71 Years Later, Zionist Terrorism Is Alive and Well

by RAOUF HALABYFacebook

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Seventy-one years to the day Jewish terrorists in Palestine committed a heinous crime for which they continue to go unpunished.

The April 9, 1948 massacre of 107 Palestinians in the Christian Village of Deir Yassin (monastery of Yassin) has been whitewashed by Israel, the U.N., the media, and the so-called law-abiding civilized Western World – a world that lectures us on morality, the rule of law, and democracy – and a Western World that has sown the pestilence of wars, misery, and chaos – from as far as Libya to the west, and as far as Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Bangladesh to the east.

And before conservatives (including Christian Zionists whose distorted end of times biblical prophecy beliefs envision a roasting of Israel and Jews as the launching pad for the promised Armageddon) accuse me of anti-Semitism as an attempt to gloss over Jewish terror against Palestinians, I am a Semite.

And before the self-righteous knee-jerk liberals, including the Alan Silvermans (one of many American Jewish characters whose unsavory and hateful emails show up in my in-box after I lift the drapes on Jewish terror and Israeli apartheid) charge to question my use of Jewish terrorism to describe events in 1017-1948 Palestine, Israel did not become a state until May 1948.

Hence, the only nomenclature to describe the myriad brutalities inflicted on the indigenous population of Palestine is to call the final solution of Palestinians what it is: Jewish Terrorism.

Hence, the only nomenclature to describe the myriad brutalities inflicted on the indigenous population of Palestine is to call the final solution of Palestinians what it is: Jewish Terrorism.

For those interested in facts, I would suggest Ilan Pappe’s book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine as a must-read. Pappe is an Israeli citizen and Chair in History at University of Exeter; he is dubbed a self-hating Jew by the ardent defenders of the faith, Christian Zionists, and Israel’s apologists.

Based on extensive research extracted from the Israeli national archives, including personal interviews, witness accounts, a plethora of documentary materials, diaries, and tape recordings, Pappe’s book chronicles Jewish terror in pre-Israel Palestine. The second half of the book chronicles the post-April 9, 1948 implementation of the U.N. partition plan, a plan that robbed Palestinians of their lives, birthright, country, identity, properties, personal possessions, and dignity.

Emboldened by the Balfour Declaration, in the 1930s Zionists formulated a plan to ethnically cleanse Palestine of her indigenous population. Demonizing the Palestinians as cockroaches, jackals, subhuman, primitive, and dirty, and with the help of European Zionists, pressure was exerted on England to implement the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

Said declaration called for the establishment in Palestine a homeland for the Jews. Pappe documents Britain’s Machiavellian scheme in handing over Palestine to European Jews; that the Brits (pox on their house) were complicit is supported by their standing by as one defenseless Palestinian village after another was wiped off the face of the earth. In fact, British Mandate forces in Palestine provided logistical support to Jewish terrorist organizations, including military training and arms. Pappe cites the example of a British Sergeant who trained Jewish terrorists in using bayonets; the sergeant advised that “killing dirty Arabs” with bayonets will same ammo for other purposes.

Plan Dalet was a military plan whose sole intention was to depopulate Palestine of her indigenous population so as to create an ethnically pure Jewish state. The plan followed a systematic implementation. First was the infiltration of Palestinian villages and communities by Jewish fact-gathering spies/personnel, often posing as businessmen or farmers who would befriend the locals to gather intelligence. And sometimes these Jewish spies (as they still do today) pretended to be Palestinian Arabs. The names of the Mukhtars (community elders) and the organizational community structures were inventoried; meticulous details of the villages’ layouts were recorded, and intelligence gathering on every aspect (rich farm lands, water resources, topographical data, demographics) was recorded. Pappe documents these materials under the heading “Village Files,” files that were eventually sent to the Tel Aviv headquarters of the Jewish leadership. Gathered over a period of fifteen years, including the interception of cables and communications (with British complicity) between Palestinian resistance leaders, this information set the stage for the implementation of Plan Dalet.

