Labour MP Gerald Kaufman Attacks Israel for Its Nazi Crimes in Gaza

It wasn’t just the Irish challenging their governments over support for Israel during the bombardment of Gaza. In the video below from 2009, posted on YouTube by setfree68, the veteran Labour MP Gerald Kaufman also bitterly criticises Israel for its attacks on civilians. Kaufman himself, as his speech makes very clear, was Jewish and his family also suffered under Nazi persecution, with many of relatives being murdered. He makes an explicit parallel between the way the Nazis treated them and the other Jews, and how the Israelis were then treating the Palestinians. Kaufman was one of the MPs, who lost his seat and was convicted of fiddling his expenses during that scandal a few years ago. Nevertheless in many ways he was a fine politician, and certainly spoke the truth here with real moral courage that certainly was not shared by the former Labour leader, Tony Blair.

He begins by addressing the deputy speaker, and describes how he was brought up as an Orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf on his family’s kitchen was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund into which they put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in Palestine. He first when to Israel in 1961 and states that he has since been there more times than he could count. He has family and friends in Israel, one of whom fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973, and was wounded in two of them. He states that he is wearing a tie-clip made from a campaign decoration awarded to one of his friends, which he presented to Kaufman. He states that he knew most of the prime ministers of Israel, starting with the founding PM, David Ben-Gurion and describes Golda Meir as his friend, along with deputy prime minister Yigal Alon, who was the general, who won the Negeb for Israel in the 1948 War of Independence.

He states that his parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland, and that most of their families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. His grandmother was ill in her bed when the Nazis came to her hometown of Stashev, and she was shot dead in her bed by a German soldier. He then goes to state that his grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt among gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count. He mentions that on Sky News a few days previously an Israeli arm spokeswoman Major Liebovich was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time, 800 Palestinians. The total, he says, is now a thousand. Leibovich replied that five hundred of them were militants. That, he states unhesitatingly, is the reply of a Nazi. He says that he supposes that the Jews fighting unhesitatingly for their lives in the ghetto could have been dismissed as militants.

He then goes on to discuss Hamas and the problems they pose for a proper peace. He states that the Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, asserts that her government will have no dealing with Hamas because they’re terrorists. Livni’s father was Atan Livni, chief operations officer of the terrorist Irgun Tzvi Liun, who organised the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed 91 victims, including four Jews. Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two British sergeants and booby trapped their corpses. Irgun, together with the terrorist Stern Gang massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the present Israeli government indicates that they would be willing in circumstances acceptable to them to negotiate with the Palestinian president, Abbas, of Fatah. He declares that it’s too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah’s previous leader, Yasser Arafat. who was a friend of Kaufman’s. Instead they besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah where Kaufman visited him. It’s because of the failings of Fatah since Arafat’s death that Hamas won the Palestinian election in 2006.

Hamas, he says clearly, is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected and is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas, including by our own government, has been a culpable error from which dreadful consequences have followed. He says that the great Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban, with whom Kaufman campaigned for peace on many platforms, said ‘You make peace by talking to your enemies’. However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however the fighting ends, there will still be 1 1/2 million Palestinians in Gaza and 2 1/2 million more Palestinians in the West Bank, who are treated like dirt by the Israelis with hundreds of roadblocks and the ghastly denizens of the Jewish settlements harassing them as well. Kaufman predicts that a time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the Jewish population in Israel. It’s time for our government, he declares, to make clear to the Israeli government that its conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, he says, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis’ real goal, which is impossible for them to achieve. He concludes with the stinging words ‘They’re not simply war criminals, they’re fools!’

The video ends with the address of a couple of websites. I haven’t visited them, and so I can’t vouch if they are reasonable websites or not, so be careful.

Kaufman’s statesmanlike speech makes it very clear that he isn’t a knee-jerk anti-Israeli, nor is he ashamed of his Jewish background. Indeed, from this it’s clear that he’s proud of his connections to Israel. But like very many decent people of every race and creed, he was disgusted by the Fascistic violence of the Israelis against the indigenous Arabs.

He is also absolutely correct about Israel’s cynical exploitation of gentile guilt over the Holocaust. This is quite different from the proper commemoration of the Holocaust and its victims, which should serve as a reminder that terrible atrocities were committed in civilised Europe, and that such horrors could indeed occur again if it is not properly remembered. And we need that now, when real Fascists, Nazis and anti-Semitic regimes are taking power in Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States and Ukraine.

