The recent Israeli attacks on Lebanon and continuing atrocities in the Gaza Strip are merely the latest in a long list of acts of criminal aggression by the state of Israel, writes Ronnie Kasrils.
Israel has traditionally been likened to the biblical David - a comely young shepherd boy who slew the monstrous Goliath of the Philistines and saved his people from slavery. Not anymore. Despite its small size, Israel has become the world's fifth top military power, boasting sophisticated land, sea and air forces and, according to general estimates, an arsenal of several hundred nuclear weapons. In its entire history it has seldom balked at using military force against its far weaker opponents, in preference to negotiations and diplomacy. In the manner of former colonial powers it has deprived the Palestinian people of their land and right to self-determination and treats them with extreme brutality born of racist contempt.
Tireless Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has stated: "World opinion is always on the side of the underdog. In this fight, we are Goliath and they are David. In the eyes of the world [outside the US], the Palestinians are fighting a war of liberation against a foreign occupation. We are in their territory, not they in ours. We are the occupiers, they are the victims."1 Given its record of force even Israel's government spokespersons have switched metaphors and are choosing different comparisons to describe their country. Israel is like the elephants of the Kruger National Park, explained Ariel Sharon's former adviser, Ra'anan Gissin, on a recent visit to South Africa. He was speaking as a guest of the conservative South African Zionist Federation, an unabashed advocacy group ready to defend anything Israel does - right or wrong; labelling anyone critical of Israel an "anti-Semite" or "self-loathing Jew" in an attempt to intimidate non-Jew and Jew alike.
"We just want to be left alone," Gissin declared to an admiring audience.
"We seem docile but if you wound us we can go crazy because we are an endangered species".2
The Lebanon Onslaught Yet it is Israel that is a danger to its neighbours and imperils its own people by fomenting war instead of seeking peaceful diplomatic solutions. As the world has seen, Lebanon - a country half Israel's size - has just experienced the wrath of the behemoth: its people killed and maimed; much of its capital, towns and villages, airports and harbours, highways, roads and bridges, electricity, fuel and water facilities destroyed. So awesome has been the devastation that Gissin could just as well have used the Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina to describe Israel's wrath. The horror is that what was unleashed on Lebanon was the wilful fury of man, not some unavoidable act of nature.
The apparent trigger of rage was the seizure by Hezbollah on 12 July of two Israeli soldiers - one originally from Durban. "Kidnapping" was the way Israel termed the capture of its soldiers on duty in a tense border area.
When Israel seizes Palestinians or Lebanese it talks about "arrest", "capture" or "detention of terrorists". At the height of this crisis Israel apprehended 41 Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament, including eight cabinet ministers and the deputy prime minister, elected in the democratic elections of January 2006 - but peremptorily seized for membership of a "terrorist" organisation. Israel holds over 9,000 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners, women and children among them. Several have been held for longer than Nelson Mandela's incarceration.
In retaliation for a Palestinian action from the Gaza Strip on 25 June, in which one Israeli soldier was captured on the border - following the Israeli abduction of a civilian Gazan doctor and his son the previous day - the people of the miniscule enclave3 have paid a heavy price of 262 killed up to mid-September. Vital infrastructure has been flattened, including Gaza's only electricity generation plant. There is great hardship, lack of water and nobody is allowed to leave what has long been a hermetically sealed open-air prison. The Gaza Strip is the most densely populated place on earth, and the poorest in the northern hemisphere. The siege and daily bombardment continues unabated after three months in what is tantamount to a creeping genocide. One Israeli soldier died in this period. Militants in Gaza have periodically fired makeshift rockets into Israel. However, if we are looking for the initial trigger of the current round of conflict we need to be reminded that the killing of an entire Palestinian family on a Gaza beach by an Israeli shell ended a Palestinian unilateral truce that had lasted almost a year. It was this Israeli attack that prompted the 25 June action.
The death toll on the Lebanese side between 12 July and 14 August 2006 was over 1,200 human beings killed - of which one-third were children -according to general media reports. Thousands more have been mutilated and many more have seen their homes razed to the ground. A staggering one-quarter of a population of four million was displaced. The Israeli Air Force launched over 7,000 air attacks, and its navy conducted an additional 2,500 bombardments, reinforcing the massive artillery, tank and ground force assault. All this against a weak country, with no air force or navy to speak of. There have been wry comments that if this was the way Lebanon's moderate government was "rewarded" after Syria's withdrawal in 2005, how would Israel treat its real adversaries?
