of the Arabs, from both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and not to undermine these cause after all, we want to create a new map.” (Benny Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 338).
-”The guideline of our policy has always been the idea that a permanent situation of no peace and a latent war is the best situation for us, and that it must be maintained at all costs. … we are becoming stronger year by year in a situation of impending conflict where it is possible that actual fighting may break out from time to time. Such wars will usually be short and the results guaranteed in advance, since the gap between us and the Arabs is increasing. In this way we shall move on from occupation to further occupation. … this criminally mischievous policy has led us into the crisis we are living through today…We have not been seeking peace for twenty-five years — all declarations to that effect have been no more than coloured statements or deliberate lies. There is of course no assurance that we could have made peace with the Arabs if we had wanted to. However, it has to be heavily emphasized that we have not only made no attempts to seek peace, but have deliberately and with premeditation, sabotaged every possibility of doing so.” (Yeshayahu Leibowitz, 30 November 1973)
-From former Israel Attorney General Michael Ben Yair who wrote on 3/3/2002: “We enthusiastically chose to become a colonial society, ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from Israel to the occupie territories, engaging in theft and finding justification for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories, we developed two judicial systems: one – progressive, liberal – in Israel; and the other – cruel, injurious – in the occupied territories. In effect, we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories immediately following their capture. That oppressive regime exists to this day.”
35. Christians are leaving Palestine because of persecution by Muslims not because of Zionist occupation and colonization
- See links and resources from all main Palestinian Christian denominations and other Christians around the world.
- The Christian presence in Palestine under Israeli military rule. A short clip from the award-winning film from Occupation 101 titled Voices of the Silenced Majority.
- Palestinian Christians make action against construction of Israel’s separation barrier on Palestinian Christian lands in Wadi Nis village (South of Bethlehem area,) marking Good Friday
-Christians and Muslims join hands to march on Palm Sunday insisting