But the Israelis and their supporters do exploit the Holocaust. We’ve seen it with the way the Israel lobby smears their opponents as anti-Semites, and people like Mike as Holocaust deniers. Indeed, Margaret Hodge used the Holocaust to smear Corbyn when she whined that her suspension was like that of the Jews in eastern Europe waiting for the Nazis’ knock at the door. Of course, it was nothing like that, and Jews and non-Jews, whose relatives really had suffered arrest and imprisonment by the Nazis angrily reminded her of that. Norman Finkelstein also addressed it in his book, The Holocaust Industry, in which he described how the Israeli state and greedy lawyers enrich themselves by suing governments and organisations for compensation and monies owed to Holocaust survivors and their families, but then swallow this in legal fees. Thousands of Holocaust survivors have been swindled like this, and left in poverty in Israel.

As for Hamas, they’re horrific. But they were democratically elected, something Killary lamented in a recorded phone call. The time is long past when governments around the world should be indulging Israel and its genocidal policies. But they will, because of geopolitical reasons. Israel is the West’s key ally in the Middle East, along with Saudi Arabia. And they sell guns and other weapons to eastern Europe, as well as no doubt buying all that ‘wonderful kit’ David Cameron raved about as an arms factory in Lancashire.

The Democrat politicos who aren’t going to AIPAC this weekend have made a great moral decision. It is one which I hope more of the world’s politicians follow, and that I hope it also pays off as an increasing number of people in America and Europe turn away from Israeli brutality. As for Kaufman, he may have been a crook, but he would have been a far better Foreign Minister than that clown Boris.

Two Photos of Bristol’s King David Hotel

At the corner of one of the streets leading off Park Row to Bristol’s BRI hospital is the King David Hotel. I was heading up to the hospital this morning, and took these two photos of it. It’s a fascinating and very attractive building, as you can see. It’s in yellow and red brick, and recalls some of the other buildings in Bristol in the Venetian Gothic style of architecture. I don’t know when it was built, or even if it’s still used as a hotel. I don’t think so, because, as you can see, the main door has been sealed. I suspect that like many of the buildings around Clifton, it’s been converted to offices.

It shares its name with that other King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which was notoriously bombed by the Irgun as part of Israel’s war of independence against the British. My guess is that Bristol’s King David Hotel may have been built about the time the Jerusalem hotel was in its heyday, and was the place to stay for visitors to the Holy Land. I also think that it probably has some connection to Bristol’s Jewish community. Jews have been living in Bristol since the Middle Ages. Back in the 1990s or so archaeologists discovered the remains of a miqveh, a Jewish ritual bath, with an inscription in Hebrew, zaklim, meaning ‘flowing’ on Jacob’s Wells Road. In the 1820, when by law only members of the Anglican Church were supposed to serve in local and national government, two Jews and a number of Protestant Nonconformists were recorded sitting in Bristol’s corporation. And Park Row did have a very beautiful synagogue. It was cut into the hillside, and had huge Hebrew characters carved on its facade. This was, if I recall properly, carved to look like an ancient Hebrew temple. I’ll have to try and look this all up, but it seems to me that the Hotel may have been built by someone with connections to Jerusalem, and may have been a member of the synagogue’s congregation. Whatever the building’s history, it’s a fascinating piece of Bristol’s historic landscape, showing the city’s religious and ethnic diversity and its global connections.

 

George Galloway on the Israeli Conspiracy Exposed by Al-Jazeera

This video is George Galloway’s take on the plot exposed by Al-Jazeera in their documentary ‘The Lobby’, and published in the press by the Mail on Sunday, of Shai Masot and various Labour and Conservative Friends of Israel to ‘take down’ various politicians the Israelis found inconvenient.

One of the politicos they discussed doing this to was the Conservative minister, Alan Duncan. Galloway notes that Duncan is one of the first openly gay Tory MPs, so you don’t have to be Einstein to imagine what kind of scandal they would invent to bring him down. Galloway states that this should have been enough for Duncan’s boss, Boris Johnson, who Masot described as ‘an idiot’ to summon the Israeli ambassador, Mark Regev, to London and give him his marching orders. Another MP they also discussed bringing down in a scandal was Sir Crispin Blunt, the chairman of the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee, who is also gay. Again, you don’t have to spend much time wondering what that scandal might have been. He speculates whether they would have tried to bring Duncan and Blunt together as sexual partners.

