Chapter 3 — The rise of Hebrew fascism and the sacking of Palestine
By 1920, Zionism had gotten it’s foot in the door of the UK establishment. And in to the corridors of the White House.
And in to Palestine.
Everybody was about to learn what support for zionism actually entailed. Both friend and foe. The British had left a trail of burned bridges behind them. And ignored advice from all quarters as to the nightmare that was about to unfold.
The turn of the twentieth century was also to be the time where zionism would fine tune its tactics for accomplishing its goals. One was the formula of Louis Brandeis and his “zionist lieutenants”, where influential and/or strategically placed people in positions of power would be recruited. Another was to have the ear of very influential people, as they did in the UK, and convince them that their ideas matched theirs. That the ideas were actually their own. They would convince people in power that zionist aims ticked all of the boxes of their own elitist goals. A supremacist pyramid scheme.
Riots in Palestine
As early as April 1920, while Palestine was still under military government, “anti-Jewish” riots broke out. The report of the military commission of inquiry wasn’t published until 1937. The underlying causes of the riots were cited as:
“The Arabs’ disappointment at the non-fulfilment of the promises of independence which they believed to have been given them in the War.
The Arabs’ belief that the Balfour Declaration implied a denial of the right of self-determination and their fear that the establishment of a national home would mean a great increase of Jewish immigration and would lead to their economic and political subjection to the Jews.”
( British Government, Palestine Royal Commission: Report, Cmd. 5479 (1937), p. 50.)
This was expounded on by Professor Henry Cattan in 2000:
“The first ground of invalidity of the Mandate is that by endorsing the Balfour Declaration and accepting the concept of the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine it violated the sovereignty of the people of Palestine and their natural rights of independence and self-determination… The establishment of a national home for an alien people in that country was a violation of the legitimate and fundamental rights of the inhabitants. The League of Nations did not possess the power, any more than the British Government did, to dispose of Palestine, or to grant to the Jews any political or territorial rights in that country. In so far as the Mandate purported to recognize any rights for alien Jews in Palestine, it was null and void.”
(The Palestine Question Hardcover — May 1, 2000 by Professor Henry Cattan pp30–33)
Within a year of Palestine coming under civil administration, riots again broke out in May 1921, actually spreading from a clash between Jewish factions. There were 95 dead and 220 injured. A formal inquiry commission, headed by Sir Thomas Haycraft, Chief Justice of Palestine, found:
“The fundamental cause of the Jaffa riots and the subsequent acts of violence was a feeling among the Arabs of discontent with, and hostility to, the Jews, due to political and economic causes, and connected with Jewish immigration, and with their conception of Zionist policy as derived from Jewish exponents.
…
The outbreak was not premeditated or expected, nor was either side prepared for it; but the state of popular feeling made a conflict likely to occur on any provocation by any Jews …”
(Palestine: Disturbances in May 1921, Report of the Commission of Inquiry, Cmd. 1540 (1921), p. 59.)
Not forgetting the decades old contempt with which the new “settlers” had treated the locals.
Palestine was a tinderbox. And understandably so.
The statement of the Churchill Memorandum of July 1922 disclaimed any intent to create “a wholly Jewish Palestine” or to effect “the subordination of the Arab population, language or culture in Palestine”.
But then turned that statement completely on it’s head:
“…it is essential that it should know that it (the Jewish people) is in Palestine as of right and not on sufferance. That is the reason why it is necessary that the existence of a Jewish national home in Palestine should be internationally guaranteed, and that it should be formally recognized to rest upon ancient historic connection …”
(British Government, Palestine: Statement of Policy — Cmd. 1700 (1922), pp. 19–20.)
Churchill reiterated this several years afterwards, when he said that the intention of the 1922 White Paper was “to make it clear that the establishment of self-governing institutions in Palestine was to be subordinated to the paramount pledge and obligation of establishing a Jewish national home in Palestine”.
(Report of United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (A/648), p. 21.)
Palestinians in turn declared:
“… We wish to point out here that the Jewish population of Palestine who lived there before the War never had any trouble with their Arab neighbours. They enjoyed the same rights and privileges as their fellow Ottoman citizens, and never agitated for the Declaration of November 1917. It is the Zionists outside Palestine who worked for the Balfour Declaration …
“We therefore here once again repeat that nothing will safeguard Arab interests in Palestine but the immediate creation of a national government which shall be responsible to a Parliament of all whose members are elected by the people of the country — Moslems, Christians and Jews …
“… [Otherwise] we see division and tension between Arabs and Zionists increasing day by day and resulting in general retrogression. Because the immigrants dumped upon the country from different parts of the world are ignorant of the language, customs and character of the Arabs, and enter Palestine by the might of England against the will of the people who are convinced that these have come to strangle them. Nature does not allow the question of a spirit of co-operation between two peoples so different, and it is not to be expected that the Arabs would bow to such a great injustice, or that the Zionists would so easily succeed in realizing their dreams …”
(Moore, John Norton, The Arab-Israeli Conflict (Princeton, University Press, 1974), pp. 22 ff.)
In the middle of Churchill’s forked tongue approach to the Palestinians’ real concerns, in stepped Russian journalist and zionist Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky who voiced Zionism’s true intentions. He wrote an essay in 1923 titled The Iron Wall.
Notice how he repeatedly uses two key words that rebuke modern day zionist propaganda. Palestine and colonialism. Also remember that in 1923, the envisaged exodus of Jews to Palestine was still an abject failure. And that Jews, including non-zionist Jews, made up just 10% of the population of Palestine. Even so, our supremacist friend Jabotinsky wanted the 90% to make way. By force:
“There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting “Palestine” from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority.
My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.
(“The Iron Wall” by Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotisnky, November 4, 1923)
Jabotinsky’s solution more than ten years later? Remove/reduce the majority non-zionist population.
“if we desire that Eretz Yisrael should become and remain a Jewish State, we must first of all create a Jewish majority”
(“The fundamentals of the Betarian world”, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotisnky, 1934)
Although the number of immigrants on paper were negligible, the effects on the ground were felt by the locals.
During the twenties about 100,000 Jewish immigrants entered Palestine, peaking in 1925 (33,801) and dropping off considerably by 1927 (2713). Far short of the numbers envisaged by the Zionist Organization, but substantial enough to make a marked impact in a country where the total population in 1922 was officially estimated at about 750,000.
(Report and General Statement of the Census of 1922, Jerusalem, 1922, p. 3.; Palestine Royal Commission Report- Cmd. 5479 (1937), p. 279.)
In absolute terms the Jewish population more than doubled, and in percentage terms rose from below 10 per cent to over 17 per cent during this period.
Immigration was virtually under the control of Zionist organizations, as described in the report of an official Commission:
“… We were informed by the Chief Immigration Officer that in the allocation to individuals of the certificates which are supplied in blank to the General Federation of Jewish Labour, it is the practice of that body to have regard to the political creed of the several possible immigrants rather than to their particular qualifications for admission to Palestine. It is clearly the duty of the responsible Jewish authorities to select for admission to Palestine those of the prospective immigrants who are best qualified on personal grounds to assist in the establishment of a Jewish national home in that country: that political creed should be a deciding factor in the choice between applicants is open to the strongest exception”.
(Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances — Cmd. 3530 (1930), pp. 104–105.)