Simply put, Plan Dalet was a military plan whose sole intention was to terrorize, through sheer asymmetrical brutal force, unarmed Palestinians, and to drive them off the land.

Under the cover of dark, Jewish terrorists would enter villages from the three weakest flanks; bombs would be thrown through windows of alternating homes and, as the terrorized villagers emerged from their homes, they were machine-gunned in cold blood. The same tactics were used either in the early or late hours of the day. With the help of masked informants, males were targeted for executions either in the center of the village square or on the outskirts of villages. Frequently one group of males was ordered to dig graves into which corpses were deposited and, Nazi-style, these unsuspecting villagers were in turn gunned down and deposited into the mass graves. The coup de grȃce for rural Palestine was the summary expulsion of the entire population – this after looting, the stealing of jewelry, and ISIS-style assaults on women and girls, including the raping of young girls.

As soon as a village was ethnically cleansed, the rich farmlands were appropriated for the collective Kibbutzim. The fate of most of the structures was a systematic demolition (bombing and razing) of homes, mosques, schools, and churches. Crimes that are still committed as I write. In the span of three years, over 530 Palestinian villages were pulverized to rubble and permanently wiped off the face of that land made unholy and blemished by murderous Jewish terrorists. To cover their dastardly deeds, Israeli leaders, with the help of Jews in diaspora, planted pine forests in each of the 530+ locations of what used to be Palestinian villages. And to this day the visible remains of homes, mosques, and churches, albeit in rubble reminiscent of ancient archeological sites, bear witness to the Jewish attempt to erase Palestine from the annals of history.

Pappe calls this reprehensible policy Memoricide.

How could the survivors of the Holocaust, those who want to keep reminding us of Nazi atrocities, undertake Gestapo tactics to effect this memoricide?

Presented in chronological order, Pappe’s meticulous recording of the genocidal carnage highlights the following: so successful were these Jewish terroristic crimes in ethnically cleansing some 300+ villages leading up to early 1948, the terrorists became emboldened as they began attacking urban centers. Beginning on page 91 and under the heading “Urbicide,” Pappe tells his readers that Ben Gurion and his henchmen moved on to urban Palestine in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and Safad. In Acre, the Jewish terrorists deposited typhoid viruses into the drinking water, thus killing scores of civilians. A similar attempt in Gaza was preempted when the two Jewish chemists were caught. In Haifa, barrel bombs (loaded with oil and explosives) were rolled down into Palestinian neighborhoods thus killing and terrorizing civilians, and jeeps, mounted with loudspeakers, drove through Arab neighborhoods in Jaffa, Haifa, and other urban centers advising Palestinians to flee lest they suffer the same fate as this or that village.

Jerusalem was the coveted prize of the murderous interlopers.

To frighten Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, the Posh Semiramis hotel in a West Jerusalem suburb was bombed killing, among other victims, a Spanish diplomat, and the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in which 94 people were killed when and entire wing of the hotel collapsed was a message to the British to acquiesce, keep their eyes blindfolded, keep their mouths shut, and to get out of Palestine – pronto.

Years later, Menahem Begin (the most wanted Jewish terrorist on whose head the Brits put a pile of Georges) would later become Israel’s Prime Minister, and he would brag about his role in this and other Irgun terrorist murderous crimes.

And yes, he would also be awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace. That’s akin to giving Goebbels or Mussolini The Humanitarian Man of the Year Award.

Which brings me to this…

The leadership of the Jewish terrorists realized that if Jerusalem’s Palestinian population could be terrorized and ethnically cleansed as the rural and other urban areas had been cleansed, then the prize was within their reach.

Thus, having perfected their killing tactics and having terrorized Palestinian villages with their successive successful ethnic cleansing tactics, the Jewish terrorists set their eyes on Deir Yassin, a small village within Jerusalem’s jurisdiction.