But Boris immediately declared the matter closed, leading Galloway to ask this question: if that had been a Russian or Iranian embassy official doing the plotting, would the affair then have been closed? Or would the ambassadors have been brought into the Foreign Office and then expelled from the country? If this had been any other state, we would now be in the middle of a state to state crisis because of it.

Galloway then leaves Duncan and Blunt, as they can look after themselves. He’s far more interested in the Labour aspects of the scandal. Galloway recalls how he and Corbyn have marched together in support of the Palestinians for over 30 years. Which is why, the moment Corbyn was elected, and even before, when it seemed he would win the leadership of the Labour party, the Israel lobby went ‘bananas’. They persecuted him every step of the way to the leadership, and once he had, they conspired to have him overthrown. They concocted the fake anti-Semitism scare within the Labour party, making it seem that it was a nest of racism, when in fact there was nothing to these allegations whatsoever. He states that the only thing the mass of Labour members have in common with Jeremy Corbyn in this is their support for the Palestinian people, and their opposition to Israel’s crimes.

Galloway then moves on to talk about Joan Ryan, the Labour MP for Enfield North, who was also at the lunch with Masot. But you wouldn’t know represented Enfield; she’s better described as the MP for Tel Aviv, and is the chair of Labour Friends of Israel. Ryan was filmed grinning all over her face when Masot told her the good news that he had secured a million pound slush fund to secure Labour politicians to come to Israel’s aid. This was dressed up as a fund to fly Labour MPs to Israel for ‘fact-finding missions’, a pretext which Galloway describes as entirely bogus. He points out that most of them have already been on several ‘fact-finding’ missions to Israel. You can also fly to Israel for well under a thousand pounds. So if half of all Labour MPs have taken the Shekel, that only means an expenditure of 100,000 pounds. What’s the other 900,000 quid for?

He answers that it was a slush fund to destabilise Jeremy Corbyn, to remove him as the leader of the Labour party, by Labour MPs themselves, on behalf of a foreign power. And Israel isn’t just any foreign power, but the biggest violator of international law, and one which has just been condemned by the entire Security Council of the United Nations for its crimes against the Palestinians. He asks what kind of Labour MP is not only in bed with a state like that, but is covertly receiving money from a foreign embassy, for the defence of that country, when it stands in public disapproval amongst all Labour members and most people in Britain, and most countries in the world?

He then goes on to discuss the Conservative official’s remark at the lunch that almost all Conservative MPs are members of the Conservative Friends of Israel. Galloway says that he can tell you himself that at least half of Labour MPs are members of the Labour Friends of Israel. He states ‘Isn’t it about time that you demanded that your MP’s first allegiance was to Britain? That their first responsibility should be to debate and decide what Britain’s foreign policy should be, rather than be agents for a somebody’s else’s country?’ He then goes on to say, ‘And when that somebody else’s country is a country of gangsters that murder people, including British people, and for a very long time’.

He states that the Israel lobby has been in Westminster and Whitehall before, they tried to murder Churchill when he was leading the country in the epic battle against Fascism, the perpetrators of the Holocaust which murdered six million Jews. They planted bombs in the Foreign Office and Whitehall, which killed British officials. Talking about the Stern Gang in Israel, he describes how they hanged two British sergeants in an orange grove and took pictures of it so that it could be used as propaganda around the world. The blew up more than 90 British civil servants in a hotel in Jerusalem. He goes on to say that Israel invented terrorism, or at least, modern terrorism. Yet it now calls its victims, the Palestinians, terrorists and themselves the victims of terror. Before we sort out the Middle East and its problems, we have to sort out our own parliament and democratic system. He states

We must not tolerate its subversion by a foreign power. We cannot tolerate members of Parliament being bought and paid for by a foreign power. Because we can never know, when they say, when they ask, when they do what they do in parliament, we can never know if its in our interests or it’s in the interests of someone else.

He states that he hasn’t seen the Al-Jazeera documentary yet, but when he does, he’s sure he’ll have the chance to come to talk to us about it again.

The Israelis didn’t invent modern terrorism. It first seems to have appeared in the wave of assassinations carried out by nationalists and radicals, including anarchists and socialists/ Communists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, like the various plots in Russia to kill the tsar. But certainly the founders of Israel used terror in their attempt to overthrow British rule in Palestine. The Stern Gang not only killed the two sergeants, they also booby-trapped the bodies to kill the British squaddies come to retrieve their remains. The bombing of the hotel in Jerusalem was the King David, and the attack is notorious. However, I was not aware that Zionist terrorists had planted a bomb in Whitehall, though I don’t doubt it occurred. Galloway is also clearly speculating when he describes the slush fund procured by Masot as mainly for the overthrow of Jeremy Corbyn, but I have no doubt that here he’s also right.

