Remembering Al Nakba 2

Dramatic video shows Palestinians, Syrians entering Israeli-occupied Golan Heights
RT @avinunu: Reminder: UN Sec Council Res 497 (1981) declares Israel’s annexation of Syria’s Golan to be “null & void” http://is.gd/4DDQQ5
Interactive map of Palestine villages destroyed in Nakba

Related Links

A Historical Survey of Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895 – 1947
Legitimization or Implementation: On the UN Partition Plan The Paradox of the 1947 UN Partition Plan
Interactive Map: Escalation of settler violence
Nakba: Why did Israeli historians whitewash an artillery attack?
Tracing All That Remains Since Nakba
FAQ on Plan Dalet
Refugees and Zionist propaganda
Nakba Day 2011: The Other Exodus
Ethan Bronner’s Nakba denial in The New York Times

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces began in late 1947, so that by 15 May 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had already been expelled from their villages and cities before a single soldier from any Arab army had intervened. The exodus from, for example, Jaffa began in early 1948 after Zionist terrorists belonging to the Stern Gang set off a massive car bomb destroying the Jaffa municipality building on 4 January (this is all well-documented in books by right-wing Israeli historian Benny Morris, among others). Many villages in the north of Palestine were also depopulated around that time.

Rightwing group publishes Nakba denial booklet
Occupation & Nakba: Interview with Ariella Azoulay & Adi Ophir
New video shows Israeli soldiers firing as mass marchers enter Golan
Pro-Palestinian rallies turn deadly on Israel’s borders : the ABC Radio Australia should be ashamed of its bias toward the zionist entity in this zioshillery.
Zionists’ ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Haifa exposed
Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine by Walid Khalidi

‘Looking at what was happening on the ground during December 1947-15 May 1948 was teh first track we followed in examining the Israeli version of the events of this period; the second track was to challenge the Israeli lie of evacuation orders head on. If the orders were broadcast as the government of Israel, its top leadership and the Kimches et al. insisted, and if these orders reached hundreds of villages and a dozen towns causing their evacuation by hundreds of thousands, surely some tract or echo of these orders should be on record. The obvious place to look was the back files of the Near East monitoring stations of the British and American governments (the BBC Cyprus listening post and the CIA-sponsored Foreign Broadcast Information Service), both of which covered not only all the radio stations in the Near East, but also the local newspapers as well. I therefore checked the BBC monitoring archives at the British Museum, London, and published the result in my article “Why Did the Palestinians Leave?” (Middle East Forum July 1959). Not only was there no hint of any Arab evacuation order, but the Arab radio stations had urged the Palestinians to hold on and be steadfast whereas it was the Jewish radio stations of the Haganah and the Irgun and Stern Gang which had been engaged in incessant and strident psychological warfare against the Arab civilian population.’

Cheering Netanyahu’s Intransigence
Excellent history of Herzl’s zionism and British scheming: Victor Kattan “From Coexistence to Conquest”
The Population Transfer Committee: November 1937
By the close of 1937, the JNF-linked Jewish Agency had established the Population Transfer Committee, and in 1940, director of the JNF Lands Department Yosef Weitz wrote:

It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples.… If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us … There is no room for compromises … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer all of them, save perhaps for Bethlehem, Nazareth and old Jerusalem. Not one village must be left, not one [bedouin] tribe … For this goal funds will be found … And only after this transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers and the Jewish problem will cease to exist. There is no other solution.[89]

Land Without a People – by Michael Palumbo

‘There is no hope that this new Jewish state will survive,
to say nothing of develop, if the Arabs are as numerous as
they are today.” So spoke Menahem Ussishkin, at 75, one of
the oldest and most respected Zionist leaders. His audience
on the afternoon of 12 June 1938 was the Executive Commit-
tee of the Jewish Agency, which was considering a plan by
the British administration to divide Palestine between
Arabs and Jews. For decades there had been strife between
the two ethnic groups in the mandate territory and now the
British administration was considering partition as the
best way to end the conflict between the Jewish colonists
and the indigenous Arab population. But partition would
leave over 200,000 Arabs in the proposed Zionist state, and
the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine was
grappling with the problem of how best to get rid of them.

None of the members of the Executive disagreed with
Ussishkin when he stated: ‘The worst is not that the Arabs
would comprise 45 or 50 per cent of the population of the
new state but that 75 per cent of the land is owned by
Arabs.’ This land was desired for the waves of Jewish immi-
grants who would populate the Jewish state. There were many
other reasons why the Zionists wished to get rid of the
Arabs. Ussishkin claimed that with a large Arab population
the Jewish state would face enormous problems of internal
security and that there would be chaos in government. ‘Even
a small Arab minority in parliament could disrupt the
entire order of parliamentary life.’

