The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 3
Refugees, genocidal attacks, and faux Palestinian revanchism
“In 1964, the Palestinian Liberation Organization was created – not to liberate Palestinians from Jordanian and Egyptian rule – but to begin a 40-year campaign of terror against Israel with the openly avowed goal of ‘pushing the Jews into the sea’.”1
By
The idea of a possible sovereignty of Palestine for a Palestinian people was implicitly rejected by the San Remo Resolution in April of 1920 when the future of the former territories of the Ottoman Turkish Empire was decided through the assignment of League of Nation mandates. Non-annexation of the territory and its administration as a "sacred trust of civilisation" to develop the territory for the benefit of its native people were governing principles of the Mandate system2. However, the international group of leaders in San Remo identified no people considered indigenous to Palestine. Four decades later the KGB fabricated the Palestinian people to help with their anti-American/anti-Zionist propaganda and subversion of the Middle East.
In a March 31, 1977 interview with the Amsterdam-based newspaper Dagblad de Verdieping Trouw, PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhse’in said:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct 'Palestinian people' to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.”3
Refugees
“To us, the refugee issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.” - Senior Fatah Central Committee member Sakher Habash (1998)
The displacement of both Arabs and Jews from all over the Arab Peninsula and Europe in the post WWII period and just after Israel’s War of Independence was discussed briefly in my last essay. An unprecedented level of Jewish refugees were absorbed into the new Jewish state, while what became of displaced Arab refugees can only be described as one of the darkest chapters in the modern era. However Arabs who stayed in Israel, or who migrated there due to displacement, enjoyed by far the highest standard of living of any Arabs living in the Arab peninsula at any period throughout the entirety of its history.
At no point were Arabs living in Israel exiled by the Jews. The Jews assured them they would be safe if they stayed, but Arab propaganda convinced many to leave and promised they would get their homes and land back after the Jews were wiped out. After both the Israeli War of Independence and the Six-Day War, many displaced Arabs and their offspring became the refugees who would later be used as pawns by the PLO. As of 2018, 70% of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip were refugees.4
In 1948, as a consequence of the first Arab war of annihilation against Israel, Egypt occupied the Gaza Strip, corralling Palestinian refugees into an “open air prison” in an indefinite state of limbo. Similar to Palestinian refugees who were forced into overcrowded refugee/prison camps in Lebanon, those kept in the Gaza Strip were denied freedom and basic human rights. Anyone who attempted to escape was killed.
During this period, Jordan occupied the West Bank where they similarly penned in Palestinian refugees in a perpetual stand-off. However, only in Jordan were refugees eventually granted citizenship. Most, but not all, became Jordanian citizens, and approximately 18 per cent live in the ten recognized Palestine refugee camps throughout the country.5
It is worth highlighting that upon the establishment of the various Palestinian refugee camps there was still no mention of the Palestinian plight being one aimed at eventual self determination. As mentioned in my last essay, it was Soviet KGB operatives during the 1960s and 1970s who engineered the idea of a “Palestinian people,” in order to rebrand the Arab goal of Jewish annihilation as a struggle for national liberation of Arab refugees (Palestinians) who were being used for this purpose.
From what has been covered so far in this essay series, it follows that the Arabs were not only the aggressors in the 1948 war of annihilation, but were also culpable for the refugee crisis. After Israel won the war, they passed a law allowing Arab refugees to resettle in Israel as long as they signed a form renouncing violence, swore allegiance to the state, and became peaceful productive citizens. This resulted in more than 150,000 Arab refugees becoming prosperous Israeli citizens. Jews are not offered the same from Arab states.6
The Six Day War
In 1967 Israel was the victim of more genocidal Arab aggression. This time, there was 5 casus belli that triggered a military response from Israel:
Egypt demanded the evacuation of UN peacekeeping forces, in place since the Sinai Campaign.7
Egypt blocked the Israeli shipping port of Eilat in the Straits of Tiran.
Egypt positioned 150,000 troops and two tank Battalions at Israel’s western border.
Egypt made a military pact with Syria and Jordan.
Egypt forces invaded Israel’s air space by conducting surveillance over-flights of the Israeli atomic reactor in Dimona
Considering the exigency resulting from the threatening nature of the above acts of aggression, “had Israel retaliated with lethal force after any one of these five, its military action would have been completely legal per international law, as legitimate defensive response to existential threats from an aggressor.”8
On June 4, 1967, the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to give the defense ministry the green light to decide when and how to respond to Egypt’s aggression. The next day, after receiving intelligence that an Arab strike was hours away, Israel preemptively attacked the Egyptian air field destroying 180 fighter jets while Egyptian pilots were still eating breakfast. Israeli fighters also attacked Syrian and Jordanian air forces, as well as an airfield in Iraq. Altogether Israel claimed to have destroyed 302 Egyptian, 20 Jordanian, and 52 Syrian aircraft.9
Israeli forces then engaged in tank and infantry battles with the Egyptians in the Sinai desert. On June 9, the head of Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Yeshayahu Gavish informed the chief of staff: “IDF forces are on the banks of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea. The Sinai Peninsula is in our hands. Congratulations to you and the IDF.”10
Jerusalem had also been attacked on June 5th, this time by Jordanian ground forces. The Israelis counterattacked and during the course of a bloody 48 hours, took control of the West Bank of Jordan.
