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STATE
OF TERROR: HOW TERRORISM CREATED MODERN ISRAEL
Thomas Suarez
Olive Branch Press
Our first identity is human. To place any subsidiary identity above
our humanity is a mistake. Though there are genetic differences
between racial groups, they are trivial compared to our shared
biological inheritance, as are differences of belief .
Language is a prime example
of that inheritance. All individuals born without brain damage will
assimilate the languages of their linguistic community effortlessly
and unconsciously. The extraordinary variety of languages is
underpinned by the fact of language per se. Nor is there any need to
be anxious about the loss of individuality in recognising our shared
biological heritage. Every individual has an idiolect, ie, a unique
way of using their language or languages. Our shared inheritance has
guaranteed our uniqueness.
Our shared biological inheritance is a relatively recent discovery.
For millennia, people have defined themselves primarily by some
secondary characteristic; usually belonging to a “tribe” (in the
widest possible sense) or by occupation by right of having been
there first in a geographical territory. Flannery and Marcus in
their study The Creation of
Inequality, argue that “we were here first” is a powerful
assertion in the creation of identity and relationships. The history
of humanity (as opposed to the pre-history) is the story of uneven
development. Our shared humanity runs up against the barriers of
property and power. Yet our shared biological inheritance is a fact.
It ought to be the fact which guides our actions. Henry Morton
Stanley and Cecil Rhodes might have believed they were superior
because they had white skins. Their delusion doesn’t excuse their
arrogance or violence; but today the delusion has been exposed. Show
the world’s best neuroscientists a European brain, and Asian brain,
an African brain, a Latin American brain, the brain of a Christian,
a Hindu, a Muslim, an atheist and they won’t be able to tell you
which is which. Racial purity is nonsense; racial superiority
tantamount to insanity.
Nor can the fact of our shared biological inheritance be compatible
with messianic entitlement. People have a right to believe what they
like, but not to deny the facts. Injustice can be usefully defined
as the establishment of a special case. All injustice rests on this:
the special case of the monarch, the aristocrat, the slave owner,
the feudal lord, the employer, the husband, the priest. The doctrine
of messianic entitlement is an obvious special case. It is not the
same as “we were here first” but rather an assertion that even if we
weren’t . we have a right to turf you out because a deity of some
kind has granted us a part of the earth as our own. Neither the
Bible nor any other religious text is potent as legal title. That is
a gross confusion of the secular and the spiritual. As a matter of
historical fact, land ownership has been gained through conquest. In
the modern world, where title to your garden and that of a nation
state to what lies within its borders is legally determined, deities
are an irrelevance.
The Israeli claim to Palestine rests on four precepts:
God promised the land to Abraham;
Jewish people settled and developed the land;
the international community granted political sovereignty in
Palestine to Jewish people;
the territory was captured in defensive wars.
All four are dubious.
God can’t grant legal title to anything. The right to freedom of
belief is a fundamental human right, but that a possible deity can
be claimed as indefeasible proof of a right to ownership is
inadmissible, for the obvious reason that the claim can’t be granted
any objectivity. A woman may claim the fairies at the bottom of her
garden have granted her the right to a piece of the earth, but why
should the rest of us accept it? That some Jewish people settled and
developed some of the land is uncontroversial but across the three
thousand years of the Israeli claim, a significant variety of people
were involved in the same way. If Israel claims the support of the
international community, then logically it should comply with the
rules that community agrees. Hence, it ought to withdraw its illegal
settlements and lift the siege of Gaza. The wars and conflicts by
which Israel gained control of the land it now occupies were by no
means exclusively defensive.
This book examines in thorough and excruciating detail the terrorism
which brought Israel into existence. Suarez has unearthed some
previously ignored documents in the British archives which establish
the historical accuracy of his thesis: that far from being isolated
incidents carried out by a few rogue elements, Zionist terror was
co-ordinated, sustained, planned, conscienceless and sustained
beyond the establishment of the Israeli State. If you’re unfamiliar
with Irgun, Lehi, the Haganah, and more organizations convinced that
the brutal slaughter of anyone who stood in their way (including
Jews) was legitimate in the campaign to seize the land granted by
god, this book will enlighten you.
Partly the book is a catalogue of the barbarism. Suarez has chosen
to do this, presumably, to make clear the evidence is
incontrovertible. Some of the atrocities are famous: the bombing of
the King David hotel in Jerusalem on 22nd July 1946 by
the Irgun, for example. Others, though no less vicious and motivated
by an insane conviction of rectitude, might have slipped from public
notice but for this book.