And he’s right about the threat they pose to British politics and democracy, no matter how much they may try to pose as victims and whine about anti-Semitic tropes.

Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party and the Rise of Militant Zionism in America: Part 1

One of the points made by Jewish supporters of the Palestinians is that there at more Christian than Jewish Zionists in America. Indeed, Prof. Norman Finkelstein has pointed out that support for Israel amongst Jewish Americans was marginal until the late 1960s, when Conservative activists worked hard to engineer support for the country after its victories against the surrounding Arab nations. Mike made a similar point in his defence of himself and his commenter, Paul Mabbo, against the accusations of anti-Semitism flung by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism. Not everyone making the accusations was necessarily Jewish.

In fact there has been an alliance between right-wing American Christian groups and militant Zionists since before the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980s. Reagan’s election was partly due to his support from these right-wing Christian groups, brought about by the fundraisers and PR men Richard Viguerie, Terry Dolan, Howard Phillips and Ed McAteer. These men founded, led or advised a slew of conservative Christian organisations such as Conservative Caucus, Religious Roundtable, National Conservative Political Action Committee, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Christian Voice, Young Americans for Freedom and the Moral Majority. The term ‘Moral Majority’ was coined by either Weyrich or Phillips when McAteer arranged for them to meet Jerry Falwell. McAteer was then the head of the Christian Freedom Foundation, which was funded by money from the Pew and DeVos families, who owned Sunoco and AmWay respectively. It isn’t surprising that Betsy DeVos has now popped up as Trump’s Education Secretary, with a militant right-wing plan to privatise all American public schools into Charter Schools with an explicitly right-wing Christian curriculum. Weyrich was also a member of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, which was financed by money from the Coors and Richard Scaiffe. As well as being a member of Young Americans for Freedom, Phillips had also been a minor member of Nixon’s administration. They chose Falwell because he had helped Anita Bryant defeat the Dade County Gays Rights Bill in 1977.

Falwell was one of the most notorious of the right-wing televangelists of the 1980s. He was actually the least popular of them, became the most influential through his contacts with Ronald Reagan. He first came to public attention for his 1965 speech denouncing Martin Luther King. However, it was the series of rallies he conducted in 1976 and ’77 which brought him to the attention of the leaders of the American Christian right. In 1983 Reagan allowed Fallwell to attend National Security briefings on the possibility of nuclear war with Russia, and discussed theology and nuclear war with him in his presidential limousine. Fallwell was also active establishing links with the Israeli leadership to the point where he became the most influential gentile lobbyist for Israel and Israeli expansionism.

As part of this, Falwell began arranging tours to the Holy Land. One of these was attended by a journalist, Grace Halsell, in 1983. She noted the prominent role apocalypticism played in the tours, with many of her fellow tourists believing that Christ’s return, and the end of the world were imminent. These tours also had an explicit agenda in drumming up support for Israel. The Israeli guide referred to Palestinians as Arabs, following the official Israeli line set by Golda Meir that there were no Palestinians. He then went on to state that the ‘Arabs’ preferred to live in poverty, had repeatedly refused Israeli friendship and bluntly stated that ‘all Muslims were terrorists’. When the tour bus stopped at Nazareth, it was only to use the toilets there. Halsell suspected that they were being prevented from speaking to any Palestinians or Christians living in Israel. This is not unlikely. One of the ministers at our church said that if you go to Israel, you will be kept from meeting Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. The tour finally met Falwell at a hotel in Jerusalem, where they were treated to a speech by the Israeli defence minister, Moshe Arens, boast about Israeli victories in the invasion of Lebanon.

Falwell was richly rewarded by the Israelis for his services to them. A forest was named after him, he was showered with free trips to the country, and was also given a private jet by the Israeli government. He became the only gentile to receive the Jabotinsky medal, named after the Zionist leader, who advocated waging a war of extermination against the Palestinians in order to set up an Israeli empire that straddled both sides of the Jordan. It was Falwell who turned Jesse Helms, another prominent Reaganite, from a militant anti-Zionist into an enthusiastic supporter of Israel.

