Preventing Palestine – A Political History From Camp David to Oslo

by Jim Miles

Preventing Palestine – A Political History From Camp David to Oslo. Seth Anziska. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2018.

In all my recent readings of history and current events, Preventing Palestine stands out as being one of the best written – if not the best – and one of the most essential for understanding the overall historical process of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories of Palestine. Given the nature of the book, it also hints at the gradual process through which all of Mandatory Palestine west of the Jordan River gave way to the acceptance of only a partial space – the West Bank and Gaza – within the overall colonial-settler area of Israel, as a region for a Palestinian state. Its general focus however is the political process beginning with Jimmy Carter to find a solution to the stalemate between the Arab countries and Israel, including a settlement of the Palestinian position, after the Yom Kippur war of 1973.

The result was a highly watered down document – the Camp David Accords – providing Anwar Sadat of Egypt with his original territory, peace with Israel, and the usual billions of dollars from the U.S. Palestine and the other Arab states were not included in the deal with Palestine receiving the first in a series of many talking points but no commitments or action towards an actual sovereign entity.

Among the many players, Sadat is criticized for his lack of concern for the Palestinian cause. Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski appears as making an honest effort to find a regional settlement, partly from concerns of the era about the Soviet Union’s strength in the region. Arafat obviously plays a significant role, in this era through the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan then Lebanon (with the chapter on Lebanon being one of the clearest presentations of that nasty little war) and the lead up to the Oslo Accords. The main player is Israel’s Menachem Begin who persevered with the single most important element of the talks – a denial of any sovereign rights to the Palestinians – at most offering them “individual autonomy” with respect to civil law, but no sovereign or state entity was ever proffered.

Political history can be boring, but author Set Anziska has obviously done a tremendous amount of work researching the material and making it come to life. He achieves this through access to newly released unredacted archival material within Israel, a long list of secondary reading sources, unpublished manuscripts, and many personal interviews. From this is crafted an interesting and detailed read reflecting much of the personalities of the characters involved and the processes they undertook in an attempt to reach their goals. The format of Preventing Palestine is one of the finest I can remember for a political history, with strong topical presentations, well presented story lines, and very strong summaries of each chapter leading to the next sections topic.

The strongest idea reiterated over and over – until Begin finally had his way – is that of not giving any land up for a sovereign Palestinian state. It starts with “100 years ago Palestine was mostly empty….There was no such thing as an Arab-Palestine that existed for 1300 years before we came.” It continues on through “We will not negotiate over a Palestinian state,” with Anziska summarizing, “Israeli leaders were in fact proffering comprehensive negotiations as a means to maintain indefinite political sovereignty over the territories.” Those ideas continue on throughout the work, with the final clear summary,

“In continuing with the post 1967 “decision not to decide” on the fate of the territories and deferring substantive negotiations over the Palestinian question in an autonomy process explicitly designed to prevent sovereignty, Camp David actually enabled the triumph of an Israeli vision intent on suppressing the demand for self-determination. This highly consequential strategy was a defining feature of Begin’s statecraft, often lost in the broader picture of the peace treaty with Egypt….autonomy for the local inhabitants of the occupied territories was diluted to a point where it signaled indefinite Israeli control of the territories rather than a means to eventual self government.”

In short, the two state solution has not died, it was stillborn, with the Oslo Accords essentially extending Begin’s denial of sovereignty and statehood into the indefinite future.

Preventing Palestine is an excellent read, and an essential one for a much more clear understanding of the current Palestinian situation.

Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications.

‘Zionist Regime Concealing 300,000 Documents About Palestinian Massacres’

 
WEST BANK  – The Zionist regime has been hiding 300,000 documents about its massacres of Palestinians, thousands of them dating back to the 1800s, a report says.

The regime’s "State Archives” declassified secret documents last summer, but some 300,000 documents, which antedate the 1948 establishment of the regime, remained classified, according to the +972 Magazine.