After just six days of fighting, Israeli forces were miraculously in a position to advance further into Arab territory and secure a larger defensive perimeter between themselves and their hostile Arab neighbours. However, the Soviet Union had become increasingly alarmed by the Israeli advances and was threatening to intervene. The Israelis accepted a cease-fire on June 10 when U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised “in the strongest possible terms” that they do so. A temporary peace for Israel was established.
KGB directed Islamic terrorism
“We in the Soviet bloc tried to conquer minds, because we knew we could not win any military battles...we had only to keep repeating our themes — that the United States and Israel were ‘fascist, imperial-Zionist countries’ bankrolled by rich Jews. Islam was obsessed with preventing the infidels’ occupation of its territory, and it would be highly receptive to our characterization of the U.S. Congress as a rapacious Zionist body aiming to turn the world into a Jewish fiefdom.” - Major General Ion Mihai Pacepa (the highest ranking Soviet bloc defector)
In the 1970s, the KGB sent thousands of agents of influence into the Islamic world with “the task of portraying the United States as an arrogant and haughty Jewish fiefdom financed by Jewish money and run by Jewish politicians, whose aim was to subordinate the entire Islamic world.”11 This involved circulating an Arabic translation of the anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion and a KGB-fabricated document claiming the United States and Israel were conspiring to transform the Islamic world into a Jewish colony.
The KGB Chairman in 1972, Yury Andropov, told General Pacepa that “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.”12
Along with the propagandistic campaigns of disinformation aimed at Islamic countries, the Soviets were also organizers of Islamic terror.
“By the end of the 1960s, the KGB was deeply involved in mass terrorism against Jews, carried out by various Palestinian client organizations. Here are some terrorist actions for which the KGB took credit…November 1969, armed attack on the El Al office in Athens, leaving 1 dead and 14 wounded; May 30, 1972, Ben Gurion Airport attack, leaving 22 dead and 76 wounded; December 1974, Tel Aviv movie theater bomb, leaving 2 dead and 66 wounded; March 1975, attack on a Tel Aviv hotel, leaving 25 dead and 6 wounded; May 1975, Jerusalem bomb, leaving 1 dead and 3 wounded; July 4, 1975, bomb in Zion Square, Jerusalem, leaving 15 dead and 62 wounded; April 1978, Brussels airport attack, leaving 12 wounded; May 1978, attack on an El Al plane in Paris, leaving 12 wounded.”13
In the next essay I will cover the First Intifada and the founding of Hamas in the 1980s, as well as touch on the highly contentious issue of Israeli settlements.
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Thanks for reading. Incase you missed them, here are the introduction essays: Israel, Islam and Settler Colonialism and - The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 1 and The history of Jews, Palestinians and Israel - Part 2
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Matz, 2005, pp 70-71, "Primarily, two elements formed the core of the Mandate System, the principle of non-annexation of the territory on the one hand and its administration as a 'sacred trust of civilisation' on the other... The principle of administration as a 'sacred trust of civilisation' was designed to prevent a practice of imperial exploitation of the mandated territory in contrast to former colonial habits. Instead, the Mandatory's administration should assist in developing the territory for the well-being of its native people."
The Sinai Campaign was the final battle in Egypts terror war against Israel that lasted from 1949 to 1956
DAVID MEIR-LEVI: BIG LIES. Demolishing The Myths of the Propaganda War Against Israel (freerepublic.com) (Sub-section “Six Day War”)
The six-day war: Israel claims land and air successes as Britain and US declare neutrality, The Guardian, (June 6, 1947).
 | A guest post by
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Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli Military Governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist Movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah Party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)
“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”
“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.
To learn more :
https://revolver.news/2023/10/ron-paul-hamas-was-created-by-israel-and-the-us-to-counteract-yasser-arafat/
"Israel wasn’t just the site of regional disputes—it was a Cold War satellite, wrapped up in the interests of the Soviets and the Americans."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-six-day-war-tells-us-about-cold-war-180963590/
"Nowhere was the impact of the Cold War more pronounced or pervasive than in the newly independent state of Israel. The triumph of the Israelis during the first stage of the Arab-Israeli conflict (and the revival of hostilities thereafter) is just one example of how the competition for regional influence between the United States and the USSR impacted rivalries and altered the political destiny of the Middle East. While the Cold War is long over, its ghosts continue to haunt the nations that were swept up in its tide."
https://medium.com/thepensivepost/how-the-cold-war-ignited-the-modern-israel-palestine-conflict-9a4901c6386c