Falwell also visited the West Bank, where he had his photo taken with a Jewish American family, who had recently immigrated there. He set up a convention in Annapolis in 1983 to organise support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This was attended by James Watt and Richard Allen, two members of Reagan’s administration; Yehuda Hellman and other Jewish leaders; Viguerie, Phillips and Weyrich; and former presidential sleazebag Richard M. Nixon. Falwell also told a Texan newspaper that same year that Israel had a divine mandate, through the covenant between the Lord and the patriarch Abraham, to parts of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan, and that the whole of Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait should also belong to Israel. This would have to be achieved through force. Falwell stated that ‘good intentions are acts of stupidity’.

Extremist American Christian groups have also given support to Jewish terrorists, such as Gush Emunim, who have attempted to blow up the Dome of the Rock mosque in Jerusalem in order to restore Solomon’s Temple, whose site they believe the mosque occupies. In 1984 18 members of the terrorist group were convicted of trying to blow up the mosque, with the covert support of the Shin Bet and other members of the Israeli army and police. The group also attacked three Palestinian mayor, wounding them.

The terrorists were received as popular heroes in Israel, including by the judge who sentenced them. There were pleas for mercy from Yitzhak Shamir, and American right-wing Christians and Jews began sending money to finance their defence. Wealth American Jews also fund Gush Emunim and Meir Kahane’s extreme right-wing Kach party. Gush Emunim is also funded by Marcus Katz, a Mexican arms salesman, who made immense profits from selling guns and other armaments to Iran and various South American countries. Ruben Mattus, the head of the ice cream firm Haagen-Dazs, is one of the major backers of Kahane’s Kach party in Israel and his Jewish Defence League in the US.

The foremost Christian supporter of Israeli terrorism, at least in the 1980s, was the Jerusalem Temple Foundation, headed by the self-declared new Nehemiah, Terry Reisenhoover. Reisenhoover’s an Oklahoma speculator in oil and land, and styles himself after the Biblical Nehemiah, who was the first governor of Jerusalem after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon. The land Reisenhoover has speculated on, along with his Israeli partner, Shony Braun, includes land taken from Palestinians on the West Bank. Reisenhoover appointed as secretary Stanley Goldfoot, once implicated in the Stern gang’s 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem Temple Foundation aimed to raise $100 million annually to rebuild the Temple and establish a yeshiva to teach the future priests the correct way to sacrifice animals there. They also supplied funds to Gush Emunim’s defence lawyers after the 1983 attack.

Another right-wing Christian group funding Israeli terrorism is the International Christian Embassy, who lobbied their governments to move their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This group were also financed by South Africa.

The Empire Files on the Foundation of Israel and Ethnic Cleansing of the Palestinians

This is part of a longer piece from The Empire Files, no. 37, presented by Abby Martin, formerly of RT and now, I think, a presenter with Telesur English. This tells the story of the shrinking of Palestine from the foundation of the early Zionist settlements to the carnage of the foundation of Israel in 1948. It’s a grim, ugly picture of organised, imperialist brutality, meted out by people Albert Einstein and other western Jewish critics compared to the Nazis and the Fascists, a view also held by one of the Israelis’ own army officers.

It’s entitled The Untold History of Palestine and Israel, and Martin states that this is the history that is not taught in schools. She and her team had been there filming the Israeli occupation of the West Bank for two weeks. It’s a brutal occupation that is funded by the US taxpayer to the tune of $30 billion in aid. But Israel is presented to Americans through the images of ‘Birthright Tours’, which show Israel as a fun-loving, peaceful land threatened by militant Muslims.

Palestine was originally a province of the Ottoman Empire. During Ottoman rule, it had a population of 500,000 people. 75 per cent of these were Muslims, 20 per cent Christian, and 5 per cent Jewish. Nearly all of them were Arabs. Its cities were centres of intellectual culture and art, drawing visitors and scholars from across the Middle East. Even before it had borders, Palestine constituted a distinct, recognisable nation through its peoples shared customs and culture.

Martin explains that the Zionist movement began in the late 19th century as a reaction to the anti-Semitic violence and pogroms, which broke out in eastern Europe. She correctly states that Zionism was the belief in an exclusively Jewish state. I make this point here, because Nazis used the term incorrectly to mean their stupid and imaginary Jewish conspiracies to enslave gentiles. The Zionists were at this point only a small minority within the Jewish people. Most Jews wanted to stop to anti-Semitism in their own countries. This is illustrated with an article from the New York Times about Jewish Ukrainians organising to stop anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Many Jews resisted leaving Europe on the grounds that this would be giving in to the anti-Semites.