National resistance from Lebanon came overwhelmingly from Hezbollah, but also included the communist combatants of the National Resistance Front, which has mourned the loss of seven experienced fighters out of 184 battlefield deaths on the Lebanese side. Hezbollah fired several thousand rockets into northern Israel, including the city of Haifa, which caused light damage but constituted a huge psychological impact, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing south. Forty-two Israeli civilians were killed. This was in response to Israel's initial bombardment of central and southern Lebanon and, within a few days, Beirut. Significantly it was the national resistance on the ground against the Israeli invasion force that inflicted most casualties on the Israeli military, 120 of whom were killed.
At the village of Qana in the south of Lebanon, 56 people died instantly -forty of them children - when the building they sought shelter in was hit by an Israeli precision-guided missile. Israel claimed Hezbollah had been firing rockets from or near the building. This was shown to be untrue. The same village, said to be a Hezbollah stronghold, had seen 150 inhabitants die in a similar attack in 1996. Israel justified these massacres in the same way that apartheid security forces explained similar assaults on Southern African frontline states, claiming the "terrorists" hide among the people. Lebanon's agony continued as Israel applied a punitive land, sea and air blockade. The United Nations (UN) had to plead with the Israeli government to allow a special corridor for emergency humanitarian supplies.
Israel, whose founding-fathers pledged it would radiate as an inspirational "light unto the nations", displays the aggressive mentality of a corrupt colonial power; brutally drowning in blood and flames any resistance to its rule. To claim that Israel was responding to provocation is the cynical old ploy of pinning the blame on the victims. We saw plenty of that in apartheid South Africa.
Investigations into the weapons Israel has used in Lebanon are being conducted by eminent geneticists. New and hitherto unknown injuries to corpses raise the possibility that Israel used "direct energy" weapons and chemical or biological weapons during the conflict.4 These also included suction and white phosphorous bombs used against civilian centres with ghastly results. Over one million American-made cluster bombs and bomblets were dropped on the south. Ninety percent of these were dropped in the last three days before the ceasefire, constituting a dormant lethal minefield.
Since the ceasefire, fifty-two Lebanese, the majority children, have been killed by these mines. "What we did was insane and monstrous," stated an Israeli commander, in an interview with an Israeli newspaper.5 The UN humanitarian chief, Jan Egeland, labelled the cluster bomb attacks "completely immoral".6 An Amnesty International Report published findings that point to an Israeli policy of deliberate destruction of Lebanese civilian infrastructure during the onslaught on that country. "Israel's assertion that the attacks on the infrastructure were lawful is manifestly wrong. Many of the violations identified in our report are war crimes, including indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks," said Amnesty official Kate Gilmore.7 Israel's claim that it gave people ample warning to get out of areas it planned to bomb was seen to be an absolute sham, since escape routes along the road network had been effectively destroyed and Israel's aircraft fired on any vehicle on the move. It was mainly the families of the poor, the weak and disabled, unable to flee, who were killed while sheltering in their homes or nearby buildings or caught in the open. Amnesty found this a clear contravention of the conduct of war that forbids the deliberate targeting of civilians. Amnesty likewise criticised Hezbollah for firing missiles indiscriminately into Israel but made it perfectly clear that Israel's actions were totally overwhelming, excessive and disproportionate, and that Lebanon suffered catastrophic destruction.8 The celebrated Norwegian writer, Jostein Gaarder, regarded as a friend of the Jewish people, was so shocked he wrote: "It is time to learn a new lesson: We no longer recognise the state of Israel. We could not recognise the South African apartheid regime...We call child murderers 'child murderers'... We do not recognise the principle of a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye... We do not recognise the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st Century map of the Middle East."9
The Zionist Agenda The world struggles to understand the cause of the conflict. Talk of Israeli Jews being an endangered species is the standard Zionist line: the Jews escaping persecution in Europe began returning to Palestine at the end of the 19th Century to reclaim their biblical homeland. As the Zionist pioneers acquired land, and began building up the Jewish community, they were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinian Arabs, allegedly stemming from their inherent anti-Semitism. The settlers, so the story goes, were forced to defend themselves then, as now.
In fact from the outset, Zionism was aimed at the dispossession and eviction of the indigenous Palestinian population so that Israel could become an exclusivist Jewish state. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund, usually from absentee Arab landlords and often by deception, was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs. The situation continues to this day.
As the Palestinian people awoke to these intentions they quite naturally began resisting. At the end of the First World War and the collapse of the German-aligned Turkish Ottoman Empire - which had ruled much of the Middle East from the early 16th Century - the map of the region changed drastically. Palestine and Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia) both fell under British mandate rule in 1919, with Syria being awarded to France. Lebanon was created from Syrian territory by the French in 1920, which explains Syria's interest and influence in that country. Britain established kingdoms in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Transjordan.