"The very existence of the 300,000 classified files—their names, dates, and origin within the state bureaucracy—had been kept a secret, until now. One-fifth of the files, deemed too sensitive still by the regime, were excluded from the disclosure,” the report by Israeli Jewish journalist Asaf Shalev said.

"There were many people who were concerned about the opening of this catalog,” Israel’s "State Archivist” Yaacov Lozowick was quoted by the website as saying in a statement accompanying the release.

Some of the files, which were kept secret, reportedly date back to 1821, while 125 of them date back to the 19th century and nearly 2,000 papers predate the Nakba (Catastrophe Day).

Files on the two most notorious massacres of Deir Yassin and Kafr Qasim by the Zionist regime are among the hidden documents, the website said.

The Kafr Qasim massacre took place on October 29, 1956 -- the first day of the Suez war -- when Israeli forces killed residents of the village who returned from their nearby agricultural lands.

Deir Yassin has long remained a symbol of the regime’s violence against Palestinians due to the particularly gruesome nature of the 1948 slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the tiny village.

The Deir Yassin massacre, which was carried out on April 9, 1948, was led by the Irgun militia group, whose head was future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with support from fellow Zionist militiamen affiliated with Haganah and Lehi groups.

According to the report, the massacre was one of the first in what would become a long line of attacks in a number of Palestinian villages, part of a broader strategy called Plan Dalet by Zionist groups to scare Palestinians in the hope that the terror would lead to an Arab exodus.

Around 750,000 Palestinians took refuge abroad in the face of the massacres — most notorious among them the one in Deir Yassin.

Grim 50th anniversary of the Six-Day War

“We decided to attack him” – Menachem Begin

By Yusuf Dhia-Allah

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of Zionist Israel’s Six-Day War of aggression and conquest of the lands of three Arab states as well as the rest of Palestine that it had not hitherto occupied. Launched in the early hours of June 5, 1967, the surprise Israeli attack wiped out the entire air force fleets of Egypt and Syria. From there on, it was a cakewalk for the Zionist invaders to capture the Sinai Peninsula including Gaza from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. The Jordanian forces did not put up a fight; the putative King Husayn ordered them to withdraw abandoning al-Masjid al-Aqsa to the Zionist invaders.

The year 2017 marks another grim anniversary: the launch of the colonial enterprise to fracture the Muslim East into weak unstable nation-states to make way for the implantation of the Zionist entity in Palestine. It is the 100th anniversary of the infamous Balfour Declaration when then British Foreign Secretary James Balfour, in response to a letter from Walter Rothschild promised to create a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.

On what basis did Balfour, a staunch anti-Semite (he had backed the Aliens Act of 1905 prohibiting entry of Jews into Britain) make such an outrageous and blatantly unjust promise? The British did not own Palestine; they were on the verge of capturing it from the Ottomans but the land belonged to the Palestinian people. They have inhabited it for thousands of years yet one of the greatest injustices was perpetrated to dispossess them of their ancestral lands and implant an alien European colonial settler entity in their place.

Before digging deeper into the British conspiracy, let us first consider the circumstances that led to the Six-Day War. Tensions between Egypt, then ruled by the firebrand Egyptian nationalist Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, and the Zionist entity were rising. The Zionists accused ‘Abd al-Nasir of threatening to invade Israel and “drive the Jews into the sea.” This allegation was based on the fact that ‘Abd al-Nasir had ordered two divisions of his army into the Sinai Peninsula that Israel said posed an “existential threat.”

This was a preposterous lie. Neither the Egyptian army nor a combination of Arabian armies fed on a steady diet of Arabian nationalism was capable of fighting the Zionist army. ‘Abd al-Nasir had merely moved two divisions into the Sinai Peninsula; it was a defensive move. General Ezer Weizmann, chief of the Israeli air force at the time admitted, “There was never a real danger of extermination [of Israel].” Zionist political leaders — Prime Minister Levi Eshkol among them — peddled the fiction that “the very existence of the State of Israel hung upon a thread” (June 12, 1967, speaking in the Knesset). General Yitzhak Rabin also admitted that two divisions of the Egyptian army in the Sinai posed no threat to Israel.

