The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 2
The Ingathering of the Exiles and the emergence of the Palestinian Liberation Organization
“I have listened to your demands and it seems to me that in your view the compromise is: We want our demands met completely, the rest can be divided among those left.” - Czechoslovakian member of the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine, at a meeting with a group of Arab delegates in Beirut (1947).1
By
On the morning of Friday, May 14, 1948, just three years after the second world war, and one day before the end of the British mandate in Palestine, rumors circulated about the imminent declaration of the Jewish state. Even before the national founder and first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, was able to make the historic announcement, Jews had taken to the streets in celebration singing Hatikvah (the national anthem of Israel). At 4 pm the ceremony began. It took Ben-Gurion 17-minutes to read the entire 664-word Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel. Four hours later, Egypt bombed Tel Aviv.2
Violence had erupted the previous year when the United Nations partition plan was first announced. The Arabs, knowing the vote would soon pass, delivered on a promise made to the UN to “drench the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood3.” Indeed, several dozen Jews and Arabs were killed within the first two weeks of the UN’s partition announcement. The total from November 1947 to February 1948: 427 Arabs, 381 Jews, and 46 British were killed, and 1,035 Arabs, 725 Jews, and 135 British were wounded4.
Within a day of Ben-Gurion declaring Israel an independent state, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq had all entered Palestine taking control of Arab areas and attacking Israeli forces and Jewish villages. This First Arab-Israeli War, known as the War of Independence, lasted until 1949 and claimed the lives of 6,373 Israelis (1% of the population) and an estimated 7,000 Arab lives5. In the end the Israelis won a decisive victory, fighting back the Arab invaders and ending up with considerably more land than the UN plan had given them (approximately 1/3 more), even though the West Bank was taken by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip by Egypt.
However, the fallout from this victory meant the exile of Jewish populations from several neighbouring Arabic countries. kibbutz galuyot, which means the ingathering of the exiles, can refer generally to aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel), but often refers specifically to the post-war of independence / post-World War II period where displaced Jews from all over the Arabian Peninsula and Europe were absorbed into the brand new state of Israel.
Due to the terrible persecution of the Jews in Europe, which saw the pinnacle of human deprivation in the Holocaust (genocide of 6 million Jews), from 1948 to 1950 the State of Israel absorbed over 260,000 European Jewish immigrants. From 1950 to 1954 the state would absorb approximately 800,000 Jews – almost all from the Arab peninsula. Many from Jewish communities that were displaced from lands they had lived on for centuries. For example, the first wave, arriving immediately upon the founding of the Jewish state, came from Yemen. The Yemenite Jews were part of an isolated Jewish community with roots tracing back over a thousand years, with some academics placing their origins to the First Temple in the era of King Solomon6.
The Law of Return was passed in 1950. This gave all Jews of the diaspora, as well as their children and grandchildren, the right to relocate to Israel and acquire Israeli citizenship on the basis of their Jewish identity7. Since the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, when the Jewish population numbered 650,000, more than 3 million Jews have made aliyah to date.8
The Palestinian Liberation Organization
“The exploitation of Arab hostility to the Balfour Declaration, the Palestine Mandate, and the existence of Israel has been a major weapon in the Soviet campaign to dominate the Middle East.”- Professor Eugene Rostow, 1980 article "Palestinian Self-Determination9.”
1964 saw the formation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) at the first Arab League Summit in Cairo, Egypt. The PLO is a nationalist coalition recognized as the official representation of the Palestinian people. The United States designated it as a terrorist group in 1987, though a presidential waiver has permitted American–PLO contact since 1988. The PLO legislature, the Palestinian National Council, holds a charter with the goal of the complete elimination of Israeli sovereignty in Palestine and the destruction of the State of Israel10.
American lawyer and independent researcher, Wallace Edward Brand, has written extensively about Soviet Russia's subversion of the “peace process” and how the Soviets incited the Muslim world against the Jews and the U.S. In his essay, Soviet Russsia, The Creator of the PLO and the Palestinian People, Brand details “the revelations of the highest ranking Soviet bloc defector, Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa…(showing) that the peace process is, and has from the outset, been nothing but a charade.”
Brand points out that the 1960s and 1970s were an era of Cold War Soviet subversion. The Russians were creating various “Liberation” movements. “...Palestine and Bolivia in 1964, Columbia 1965, in the 70s ‘The Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia’ that bombed US airline offices in Europe, and ‘The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine that bombed Israelis.’ But the PLO, was by far its most enduring success11.”