Anti-colonial struggles soon developed everywhere. In Palestine national consciousness sharpened against both the British mandate and the Zionist settlers. A courageous national uprising of the Palestinian people broke out from 1936 to 1939, and was mercilessly put down by British troops and Zionist militia. The Zionists had no hesitation in using terrorist tactics against both the Palestinians and later the British, whose policy interests vacillated between Arabs and Zionists. Nevertheless Britain gave decisive support to the Zionist project with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, seeing a Jewish homeland as a potential strategic buffer against the Arabs.
Winston Churchill, then Britain's Colonial Secretary, made this clear in a 1921 statement: "Zionism is good for the Jews and good for the British Empire." This strategy was later spurred on by the increasing importance of the region as oilfields were discovered from Iraq to Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the Cold War unfolded. International sympathy for the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust - certainly the most horrific act of genocide in modern history - flooding into Palestine after the Second World War, proved decisive in swinging the balance of power in favour of Zionism.
Consequently in 1947 the UN decided on a Partition Plan - Resolution 181 -to create separate Arab and Jewish homelands. Approximately 56% of the former British Mandate territory was granted to the Jews and 44% to the Palestinians. Yet the latter population at 1,250,000 in 1948 was double that of the Jews, who up to that stage only owned 7% of the land. The Zionists had no hesitation in accepting the UN proposal - for the time being. The Palestinians, who were not consulted by the UN, rejected the proposal. They were naturally unwilling to surrender any of the land they had lived in for centuries to intruders from Europe. The USA put considerable pressure on Latin American states to vote in favour of the recognition of Israel by the UN at the time, when there were few African and Asian states represented in that august body. The vote was 33 in favour, 13 against with 10 states abstaining. The Palestinians were being made to pay a heavy price for the persecution of Jews in Europe.
Although Israel cast itself in the image of the diminutive David facing the mighty Arab Goliath, the kingdoms of the Middle East were extremely weak and disunited and, despite their rhetoric, unable to assist the Palestinians.
The Zionists claim that Israel had to face incredible odds to survive against the Arab "hordes". They refer to an invasion by five Arab armies.
These are cited as Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria - all weak kingdoms or states under British and French influence. In fact Lebanon had no army whatsoever; the Iraqi's were mobilised only after the ceasefire; and Syrian and Egyptian forces were poorly organised and led. The only force that had seen action during the World War was the Jordanian Arab Legion -a redoubtable outfit but only two battalions strong. The latter's monarch, King Abdullah, seeking to hold on to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, was involved in secret negotiations with the Zionists and later assassinated. In fact the Arab coalition failed to create a joint command, never entered that part of Palestine set aside for the Jewish state, and was hopelessly outmatched.
Far from the Arab countries constituting a threat to Israel, it was precisely the Zionists that aimed to subjugate the Palestinians in particular and control the Arabs in general. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, made this perfectly clear when he stated: "The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British Mandate. The Jewish people have got another map, from the Nile to the Euphrates." In May 1948 he stated: "The Achilles heel of the Arab coalition is Lebanon. Muslim supremacy in Lebanon is artificial and can be easily overthrown... Smash Lebanon... establish a Christian state there... eliminate Transjordan... Syria will fall to us."10 After Israel's unilateral declaration of independence in May 1948 - and in the face of an Israeli attack on the Palestinian 44% of territory - the Arab forces advanced with the aim of protecting that section of the partition settlement set aside for the Palestinians. Israeli forces, equal in number to all the Arab forces put together and far better organised and equipped, prevailed. At the end of hostilities in 1949 they had gained 78% of what had once been historic Palestine. This constituted a monstrous land grab.
Jerusalem was divided along the ceasefire line into West Jerusalem under Israeli control, while East Jerusalem and the West Bank were in Jordanian hands, to be formally annexed by Jordan in 1950.11 After the June 1967 Six Day War East Jerusalem and the West Bank fell under Israeli military occupation, which remains the case today.
The indigenous Palestinians lost their land and many - like the Jews of Nazi Europe - became homeless refugees; initially in 1948-49 when approximately 750,000 or 60% of their number fled for their lives; and again in 1967, when many hundreds of thousands more were expelled. Today Palestinian refugees number an estimated four million in the diaspora, with 2,200,000 desperately hanging on in the West Bank and 1,300,000 in the Gaza Strip. Those who remain in Israel amount to 1,200,000 or one-fifth of the population, where they are discriminated against in law as second-class citizens bereft of the property, housing, health, education and municipal rights enjoyed by Jews.