Similarly, a number of Jewish organizations such as the Colonisation Department of the Zionist Organization, financed by the Keren ha-Yesod, were actively engaged in acquisition of land both for individual immigrant families as well as for the Yishuv or Jewish settlements. Several of these organizations had been operating since the nineteenth century, notably the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association (PICA). With the British occupation of Palestine in 1918 all land transactions were suspended. The registers were reopened in 1920, at which time it was estimated that Jewish land acquisitions stood at about 650,000 dunums or 2.5 per cent of the total land area of 26 million dunums).
(Palestine, Government of, A Survey of Palestine, Jerusalem, 1946, vol. I, p. 244.)
By the end of the decade this figure had nearly doubled to 1,200,000 dunums, just below 5 per cent.
(British Government, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development — Cmd. 3686, p. 39.)
The Seeds of Hebrew Fascism
Fascists and racists Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Wolfgang von Weisl founded the Revisionist Zionism movement in 1925.
Revisionists had a vision of occupying the full territory, and insisted upon the Jewish right to sovereignty over the whole of Palestine.
Wolfgang von Weisl joined Jabotinsky in 1925 to become one of the co-founders of revisionism. He was Jabotinsky’s financial director. And a supporter of fascism. He would later describe the victory of fascist Italy over Abyssinia (Ethiopia) as “a triumph of the White races against the Black”. He also asserted the Revisionists “wanted to bring to Palestine, within the next ten years, 900,000 Jews from Poland, 300,000 from Roumania and 300,000 from Germany.”
(“Dr. von Weisl Believes in Fascism,” 6/12/34 World Jewry, a London Jewish establishment journal.)
Keep it nice and white, eh?
Years after the two main founders of zionism, Herzl and Weizmann, had declared their sympathy for antisemitism, it would continue at the core of zionist ideology.
In 1925, the co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, Jacob Agus, basically admitted that zionism has the same nationalist ideals as antisemitism.
“If we do not admit the rightfulness of antisemitism, we deny the rightfulness of our own nationalism… It is right, therefore, that they should fight against us for their national integrity.”
(1925, Jacob Klatzkin, zionist, co-editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, Jacob Agus, The Meaning of Jewish History, vol. II, p. 425.)
They saw antisemitism as the key to increasing the Jewish population in Palestine. They saw fascism as a kindred ideology:
“Professor Sacerdoti (the zionist leader in Italy) is persuaded that many of the fundamental principles of the Fascist Doctrine.. are no more or less than Jewish principles.”
(Source: Guido Bedarida, ‘The Jews under Mussolini’, Reflex (October 1927), p.58.)
In 1928, extremist Abba Ahime’ir joined Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement. He called for the “evacuation of Jews from Europe to Palestine”. This would be Zionism’s main goal for decades to come as their colonialist project was still failing (15% at this point).
[He did not support] “the free entrance of Jews to our land, but only the free entrance of Zionists. Zionists are the only ones we need here”.
He believed that the only solution to the “Jewish problem” was their evacuation from Europe to Palestine.
(Words that can’t be retracted, Ha’aretz, April 20, 2012)
This mentality had prevailed a couple of years earlier when on June 30, 1924, zionism had killed its first Jew in Palestine.
Dutch Jew Jacob Israël de Haan was assassinated by Avraham Tehomi on the orders of Haganah leader Yitzhak Ben-Zvi for his anti-Zionist political activities and contacts with Arab leaders.
(Shlomo Nakdimon; Shaul Mayzlish (1985). Deh Han : ha-retsah ha-politi ha-rishon be-Erets Yisraʼel / De Haan: The first political assassination in Palestine (in Hebrew) (1st ed.). Tel Aviv: Modan Press. OCLC 21528172; Marijke T.C.Stapert-Eggen. “The Rosenthaliana’s Jacob Israel de Haan Archive”. University of Amsterdam Library.)
Early apartheid
The Zionist Organization was guilty during those years of what can only be described as racial discrimination. Apartheid. This, and the attempted subjugation of the vast majority of the population to the wishes of an entity who saw themselves as superior, under British protection, lead to inevitable violence and loss of life in 1929.
A commission headed by Sir John Hope Simpson investigated questions of immigration and land transfers:
“The Commission went into great detail in its report, dividing Palestine into areas according to cultivability, and estimating total cultivable land at about 6.5 million dunums of which about a sixth was in Jewish hands.”
(British Government, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development — Cmd. 3686, p.23)
Simpson quoted the employment policies of the Zionist agencies:
“The effect of the Jewish colonization in Palestine on the existing population is very intimately affected by the conditions on which the various Jewish bodies hold, sell and lease their land.
The Constitution of the Jewish Agency: Land Holding and Employment Clauses …
(d) Land is to be acquired as Jewish property and … the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people.
(e) The Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labour … it shall be deemed to be a matter of principle that Jewish labour shall be employed …”
Keren Kayemet draft lease: Employment of Jewish labour only
“… The lessee undertakes to execute all works connected with the cultivation of the holding only with Jewish labour. Failure to comply with this duty by the employment of non-Jewish labour shall render the lessee liable to the payment of compensation …
The lease also provides that the holding shall never be held by any but a Jew …”
Keren ha-Yesod agreements: Employment of labour
“The following provisions are included:
Article 7 — The settler hereby undertakes that … if and whenever he may be obliged to hire help, he will hire Jewish workmen only.”
“In the similar agreement for the Emek colonies, there is a provision as follows:
Article 11 — The settler undertakes … not to hire any outside labour except Jewish labourers.’”
(British Government, Palestine: Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development — Cmd. 3686, pp52–53)
The revolt of 1929
The Churchill Memorandum reaffirmed the “national home” policy, and Palestinian resentment again turned to violence in August 1929, sparked by a dispute over the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. The clashes between Palestinians and Jews left 220 dead and 520 injured on both sides, and British reinforcements, including aircraft, naval vessels and armoured cars, had to be called in from outside Palestine before the situation was brought under control.
A special Commission, headed by Sir Walter Shaw, investigated this outbreak. The Shaw Commission observed:
“In less than 10 years three serious attacks have been made by Arabs on Jews. For 80 years before the first of these attacks there is no recorded instance of any similar incidents….the evidence tendered during our inquiry when representatives of all parties told us that before the War the Jews and Arabs lived side by side if not in amity, at least with tolerance, a quality which to-day is almost unknown in Palestine”.
(Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929, Cmd. 3530 (1930), p. 150.)
The Commission’s findings on the causes of the violence:
“… If there was in Palestine in August last a widespread feeling of resentment amongst the Arabs at the failure of His Majesty’s Government to grant them some measure of self-government, it is at least probable that this resentment would show itself against the Jews, whose presence in Palestine would be regarded by the Arabs as the obstacle to the fulfilment of their aspirations”.
…
It is our belief that a feeling of resentment among the Arab people of Palestine consequent upon their disappointment at the continued failure to obtain any measure of self-government … was a contributory cause to the recent outbreak and is a factor which cannot be ignored in the consideration of the steps to be taken to avoid such outbreaks in the future”.
(Report of the Commission on the Palestine Disturbances of August 1929, Cmd. 3530 (1930), pp 124–131)
Immigration by Jews to Palestine
During the 1930s, Palestine received about 232,000 legal immigrants with a steep increase between 1933 and 1936. For reasons that will become apparent.
The Jewish population in 1939 numbered over 445,000 out of a total of about 1,500,000 — nearly 30 per cent compared to the less than 10 per cent 20 years before.
The Hope-Simpson Report of 1930 had recorded that “some thousands each year” of unauthorized immigrants settled in Palestine, either having evaded frontier controls or having arrived as “pseudo travellers” and then staying on.