The Irgun was active between 1931 and 1948. Its philosophy, if
that’s not too elevated a term for a belief in thuggery, was the
Revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, who believed every Jew has the
right to enter Palestine and only armed force could ensure a Jewish
State. Lehi, often known as the Stern Gang after its founder,
Avraham Stern, was born in 1940. Its aim was the establishment of a
“new totalitarian Hebrew republic”. It sought alliance with both
fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and thought Britain a greater threat
to the Jews than the Nazis. After 1942 it sympathised with Stalin
and in 1944 declared its faith in National Bolshevism. Yitzhak
Shamir, who became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983 was its
erstwhile leader. The Lehi underground newspaper
The Front declared:
“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism
as a means of combat…We have before us the command of the Torah:
Ye shall blot them out to the
last man. Stern set out eighteen principles of rebirth of the
State of Israel. The ninth was:
Constant war against those
who stand in the way of fulfilling the goals.
Those who stood in the way included Jews. The die-hard Zionists
wouldn’t accept, for example, that displaced people who were victims
of the Nazi holocaust should choose any destination after liberation
other than Palestine. Sacrificing Jews in the cause of Zionism was
perfectly admissible. As Suarez points out, if Zionism is identified
with being Jewish, then Zionist terror encourages exactly the
anti-Jewish sentiment violent Zionism feeds on. All utterly
self-righteous creeds when put into practice end up devouring their
own children.
The State of Israel, as it has existed since 1948, couldn’t have
been brought about without extreme violence. A homeland for victims
of the holocaust did not imply what Israel became. Even the
misguided Balfour Declaration recognised the rights of the
inhabitants of Palestine. As Suarez observes, the Palestinians were
slow to respond to Israeli brutality. The Israelis required them to
become violent. It was a specifically pursued policy and obviously
still is. The Israeli double-bind is simple: either the Palestinians
submit, in which case they will be wiped out, or they resist, in
which case they are terrorists, who must be wiped out.
A few examples of the psychopathic violence of the Zionist
terrorists (every bit as demented as that we see today from
so-called Islamic State) will give a flavour of the outrages
enumerated in detail: on 22nd August 1949, Israeli
soldiers kidnapped a Bedouin girl, aged about fifteen. They took her
to an IDF camp, stripped her and made her stand under water pipe as
the soldiers rubbed her with soap. She was then raped by three
soldiers. Her hair was shorn and her head washed in kerosene. She
was gang raped over a period of three days. Then they dug her grave
in front of her and shot her. When this atrocity came to light, the
Israelis claimed it was an exception and the soldiers involved
untypical of the IDF. Suarez points out, however, that Ben-Gurion’s
elite Palmach was well-known for murder and rape. In November 1940
the passengers from three illegal immigrant ships were transferred
by the British to the Patria
which was to take them to safe haven in Mauritius. At 9.15 on the
morning of 25th November, an explosion blew the ship
apart. It keeled over within fifteen minutes killing some 267
people, more than 200 of them Jews seeking refuge from the European
war. The bombing was carried out by the Haganah (forerunner of the
IDF) under the control of Moshe Sharett, later to be Israel’s Prime
Minister. The Zionists spread the lie that the passengers had blown
up the ship themselves in distress over being unable to enter
Palestine. Thus, an evil act of Zionist terror was spun to into
Zionist propaganda. On December 18th 1947, after the UN
had passed Resolution 181(the partition of Palestine), Palmach
attacked the picturesque village of Khisas, a mixed Christian-Muslim
community. The assault began at 9 pm. Houses were blown up, burying
people in their beds. 15 Palestinians, including 5 children died.
The operation was led by Yigal Allon, a future IDF general and
Israeli statesman. The villagers were unarmed. They posed no threat.
It was later revealed that the Palmach was aware of the benign
nature of the settlement and engaged in the attack for “experience”.
The Zionist leadership saw partition as a mere temporary
expedient. As early as 1937, when partition was first suggested,
Ben-Gurion had reassured the Zionist Executive that “in the wake of
the establishment of the State, we will abolish partition and expand
to the whole of Palestine.” The Zionist project has never accepted
the idea of a Palestinian State on the land it considers to have
been its birth-right for three millennia. Prior to partition the CIA
warned that Zionists would never accept it. The Arab representatives
at the UN, on the other hand, based their claim to a Palestinian
State on the high-minded principles agreed internationally after the
First World War: rejection of conquest, the right to
self-determination, democracy. The Zionists engaged in fierce and
base propaganda of dehumanization of the Arabs, as conquerors always
must.
Israel has had twelve Prime Ministers. More than one is
implicated in terrorism. It’s current Prime Minister has written
that “nothing justifies terrorism..it is evil per se.” He’s right.