It can be noted from the above figures that approximately 4.7 million Palestinians are living in the Holy Land.
Many Palestinian refugees fled to Lebanon, Jordan and other Arab countries.
This was planned in a Zionist scenario devised years earlier by Theodore Herzl, founder of the movement in 1897, who had said the aim would be to "spirit the penniless [indigenous Palestinian] population across the border" to make way for the Jewish state. Many still live as refugees, with Israel refusing to abide by UN Resolution 194 of 1949, which recognises their "inalienable right to return home". The resolution has been re-affirmed more than 25 times, to no avail.
Ethnic Cleansing The Zionists, and orthodox Israeli historians, claim the refugees went of their own accord. Israel's so-called "revisionist" historians such as Benny Morris ("Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem"), Ilan Pappe ("Arab-Israeli Conflict"), Avi Shlaim ("The Iron Wall"), Tom Segev ("The First Israelis") and Simha Flapan ("The Birth of Israel") have revealed the brutal truth, concealed from the Western public for decades - and put an end to the myths of the 1948-49 war. The official records, these and other historians researched,12 attest to a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli forces, including an estimated fifteen cold blooded massacres, such as at the Deir Yasin village outside Jerusalem on 9 April 1948, which aimed at terrorising the Palestinian population into fleeing for their lives. Those who did not were rounded-up, marched-off or were loaded onto trucks at bayonet point, and dumped across the borders. As for Zionist allegations that Arab radio stations broadcast instructions for Palestinians to flee, the detailed monitoring by the BBC of those programmes revealed that the claims were invented for pure propaganda.
It is recounted of Deir Yassin that the slaughter of 250 inhabitants was carried out "in a cold and premeditated fashion...the attackers lined men, women and children up against the walls and shot them".13 The research of Morris (an ardent Zionist), Pappe (a communist) and the "revisionists" was stimulated by the opening of Israeli archives 20 years after the 1948-49 War and supported by UN and British records of the time.
They attest to Palestine being dismantled in four distinct waves, in which threats and atrocities were deliberately conducted to induce flight. Records show these were not capricious acts of Zionist extremists such as the notorious Irgun and Stern gangs, but part of a comprehensive plan worked out by all Zionist military formations including the mainstream Haganah (forerunner of the Israeli Defence Force) in 1943. The British failed to stop these atrocities. In the wake of such revelations, Israel's first minister of agriculture, Aharon Cizling, stated in a 17 November 1948 cabinet meeting: "I often disagree when the term Nazi was applied to the British... even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken."14 Cizling's lament was followed by the publication of a letter to The New York Times by a group of Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, condemning Menachem Begin and Irgun as Nazi and fascist.15 Nearly all Palestinian towns were rapidly depopulated (for example, Haifa, Jaffa and Jerusalem were each reduced from around 70,000 to about 3,000 Palestinian inhabitants) and 418 villages were systematically destroyed. The Arab place names of these villages were obliterated in an attempt to erase them from memory. Plundering and looting of Palestinian property was rife.
Ben Gurion confessed his bitter disappointment at the "mass robbery" in which Israeli soldiers and "all parts of the population participated".16 Israel's Ministerial Committee for "Abandoned Property" received a report that: "From Lydda alone the army took out 1,800 truck loads of property".17 Thirteen thousand Palestinians were killed - some were resistance fighters but the majority helpless civilians. This was the Palestinian "al-Nakba" (The Catastrophe), which continues in one form or another to this day.
Palestinian and Arab historians have documented the catastrophe down the years, notably Edward Said in his prolific writings, Walid Khalidi ("Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine"), Elias Sanbar ("The Expulsion") and Nur Masalha ("1948 and After").
Zionist and Palestinian Identity What exactly were the origins of these people? And how did this affect their right to the land? Israel is the only state in the world based on biblical claims and the "divine promise to a chosen people", an issue of biblical faith and not fact.
Therefore let us ask who were the Zionists? Modern Zionists at the end of the 19th century, mostly living in the Russian Empire, exploited the Judaic religious faith to make a case for an exclusive Jewish state in the Holy Land as the only way of safeguarding a "Jewish nation" in a perpetually anti-Semitic world.
This was the Zionist world-view at a time of national and ethnic oppression of many peoples at the hands of the reactionary monarchies and empires of Europe. For centuries those practicing the Jewish faith had suffered from anti-Semitism in Europe where many were merchants and traders who serviced the closed feudal economies, and were used and abused when it suited the rulers. In Czarist Russia in particular the common, mainly impoverished and ghettoised Jews frequently faced vicious pogroms.18 But not only in Russia: the scandalous treatment of a Jewish officer in the French army, Captain Dreyfus, falsely charged in the 1880s for spying for Germany, and the blatant victim of anti-Semitism, caused an international outcry and influenced the ultra-ethnic views of Theodore Herzl.