(British Government, Report on Immigration, Land Settlement and Development, Cmd. 3686 (1930), pp. 120, 125–126.)
Similarly, by the end of 1939, Jewish holdings of land had risen to almost 1.5 million dunums compared to the 650,000, of the total area of 26 million dunums, held at the start of the Mandate.
(The Peel Commission, Great Britain and Palestine, p. 61.)
Again, on paper, the statistics of the majority outnumbering Jews by 2.5:1 disguised the fact that this minority was completely insulated from the native population with the clear intention of pushing them out. And it had always been this way, even when they made up just 10% of the population. The arrogance was staggering.
The rapid increase (though short lived) coincided with Zionism’s next manouevre. Cosying up with the protagonists in the upsurge of fascism and hatred in Europe in order to sweep up the persecuted Jews for their failing project.
Antisemitic friends, fascism and zionism.
In 1932, Jabotinsky’s Betar movement, an ultranationalist, zionist youth movement, publically praised Hitler’s antisemitism.
“Yes, we Revisionists have a great admiration for Hitler. Hitler has saved Germany. Otherwise it would have perished within four years. And if he had given up his anti-Semitism we would go with him.”
— Opening statement of lawyer defending Betar students, 1932
(Elis Lubrany, ‘Hitler in Jerusalem’, Weltbahne (Berlin, 31 May 1932), p. 835.)
Also in 1933, the campaign for the global Jewish boycott of German goods gathered steam in the face of increased harassment and persecution of Jews and other groups after Hitler came to power.
Georg Landauer, director of the Zionist Federation of Germany in Berlin, agreed to sabotage the Jewish boycott in return for what would become the Ha’avara Agreement.
(Black, E. 1984. The transfer agreement: The dramatic story of the pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Carroll & Graf. p134)
Ha’avarah, or Transfer Agreement, which provided that an emigrant to Palestine could transfer his money there in German goods and exchange them for pounds upon arrival… in the thirties, when American Jewry took great pains to organize a boycott of German merchandise, Palestine, of all places, was swamped with all kinds of ‘goods made in Germany’. ”
(Eichmann in Jerusalem, Dr. Hannah Arendt)
In Britain, Lord Reading and co-architect of the Balfour Declaration and former High Commissioner of Palestine, Lord Herbert Samuel condemned the Jewish boycott in the English parliament at the request of German zionists:
“we deprecate exaggerated reports of occurrences [in Germany] or any attempts to boycott German goods…
Following this the British Foreign Minister John Simon gave the German ambassador a letter supporting that declaration.”
(Black, E. 1984. The transfer agreement: The dramatic story of the pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. New York: Carroll & Graf. p62–63)
The Zionist Federation of Germany joined in the chorus. Adding their acknowledgement, as they had always believed and voiced for decades, that there actually was a “Jewish problem”:
“…in dealing with the Jewish question…a real problem whose solution interests all peoples…especially the German people …Boycott propaganda..against Germany.. is in essence un-Zionist..
We are not blind to the fact that a Jewish question exists and will continue to exist.”
(Memo of June 21, 1933, in: L. Dawidowicz, A Holocaust Reader (New York: Behrman, 1976), pp. 150–155, and (in part) in: Francis R. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1985), p. 42.; On Zionism in Germany before Hitler’s assumption of power, see: Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge: 1980), pp. 94–95, 126–131, 140–143.; F. Nicosia, Third Reich (Austin: 1985), pp. 1–15.)
German zionists proclaimed their support for nazi policies:
“…we too, are against mixed marriage and are for maintaining the purity of the Jewish group..Zionism hopes to be able to win the collaboration even of a government fundamentally hostile to Jews….”
— Zionistische Vereinigung fur Deutschland, the German Zionist Federation.
(Source: Lucy Dawidowicz (ed.), A Holocaust Reader, pp. 150–5.)
From 1933 to 1939, the Ha’avara Agreement with nazi Germany financed the colonialist project in Palestine.
The total amount transferred from Germany to Palestine through the Ha’avara between August 1933 and the end of 1939 was 8.1 million pounds or 139.57 million German marks… 60 per cent of all capital invested in Palestine between those two dates.
(David Rosenthal, ‘Chaim Arlosoroff 40 Years Later’, Jewish Frontier, August 1974, p. 23)
“[This was] of greatest importance for the country’s development.”
(Former officials of the Ha’avara company in Palestine, 1972, W. Feilchenfeld, et al., Haavara-Transfer, p. 75.; “Haavara,” Encyclopaedia Judaica, (1971), Vol. 7, p. 1013.)
The Jewish boycott was sabotaged from Tel Aviv.
“The London Boycott Conference was torpedoed from Tel Aviv because the head of the Transfer in Palestine, in close contact with the consulate in Jerusalem, sent cables to London (note: Reading and Samuel). Our main function here is to prevent, from Palestine, the unification of world Jewry on a basis hostile to Germany… It is advisable to damage the political and economic strength of Jewry by sowing dissension in its ranks.”
— Dr. Fritz Reichert, the Gestapo’s agent in Palestine in a letter to his headquarters
(Yisraeli, ‘The Third Reich and the Transfer Agreement’, p. 132)
The WZO actually helped strengthen the German export trade:
“..the WZO started soliciting new customers for Germany in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Eventually the Zionists began exporting oranges to Belgium and Holland using Nazi ships. By 1936 the WZO began to sell Hitler’s goods in Britain.”
(Reflections, Palestine Post (14 November 1938), p.6.; Yehuda Bauer, My Brother’s Keeper, p.129.)
Not only did they sabotage the Jewish boycott, they helped strengthen Hitler’s economy!
In 1934, zionist leader Joachim Prinz spouted nationalist rhetoric similar to Hitler’s. Swap the word “Aryan” for ”Jew”. There is no difference whatsoever:
“We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only honored and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honors his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honor towards the national will of other nations.”
( “We Jews”, Joachim Prinz, 1934)
Prinz was not a “minority”. Nor “extreme” as hasbara will try to convince us.
Joachim Prinz held top leadership positions in the World Jewish Congress, as president of the American Jewish Congress from 1958–1966, and as Chairman of the World Conference of Jewish Organizations. He was also a director of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Prinz emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization. In 1934 he published “Wir Juden (We Jews)”, to celebrate Hitler’s so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism:
“The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.”
“The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. ‘We are not unhappy about this,”
“The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution, and great expectations that, in the congenial myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive.”
(Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Israel Shahak, 1994, pp 71–72)
“….there was no country in the world which tried to solve the Jewish problem as seriously as did Germany. Solution of the Jewish question? It was our Zionist dream! We never denied the existence of the Jewish question! Dissimilation? It was our own appeal”
— Joachim Prinz 1937
(Source: Young Zionist/London, November, 1937, page 18)
During the 1930s, Shmuel Merlin, Secretary General of the NZO, claimed that he wanted to “take the Jews out of Poland” rather than fight antisemites there:
“It is absolutely correct to say that only the Bund waged an organized fight against the anti-Semites. We did not consider that we had to fight in Poland. We believed the way to ease the situation was to take the Jews out of Poland. We had no spirit of animosity.”
Shmuel Merlin, Secretary General NZO
(Shmuel Merlin (interview with Lenni Brenner, 16 September 1980
“Zionist-Revisionism: The Years of Fascism and Terror”, Lenni Brenner)
Abba Ahime’ir, the aforementioned senior member of Jabotinsky’s revisionist movement, chimed in praising Hitler and other fascists.