The Americans also jumped into the fray. The Zionists told US President Lyndon Johnson that they “feared” an invasion from Egypt or a combination of Arabian armies. Johnson contacted ‘Abd al-Nasir and assured him that the Israelis would not attack if he (‘Abd al-Nasir) were not to initiate hostilities and to show good faith by pulling his forces back from the Israeli border in the Sinai. Like a fool — or a coward — ‘Abd al-Nasir fell for the trap.

On June 5 when the Israeli air force struck, the Egyptian army was asleep; the air forces of Egypt and Syria had no clue that they were about to be wiped out. The head of the Egyptian armed forces, Field Marshal (no less) ‘Abd al-Óakim ‘Amir was not even in Cairo and his aircraft could not land as he returned from a trip because the airport had been bombed with the entire Egyptian air force wiped out on the ground. The Syrian air force suffered a similar fate.

In six days, the Arabian armies were crushed. Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed in Israeli air strikes or tank and artillery fire. Many others died of thirst in the scorching heat of the desert. Arabian nationalism suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Zionist nationalism.

On June 8, the Israeli air force attacked the USS Liberty, an American communications ship in international waters monitoring Israel’s attack on the three countries. This was a deliberate act of aggression against the US. The Israelis murdered 34 American sailors and injured 171 others in an attack that lasted nearly an hour. The ship’s markings were clearly visible and the Israeli pilots knew precisely what they were attacking, yet it did not prevent them from carrying out their war crime against their principal benefactor, the US.

Far from holding the Zionists responsible for this dastardly crime, the Americans hushed up the episode calling it a “mistake” confirming that the US was a Zionist colony. The ever-pliant US media tried to present the Zionist aggression against its Arab neighbors as a “preemptive” strike in which tiny beleaguered Israel was left with no choice but to defend itself because it was surrounded by a “sea of Arabs.”

Mythmaking is an obsession of the Zionists and their apologists in the West. They have always peddled the lie that the Jewish people faced relentless hostility and persecution in Europe — they were nearly wiped out in the Second World War — hence the need for a separate homeland for them.

In 1917, when Balfour made his illegal and infamous promise to Walter Rothschild, the Jewish people faced no such threat. True, Christian Europe had shown extreme hatred toward them but why should the Palestinians pay a price for crimes perpetrated by the Europeans? Besides, why is it fair to displace the Palestinians from their homes, villages, and towns to make way for a people being persecuted in Europe? It would be a lot fairer to create a homeland for them in Germany, the main perpetrator of such crimes against them.

The fascist Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin, a one-time terrorist mastermind and on the British list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” exposed the false claim peddled by the Zionists that they had faced an existential threat from the Arabian armies in 1967. During a speech to the Israeli National Defense College on August 2, 1982, Begin said, “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him [Egyptian President Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir].”

General Matti Peled, an Israeli commander in the June 1967 war, also corroborated this lie. He told the Israeli newspaper Ha‘aretz (March 19, 1972), “The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only a bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” Peled, appalled by brutalities inflicted on innocent Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, later turned into a peace activist.

Zionist Israel, the only colonial settler entity, is ever expanding. In 1948, the UN allocated it 56% of Palestinian territory without even asking the Palestinians whether they agreed to the theft of their land by the Zionists. In figures released on December 31, 1922 after the British conducted census, the Jewish population of Palestine was a mere 11%. How did it burgeon to 30% by 1948? This was another treacherous act perpetrated by the British colonialists: they facilitated a massive illegal influx of Jewish people from Europe into Palestine.