While Europe's Jews became emancipated by the Enlightenment and French Revolution, as well as the revolutions of the 19th century, Zionists like Herzl saw anti-Semitism as an inevitable phenomenon.
The Jews were a religious faith group, not a national group, living in many countries. The Zionists, influenced by ethno-national trends that were hostile to working class internationalism, became fixated with the idea of creating an ethnic homeland. They looked to Palestine for this possible home.
The Bible refers to the ancient land of Canaan as the land of milk and honey "promised" by God to Moses and his people, the Hebrews.19 This was the territory Herzl identified as the natural Jewish homeland. The Zionists were not particularly religious, in fact many were agnostics. In contrast the religious, cultural Zionists regarded Jerusalem (Zion) and the Holy Land as a spiritual place they sought to visit in the manner of pilgrims. They preached that only with the coming of the Messiah should the Jews be permitted to return to make their homes there. The idea of setting up a state was sacrilege to them. There were also secular, cultural Zionists who in time opposed the political Zionist notion of an exclusive Jewish state in the form it took from 1948.
Biblical narrative raises the question as to what was Canaan and who were the Canaanites. Archaeologists have shown that a Canaanite kingdom did in fact exist in the region of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria between 3500 and 1000 BC, in the Middle Bronze period. Archaeological digs provide evidence that Jerusalem was a large, fortified Canaanite city already in 1800 BC. The area between the Nile and the fertile crescent of the Tigris-Euphrates rivers is a cradle of civilisation where agriculture and the first towns developed. Former nomadic groups such as the Canaanites, Philistines, Samaritans and Hebrews settled down, became farmers, traders and artisans. Kingdoms, with their rulers, priests, armies and slaves, rose and fell.
The Kingdom of David and Solomon, narrated in the Bible and on which Zionists base their territorial demands, was one such example.
Archaeological and historical researchers strive to base its existence between 1000 BC and the destruction of Judah in 586 BC, while some question whether it existed at all. A subsequent Jewish kingdom existed in Roman times (Herod was one such monarch at the time of Jesus) and was destroyed in 70 AD, followed by the expulsion of most Jews in the second century AD for daring to bravely rise against Rome. It is recorded, however, that a majority of Jews were living outside Palestine at the time of the Roman Empire. Thriving Jewish religious and commercial centres existed in Alexandria and Babylon prior to the Roman Empire's existence.20 The people who co-existed in Palestine after the collapse of Imperial Rome were a veritable melting-pot of farmers, artisans, traders, scholars, priests, pagans, nomads, Persians, Samaritans, Christian converts, Greeks, Jewish survivors and old Canaanite tribes.21According to scholars of antiquity, all these people were additions, "sprigs grafted onto the parent tree... And that parent tree was Canaanite... The Arab invaders of the 7th Century AD made Muslim converts of the natives, settled down as residents, and intermarried with them, with the result that all are now so completely Arabised that we cannot tell where the Canaanites leave off and the Arabs begin."22 For Palestinians this is a living legacy. Visitors to the West Bank town of Qalquilia will find that the inhabitants proudly point out that its existence dates from the Canaanite era. Another such place is Jericho, the oldest city in the world, on the western shore of the Dead Sea, which the Bible records as falling to the Hebrews after their sojourn in the desert.
Palestine (Filastin in Arabic) became a predominantly Arab and Islamic country at the end of the seventh century. At the onset of the 19th Century it had a population of some 250,000 of which an estimated five thousand were Jews. The latter gravitated to the Holy Land for purely religious and spiritual purposes, were free to practice their faith and got on harmoniously with their Palestinian neighbours. This was the case throughout the Islamic world where Jews had settled, were accepted and flourished.23 As John Rose, a noted researcher on Zionism and its mythology, points out, at the height of Islamic civilisation there was a flowering of relations and a common Islamic-Judaeo culture.24 Uri Avnery, a noted Israeli scholar, reminds us that in 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. This was 400 years after Muslim domination in which no effort had been made to impose Islam on the Christians and Jews living there because religious freedom was tolerated under Islam.25 Palestinian farmers were devoted to their land, which they had productively cultivated for centuries. The waters of the Jordan River to the east, the Litany River to the north (in present day Lebanon), and the aquifers of the West Bank highlands allowed for the raising of a bountiful variety of crops and livestock. Farmers prospered and families counted their wealth on the basis of their precious olive and fruit trees - much like African farmers count their head of cattle. The townspeople were well-educated, urbane, religious and also secular in their views. They all believed they belonged to a land called Palestine, as well as feeling they were part of a larger Arab people - in much the same way that Africans feel allegiance to their own country and mother Africa.