“They frighten us with a scarecrow called ‘separation.’ But separation is the path taken by the national movements that are affiliated with the glorious names of Ataturk, Mussolini, Pilsudski, de Valera, Hitler.”
(Abba Achimeir, “From a Fascist’s Notebook,” Do’ar ha-Yom, 1933)
[NOTE: de Valera, the Irish premier who took the reigns in Ireland after the British were removed has NO place among that lot!]
Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was Jabotinsky’s secretary. He described Ahime’ir as his “mentor”.
(Salon Magazine, The Iron Wall, Christopher Hitchens, Dec 30, 2003)
Jabotinsky was still calling for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Palestine. He also praised Hitler’s “purification” of the nation:
“We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East. . . . The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz-Yisrael. . . . [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.”
(Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 29)
“The world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them….Hitler — as odious as he is to us — has given this idea a good name in the world.”
(One Palestine Complete, p. 407)
During this time…busy, busy, busy..Zionism became an ally of Austrian fascists who had set up “Gentile Friends of Zionism”. The Austrian regime attempted to introduce segregation in schools there to separate Jewish students from the rest.
Austrian leader Engelbert Dollfuss staged a coup and set up a so-called “Austrofascism” dictatorship backed by Mussolini. Austrian zionists welcomed the move and became apologists for them internationally.
When Dollfuss was assassinated, Nahum Sokolow (secretary general of the World Zionist Congress and leading advocate of the Balfour Declaration) asked his audience at the Jewish Club in South Africa:
“to rise in the memory of this great patriot and leader of his country, whom I knew very well and met very often … was one of the friends of our cause. He was one of those who established, with my help, the organisation of Gentile Friends of Zionism in the Austrian capital.”
(Sokolow Honours Memory of Dollfuss, PalestinePost (13 August 1934) p.4)
In November 1934, Mussolini set up a Betar squadron at his scubla marittima at Civitavecchia, where 134 cadets were trained by the notorious Blackshirts; in 1936, Il Duce himself reviewed his Zionist wards.
(Kaplan, Eran (2005. The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy. University of Wisconsin Press. P. 156)
That same year, SS officer Leopold von Mildenstein and Zionist Federation official Kurt Tuchler toured Palestine together for six months to assess Zionist development there.
Von Mildenstein was promoted to head the Jewish affairs department of the SS security service in order to support Zionist migration and development more effectively.
In “A Jewish homeland in Palestine”, he wrote in his concluding article:
“pointed the way to curing a centuries-long wound on the body of the world: the Jewish question.”
Der Angriff issued a special medal, with a Swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other, to commemorate the joint SS-Zionist visit. A few months after the articles appeared, von Mildenstein was promoted to head the Jewish affairs department of the SS security service in order to support Zionist migration and development more effectively.
(Jacob Boas, “A Nazi Travels to Palestine,” History Today (London), January 1980, pp. 33–38.)
In 1935 the “Nuremberg Laws” were introduced in Germany.
The only other flags permitted to be flown bar the Reich national flag were the “Jewish colors”.
Zionism became the only other party legalized in the Reich.
German zionists welcomed these new laws.
Paragraph 4 in “The Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”, part of the infamous Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935, states that 1. “Jews are forbidden to display the Reich and national flag or the [German] national colours. 2. On the other hand, they are permitted to display the Jewish colours. The exercise of this right is protected by the State.”
(The Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Jewish Virtual Library)
“Zionism became the only other party legalized in the Reich, the Zionist flag the only other flag permitted to fly in Nazi-land. It was a painful distinction for Zionism to be singled out for favors and privileges by its Satanic counterpart.”
(“Baal is not God’, Congress Bulletin (24 January 1936), p. 2., Rabbi Stephen Wise; ‘Zionism in the Age of the Dictators’, Lenni Brenner)
German zionists tripped over themselves to welcome these laws:
“Germany … is meeting the demands of the World Zionist Congress when it declares the Jews now living in Germany to be a national minority..Germany has given the Jewish minority the opportunity to live for itself..”
(Zionist Jüdische Rundschau editorial (1935) a few days after the Reichstag adopted the so-called “Nuremberg laws” that prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and Germans and, in effect, proclaimed the Jews an alien minority nationality.)
The Bavarian Gestapo issued orders to treat zionist Jews more leniently.
“…members of the Zionist organisations are, in view of their activities directed towards emigration to Palestine, not to be treated with the same strictness which is necessary towards the members of the German-Jewish organisations [assimilationists]”
— Bavarian Gestapo, 1935
(Source: Kurt Grossmann, “Zionists and Non-Zionists under Nazi Rule in the 1930s,” p. 340)
In 1935, the SS praised zionism for trying to “solve the Jewish problem”
“The recognition of Jewry as a racial community based on blood and not on religion leads the German government to guarantee without reservation the racial separateness of this community. The government finds itself in complete agreement with the great spiritual movement within Jewry, the so-called Zionism, with its recognition of the solidarity of Jewry around the world and its rejection of all assimilationist notions. On this basis, Germany undertakes measures that will surely play a significant role in the future in the handling of the Jewish problem around the world.”
(Official SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, May 1935)
“We must separate Jewry into two categories… the Zionists and those who favor being assimilated. The Zionists adhere to a strict racial position and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state.”
— Reinhardt Heydrich, SS General
(Source: Hohne, Orders of the Death’s Head, P 333 and Karl Schleunes, The twisted Road to Auschwitz)
The Gestapo also bent over backwards to help zionists:
“The Gestapo did everything in those days to promote emigration, particularly to Palestine. We often received their help when we required anything from other authorities regarding preparations for emigration.”
— former head of the Zionist Federation of Germany, Dr. Hans Friedenthal
(Source: F. Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question (1985), p. 57.)
For over 30 years, zionism had been using Herzl’s and Weizmann’s “antisemitic friends” and “Jewish problem” discourse to achieve their goals. They had the ear of all of the antisemitic, far right and/or fascist regimes in Europe. Just as Herzl had gone to see Russian minister of the interior Vyacheslav von Plehve (the infamous anti-Semite who encouraged the Kishinev pogroms) in 1903, Jabotinsky, using the Polish press as his vehicle, called for the “evacuation” of 1.5 million Jews from eastern Europe, most of them from Poland:
[Note: Polish Jews rejected this, of course]
On June 9, 1936, Jabotinsky met with Polish Foreign Minister Jozef Beck and on September 11, with Prime Minister Felicjan Slawoy-Skladkowski. In October 1937, he returned to meet Marshall Edward Smygly-Rydz. He worked out what he was pleased to call an “alliance” with the anti-Semitic regime.
(Jabotinsky, Evacuation — Humanitarian Zionism, Selected Writings (S. Africa), 1962, p.75.)
In 1937, Feivel Polkes, commander of the Haganah, took fascist alliances a step further by actually offering to work with German intel in Palestine. He also praised German policies which would increase Jewish immigration there.
(Heinz Höhne, Der Orden unter dem Totenkopf, — Order under the Skull -,Gütersloh, 1967, p. 309.)
“(Polkes) would, among other things, vigorously support the foreign interests of Germany in the Middle East…”
(Memorandum by SS-Oberscharführer Herbert Hagen, director of the Judenreferat, RFSS film roll 111 . p. 4.)