The terrorism which brought the State of Israel into existence was
evil per se. It was perpetrated out of conviction based on the four
precepts cited at the start of this review. As Suarez argues, the
Israeli claim to Palestine is based on racial purity and messianic
entitlement. There is no solution to the conflict between the
Israelis and the Palestinians (some Israelis deny that such a thing
as a Palestinian people has existed, does exist or can exist)
without a renunciation by the Israelis of both racial purity and
messianic entitlement. They are regressive, outdated, intellectually
and morally flawed concepts.
As early as January 1949, the
New York Times journalist
Anne McCormick was arguing that no two-state solution was possible
because of Israeli refusal to accept the limits imposed by UN
Resolution 181. Of course, the minority view of UNSCOP was that
there should be a single State with autonomous Arab and Israeli
areas. Ernest Bevin thought Resolution 181 had ceded to the extreme
demands of the Zionists and was frustrated that the opportunity for
a democratic State, founded on one person one vote had been missed.
Such a State was impossible without defined borders, which Zionists
refused and Israel still does not have. In 1949 the CIA reported
that the Israeli refusal to accept borders was “a long-range
disaster”. Reuven Shiloah, the first director of Mossad, declared it
would always be Israel’s right to take more land as necessary.
Is there any other nation-State which does not accept
borders? Any other which claims for itself the permanent,
inalienable right to seize such land as it deems fit?
The Jewish community in Iraq, which had been there for some
two thousand years, was destroyed by the Zionists in a dirty tricks
operation. The Israelis drummed up anti-Jewish violence in Iraq as a
prelude to ethnically cleansing 120,000 Jews who were put in refugee
camps.North African Jews were coerced by the Zionist into leaving
their homes, were sprayed with DDT and conscripted to the army for
three years to bear the brunt of the attacks across the Armistice
Line.
The Zionists sent letter bombs to Churchill, Bevin, Eden; the
Kingdom of Israel, a post- 1948 terror group, made two attempts on
the life of Adenauer and even tried to murder Jascha Heifetz for
including Richard Strauss in one of his programmes.
The distressing and depressing details pile up. What they all
lead back to is a simple but devastating mistake in thinking and
feeling: the Zionist belief that they are a special case. The
self-deceptions by which the Israelis maintain their ludicrous claim
to the whole of Palestine would be laughable if they hadn’t led to
so much death and misery. At more than one point, Suarez assimilates
the ideology and terror of the Zionists to the ideas and practices
of the Nazis and there is no doubt that the Havaara Transfer
Agreement brought relief to the Nazi regime by breaking the
effective economic boycott. Ethno-political Zionism is an
anti-democratic creed and no democrat should give it comfort. That
is why the USA’s unconditional support for Israel is unacceptable.
Without that support, the Israelis would be much less likely to
resist compromise. As for the transfer of the US Embassy to
Jerusalem it’s hard to decide which is greater, its stupidity or its
wickedness.
There is much more to say about this indispensable book. It
leaves no doubt that violent Zionists had no qualms about employing
terrorism in order to fulfil their aims. That is as vile and morally
abject as the actions of Islamic State .Apparently intractable
conflicts can be resolved. The violence in Northern Ireland was
brought to an end by compromise on both sides. Whether the partition
of Ireland was a crime against the Irish people may remain a potent
question, but the willingness to accept existing realities and to
make peace the only worthwhile aim brought a settlement. The same
can happen between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but just as
Ian Paisley had to ditch his rhetoric of no surrender, so the
Israelis will have to let go of messianic entitlement.
In response to the recent events in Gaza, the long-serving
Labour MP Louise Ellman was quick to blame Hamas: they encouraged
violence; they goad people to attack the fence. It is beyond
controversy that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, but Zionist
leaders are on record as saying that terrorism by the Palestinians
serves their cause. If supporters of Israel are to condemn
terrorism, let them condemn the Irgun, Lehi, the Haganah. Then the
world will know they are serious about peace.
There have been instances of unacceptable anti-Semitism in
the Labour Party and a recent furore. Mrs Ellman takes what could
perfectly reasonably be seen as an anti-Palestinian view. Her
position is deeply biased. She excuses Israel its faults and heaps
all blame on those who, as Suarez argues, have never laid siege to
Israel, controlled who may or may not enter Israel, blocked Israeli
students from pursuing their education, commandeered Israeli
aquifers, decided who Israel’s leaders may be, forbidden Israelis
from eating lentils or using shampoo. Why isn’t there a furore over
that? Why are there no calls to expel anti-Palestinians from the
Labour Party?
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