By the 1880s, and the first Zionist migration, the Jewish population grew to 24,000 or 5% of a Palestine population of 430,000. At the establishment of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1922, the Jewish population had risen to 84,000 out of a total of 841,000 inhabitants or 11% of the population.
British records attest to how productive Palestinian farming was at the time, with the territory becoming the world's largest exporter of oranges, the famous Jaffa orange named after the coastal town.
A land without people?
Despite these facts the Zionists perpetuated one of their favourite myths, deceiving would-be Jewish immigrants as well as an ignorant world, that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". They claimed it was barren and just waiting to be civilised. On the eve of World War Two, after several waves of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe, the census figures kept by the British showed a population composed of one million Palestinians, and 386,000 Jews. By 1945 there were about 500,000 Jews in Palestine or 31% of the population.26 The Zionists claimed at their founding Congress in Basle in 1897, that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates was "the promised land" where their forefathers had once lived.
They hoped to achieve this by pragmatic stages or what Ariel Sharon would later call establishing "facts on the ground" by conquest or settlement. By 1947 with their eyes set on a Jewish state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River in the east, and Aqaba on the Red Sea in the south to the Litany River in the north, they were prepared to accept the UN Partition Plan and 56% of the British mandate territory, as a launching pad for further expansion and annexation.
Erich Fromm, the noted Jewish writer and thinker living in Palestine, argued at the time that "if all nations would suddenly claim territory in which their forefathers had lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse."27 One would agree that this is precisely what the Zionists have transformed the Holy Land into. Such logic would for example expel all those of European and Asian descent from South Africa; give vast tracts of the country where the Batswana, Swazi and Basotho people had once resided to Bechuanaland, Swaziland and Lesotho. In fact taken to its conclusion only the rights to the land of the original Khoi and San people of South Africa would be worthy of recognition. On a similar track much of the USA - parts of California, Texas, Florida - would be returned to Mexico. Come to that North and South America would need to be handed back to the indigenous American peoples.
Jewish socialists and communists around the world, in Palestine, South Africa, Europe, America and Arab countries, opposed the Zionist doctrine as ultra-reactionary nationalism - in fact comparable to Afrikaner nationalism and its "chosen race" mythology. Thriving, well assimilated Jewish communities such as in Iraq were not interested in the Zionist project at all, until Israel's Mossad agents began bombing Baghdad synagogues in 1950-51. In a little known story they were reluctantly relocated to Israel through the connivance of the corrupt Iraqi rulers with Israeli agents.28 Marxists stressed, then as now, the need to organise a common struggle of all population groups for a democratic society in a unitary state; a country which belonged to all its inhabitants regardless of background, as proclaimed in our own Freedom Charter. It was in the winning of democratic rights, equality and common citizenship for all, that a united people could deal with threats of anti-Semitism, racism, fascism, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination. They pointed out that to be Zionist by definition was intrinsically anti-democratic as it endorsed the principle of a state with special rights for Jews. Such outspoken Jews in Palestine, identifying themselves as Palestinian Jews, were often brutally assaulted by Zionist thugs and even killed. Einstein's New York Times letter condemned the fascist methods of the Irgun and Stern gangs that "inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community". The letter continued: "Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them".29 Even the earlier rabbis denounced Zionism as being diametrically opposed to Judaism, opposed as they were to defining the Jewish people as a nationalistic entity rather than a faith group. Latter day rabbis, Rabbi Hirsch of Jerusalem among them, adhere to the biblical position that "the Jewish people are charged by Divine oath not to force themselves back to the Holy Land against the wishes of those residing there".30 Most tellingly, after the Zionist Movement's creation in 1897, a delegation of sceptical Vienna rabbis visited the Holy Land to assess the potential of a Jewish homeland there. Their observation was simple and to the point: "The bride is indeed beautiful but already married to another man."31 This of course did not deter the Zionists who plotted from the start to expel the bridegroom and abduct the bride by whatever force was required. In fact the land has been hijacked from its rightful owners exactly as in colonial conquest the world over. Consider that in South Africa such dispossession was a protracted process over three centuries, with ebbs and flows. In Palestine colonial settler dispossession was concentrated into fifty years of extreme relentless brutality, and outrageously permitted to happen in the mid-20th Century.