Menahem Begin and his Irgun terrorist organization, along with Lehi, yet another sordidly brutal Jewish organization, attacked the tiny village of Deir Yassin. 107 civilians were killed, and some 50 children were loaded on trucks and deposited in an East Jerusalem neighborhood. To her credit, Ms. Hind Husseini, the daughter of one of Jerusalem’s oldest Palestinian families, took the children in and opened an orphanage to house these youngsters whose parents were killed in a calculating and premeditated act of genocide. Some fifty of the village’s men and women were stripped of their clothes, loaded on flat-bed trucks, and driven through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhood to (ironically) be taunted by Holocaust survivors.

How soon the survivors forget and make a mockery of human decency. The persecuted have become the persecutors. Reporters have documented the carnage: corpses dotted the village’s square, several civilians were disemboweled, others were dumped into a well, and several women disfigured as a result of the malevolent theft of their jewelry – from their ears and arms. For those interested in pursuing the truth see Ofer Aderet’s (another self-hating Jew) complete and thorough July 16, 2017, report:

Testimonies From the Censored Deir Yassin Massacre: ‘They Piled Bodies and Burned Them’

A young fellow tied to a tree and set on fire. A woman and an old man shot in back. Girls lined up against a wall and shot with a submachine gun. The testimonies collected by filmmaker Neta Shoshani about the massacre in Deir Yassin are difficult to process.

Not only did the Irgun and Lehi terrorist thugs commit a barbarity as heinous as Hitler’s Gestapo, but they went on to brag about it and broadcast, again, through jeep-mounted loudspeakers driven in Palestinian neighborhoods, to taunt, threaten, harass, and instill fear in the remnants of Palestine’s population

And thousands Palestinians fled for their lives, with only the clothes on their backs.

And thus began the Naqbe (Ar. for Catastrophe). 750,000 Palestinians were cleansed from their ancestral lands. And the world stood by, as it still does today, as the 71-year tragedy plays out.

Israel was born as a result of hatred, apathy, brutality and crimes of epic proportions. And because deeply embedded in Israel’s DNA is that same hatred, apathy, brutality, and monstrous penchant to subjugate, dehumanize, kill, and rule over a people yearning to have the yoke of occupation lifted, Israel has thrived on the banality of its ethnocentrism. Egged on by their politicians, military, and rabbinical leaders, the majority of Israelis consider the Palestinians as dirty Arabs, cockroaches, jackals, and subhuman.

The Israelis have built a Holocaust memorial to tell the world “Never Again.” The once-thriving Palestinian village of Deir Yassin lies in very close proximity to the Holocaust memorial.

And what have the Israelis built on Deir Yassin’s holy site?

Would you believe it? A mental institution. Yes, a home for Meshugaim (Heb. For lunatics).

For over 60 years Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the ranks of the Haganah, Irgun, Stern, and other Jewish terrorist organizations. And today they are led by a racist warmonger abetted by another racist, bigoted, orange-haired schoolyard bully.

In 1988 La Belle Femme and I visited Bethlehem’s Church of the Holy nativity where we bought a few candles that hold special meaning. On special occasions I light a candle for a brief moment to think of someone special, someone in need of a cure, a miracle of sorts, to meditate, and to summon that deity whether She/He be Elohim, God, or Allah (and aren’t they all the same?) to somehow pull a Deus Ex Machina for a loved one, a friend, or an acquaintance. And for me faith teeters between believing and doubt, a kind of struggle between the heart and the mind, a migration from certainty to uncertainty and back again to certain.

Today I will light the candle for a longer period of time to honor not only the memory of the innocent lives brutally wasted at Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, but the lives of the thousands of Palestinians wasted by God’s Unchosen and their so-called Arab brethren.

Raouf J. Halaby is a Professor Emeritus of English and Art. He is a writer, photographer, sculptor, an avid gardener, and a peace activist. 