The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement By Itzhak Galnoor

In late 1937, a Population Transfer Committee was established in the Jewish Agency to prepare material for the hearings of the Woodhead commision. The main document suggested two goals: reducing the Arab population in the territory intended for the Jewish state, and freeing agricultural land for Jewish settlement. I talso contained a detailed plan for the voluntary transfer of about 100,000 Arab farmers to the Gaza district, Transjordan, and Syria. The committee found it very difficult to reach clear recommendations and made do with the general declaration that “the transfer of Arab population on a large scale is a precondition for establishing the state.”

A Critique of Benny Morris by Nur Masalha

Video: Tel Aviv exhibit features testimony by Nakba perpetrators

The Common Archive aims “to create an audio-visual online archive of Jewish executor’s testimonies of the 1948 crimes with cross references to testimonies of Palestinian refugees and other historical visual data (maps, photos, etc).”

Palestine / Israel Links

Palestine Papers: Why I blew the whistle Ziyad Clot:

The “peace negotiations” were a deceptive farce, whereby biased terms were unilaterally imposed by Israel and systematically endorsed by the US and EU capitals. Far from enabling a negotiated fair end of the conflict, the pursuit of the Oslo process has deepened Israeli segregationist policies and justified the tightening of the security control imposed on the Palestinian population as well as its geographical fragmentation. Far for preserving the land on which to build a State, it has tolerated the intensification of the colonisation of the Palestinian territory. Far from maintaining a national cohesion, the process I participated in, albeit briefly, proved to be instrumental in creating and aggravating divisions amongst Palestinians. In its most recent developments, it became a cruel enterprise from which the Palestinians of Gaza have suffered the most. Last but not least, these negotiations excluded for the most part the great majority of the Palestinian people: the 7 million-Palestinian refugees. My experience over those 11 months spent in Ramallah confirms in fact that the PLO, given its structure, was not in a position to represent all Palestinian rights and interests.

Israelis attack Palestinian funeral
Palestinian & jewish voices speak at Sydney conference for BDS against Israeli occupation & apartheid
Israel is not an island : The Arab Revolution is knocking at Israel’s door
Australia, where ‘human rights’ festivals ban protest art against Israeli oppression
Bloody Sunday as Israel kills 21 in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria
Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk asks court to cancel his ‘Jewish’ status
Arab Spring headaches for Barack Obama : “When Israel kills demonstrators is that the same as when Syria or Libya does the same?”

Other Links

Australia is now in the business of turning away refugees.
The “dodgy dossier” : the truth will out

A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq’s weapons programme was drawn up “to make the case for war”, flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister’s chief spin doctor.

In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: “We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care.”

His evidence is devastating, as it is the first time such a senior intelligence officer has directly contradicted the then government’s claims about the dossier – and, perhaps more significantly, what Tony Blair and Campbell said when it was released seven months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Minister for Indigenous Affairs needs to be Indigenous
Existence, Validity, Recognition :

Recognising Indigenous Australians as the first Australians is set to become next great debate on the national agenda. Acknowledged as a “Once in 50 year opportunity” by Prime Minister Julia Gilard it is with reserved optimism and nervous anticipation I, like many Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians await the 2011 government proposal and subsequent 2013 Referendum. With only 8 of the past 44 constitutional amendments being successful, it will take a movement at the ballot boxes reminiscent of the 1967 Referendum in which more than 90% of Australians voted in favor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders being recognised as Australian citizens.

Omar Barghouti on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel

Omar Barghouti has toured the US during April 2011 inspiring activists with his talks on boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel and promoting his new book “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions : The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights”. His tour almost didn’t eventuate due to inexplicable delays in granting his visa by the US Consulate in Jerusalem. Here’s some of Barghouti’s recent pithy statements about BDS and Israel.

“Some people say BDS is not fair and not effective … Israel is a democracy. On almost every level, Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group. The Palestinian-led BDS movement is calling Israel an apartheid state, and the main refutation of this is that Israel allows Palestinians to vote.

Apartheid is not defined according to whims of this or that scholar. Apartheid is when the discrimination is legalized. Now there are commissions to accept new residents into communities. Imagine an Irish White guy saying: ‘We don’t accept this Latino guy; his food smells funny, he doesn’t fit?’ But in Israel now it’s legal.

Israel is losing the battle for hearts and minds at the grassroots level. It maintains connections with the elite, but competes with Iran and North Korea as the most hated countries in the world”.