Höhne commented on Polkes’ offer with the words:
“…behind it there clearly stands the immigration policy of the Haganah.” (Heinz Höhne, op. cit., p. 330)
“Pressure is being exerted on the Reich Deputation of the Jews in Germany in order to compel Jews emigrating from Germany to head only to Palestine and not to any other country…such a measure lies entirely in the German interest and it is already being put into effect by the Gestapo.”
(Memorandum by Eichmann’s superior, Franz-Albert Six in RFSS film roll 411; German war records captured by American troops and kept at the National Archives in Washington; Sources:
Zionists like Polkes were interested in using the persecution of Jews in Europe to increase the influx of Jews to Palestine to outnumber the Arabs there. As they always had done.
“in Jewish nationalist circles people were very pleased with the radical German policy, since the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would be so far increased thereby that in the foreseeable future the Jews could reckon upon numerical superiority over the Arabs in Palestine.”
— Feivel Polkes (leading Haganah figure) in conversation with Adolf Eichmann, 1937
(David Yisraeli, The Palestine Problem in German Politics 1889–1945 (Hebrew), Bar-Ilan university, Appendix (German): Geheime Kommandosache Bericht, pp.301–2; Ibid., p.304.)
Alongside the zionist strategy of corralling persecuted Jews to Palestine through alliances with the persecutors of the Jews, were the methods in which they actually halted the flight of hundreds of thousands of them unless their destination was Palestine (to be discussed).
In the midst of this cold head counting and manouevring, Weizmann laid his cards on the table in 1937:
“The hopes of Europe’s […] Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, ‘Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine? ‘I replied, ‘No’….From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people…The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world…Only the branch of the young shall survive…They have to accept it.”
(Chaim Weizmann reporting to the Zionist Congress in 1937 on his July testimony before the Peel Commission in London)
In 1938, David Ben Gurion (aka David Grün), the Labour zionist leader from 1919, rejected an offer by the British to evacuate German Jewish children to England after Kristallnacht.
“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel.”
— David Ben-Gurion, 7 December 1938
(Yoav Gelber, Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939–42), Yad Vashem Studies, vol.XII, p.199.)
Palestine burning
While zionist leaders weaved their webs with the persecutors and enemies of the working class, both Jew and Gentile, Palestine was on fire.
The Jews that they had successfully corralled from Europe towards their project didn’t help matters.
“The drive of political zionism to establish a settler State in Palestine was met by violent resistance from the Palestinians, and this situation simmered until it boiled over in 1936.”
(“The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1988,” by UNISPAL — Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR), June 30, 1978)
The riots of 1933
The persecution of Jewry brought an exodus of Jews from Germany and other European countries. Large numbers came to Palestine, exciting the already simmering resentment again into violence. No formal commission was appointed to inquire into this new outbreak in 1933, which was surveyed in the Peel Report of 1937.
Examining the effects of the sudden increase in immigration, the report comments:
“The Arab reaction to this sudden and striking development was quite natural. All that the Arab leaders had felt in 1929 they now felt more bitterly … the greater the Jewish inflow, the greater the obstacle to their attainment of national independence. And now, for the first time, a worse fate seemed to threaten them than the withholding of their freedom and the continuance of Mandatory rule. Hitherto, with the high rate of natural increase among the Arabs, it has seemed impossible that the Jews could become a majority in Palestine within measurable time. But what if the new flood of immigration were to rise still higher? That question gave a very different colour to the idea of self-government in Palestine as Arab nationalists had hitherto conceived it. It opened up the intolerable prospect of a Jewish State — of Palestinian Arabs being ruled by Jews. It is not surprising, therefore, to find … the old antagonism growing hotter and hotter, till it bursts again into flames.”
(British Government, Palestine Royal Commission: Report, Cmd. 5479 (1937), p. 82.)
Clashes erupted mainly in Jerusalem and Jaffa, with considerable casualties, although not as heavy as those of 1929. The report continues:
“So one more page of the history of Palestine under the Mandate had been written in blood. And there was one feature of this last outbreak of Arab violence which was as unprecedented as it was significant. In 1920, 1921 and 1929 the Arabs had attacked the Jews. In 1933 they attacked the Government. The idea that the British authorities in London or Jerusalem were trying to hold the balance even between Arab and Jews was now openly scouted. They were allies of the Jews, it was said, and the enemies of the Arabs. The Mandate was merely a cynical device for promoting British ‘imperialism’ under a mask of human consideration for the Jews …
“It was thus becoming clear that the crux of the situation in Palestine was not growing less formidable with the passing of time. On the contrary, the longer the Mandate operated, the stronger and more bitter Arab antagonism to it became”.
(British Government, Palestine Royal Commission: Report, Cmd. 5479 (1937), p. 84–87)
In 1936, the Palestinian resistance to foreign rule and to foreign colonization broke out into a major rebellion that lasted virtually until the outbreak of the Second World War.
In April 1936, what started as minor Arab-Jewish clashes quickly flared into a widespread revolt. A new union of Palestinian political parties was formed, the Arab Higher Committee, headed by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Hajj Amin al-Husseini. The Committee called for a general strike to support the demand for national government. Despite strong Palestinian resistance to Jewish immigration, the British Government issued permits for several thousand new immigrants, offering further provocation to Palestinian nationalists. 130,000 had arrived over a three year period.
As the strike prolonged, violence increased. There were attacks on British troops and police posts as well as on Jewish settlements, sabotage of roads, railways, pipelines and so on. The British administration imposed curfews, resorted to mass arrests, collective fines, and internments in concentration camps and other emergency measures.
The principal vehicle of zionist violence was the Haganah, a covert paramilitary force formed early in the mandate years. The Jewish settlers also benefited from 2,800 of their number being enrolled in the police forces as supernumeraries.
The British Government turned to the rulers of other Arab States for the mediation that eventually led to the calling off of the strike in October 1936. The official count of casualties was 275 dead and 1,112 wounded.
(British Government, Palestine Royal Commission: Report, Cmd. 5479 (1937), pp95–106)
The High Commissioner declared the Arab Higher Committee proscribed, arresting its prominent leaders and deporting them to the Seychelles Islands, while the Mufti of Jerusalem was able to escape to Lebanon, from where he continued to direct the rebellion.
Military courts were established, awarding 58 death sentences by the end of 1938, apart from numerous life imprisonments.
(The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) op. cit., p. 115.)
By October 1938, the British military presence multiplied significantly and Palestine was under military control.
“The nature and extent of the Arab rebellion of 1938 can be gauged not only from the figures given…of British armed forces in the country, but also from the fact that casualties during the year reached a total of 3,717, as against 246 in 1937 …”
( The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) pp. 116–118.)
In addition to the Haganah, another organization, the Irgun Tzeva’i Leumi was active, as were “special night squads”, trained by Major Orde Wingate, a serving British officer. According to Christopher Sykes, “the SNS gradually became what Wingate secretly intended, the beginnings of a Jewish army”.
(The Sunday Times (London), 12 April 1959)
Bloodbath
1937–1939
The Irgun conducted a campaign of violence against Palestinian Arab civilians resulting in the deaths of at least 250.
(Perliger and Weinberg, 101.; J. Bowyer Bell, Terror out of Zion: the fight for Israeli independence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977). pp.181
July 6, 1938
18 Arabs and 5 Jews were killed by two simultaneous bombs in the Arab melon market in Haifa. More than 60 people were wounded
(“18 Arabs Die In Bomb Blast”. The Vancouver Sun. June 19, 1939. Retrieved 15 October 2011.)
July 15, 1938
A bomb left in the vegetable market in Jerusalem by the Irgun injured 28.