INTERVIEW: Ilan Pappé: How Israel turned Palestine into the biggest prison on earth

A history of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip examines what military formulas are used to control Palestinian lives

A Palestinian demonstrator tries to destroy the wall separating the West
Bank city of Abu Dis from East Jerusalem in November 2015 (AFP)

Mustafa Abu Sneineh

The Six Day War of 1967 between Israel and the Arab armies resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Israel sold the story of this war as an accidental one. But new historical documents and minutes from the archives show that Israel was well prepared for it.

In 1963, figures from the Israeli military, legal and civil administrations enrolled in a course at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to set up a comprehensive plan to deal with the territories that Israel would occupy four years later, and manage a million and half Palestinians living in them.

The motivation was the failure in how Israel dealt with the Palestinians in Gaza in its short-lived occupation during the Suez Crisis in 1956.

In May 1967, weeks before the war, Israeli military governors received boxes that contained legal and military instructions on how to control the Palestinian towns and villages. Israel would go on to transform the West Bank and Gaza Strip into mega prisons under military rule and surveillance.

Settlements, checkpoints and collective punishment were part of this plan, as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé shows in The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, an in-depth account of the Israeli occupation.

Published on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war, the book has been shortlisted for the Palestine Book Awards 2017, organised by Middle East Monitor, due to be announced in London on 24 November. Pappé spoke to Middle East Eye about the book and what it reveals.

Middle East Eye: How does this book build on your previous book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine about the 1948 war?

Ilan Pappé: It is definitely a continuation of my earlier book The Ethnic Cleansing that describes the events of 1948. I see the whole project of Zionism as a structure not just as one event. A structure of settler colonialism by which a movement of settlers colonises a homeland. As long as the colonisation is not complete and the indigenous population resists through a national liberation movement, each such period that I'm looking at is just a phase within the same structure.

Although The Biggest Prison is a history book, we are still within the same historical chapter. It's not over yet. So in this respect, there should be probably a third book later on looking at the events of the 21st century and how the same ideology of ethnic cleansing and dispossession is being implemented in the new era and how it is resisted by the Palestinians.

MEE: You speak about ethnic cleansing taking place in June 1967. What happened to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip then? How was this different from the ethnic cleansing of the 1948 war?

IP: In 1948 there was a very clear plan to try and expel as many Palestinians as possible from as much of Palestine as possible. The settler colonialist project believed it had the power to create a Jewish space in Palestine that would be totally without Palestinians. It didn't really work that well but it was quite successful as you all know. Eighty percent of the Palestinians who lived within what became the state of Israel became refugees.

As I show in the book, there were some Israeli policymakers who thought maybe we can do in 1967 what we did in 1948. But the vast majority of them understood that the 1967 war was a very short war, it was for six days, and there was already television, and quite a few of the people that they wanted to expel were already refugees from 1948.

So, I think the strategy was not ethnic cleansing in the same way that it was implemented in 1948. It was what I would call incremental ethnic cleansing. In some cases they expelled droves of people from certain areas such as Jericho, the Old City of Jerusalem, and around Qalqilya. But in most cases they decided that military rule and a siege to enclose Palestinians in their own areas would be as beneficial as expelling them.

From 1967 until today, there is a very slow ethnic cleansing that probably stretches over a period of 50 years and it's so slow that sometimes it can only affect one person in one day. But if you look at the whole picture from 1967 till today, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that are not allowed to return to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.

MEE: You differentiate between two military models that Israel uses: the open prison model in West Bank and the maximum security prison model in Gaza Strip. How do you define these two models? And are these military terms?

IP: I use these terms as metaphors to explain the two models that Israel offers to the Palestinians in the occupied territories. I insist on using these terms because I think the two-state solution is actually the open prison model.

The Israelis control the occupied territories directly or indirectly, and they try not to penetrate into the densely populated Palestinian towns and villages. They partitioned the Gaza Strip in 2005 and they're still partitioning the West Bank. There is a Jewish West Bank and a Palestinian West Bank which is no longer a coherent territorial area.