Barghouti highlights the hypocrisy of zionist opposition to BDS:

‘Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League repeats the mantra that by advocating comprehensive Palestinian rights, including full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the UN-sanctioned right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were forcibly displaced, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is “de-legitimizing” Israel and threatening its very “existence.” This claim is frequently made by Israel lobby groups in an obvious attempt to muddy the waters and to push beyond the pale of legitimate debate the mere statement of facts about and analysis of Israel’s occupation, denial of refugee rights, and institutionalized system of racial discrimination, which basically fits the UN definition of apartheid.

Specifically, what is often objected to is the demand for full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. One can only wonder, if equality ends Israel’s “existence,” what does that say about Israel? Did equality destroy South Africa? Did it “delegitimize” whites in the Southern states of the U.S. after segregation was outlawed? The only thing that equality, human rights and justice really destroy is a system of injustice, inequality and racial discrimination.

The “delegitimization” scare tactic, widely promoted by Israel’s well-oiled pressure groups, has not impressed many in the West, in fact, particularly since its most far-reaching claim against BDS is that the movement aims to “supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle” — hardly the most evil or disquieting accusation for anyone even vaguely interested in democracy, a just peace, and equal rights.’

Palestine / Israel Links

Map of areas in the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea in the Occupied West Bank which are closed to Palestinians (B’t Selem) [pdf]
DCI-Palestine: There were 220 Palestinian children (12-17 years) in Israeli detention at the end of April 2011. [pdf]
Protection of Civilians Weekly Report, 27 April – 3 May 2011
Kiri Te Kanawa brings shame on New Zealand – GPJA
James Petras M.I.A.

Precisely for that reason, the lobby must be confronted. It is a component of ruling class power, and to deny its influence will not fly. But behind and among it are blood-merchants, and none of them care about Palestinians – nor, one suspects, do Palestinians’ latest allies among the “realist” policy intelligentsia. American capital barely cares enough about Israeli militarism and occupation to dump its money into J Street, let alone to crash the hammer down on Zionist malfeasance in the Middle East. They do not and will not care about Palestinians until their interests are threatened more directly. The way to do that is simple. It’s by linking demands with others threatened by Israeli militarism, by American imperialism, and by capitalism more broadly, and making the costs of maintaining an Israeli client state in the Middle East higher than the costs of giving it up. Misguided fairy tales like Petras peddles simply won’t do in forging the political project that can lead to freedom in the Middle East. Perhaps at this hour it’s time for some realism. Which doesn’t mean defeatism. Just because the enemy is big does not mean we can’t bring it down.

Revealing Gaza’s avant garde beauty

Other Links

WikiLeaks: Grand Jury Hearing Opens in US

Innoculate : New Hasbaroid Epidemic Imminent

Prepare the disinfectant and scrubbing brush. Richard Silverstein alerts us to the impending arrival of a new wave of hasbaroids, targeting major news sites, and emanating from Hasbara Central at the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

Silverstein’s friend responded to an email solicitation and

received this official communique from the ministry with talking points about Operation Cast Lead which s/he was to use in her/his propaganda efforts. Among the links was a Peter Beaumont Cif piece. The following were identified as “target sites”: the Times, the Guardian, Sky News, BBC, Yahoo!News, Huffington Post, and the Dutch Telegraaf. Also targeted were other media sites in Dutch, Spanish, German and French considered critical of the invasion.

The Israeli marketing strategy is to blindside the world with glowing information. This is in line with current theory about positive messaging, exemplified in this Economist article – ‘Denial is useless. Spread happy truths instead.’

How to counteract this pernicious propaganda? spread the truth and expose the perfidy of the hasbara strategy itself. Refer to this latest infamy and plans at Israel’s strategic hasbara stinktank, the Reut Institute. Ensure your facts are presented in complete and unassailable terms – accounts which support human rights, freedom and justice are far more happy truths than tendentious sickly icing on a poisonous cake of Israel manifest destiny, technological superiority, privilege and oppression.

Related Resources to Use to Combat Israeli Propaganda

Read the Palestine Papers which show Israel has never been serious about peace.
Download the Veritas Handbook, an excellent resource for activists for Palestine.
Download the Goldstone Report and familiarise yourself with it.
Read the UNHRC investigation into Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza Flotilla.
Search the Electronic Intifada site to find other information to support your arguments and follow @intifada on Twitter
Read Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”.
Read Ali Abunimah’s One Country, A Bold Proposal To End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and follow @avinunu on Twitter
Read the main sources which define Israeli apartheid.
Familiarise yourself with the latest statistics about Palestinians’ real wishes. Also see here.
Participate in the Palestinian boycott of Israel – the cure for apartheid is BDS, BDS and more BDS
The anti-semitism inherent in the anti-boycott movement.
Join Facebook groups which support Palestinian rights and the boycott of apartheid Israel.