Zionism became a fervent movement under its Theodor Herzl, who claimed to be its father. Herzl was an Austrian atheist. He first considered homelands in Argentina and Uganda, before finally deciding on creating a Greater Israel in the Middle East. As shown on a map, this would include not just Palestine, but also the whole of Jordan and Lebanon, and parts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and a tiny section of Turkey. Herzl spent his time travelling around the West trying to gather support and sponsorship for his scheme. He wrote to the Duke of Baden, for his aid, saying

If it is God’s will that we return to our historic fatherland, we should like to do so as representatives of western civilisation and bring cleanliness, order and well-established customs, … to this plague-ridden, blighted corner of the Orient.

The Zionists promised to make Palestine a vanguard against barbarism, which meant that it would be an extension of western military power, and ‘build highways of the civilised peoples’, which meant trade for western millionaires. Their slogan was ‘A land without a people for a people without a land’. But the Zionists were all too aware that the land already had a people, and were determined to cleanse them. Another Zionist leader, Israel Zangwill, said

Palestine is not so much occupied by Arabs as overrun by them.

From the first the Zionists planned on the expulsion of the indigenous peoples. Much of the country was semi-feudal, with tenant farmers labouring for absentee landlords away in the cities of Jordan or Syria. From 1892 onwards the Zionists began purchasing this land. In many cases the new, Jewish owners evicted the original inhabitants. Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived in peace and harmony in the region for thousands of years, but these purchases and expulsions resulted in immediate conflict.

New opportunities for the further expansion of the Jewish settlements arose during World War I. The Zionists were aware that the Russians, British and French were planning to carve up the region. The infamous Syke-Picot agreement divided the Middle East between the French and British. Britain was given control of Palestine by the League of Nations. The British government, composed of lords, then issued the Balfour Declaration, which pronounced the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The British Mandate resulted in riots in Jerusalem by the indigenous Palestinians, who naturally resented having their homeland given away without their consultation.

Again, the Zionist settlers were planning the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. In 1924 the US envoy stated

The Zionists look forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine.

At this point, settlers comprised 10 per cent of the population. But this was already producing a refugee crisis. This section of the film shows a picture of rally of Palestinian refugees in Syria from 1929. Already there were 50,000 of such people, thrown out of their homes. As more land was purchased, and people evicted, David Ben Gurion, the future prime minister and mascot of Ben Gurion airport, declared

We were not just working. We were conquering, conquering, conquering land. We were conquistadors.

From 1920 to 1939 the settler population rose from ten to thirty per cent. Ben Gurion himself laid out the settlers’ plans for ethnic cleansing:

We must expel the Arabs and take their places.

This policy naturally produced a rise in clashes between the Palestinians and the Zionist settlers. In 1936 the Palestinians launched a general strike against British rule. This was initially peaceful, until the British declared martial law, and recruited Zionist settlers to attack dissidents and Arab villages. This provoked the strike to become an armed uprising. The British in response embarked on a policy of blowing up Arab homes. 200 were destroyed in the Arab village of Yaffa. The rebellion was eventually crushed three years later in 1939. The death toll was 5,000 Palestinians against 300 settlers and 250 British soldiers. The Zionists formed their own armed forces, which were later used in the war of independence. These comprised the Hagana, the official force recognised by the British authorities, and various unofficial militias, the largest of which was the Irgun. These militias began by attacking the Palestinians, before moving on to British soldiers. It was the Irgun which bombed the Kind David Hotel, killing 91 people, including 17 Jews. This was so popular that one of the militias’ leaders, Menachem Begin, later became president of Israel.

Abroad, many Jews were far less impressed. Albert Einstein and a group of other Jews wrote a letter to the New York Times condemning Begin’s movement. They wrote that it was

A political party closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

But the Zionists continued with their plans for the country’s ethnic cleansing. Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in 1940

There is no room for both people in this country … and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries, to transfer them all.

… We must not leave a single village, a single tribe.

The terror created by the Holocaust with its six million Jewish dead, along with the mass murder of other peoples, political prisoners and gays, propelled Zionism from the political fringe to a mass movement. In 1947 the British turned Mandated Palestine over to the UN. This finally gave in to 70 years of Zionist campaigning, creating the state of Israel. The new state was given 70 per cent of the area’s land. Palestine was divided into three zones. However, the new Israel still had a population that was forty per cent Arab. This was a situation that the Israeli founders and leaders were determined to remove. Ben Gurion announced that

There can be no stable and strong Jewish state so long as it has a Jewish majority of 60 per cent.