The aim was to create a reasonably large population base, a core group, so that it could claim 56% of the territory. But the Zionist enterprise is based on theft; it has continued to expand. In 1948, when the Palestinians refused to accept the theft of their land, the Zionists simply launched a campaign of ethnic cleansing and grabbed 78% of the territory. In 1967, the Zionists occupied the remaining 22% as well.

Today, Palestinians are forced to live in disjointed bantustans in their own land, much like the Africans were forced to do under the apartheid regime in South Africa. But South African apartheid ended decades ago, Zionist apartheid has intensified. The chances of a Palestinian state are fast receding as the Arabian regimes have also now come out openly in support of the Zionists.

Their own leadership — the so-called Palestinian Authority and now Hamas as well — has betrayed the Palestinian people. The Arabian rulers had abandoned them a long time ago. The recent spat between Saudi Arabia and Qatar has exposed, yet again, the cowardly nature of these rulers who have abandoned even the pretence of supporting the Palestinian cause.

These rulers would rather fight — and kill — other innocent Muslims than fight the Zionist war criminals.

By Yusuf Dhia-Allah

-Yusuf Dhia-Allah

50 years of zionist forgery and land grab

By Zafar Bangash

One of the biggest injustices of the twentieth century - the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the State of Israel - is being celebrated in a manner bordering on the scandalous. The implantation of the zionist entity in Palestine has been rightly described asal-Nakba (the catastrophe) by Palestinians.

The hoopla surrounding Israeli celebrations conveniently ignores the fact that Palestine was stolen by European Jews in connivance with the European powers, primarily Britain but also France (and later the US) to create a western beach-head in the heartland of Islam. This was only made possible by driving out the indigenous population - the Palestinians - from their ancestral lands, through terror and mass murder.

The zionists have peddled the mythology of turning 'deserts into orchards' with the active collaboration of the west. Their claim to Palestine is based on a complete perversion of historical facts sprinkled with Biblical references to geography. The zionists - most of them secular fanatics who have nothing to do with Judaism - have reduced the Bible to a real estate manual.

The zionist colonial settler enterprise was launched by shedding the blood of the Palestinians. It has been sustained through terror, the most common characteristic of the zionists, for 50 years. More than 475 Palestinian towns and villages were completely wiped out. There is no trace left of them anymore.

Soon after the June 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed Israeli general, had boasted to a group of visiting Jews from the US that the present generation had expanded the boundaries of the State of Israel this far. Now it was upto the next generation to take them further. He also candidly admitted that hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns had been wiped out.

Contrary to zionist propaganda, now admitted even by some Israeli historians, the Palestinian inhabitants of these once-thriving towns did not flee on orders from the Arab regimes. They fled in the face of the zionist terror machine. Deir Yasin (April 9, 1948) was but one example of numerous zionist atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians. Palestinian women were parade naked in the streets. Many of them were bayoneted to death before their bodies were dumped in wells. At least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in this campaign to settle European Jews in Palestine. This obscenity is being celebrated today as a great achievement.

Many leaders of the zionist terrorist gangs - Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir et el - later became prime ministers of the 'only democracy in the Middle East'. The 'most powerful democracy' in the world - the US - has such a close relationship with the 'only democracy' that massive annual handouts are bestowed upon it even while American citizens are denied many of their basic needs.

The zionist State receives between US$4 to US$6 billion annually in aid (grants and loans) from the US. In the first 20 years of Israel's existence (1948-1968), it received only $348 million. But in the next 20 years, this shot up to $82 billion. The last 10 years have witnessed further burgeoning of these handouts.

As a colonial settler enterprise, Israel does not meet the standard test for such an entity. Traditionally, colonial possessions not only stand on their own feet but also remit large sums, in goods and money, to the mother country. The zionist entity, on the other hands, thrives as a parasite on the American body. Without American handouts, it cannot survive. Israel is America's biggest welfare recipient.