(The Times Saturday July 17, 1938)
July 25, 1938
The Irgun threw a bomb into the melon market in Haifa resulting in 49 deaths.
(The Times Tuesday July 26, 1938)
February 27, 1939
33 Arabs were killed in multiple attacks, incl. 24 by bomb in Arab market in Suk Quarter of Haifa and 4 by bomb in Arab vegetable market in Jerusalem.
(Y. Ben-Ami, Years of Wrath, Days of Glory; Memoirs of the Irgun, Speller and Sons, New York 1982; p 229. Casualty figures from Palestine Post Feb 28, 1939)
May-July, 1939
A series of Irgun atttacks lead to 53 Arab deaths with no reply.
(Wiki)
“By 1939, the large-scale military operations by the British Government against the Palestinian nationalist guerrillas were showing success. Meanwhile, Palestinian grievances were at last being heard in London at a conference attended by other Arab States. As war approached, Britain again turned to these friendly Arab States to intercede in Palestine, and the rebellion was ended after three and a half years.
The rebellion of 1936–1939 culminated 15 years of Palestinian resistance to the Mandate, and was to bring far-reaching consequences in Palestine. It left no doubt that the Palestinians would not acquiesce in the loss of their country under the Balfour Declaration and disproved the Churchill policy’s insistence that the “dual obligations” undertaken could be reconciled and would not disturb the peace in Palestine. The response of the British Government had been to propose, in place of the independence pledged two decades earlier, a plan to partition Palestine.”
(Excerpted from the report “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1988,” by UNISPAL — Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR), June 30, 1978)
The situation in Palestine had reached a crucial point. The Royal Commission had declared the Mandate unworkable. The very simple fact that the British establishment had repeatedly ignored. And would never admit to.
The Commission’s own partition proposals had proved equally unworkable. The 1939 White Paper had postulated an independent unified Palestine, with a Palestinian Arab majority, in 10 years…The Palestinians had sensed that only through violence could they force recognition of their inherent rights. The Zionists in turn had reacted with violence…The Second World War was to act as a catalyst in the interplay of these forces, and the pace of events accelerated.
Shortly before the war broke out, both the Jewish Agency as well as Palestinian Arab leaders declared their support of the Allies… Violence subsided as the leaders of both sides observed a political truce. Jewish and Arab battalions were formed in Palestine, the Jewish units ultimately forming a Jewish Brigade.
(Author: Excerpted from the report “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1988,” by UNISPAL — Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR), June 30, 1978)
It’s important to remember at this point that one of the leaders of Haganah was offering their services to the Germans!
The implementation of the 1939 White Paper:
Despite the demands of the war effort, the British Government, disturbed by the dangerous situation in Palestine, proceeded with the policy of the 1939 White Paper in an effort to diminish the political tension.
In February 1940, the Palestine authorities issued the Land Transfer regulations, dividing Palestine into three zones. In the largest zone, any transfer of land to a person who was not a “Palestinian Arab” was prohibited, exceptions being permitted only under specific conditions and with the High Commissioner’s permission. In the second zone “Palestinian Arabs” were permitted to transfer land only between themselves. In the third zone there were not restrictions on land transfers.
The clauses of the 1939 White Paper relating to immigration were also implemented, but at the end of the five-year period in 1944, only 51,000 of the 75,000 immigration certificates provided for had been utilized. In circumstances where Jewish refugees from Europe were fleeing violence and persecution, the White Paper’s limits were relaxed and legal immigration was permitted to continue indefinitely at the rate of 18,000 a year.
The Jewish response
The Palestinian rebellion, the Royal Commission’s report and the 1939 White Paper’s policies constituted a series of reversals to the aim of political Zionism to establish a settler state in Palestine. It had become evident that the Mandatory Power was re-interpreting its earlier commitment to the Balfour Declaration. Three features of the response by some Zionist groups were illegal immigration, terrorism and an attempt to obtain support from the United States.
(Excerpted from the report “The Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917–1988,” by UNISPAL — Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR), June 30, 1978)
The British were worried that the influx of immigrants from axis-controlled Europe “offered an opportunity for the infiltration of enemy agents”. And “In November 1940, it was decided that illegal immigrants would be deported to an alternative place of refuge in the Colonial Empire.”
(British Government, The Political History of Palestine (Memorandum to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) (Jerusalem, 1947), p. 30.)
One such refugee ship was The Patria in Haifa port in 1940. 250 Jews were sacrificed by zionists:
“The Jewish Agency…..decided to use the lives of the immigrants for a gamble with a drastic, dramatic act aimed at achieving political goals. Haganah activists took an enormous explosive charge into the ship despite the danger to the lives of the 1,783 people. The ship blew up. The British did all they could to save the passengers, but the number of victims nonetheless reached 257. The following day the Jewish Agency declared that the act was carried out by the passengers themselves in protest.” (Christopher Sykes, p. 269)
The passengers of another refugee ship were actually rejected for entry in to Palestine because of the number of elderly and “undesirables”:
“Although Montor was an ardent Zionist, the prevailing Zionist aim at the time was for “selective” immigration to build a Jewish state, not the rescue of Jewish refugees. Therefore in 1940 Montor, as executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal, refused to intervene for a shipload of Jewish refugees stranded on the Danube. He wrote a letter to a rabbi in Maryland stating that “Palestine cannot be flooded with … old people or with undesirables.” He circulated thousands of copies of the letter, which asked Jews not to support illegal immigration to Palestine.”
(Henry Montor, Jewish Virtual Library)
Between April 1939 and December 1943, over 20,000 illegal immigrants arrived in Palestine.
(The Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), Great Britain and Palestine, p. 132, fn.)
The rabid dog
During the war years, post-1940, the zionists resorted to violence. Again. The recourse to terrorism is described in an official British document as follows:
“The lull in terrorist activity did not continue throughout the war years. The Jewish community resented the Land Transfers Regulations and the measures taken against unauthorized immigration.
In 1942, a small group of Zionist extremists, led by Abraham Stern, came into prominence with a series of politically motivated murders and robberies in the Tel Aviv area.
In the following year there came to light a widespread conspiracy, connected with Haganah, for stealing arms and ammunition from the British forces in the Middle East.
In August 1944, the High Commissioner narrowly escaped death in an ambush outside Jerusalem.
Three months later, on the 6th November, the British Minister of State in the Middle East (Lord Moyne) was assassinated in Cairo by two members of the Stern group.
A third illegal Jewish organization, the Irgun Tzeva’i Leumi, was responsible for much destruction of Government property during 1944.
*The outrages perpetrated by the Stern group and the Irgun Zvei Leumi were condemned by the official spokesmen of the Jewish community;…
On the 22nd July 1946, the campaign conducted by terrorist organizations reached a new climax with an explosion which wrecked a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, containing the offices of the Government Secretariat as well as part of military headquarters, and killed 86 public servants, Arab, Jewish and British, as well as five members of the public.
Later terrorist activities have included the kidnapping of a British judge and of British officers, sabotage of the railway system and of oil installations at Haifa, and the blowing up of a British Officers’ Club in Jerusalem with considerable loss of life.