In Gaza the Israelis are the wardens that lock the Palestinians from the outside world but they don't interfere with what they do on the inside.

 Ilan Pappé

'We should talk about ethnic cleansing. We should find what replaces apartheid. And we have a good example in South Africa. The only way to replace apartheid is with a democratic system.'

The West Bank is like an open-air prison where you send petty criminals who are allowed more time to go outside and work outside. And there's no harsh regime inside but it's still a prison. Even the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, if he moves from Area B to C, he needs the Israelis to open the gate for him. And that's for me very symbolic, the fact that the president cannot move without the Israeli jailer opening the cage.

There is, of course, a Palestinian response all the time to this. Palestinians are not passive and they don't accept it. We saw the first Intifada and the second Intifada, and perhaps we will see a third Intifada.  The Israelis say to the Palestinians, in a prison management mentality, that if you resist we will take away all your privileges, like we do in prison. You won't be able to work outside. You won't be able to move freely, and you will be punished collectively. This is the kind of the punitive side of it, collective punishment as retaliation.

MEE: The international community shyly condemn the building or expanding of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. They do not consider it as a major part of Israel’s colonial structure as you describe in the book. How did Israeli settlements begin and was the basis of it rational or religious?

IP: After 1967 there were two maps of settlements or colonisation. There was a strategic map that was devised by the Left in Israel. And the father of this map was the late Yigal Allon, the main strategist, who worked with Moshe Dayan in 1967 on a plan to control the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Their principle was strategic not so much ideological, although they believed that the West Bank belonged to Israel.

They were more interested in making sure the Jews did not settle in densely populated Arab areas. They said everywhere where Palestinians don't live in a concentrated way we can settle. So, they started with the Jordan Valley because in the Jordan Valley there are small villages but it's not dense like in other parts.

The problem for them was that at the same time they drew their strategic map, a new Messianic religious movement emerged, Gush Emunim, a religious national movement of Jews, who didn't want to settle according to the strategic map. They wanted to settle according to the biblical map. They had the idea that the Bible is a book that tells you exactly where the ancient Jewish cities are. And as it happens that map meant that Jews should settle in the midst of Nablus, Hebron and Bethlehem, in the midst of the Palestinian areas.

At first the Israeli government tried to control this biblical movement so that they would settle more strategically. But several Israeli journalists have shown that Shimon Peres, the minister of defence in the early 70s, decided to allow the biblical settlements. The Palestinians in the West Bank were exposed to two maps of colonisation, the strategic and the biblical.

The international community understands that according to international law it doesn't matter whether it's a strategic or biblical settlement, they're all illegal.

But what is unfortunate that the international community from 1967 accepted the Israeli formula that says "the settlements are illegal but it's temporary, once there is peace we will make sure that everything will be legal. But as long as there's no peace we need the settlements because we are still at war with the Palestinians.”

MEE: You say that “occupation” is not the accurate word to describe the reality in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And On Palestine, a dialogue with Noam Chomsky, you criticise the term “peace process”. This is controversial. Why are these terms not accurate?

IP: I think that language is very important. The way you frame a situation can affect your chances of changing it.

We have been framing the situation in the West Bank in the Gaza Strip and inside Israel with the wrong dictionary and words. Occupation always means a temporary situation.

The solution for occupation is the end of occupation, the invading military goes back to its country, but this is not the situation either in the West Bank or in Israel or Gaza Strip. This is colonisation, I suggest, although it sounds like an anachronistic term in the 21st century, I think we should understand that Israel is colonising Palestine. It started colonising it in the late 19th century and is still colonising it today.

There is a settler colonial regime that is controlling the whole of Palestine in different ways. In Gaza Strip it controls it from the outside. In the West Bank it controls it differently in area A, B and area C. It has different policies towards the Palestinians in the refugee camp, where it does not allow the refugees to come back. That's another way of maintaining the colonisation by not allowing the people who were expelled to return. It is all part of the same ideology.