In his book, History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, David Meir Levi asks, “How did unacceptable anti-Semitism morph into justifiable anti-Zionism, and odious Jew-hatred turn into a politically correct Israel-hatred?” In the following excerpt Levi describes the motivations of PLO leader, Yassar Arafat (during the Vietnam war):
"Arafat was particularly struck by Ho Chi Minh's success in mobilizing left-wing sympathizers in Europe and the United States, where activists on American campuses, enthusiastically following the [propaganda] line of North Vietnamese operatives, had succeeded in reframing the Vietnam war from a Communist assault on the south to a struggle for national liberation. Ho's chief strategist, General Giap, made it clear to Arafat and his lieutenants that in order to succeed, they too needed to redefine the terms of their struggle. Giap's counsel was simple but profound: the PLO needed to work in a way that concealed its real goals, permitted strategic deception, and gave the appearance of moderation: ‘Stop talking about annihilating Israel and instead turn your terror war into a struggle for human rights. Then you will have the American people eating out of your hand’." (emphasis mine).
The following is from Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin’s Secret War on America, a book published in 2021 by James Woolsey and Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa12:
“James Woolsey, former CIA director has been reported as stating that Pacepa is credible. Pacepa's account is also corroborated by Zahir Muhsein, a member of the PLO executive board. In an interview by the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, he stated that there is no such thing as the ‘Palestinian People’, that the term's use is a political ploy, and there is no quest for political self-determination — that as soon as the Jews have been wiped out, sovereignty would be turned over to Jordan.”
This is from Pacepa's 2006 article “Russian Footprints” in National Review Online:
"In 1972, the Kremlin decided to turn the whole Islamic world against Israel and the U.S. As KGB chairman Yury Andropov told me [Pacepa], a billion adversaries could inflict far greater damage on America than could a few millions. We needed to instill a Nazi-style hatred for the Jews throughout the Islamic world, and to turn this weapon of the emotions into a terrorist bloodbath against Israel and its main supporter, the United States. No one within the American/Zionist sphere of influence should any longer feel safe (emphasis mine). ‘According to Andropov, the Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep. The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch’.”
I’ll leave it at that for today. Read Part 3, which goes deeper into Soviet subversion in the Middle East, the refugee issue, and the 1967 “Six Day War” - the third Arab-Israeli war.
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Thanks for reading. Incase you missed them, here are the introduction essays: Israel, Islam and Settler Colonialism and Part 1 - The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 1
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Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee’s spokesman
Branovsky, Yael (6 May 2008). "400 olim arrive in Israel ahead of Independence Day - Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews". Ynetnews. Ynetnews.com. Retrieved 2013-04-29.
"Palestinian Self-Determination": Possible Futures for the Unallocated Territories of the Palestine Mandate (yale.edu)
Brand, (page 2) Soviet Russia The Creator of the PLO
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Written in 2006: “The Muslims had a taste for nationalism, jingoism, and victimology. Their illiterate, oppressed mobs could be whipped up to a fever pitch.”
Nothing has changed.
Excellent article.
And yet, we now know that allowing a few jewish ppl from europe to pitch a tent on dirt that has been majority arab for 1000s of years was a huge mistake. after being unfairly blamed and unfairly suffered during WW2, the resulting collective PTSD suffered by the jewish people has rendered them unable to govern and make the difficult choices a national state requires. this inability to govern has caused israel to illegally keep millions of native arab people in an apartheid situation for 55 years, commiting numerous war crimes by denying millions of people normal human rights. israel's only policy solutions to the occupation is to commit even more and greater war crimes = israel is unable to govern. the jewish people's collective PTSD from WW2 causes them to treat every normal crime issue as a major threat. in reality, as tragic as hamas actions are, these actions do not threaten israeli statehood.
its ironic to read someone who is knowledgeable of the gender ideology issue in support of israeli rights violations of the native arab population of palestine. many of the same mechanisms exist between the two issues.
- both israel and gender activists claim they are being threatened with major violence for minor offences.
- both Israeli and gender activists promote collective measures to address their imaginary claims.
- both israel and gender activists have spent decades on a well financed PR and lobby campaign.
- both israel activists and gender activists have morphed into fascist movements that advocate for limits on freedom of speech.
- both israel and gender activists primarily target and harm historically marginalized groups for the benefit of white men who are not marginalized, but pretend to be.