Despite the support of anti-colonial struggles for independence in the post-Second World War period, it is an anomaly that the process of colonising Palestine came to be legitimised at the United Nations in 1947.
Instrument of Western imperialism
Israel's functional role as an instrument of Western imperialism against the Arab world was demonstrated in less than a decade after its independence. In 1956 Israel participated in the infamous invasion of Egypt, with French and British forces, to seize the Suez Canal after its nationalisation by the country's revolutionary new leader Colonel Nasser. This adventure was rebuffed by Egyptian national resistance and an international outcry, with the USA pressurising the invaders to back off.
After the Suez fiasco America soon demonstrated its willingness to become Israel's chief backer. Noted Egyptian scholar, Abdelwahab Elmessiri, has pointed out that Israel had become a "functional" client state for US interests.32 He observes that when functional entities outlive their use they are unceremoniously dropped by their masters. It was through America's more than generous assistance in developmental and military aid that Israel became a regional superpower. America has been providing approximately $5 billion in aid annually - $3 billion per annum for military requirements alone since 1967 - and sees Israel as strategic ally of choice with regard to keeping the oil-rich Middle East under control. An American organisation, Jewish Voices for Peace, has pointed out that US military aid to Israel since 1949 "represents the largest transfer of funds from one country to another in history".33 It is estimated that this military aid amounted to $100 billion by the end of the 20th century.
As US President Ronald Reagan explained in 1981: "With a combat experienced military, Israel is a force in the Middle East that is actually a benefit to us. If there were not Israel with that force, we'd have to supply it with our own."
Within a decade of the 1956 Suez adventure, the region was at war again.
Once more the situation was replete with pretexts in which Israel was awaiting the opportunity to strike. In 1967 Nasser, asserting Egypt's sovereign rights, requested the UN forces to evacuate positions on the Sinai Peninsula, such as at Sharm el-Sheikh, which they had occupied under agreement in 1957 following the Suez debacle. After the UN complied, he imposed a blockade on Israeli shipping in the Straits of Tiran, in the Gulf of Aqaba.
The Israeli forces were well prepared and in June, claiming they were engaging in a pre-emptive defensive strike, launched lightning attacks by air and land on Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian positions. Israel swiftly captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan; Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt; and the strategic Golan Heights from Syria, in what came to be called the Six Day War.
Always ready to boast about their successes after establishing new "facts on the ground" through conquest, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stated that the Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches in 1967 did not prove that Nasser was about to attack Israel. "We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him," he explained.34 Military chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, was equally frank in admitting: "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."35 General Moshe Dayan, who gave the order to attack the Golan Heights, explained that "many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel". He further declared: "Our fathers had reached the frontiers which were recognised in the UN Partition Plan of 1947 [56% of the land]. Our generation reached the frontiers of 1949 [78% of the land]. Now the Six Day generation has managed to reach Suez, Jordan and the Golan Heights. This is not the end."36 Indeed history since is illustrative of Israel's continuing repression of Palestinian people and war on its neighbours. The Israeli David had clearly transformed into the domineering Goliath. Like Goliath, however, it was not invincible. The next war, against a modernising Egypt, showed the tables could be turned.
Egypt managed to achieve the only victory of Arab conventional forces over the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in the 1973 October War, which was a just war to regain lost land. On that occasion it was the well-prepared Egyptian forces that launched a surprise attack across the Suez Canal to expel Israeli forces occupying the east bank, and advanced to regain the Sinai Peninsula. After this Egypt made peace with Israel, although President Sadat who succeeded Nasser in 1970, would die in a dramatic assassination in 1979 for what his Muslim Brotherhood attackers alleged was his betrayal of the Arab cause. Egypt ultimately became the second largest recipient of US aid after Israel.
Israel and South Africa
From this time too, a cosy relationship developed between Israel and apartheid South Africa. Pretoria rushed to the Zionist state's assistance through massive arms supplies immediately following Israel's defeat in the 1973 October War. Israel more than reciprocated at a time when South Africa was facing international isolation and mounting sanctions. Among other armaments apartheid's naval strike craft were directly supplied by Israel; the Air Force's Mirage jets were upgraded with Israeli assistance; and South Africa secretly built seven nuclear missiles with Israeli expertise. In 1974 Prime Minister John Vorster, interned during the Second World War for his pro-Nazi sympathies, visited Israel as an ally and hero.