In 1948 the tensions culminated in a full-blown war, during which the Israelis launched Plan Dalet for the mass terrorisation, murder and expulsion of the Palestinian people. This was the Nakba, the Palestinian term for the destruction of their homeland, a word which means, ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic.

This section of the film describes some of the massacres that were committed, and the atrocities perpetrated against innocent civilians. One of the villages targeted for extermination was Deir Yassin, where there had been no terrorist attacks committed against the settlers. Israeli soldiers murdered nearly the entire population, raping the women before butchering them. One survivor described seeing his entire family lined up to be shot, including his mother, who was breastfeeding a baby. 200 people were murdered. A Red Cross official stated

Here the cleaning up had been done with machine guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished with knives.

!2 days after this, the Zionists attacked and massacred the people of Haifa. At the same time the Israelis broadcast radio messages intended to terrorise the Arabs. These included recordings of women wailing, and the message ‘Flee for your lives. The Jews are using poison gas and nuclear weapons.’ In Abu Shusha, the Palestinians who remained in their homes were raped, then hacked to death with axes. Those who tried to flee were shot on sight. 110 people were killed. At al-Dawayima 450 were killed, with a further 250 missing. In another village, the mosque was bombed, killing the 80 people, who had sought refuge within it. The remaining villagers were rounded up in the town square and shot, leaving a further 70 dead. In Lydda the Zionists massacred around 250-500 people, 250 of which were killed in about half an hour. This was supposedly in response to gun shots being fired from the local mosque. John Bagehot-Howe, a British army officer, commented

It would be an exaggeration to claim that great numbers were massacred. But just enough were killed, or roughly handled, to make sure all the civilian population took flight.

A senior Zionist officer, Joseph Imani, saw Palestinians shot after they came out of their homes waving white flags and carrying food. He said

Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis. Is there no more humane way of expelling the inhabitants than such methods?

During this period 800,000 Palestinians fled their homes, comprising 80 per cent of the Palestinian population of Israel. 500 villages were razed to the ground.

This is the history that you will mostly definitely not find taught in schools, as Abby Martin says. Nor will you see it covered on the mainstream news, whether in the US or over here, by the BBC. Lobster has remarked on the way the Beeb ‘ties itself in knots’ trying to tell itself that it is not biased towards Israel, while being biased towards Israel. And that monster and apologist for mass murder, Mark Regev, the Israeli ambassador, would scream blue murder if anyone in the mainstream media dared to do so, or called those responsible for these atrocities what they are – butchers and mass murderers. As Einstein and the other Jewish critics said, the Zionists responsible for such atrocities and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians are very much like the Nazis and Fascists. But Regev will scream that you’re an anti-Semite or ‘self-hating’, if you’re Jewish, if you dare to mention this.

But we do need to be aware of these atrocities, if we are to understand the paranoid mindset of the Muslim radicals in Britain today. Kalim Saddiqui, a vile bigot, who was one of those responsible for the hate campaign against Salman Rushdie in the 1980s and 1990s, was filmed at his mosque by the Beeb telling his congregation that

British society is a monstrous killing machine, and killing Muslims comes very easily to them.

When the documentary team challenged him on this, he tried to bluff his way out of it by blustering about how Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses had been published as part of a propaganda campaign to prepare for a ‘holocaust of Muslims’. It’s a risible, stupid slander. But to some Muslims, it has a terrible verisimilitude. Many mosques do cover the atrocities committed against Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere around the world in their equivalent of Christian parish magazines. They’re acutely aware of campaigns of terror against their co-religionists. Hence such hysterical claims over here. But these atrocities are deliberately kept hidden from us, so that Islamic terrorism can appear as completely irrational, and Muslims presented as violent terrorists and butchers, killing for the sake of it. That is, admittedly, true to a certain extent of Daesh and al-Qaeda, though even with these cases there is more to it than simply that. If there is ever to be a just peace in the Middle East, we need to know about the real history of the region, how it has been conquered and its people brutalised by western imperialism and the rapacity of multinational corporations. Not only do we need to defeat the Islamists, we also need to defeat the thugs, genocides and corporate despoilers in our own societies.