(British Government, The Political History of Palestine (Memorandum to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) (Jerusalem, 1947), pp31–32)
Notwithstanding formal disclaimers of its responsibility, there appears to be some evidence of involvement of the Jewish Agency, as indicated in an official report:
“The information which was in the possession of His Majesty’s Government when they undertook their recent action in Palestine led them to draw the following conclusions:
(1) That the Haganah and its associated force the Palmach (working under the political control of prominent members of the Jewish Agency) have been engaging in carefully planned movements of sabotage and violence under the guise of ‘the Jewish Resistance Movement’;
(2) That the Irgun Tzeva’i Leumi and the Stern Group have worked since last autumn in co-operation with the Haganah High Command on certain of these operations;…
(3) That the broadcasting station ‘Kol Israel’ which claims to be “the Voice of the Resistance Movement” and which has been working under the general direction of the Jewish Agency has been supporting these organizations.”
(British Government, Palestine: Statement Relating to Acts of Violence, Cmd. 6873 (1946), p. 3.)
*These so-called “extremist groups” would be given a full pardon in 1948, be honoured, have state funerals, and provide future prime ministers. When zionist violence is discussed, the apologist ploy is to share the blame. To point at “extremists” within the movement. But they were all on the exact same page. Whether playing God with European Jewish lives, to crushing Arab lives, biting the British hand that fed their madness, or cosying up with fascists, they would all ring the wagons around themselves.
Post War
After the disgraceful, heartless actions of zionism throughout the Second World War, when Europe was in ashes, the citizens and military exhausted, zionist terrorism and manouevring stepped up. They were moving in to position to present themselves as the spokesperson for the victims they had abandoned and abused, caused by the atrocities committed by their antisemitic and fascist friends. They were moving in on fortunes left hanging (to be discussed).
Now they were setting their sights firmly on their patrons-cum-poodles, Britain. And the majority population of Palestine. The second world war was over, but the nazi methods continued.
Remember that during the war when “mainstream zionism” was supposedly on ceasefire, British intelligence had discovered that they were secretly directing some attacks and pushing the “extremist” propaganda of groups such as Irgun and Lehi.
In 1946 letter bombs were sent to British officials, including foreign minister Ernest Bevin, by Lehi.
(Walton, Calder (2 December 2017). “Coat Bomb and Explosive Prosthesis: British Intel Files Reveal How the Zionist Stern Gang Terrorized London”. Haaretz. Retrieved 5 February 2019.)
That same year, the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by Irgun.
The bombing of British administrative headquarters at the King David Hotel, killed 91 people — 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 others. Around 45 people were injured. In the literature about the practice and history of terrorism, it has been called one of the most lethal terrorist attacks of the 20th century.
(Rapoport, D.C., The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism, in Cronin, A. K. & Ludes, J. M. (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, Georgetown University Press, 2004, Washington, DC., pp. 50–51)
In 1946 also, the British Embassy in Rome was bombed by Irgun. Nearly half the building was destroyed and 3 people were injured.
(“Jewish Terrorists Admit Bombing Embassy in Rome”. St Petersburg Times. 1946–11–05. Retrieved 2010–04–08.)
In June 1947, the Stern Gang/Lehi sent multiple letter bombs to British government officials. Again.
A Stern Gang cell operating in Italy posted 21 letter bombs to senior British politicians and cabinet members including Prime Minister Clement Attlee, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Chancellor of the Exchequer Stafford, Cripps as well as Winston Churchill. Most of the letter bombs were intercepted, but some reached their intended recipients and failed to go off.
The Conservative Party’s Anthony Eden carried a letter bomb disguised in a book around with him for a whole day, until he was warned of the plot and checked inside his briefcase, where it was. British explosive experts reported that all the letter bombs were potentially lethal.
Belgian police stopped and searched two people, a man and a young woman, at the border crossing to France. The woman’s suitcase was found to have a false bottom with a secret compartment. It contained letters addressed to British officials, together with explosives, 14 pencil-type batteries, seven detonators and a watch constructed as a time fuse — similar to the letter bombs sent earlier that month and the bomb rigged up at the Colonial Office.
One of the letters, soon to be a letter bomb, was addressed to the chief secretary of the Palestine Administration, Sir John Shaw, who later secretly worked for MI5.
(Coat Bomb and Explosive Prosthesis: British Intel Files Reveal How the Zionist Stern Gang Terrorized London, Haaretz, Calder Walton, December 02, 2017)
During this period, one Mathilde Krim from Austria was married to an Irgun member and admitted to smuggling explosives in Europe. She would “become friends” with 1963 coup president Lyndon Johnson during the sixties (to be discussed later).
On July 25, 1947, Irgun kidnapped, hanged and booby trapped the bodies of two British sergeants in Palestine.
The Sergeants affair: When death sentences were passed on two Irgun members, the Irgun kidnapped Sgt. Clifford Martin and Sgt. Mervyn Paice and threatened to kill them in retaliation if the sentences were carried out. When the threat was ignored, the hostages were killed. Afterwards, their bodies were taken to an orange grove and left hanging by the neck from trees. An improvised explosive device was set. This went off when one of the bodies was cut down, seriously wounding a British officer.
(Britain Since 1945, David Childs P.34 para 1)
On September 3, 1947, a postal bomb addressed to the British War Office exploded in the post office sorting room in London, injuring 2 persons. It was attributed to Irgun or Stern Gangs.
(The Sunday Times, Sept. 24, 1972, p. 8)
In December 1947, 16 were Arabs killed and 67 wounded from bombings in Jerusalem and Jaffa. Irgun also burns down 100 Arab homes in Jaffa.
(Gilbert, Martin (2005). Routledge Atlas of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Routledge. ISBN 0–415–35901–5.)
Also in 1947, MI5 documents (released in 2003) confirmed there was “A project for an air raid on London, in the course of which leaflets were to be dropped in the name of the Stern Gang, together with high-explosive bombs”.
A member of Menachem Begin’s fascist Lehi movement, Rabbi Baruch Korff, is caught in a sting operation attempting to carry this out.
US zionists lobbied for his release. French authorities dropped all charges.
Rabbi Baruch Korff, the leader of the plot, and ten others were arrested in France in a sting operation. And the explosive devices to be used in the raid , contained in six fire extinguishers, were discovered.
Korff was part of Menachem Begin’s underground movement.
The young pilot also disclosed that, when he pointed out to Korff fog could prevent him finding the target, the rabbi told him to drop the bombs anywhere over London, brushing aside Gilbert’s concerns that innocent civilians would be killed.
“They are British,” Gilbert recalled Korff telling him, “so they are our enemy.”
Korff’s supporters in America lobbied the US State Department to intervene on his behalf. French prosecutors dropped all charges against Korff and the ten others.
Korff received a hero’s welcome from his supporters when he arrived back in Boston a few weeks later. He would become a trusted confidant of President Richard Nixon.
(Coat Bomb and Explosive Prosthesis: British Intel Files Reveal How the Zionist Stern Gang Terrorized London, Business Live, July 2014, quoting “Against Our Better Judgement”, Alison Weir; The bizarre truth about Nixon’s rabbi, The JC, Robert Philpott, July 2015)
And while zionists were terrorizing and bullying anybody in their way around the globe, the Palestinians saw their faces up close.
The Nakba
Between 1947 and 1950, zionists would ethnically cleanse the majority population of Palestine. 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children fled the rape and massacres.
…..growing violence culminated in Israel’s ruthless 1947–49 “War of Independence,” in which at least 750,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were expelled from their homes by numerically superior Israeli forces — half before any Arab armies joined the war. This massive humanitarian disaster is known as ‘The Catastrophe,’ al Nakba in Arabic.
(The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.)
According to research by Dr. Salman Abu Sitta 531 localities (villages and towns) where Palestinians lived were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1950.