Israeli land theft in the West BankUse Maps to Explain the Outrageous Extent of Israeli Land Theft

Peace Now West Bank map January 2011PDF full size map

Also note the graph on the left which shows clearly that colonization peaked during the so-called “Oslo Peace Process,” and again during the Camp David Peace charade hosted by US president Bill Clinton.

This provides a fresh evidence, if it were needed, that as far as Israel is concerned the negotiations were an exercise in deception and fraud.

Adalah interactive map and database, with histories of the various settlements.
Peace Now map
Pictorial representation.
Jordan Valley Access and Closure Map (OCHA)
ATLAS OF THE CONFLICT : Israel – Palestine
Map and Grab: The Foreign Quest for Palestinian Land Dr.Salman Abu Sitta Palestine, Britain and Empire c. 1841-1948

Please feel free to add counter-strategy suggestions in the comments of this post.

Palestine / Israel Links

Palestinian elections: Recent polls show mixed signals
Peter Beinart says what we all know
The zio-dominated Knesset is poised to pass laws criminalising boycotts against apartheid Israel, ironically likely to implode on all Israeli citizens.
Friedman the imperialist: White House disgusted with Israel
Israelis call on int’l artists to boycott Eilat festival
Gaza celebrates fall of Mubarak
Palestinians to wind up peace talks unit after leaks
Silwan’s Captive Children
Israel closes embassies over terror fears
Action Alert for the Children of Palestine | Continuous Updates of News About Violations of Children
A Palestinian boy’s Kafkaesque trial in Israel’s military court
Stop the Irvine 11 Prosecutions

Egypt Links

Striving for political and economic freedom
Helen Thomas: Egyptians Understand Their Power
Egypt asks U.S. to freeze officials’ assets: U.S. official – No mention of Mubarak’s Rodeo Drive and Manhattan properties
Mubarak and Co assets – please add verifiable information
A Warning for Egyptian Revolutionaries: Courtesy of People-Power in the Philippines
Dangerous Victims: Egyptian Revolution in Israeli Eyes
Arab democratization and the future of ‘the only democracy’

Wikileaks Links

Spy games: Inside the convoluted plot to bring down WikiLeaks
And in today’s bizarro world : Wikileaks Hires Alan Dershowitz
WIKILEAKS PRESS RELEASE Mon Feb 14 18:28:37 2011 GMT

Mr Assange will not himself be intervening in the action against Twitter because as an Australian who has committed no criminal act on US territory, he claims that the American courts have no jurisdiction over him. The head of his UK legal team, Geoffrey Robertson QC, has brought in Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished Harvard Law Professor, as part of the team to advise on the US Attorney General’s actions.

THE DERSHOWITZ HOAX
Alan Dershowitz joins Julian Assange defense team

“Assange is a journalist. He’s a new kind of journalist. He represents the newest wave of journalism,” Dershowitz said. “I’m currently in this case because I believe that to protect the First Amendment we need to protect new electronic media vigorously.”

WikiLeaks cables: The Middle East fallout could be grave – Dershowitz:

But secretary of state Hillary Clinton is surely correct when she warns that WikiLeaks poses a danger not only to the US but to international diplomacy, while at the same time trying to minimize the actual harm done by these particular disclosures.

Alan Dershowitz: Should we fight terror with torture?
I’m sure that a torture supporter will do a lot to legitimate Wikileaks…not.
Dershowitz: Torture could be justified
Dershowitz Joins Legal Team for Wikileaks
@DjinninOz: @Wikileaks yep Wiki wont be getting anymore $ from me while there’s a chance of ANY of it ending up in that racist shits pocket #
@hemara: @wikileaks I can no longer support wikileaks as long as Dershowitz is on board: he’s a liar, racist and bigot – & most troubling of all.. #
@hemara: @wikileaks ..is pro-torture & justifies killing of civilians by radically expanding definition of “combatants”. In short, an apologist.. #
@hemara: @wikileaks ..for the worst excesses of American empire. This association will fatally damage your credibility. #
@hemara: Why I declare #wikileaks can go to hell: RT @wikileaks: Dershowitz Joins Legal Team for WL http://bit.ly/fSXoXs || #Palestine #

Other Links

Clinton argues for internet freedom but fails to mention the latest French moves.
More facts emerge about the leaked smear campaigns : Glenn Greenwald
Iranian protesters persist in streets of major cities
The Un-Victim : Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy
PKB of the day : US State Secretary Clinton calls Iranian regime ‘hypocritical,’ backs anti-government protests
“Austerity” Comes to America
Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war : Curveball comes out