So I think the word peace process and occupation when they're put together create the false impression that all you need is for the Israeli military to get out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and to have a peace between Israel and the future Palestine.

Now, the Israeli military is not in the Gaza Strip and is not in that area A. It's also hardly in area B, where it does not need to be. But there is no peace. There's a situation which is far worse than the one that was before the Oslo Accords in 1993.

The so-called peace process enabled Israel to do more colonisation, but this time with international support. So I suggest talking about decolonisation not peace. I suggest talking about changing the legal regime that governs the life of Israelis and Palestinians.

I think we should talk about an apartheid state. We should talk about ethnic cleansing. We should find what replaces apartheid. And we have a good example in South Africa. The only way to replace apartheid is with a democratic system. One person, one vote or at least a bi-national state. I think these are the kind of words we should begin to use, because if we continue to use the old words, we continue to waste time and effort and we won't change the reality on the ground.

MEE: What does the future hold for Israeli military rule over the Palestinians? Are we going to see a civil disobedience movement such as the one in Jerusalem back in July?

IP: I think that we will see civil disobedience not only in Jerusalem but all over Palestine, and this includes Palestinians inside Israel. The society itself would not accept forever this kind of reality. I don't know which means it will use. We can see what happens when you don't have a clear strategy from above that individuals decide to do their own liberation war.

'There was something impressive indeed in the case of Jerusalem when nobody believed that a popular resistance can force the Israelis to retract the security measures that they imposed in the Haram al-Sharif. I think that this may be the model. A popular resistance for the future'

There was something impressive indeed in the case of Jerusalem when nobody believed that a popular resistance can force the Israelis to retract the security measures that they imposed on the Haram al-Sharif. I think that this may be the model. A popular resistance for the future that is not all over the place but in different places.

The popular resistance continues all the time in Palestine. The media doesn't report it. But everyday people demonstrate against the apartheid wall, people demonstrate against the expropriation of land, people go on hunger strikes because they're political prisoners. The Palestinian resistance from below continues. The Palestinian resistance from above is on hold.

THE FOURTH APE HAS ARRIVED AT LAST !!!

HARDtalk Speaks to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe

STEPHEN SACKUR, the English journalist and presenter of BBC's HARDtalk, epitomizes it perfectly in this interview with the brave Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. A must-watch !

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, at its heart, a story of two peoples and one land. Both see history as their justification. Which means a historian who appears to change sides inevitably becomes a figure of enormous controversy. HARDtalk speaks to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe who says the record shows that the Jewish state is racist; born of a deliberate programme of ethnic cleansing. Not surprisingly he's widely reviled in his home country. His work has been both supported and criticized by other historians. Before he left Israel in 2008, he had been condemned in the Knesset, Israel's parliament; a minister of education had called for him to be sacked; his photograph had appeared in a newspaper at the centre of a target; and he had received several death threats.

DESTRUCTION OF AL-AQSA IS NO CONSPIRACY THEORY

By Ilan Pappe

“It is useless,” asserts the colonizer in Albert Memmi’s classical tract, The Colonizer and the Colonized, “to try and forecast the colonized’s actions (‘they are unpredictable! ‘With them, you never know!).” It seems to the colonizer that “strange and disturbing impulsiveness controls the colonized.”

The only explanation official Israel and its supporters could give for why Palestinians have risen up lately is that they were influenced by Islamic propaganda. That propaganda so easily incited the “impulsive and unpredictable” Palestinians in recent weeks, according to Israeli spin.

Generally speaking, Western commentators have been more willing to place the resistance in the wider context of the oppression faced by Palestinians.

Yet this Western approach, articulated mainly by liberal academics and journalists, has something in common with the Israeli one: it regards as baseless and irrelevant the allegations that Israel plans to demolish al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem or build a “Third Temple” on the Haram al-Sharif, the surrounding compound. The allegations appear in the western media as a mere pretext which have only incidentally triggered Palestinians to rise up.