213 Palestinian villages and towns (population 413,794, 52% of the refugees) were “cleansed” while under the “protection” of the British mandate
(Abu Sitta, Salman, The Palestinian Nakba 1948, The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, (London: The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000))
Zionist forces committed 33 massacres and destroyed 531 Palestinian towns.
(Abu Sitta, Salman, The Palestinian Nakba 1948, The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, (London: The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000))
There are discrepancies in the number of villages uprooted because Abu Sitta included tribal lands because these tribes constituted a large segment of the refugees (about 100,000) and these tribes did have fixed territorial areas well known to any traveler. Israeli zionist researcher Benny Morris excluded them.
According to the former director of the Israeli army archives, Benny Morris, “in almost every village occupied by us during the War… acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes”
(Morris, Benny, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987))
On January 5–6, 1948, the bombing of the Arab-owned Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem killed twenty-two Arabs, including women and children.
(Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry”)
On April 1948, zionists massacred up to 254 Arab men, women, and children in the village of Deir Yassin.
(Norman Finkelstein, “The Holocaust Industry”)
In July 1948, the Israelis launched “Operation Danny” to conquer the cities of Lydda and Ramle. The first attack on Lydda occurred on the afternoon of 11 July when the 89th battalion mounted on armoured cars and jeeps raided the city “spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved”. “Dozens of Arabs (perhaps as many as 200) were killed.”According to Morris, the description of this raid written by one of the soldiers “combine[s] elements of a battle and a massacre”.
(Benny Morris, ‘The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited’, p.426)
In September 17, 1948, Lehi assassinated the United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte.
Bernadotte was involved in the rescue of an estimated 11,000 Jews from nazi concentration camps.
(Macintyre, Donald (2008–09–18). “Israel’s forgotten hero: The assassination of Count Bernadotte — and the death of peace”. The Independent. Retrieved 2008–12–11.)
An individual who saved 11,000 Jews from concentration camps was murdered by an entity who tried to make a deal with nazis. And “mainstream zionists” had abandoned the same concentration camp prisoners that Bernadotte rescued. Think about that.
Saliha massacre
In 1948, 70 Lebanese civilians from the village of Saliha were herded into the village square and machine gunned to death by members of the Haganah Jewish militia. They did this after being told that no harm would come to them. It was later claimed that the corpses were left there for four days. Haganah returned to bulldoze their bodies towards the mosque and blew it up to cover up their war crime.
(Zionism’s first Lebanese victims remembered, Daily Star Lebanon, May 1998; “Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit, Haaretz, September 2004)
When evil men are left to their own devices. The horror of Dawayima.
“There was no battle and no resistance (and no Egyptians). The first conquerors killed from eighty to a hundred Arabs [including] women and children. The children were killed by smashing of their skulls with sticks. There was not a house without dead. The second wave of the [Israeli] army was a platoon that the soldier giving testimony belongs to.
In the town were left male and female Arabs, who were put into houses and were then locked in without receiving food or drink. Later explosive engineers came to blow up houses. One commander ordered an engineer to put two elderly women into the house that was to be blown up…
One soldier boasted that he raped an Arab woman and afterwards shot her. An Arab woman with a days-old infant was used for cleaning the back yard where the soldiers eat. She serviced them for a day or two, after which they shot her and the infant.”
(a letter to Benny Morris, quoting one of the Israeli soldiers who were part of the Al-Dawayima massacre in October 1948. Published in Hebrew in Haaretz, translated by Mondoweiss in 2016, ‘Barbarism by an educated and cultured people’ — Dawayima massacre was worse than Deir Yassin, Jonathan Oifir)
Nakba and ethnic cleansing denial
Nakba denial is rife among apologists for zionism. In denying the massacres and brutality, they are negating the records of their own leaders during this time who themselves acknowledged what happened.
After the war, remaining lands owned by the Palestinians was 7%, while Jewish owned or controlled lands went from 8% to 85%. This land, which was allocated for use by Jews only, made the bulk of the “land of Israel.”
(Abu Sitta, Salman, The Palestinian Nakba 1948, The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, (London: The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000))
A Haganah Major General gave orders to ethnically cleanse.
“Do all you can to immediately and quickly purge the conquered territories of all hostile elements in accordance with the orders issued. The residents should be helped to leave the areas that have been conquered.”
— Cable dated October 31, 1948, signed by Haganah Major General Carmel and addressed to all the division and district commanders under his command
(Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of ‘Transfer’ in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948, Nur Masalha)
Yitzhak Rabin and Ben-Gurion gave orders to ethnically cleanse.
“After attacking Lydda and then Ramla…What would they do with the 50,000 civilians living in the two cities…Not even Ben-Gurion could offer a solution…and during the discussion at operation headquarters, he [Ben-Gurion] remained silent, as was his habit in such situations. Clearly, we could not leave hostile and armed populace in our rear, where it could endanger the supply route [to the troops who were] advancing eastward…Ben-Gurion would repeat the question: “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 one of the most difficult actions we undertook.”
(Kurzman, Dan, Soldier of Peace: The Life of Yitzhak Rabin, 1922–1995, (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 140–141.)
The reality of Rabin’s “difficult action”. The expulsion of 50–70,000 Arabs:
[an expulsion order signed by Yitzhak Rabin was issued to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stating,] “1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age.…”
(The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, Benny Morris, p207)
Moshe Dayan, military commander and future Minister of Defence, acknowledged the ethnic cleansing.
“We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat — in the place of Jibta, Sarid — in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua — in the place of Tell Shaman. There is no one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
(From an address given to Technion University students (19 March 1969), a transcription of which appeared in Ha’aretz (4 April 1969), quoted in The Question of Palestine (1980) by Edward Said, p. 14)
Yosef Nachmani (high-ranking member of Haganah and director of the offices of the Jewish National Fund in Tiberias) acknowledged the massacres and rapes. Particularly in Safsaf and Salha.
“The acts of cruelty committed by our soldiers. After they went into Safsaf, the village and its people raised a white flag. They separated the men from the women, tied the hands of some 50 to 60 peasants and shot and killed them, burying them in a single hole. They also raped a number of the women from the village…In Salha, which raised a white flag, they carried out a real massacre, killing men and women, about 60 to 70 people. Where did they find such a degree of cruelty like that of the Nazis? They learned from them.”
— Yosef Nachmani (high-ranking member of Haganah and director of the offices of the Jewish National Fund in Tiberias.
(Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p.222)
How does one summarize all of the above apart from saying that zionism was the first global terrorist organization. They were among the first fascist organizations. They worked with other fascists to the detriment of the Jewish diaspora and the working class in general. They even offered their services to Hitler’s Germany against the British while nazi money paid for their colonization project for nearly a decade. They were one of the first organizations to go by apartheid laws, decades before it was vomited on to the world stage in South Africa.
Their cruelty knew no limits. The Nakba bore that out.
While babies were having their skulls smashed in, women were being raped and unarmed men executed in remote, lonely spots, the zionist machine was working up a frenzy in the United States under the banner of the Holocaust. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine was overlooked and even encouraged under this banner.
Zionism used the Holocaust to their own advantage. And are still using it to shame people in to getting what they want. Or getting them to look the other way, or shutting them up when they carry out atrocities. People who are guilty of nothing, being shamed by people who are guilty themselves of having a hidden hand in the fate of the persecuted Jews of Europe. This forbidden knowledge will be discussed in the next chapter.