If the zionist State cannot survive without US handouts, American politicians cannot survive without Jewish support in the US. This symbiotic relation was alluded to by US vice president Al Gore on April 30 when he joined Israeli celebrations in Tel Aviv. 'We Americans feel our ties with Israel are eternal,' Gore said lyrically. He might as well have said 'without Jewish votes and money, I cannot win the presidency in the year 2000.'

There is another factor that binds the US and Israel. Two hundred years ago, European settlers in America pushed westward, expanding their frontiers at the expense of the Native peoples. Today, the indigenous population of America is found only on reservations. The zionists are pursuing exactly the same policy, only with much greater ruthlessness and efficiency. Many Americans see in the zionists the same 'enterprising' spirit that led to their own expansion.

Gore reflected this in his speech when he showered praise on Israel. 'As I lift up my eyes tonight and see the whole house of Israel, I recognize you.' Indeed. Gore could see his own forefathers in the crowd. 'And I remember the prophecy of Ezekiel - that God would raise you up... and restore your land.' Politicians are prone to hyperbole but Gore was telling blatant lies.

The land belongs to the Palestinians even if Gore was still in diapers when the zionists stole it. And as for God's fulfilling His promise to the zionists, surely God did not mean the gangsters, hustlers, mass murderers and torturers who rule the zionist State today.

Israel is the only country in the world where torture of political prisoners is not only legal but its supreme court actively endorses it. Palestinians are held without trial under what is euphemistically called 'administrative detention.' The maximum period is six months but it is routinely extended. There are Palestinians who have been held without charge or trial for four or five years.

While the western media routinely present Israel as a beleaguered State in a sea of hostile neighbours, it is the only nuclear power in the region with more than 200 nuclear weapons. Its army has grown to 600,000 and it can deploy more than 2,800 tanks and 700 combat planes, according to the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

This gives it a formidable military muscle against the Arab armies which it has defeated in almost all the wars. But since 1982, Israel's military has found itself mired in less glorious adventures, including the costly 1982-1985 invasion of Lebanon and its attempts to crush the intifadah from 1987 to 1994.

In Lebanon it got a bloody nose at the hands of the Hizbullah, whose spirit of sacrifice put the fear of God into the pleasure-loving zionist thugs. Instead of confronting the Islamic fighters, the zionists bombard Lebanese villages using long-range artillery and planes.

Hostage-taking is also a favourite ploy of the zionists. Literally hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese are incarcerated in the Khiam concentration camp where torture is rampant. Similarly, Palestinians held without trial are also tortured in prisons inside what is called Israel.

If young Palestinians are incarcerated, their leaders are expelled from their own land. It is ironic that alien occupiers from eastern Europe and America should expel people from their own homes and land where their forefathers have lived for millenia.

The zionists are also extremely sadistic. Young children are targeted for special wrath. Thousands of Palestinian children have been brutally beaten up by the gun-toting zionists. Young stone-throwing Palestinians have been buried alive; others have had their bones broken with rocks, on direct orders from Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel peace prize winner!

During the intifadah, the zionist occupiers frequently used tear gas in confined spaces, resulting in hundreds of pregnant Palestinian women suffering miscarriages. Another of their favourite ploys is to mix flour and kerosene in Palestinian homes, making it unfit for consumption.

Despite such cruelties, the zionists have failed to break the spirit of the Palestinians. Every Israeli cruelty brings out an even greater determination to stand up to the occupiers.

As the Israeli military historian Martin Van Creveld of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem admitted, 'An army which fights against the weak, becomes weak itself.' He went on: 'In these instances, the army is the sure loser because its victories are without honour and its defeats are always humiliating.'

Israeli soldiers no longer wish to serve in Lebanon, Ghazzah or the West Bank. An army sergeant candidly admitted 'We have to hide from reservists the fact that they're going to serve in the Gaza Strip or they simply don't show up.' The time is not far off when Israeli soldiers would not wish to live in Palestine either.

Already, Israel is the least safe place for Jews anywhere in the world.

 

Zafar Bangash