At the same time the relationship between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)37, the ANC and Africa's liberation movements grew stronger in mutual support and solidarity. This had crystallised with a UN General Assembly Resolution in 1975, declaring both apartheid and Zionism racist creeds and crimes against humanity. It was a very different United Nations from that that had voted to recognise Israel in 1948, with many newly independent states having emerged from colonial status. In 1979 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning Israel for its political, diplomatic, economic, military and nuclear collaboration with apartheid South Africa.
Former ANC President Oliver Tambo said at an International Solidarity conference in 1979: "The PLO in Palestine... and the ANC in South Africa...
constitute the core and the vanguard of the liberation forces of their respective countries without whom and against whom no just and lasting solutions of the fundamental problems of the Middle East and southern Africa are possible...We are convinced that out of this very important conference will come a clear call...to consolidate and raise the level of unity among all anti-imperialist and anti-racist forces; ...and rally to the support of the PLO."38
The South African Communist Party (SACP) likewise had consistently expressed a similar position. At its 1989 Congress it stated: "The anti-imperialist struggles of the developing countries are closely related to those of liberation movements struggling against the last remnants of the colonial system. In particular, Zionist Israel and apartheid South Africa are springboards to destabilise independent countries throughout their respective regions. The struggles of the Palestinian people under the leadership of the PLO, the Namibian people under the leadership of SWAPO, and South Africa's majority under the leadership of the ANC, have an importance beyond their immediate context".39
A criminal defence doctrine
The post-1967 period saw the PLO growing as a more resilient guerrilla force under Yasser Arafat's leadership. Arafat found a powerful base among the Palestinian refugees in Jordan who were about 40% of the population there.
With the PLO mounting operations across the Jordan River, and following Israeli reprisals, tensions grew between the guerrilla movement and host government. This culminated in bloody clashes in the capital Amman in 1970 known as Black September. Jordanian government forces moved to expel the PLO fearing that the Palestinians were growing strong and popular enough to possibly take over the country. Arafat consequently re-deployed his forces to the Lebanon, among the Palestinian refugee population there.
Lebanon had from at least the early 1940s been a part of Zionism's annexation plans, with the aim of establishing a pliant Christian state there. Israel, always seeking to expropriate precious water resources from its neighbours, regarded the Litany River in Lebanon's south as its preferred northern border. It constantly sought to turn the country into a Christian bulwark against the Muslims. It invaded in 1948 occupying fourteen villages; again in 1978, in Operation Litany, in which up to 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians were killed; and once more in June 1982 which led to occupation in various forms up to May 2000, with thousands more deaths and injuries during this period.
The 1982 invasion, using the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London as the pretext, forced the PLO to evacuate Beirut in August after extremely heavy fighting. Arafat relocated his headquarters to Tunisia. The withdrawal was in terms of a UN agreement that undertook to protect the Palestinian refugees in Beirut, particularly from threats by the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, an outfit with fascist origins. Under Israeli military encouragement these bandits duly massacred 1,700 unarmed men, women and children in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps on 16 September 1982. Many of the helpless victims were slaughtered with butcher's knives or shot while the IDF stood by. Women were raped before their throats were slit.
Oliver Tambo, addressing the UN General Assembly in November 1982, stated: "The parallels between the Middle East and southern Africa are as clear as they are sinister. The onslaught on the Lebanon, the massive massacre of Lebanese and Palestinians, the attempt to liquidate the PLO and the Palestinian people, all of which were enacted with impunity by Israel have been followed minutely and with unconcealed interest and glee by the Pretoria racist regime which has designs for perpetrating the same kind of crime in southern Africa in the expectation that, like Israel, it will be enabled by its allies to get away with murder."40
It needs to be noted that Ariel Sharon, Israel's Defence Minister in 1982, was found guilty by an Israeli government inquiry of complicity in the Lebanon massacres and had to resign. With governmental changes he later returned as a housing minister to construct many illegal Jewish settlements, terming the land occupied as establishing "facts on the ground". He became Prime Minister in 2001. Sharon, nicknamed "Bulldozer" for his notoriety in demolishing Palestinian houses, had made a name for himself as commander of an Israeli Special Forces unit that had razed the Jordanian village of Qibya to the ground on 15 October 1953.
Close to the armistice line with Israel, the inhabitants of Qibya were mercilessly dealt with; sixty-nine of them were massacred, two-thirds women and children. They were locked in their houses that were then systematically blown-up. The Israelis justified the slaughter as a reprisal for the killing of a Jewish woman and her two children by infiltrators whom they claimed crossed the border near Qibya. Such overwhelming and disproportionate reprisals have been the hallmark of Israel's criminal defence doctrine from its inception.
* Ronnie Kasrils is a member of the ANC National Executive Committee. The second and final part of this article will be published in the next edition of Umrabulo.
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