There is no denying that after nearly 50 years of brutal colonization one does not have to look too far to understand the depths of despair and levels of rage felt by Palestinians.

However, this understandable impulse to act against oppression should not lead us to ignore Israel’s plans towards Haram al-Sharif. Nor should we accept that Arab and Palestinian apprehensions about Israel are figments of the oriental imagination and not rooted in reality. In fact, they can be substantiated.

It is, therefore, crucial to ask, whether you are religious or secular: is al-Aqsa in danger? If it is, then its precarious future is not just an offense to Islam but also a further indication of how far Israel’s settler-colonial project could go.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL CRIME

Demolishing Arab and Islamic sites in Jerusalem is not unknown in Israeli policy and attitudes. In 1967, Israel razed the Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem.

This was an architectural gem of Islamic civilization dating back to the late 12th century and had hosted some of the most important Islamic religious orders.

When Zionism appeared in Palestine, its leaders were not only trying to purchase land for settlement but also to buy what they considered to be Jewish Jerusalem.

Baron Edmond Rothschild attempted to buy the quarter at the end of the 19th century, as did the Zionist leadership under the British Mandate — to no avail. When purchasing did not work, it was taken by force during the 1967 War and demolished.

The demolition included the destruction of the Sheikh Eid mosque built by a son of Salah al-Din al-Ayubi, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders. When learning about the destruction years later, Benjamin Kedar, a historian and vice president of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences, declared to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “it was an archaeological crime.”

The destruction of mosques was not a new practice, or one limited to Jerusalem. Zionist forces left intact only very few mosques in the destroyed Palestinian villages and towns during the Nakba — the ethnic cleansingoperation of 1948. The Israeli authorities then turned many of the remaining mosques into clubs, restaurants and animal enclosures.

GEOGRAPHY OF DESTRUCTION

Thus, neither historical monuments in Jerusalem nor mosques around Palestine were immune from the destructive policies of the colonizer. This ruination of the country’s Islamic heritage is deeply engraved in the Palestinian collective memory.

Palestinians also freqeuently witness Israel destroying buildings with armored D-9 bulldozers, supplied by the US firm Caterpillar.

However, it is not only this vivid memory of the Israeli geography of destruction that plants fears among many about the future of al-Aqsa. It is a realistic analysis of the ideology of some of the potent political forces today in Israel, who are represented in Benjamin Netanyahu’s current government.

The most important of them is the ever-growing religious nationalist movement. It used to be a marginal force, but today it is part of the establishment.

As Or Kashti of Haaretz revealed recently, part of the curriculum of that movement’s school system (Israel runs three systems: a secular Jewish one, a national religious one and the “Arab” system) is a program that advocates the building of the “Third Temple.”

Building the temple is the ambition of humanity as a whole, pupils are told. Kashti talked to experts who read the program and although he stresses that the program does not have a direct reference to blowing up al-Aqsa, the pupils are inoculated with the idea that they are on the verge of the Jewish redemption (Geula) of the mount.

This program is supported by Naftali Bennet, the education minister. Along with his colleague, Uri Ariel, Bennett is part of the Jewish Home party, which is committed to replacing al-Aqsa with a Jewish temple.

Following the election earlier this year, Ariel was appointed agriculture minister. In his previous role as housing minister, he called explicitly to build the new temple over al-Aqsa. He is not a marginal politician, and neither is his party.

The Israeli government supports with money and other means several organizations that call openly for a similar plan. The most important of them is The Temple Institute in Jerusalem, founded by Rabbi Yisrael Ariel. Its funding has been investigated by the Haaretz reporter Uri Blau.

The institute’s main goal, according to its website, is “to see Israel rebuild the Holy Temple on Mount Moriah in Jerusalem [al-Aqsa mosque compound], in accordance with the Biblical commandments.”

There is nothing ludicrous or unimaginable in assuming that a zealot Zionist will one day carry out such plans.

The author of numerous books, Ilan Pappe is professor of history and director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter.