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________________________________________________________ 5. McGovern and Cannistraro both
attack Israel - with lies. I shall consider the anti-Israel arguments of
Vincent Cannistraro and Raymond McGovern, in that order, followed by a brief
historical reflection on the broad patterns at work.
In 1996, the Observer reported on Vincent
Cannistraro’s views as follows: “Cannistraro
believes [that]. . .‘You cannot deal with this kind of terrorism as a
criminal act. While there are obviously violations of the criminal statutes
involved, in terrorism the act is not committed for gain or cash. It is
motivated by religious and political reasons. You don’t deal with that just
by putting the perpetrators in jail. It becomes an issue for the policy
makers.’ . . .‘You have
to be consistent,’ [says Cannistraro,] ‘not just in individual cases but on
the issue of terrorism as a whole. You cannot appear to give one group the
wink -- giving Gerry Adams [from the political wing of the terrorist IRA, in
Northern Ireland] an invitation to the White House -- and then condemn other
groups that feel they have an equally legitimate cause.’”[1] Terrorism should always work, says
Cannistraro; policy makers should be nice to all terrorists, without
exceptions. This is Cannistraro’s philosophy. But certain terrorists Vincent Cannistraro is
especially fond of. . . As you might expect by now, Vincent Cannistraro’s
2001 Washington Post editorial entitled “Assassination is Wrong” does not
contain one word of remorse for the slaughter of innocent Nicaraguan
villagers carried out by the terrorist Contras whom Cannistraro trained in
assassination techniques (see Part
3 and Part
4). On the contrary, the principle Cannistraro
defends in his Washington Post editorial is that it is unethical to
assassinate terrorist leaders. And notice which: “The Israeli
assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, leader of the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine [a terrorist component of the PLO], is another
instance of a misbegotten Israeli counterterrorist program. The Israeli
government has drawn up a list of Palestinian subjects who can be
assassinated and is methodically carrying out targeted killings as its
intelligence resources provide the opportunity. But it is
apparent that the assassination campaign is neither effective nor moral. . .
The U.S. government should not endorse or tacitly encourage a process that is
illegal under U.S. law and that, if such actions were abetted by a U.S.
official, would be subject to legal sanction by judicial authority and law
enforcement.”[2] In this sanctimonious homily, what does Vincent
Cannistraro mean by “a US official”? Does he mean “a US official” such as,
for example, Vincent Cannistraro, who trained the terrorist Contra force to
assassinate? Surely not, because Vincent Cannistraro did zero jail time for
his own actions, which means that he is not “a US official [who] would be
subject to legal sanction by judicial authority and law enforcement.” In
fact, Vincent Cannistraro is not even subject to the most superficial
journalistic scrutiny (as we saw in Part
4). What Cannistraro makes above is an extreme
anti-Israeli argument. It is also an incorrect one. Killing the leaders of
terrorist organizations is not immoral; what is immoral is killing innocent
civilians. If the Israeli government targets those who kill innocent Israeli
civilians, then it is doing its duty. Cannistraro also argues that killing terrorist
leaders is ineffective and in fact counterproductive because it produces
revenge killings: “The other side believes a ‘blood debt’ has been incurred
that obligates a revenge response. The cycle of violence is perpetuated.”
This argument is also incorrect. The reason Israeli responses are ineffective
is that they are timid and also contradictory (for example, many more
terrorists have been released from Israeli jails as a result of the Oslo
process madness than have been assassinated by the Israeli security
services). There is no such thing as a “revenge response” for the antisemitic
Arab terrorists -- they mean to kill Israeli Jews anyway.[3] They sometimes say they kill in revenge for acts
of Israeli self-defense so that CIA terrorists such as Vincent Cannistraro
can defend the killing of innocent Jews as a “revenge response” in the pages
of the Washington Post, thus educating the public to blame the Arab-Israeli
conflict on the fact that, every once in a while, the Israelis choose to
defend themselves. Now, the absurd extremity of Vincent Cannistraro’s
argument suggests that, though fond of all terrorists, perhaps he is
especially fond of the Arab terrorists who attack Israel. Recently, during a PBS
Frontline interview in which he functioned, as always, as an ‘expert,’
Cannistraro made a statement that is consistent with that hypothesis: “VINCENT
CANNISTRARO: The [1982] Lebanese occupation by Israel caused the Palestinians
to have to leave Lebanon eventually. . . They had been the protectors for the
American diplomatic community in Beirut. . . There was liaison with the PLO,
and the Americans were depending on them for their security.”[4] Take note that the year 1982 is eleven whole years
before the signing of the Oslo agreement. Nobody was pretending in 1982 that
the PLO wanted peace, or that it was anything other than a terrorist
organization, and Israel invaded Lebanon because the PLO was killing Israeli
civilians from its bases there. And yet, at the same time that the PLO was
murdering innocent Israeli civilians, the US was employing PLO terrorists for
security at its Beirut embassy. Vincent Cannistraro, who in 1982 was training
terrorists for Ronald Reagan’s CIA clandestine service, sings in harmony: he
calls the PLO terrorists “protectors,” and what he loudly laments is not the
loss of innocent Israeli civilian life but the fact that in 1982 the IDF
pushed the PLO out of Lebanon, forcing them to exile themselves in faraway
Tunis. This subsequently made it difficult for the PLO to kill Israeli
civilians -- difficult, that is, until the US twisted Israel’s arm and forced
it to accept the PLO as the government in the West Bank and Gaza.[5] In the same interview Cannistraro alleges that the
US took Israel’s side in 1982, but this is false: the US put great pressure
on Israel in order to make sure that the PLO terrorists could leave Lebanon
safely, and then the US provided military cover for the evacuation of the
same PLO terrorists.[6] Cannistraro has been terribly consistent in his
theme of apology for the Arab terrorists. For example, he was quoted by USA Today
defending the argument that the money raised by ‘charities’ associated with
Arab terrorist groups supposedly does not go to make weapons.[7] I now turn to Raymond McGovern.
On September 11, 2001, thousands of innocent
Americans died in attacks in New York and Washington for which the Al-Qaeda
Islamist terrorists took responsibility. Just a few days later, on September
17, Ray McGovern declared in a Christian Science Monitor editorial that the
fault lay with ‘the Jews.’ And why? Because, according to McGovern, it was
Arab opposition to the alleged US support for Israel that had caused the
attack. McGovern’s argument is that US support for Israel is immoral and not
unlike US support for the oppressive and extreme right-wing South Vietnamese
regime in the 60s. In other words, McGovern presents the Arab terrorists who
kill innocent Israeli civilians as the people with justice on their side. “I was an Army
officer in the early ’60s when ‘counterterrorism’ came into vogue. Woefully
uneducated in Southeast Asian history, our leaders had concluded that North
Vietnam was attacking ‘democratic’ South Vietnam through terrorism. Most of
us had no idea that the Vietnamese ‘terrorists’ had thrown off invaders from
China, France, and Japan, and that millions of Vietnamese were again ready to
drive off others. We are no
better educated on the history of the Middle East... We are simply
going to make war on terrorists. And we will be no more successful this
time... Israeli leader Ariel Sharon sent tanks into Palestinian-controlled
territory. On Friday, he ordered his foreign minister to boycott a meeting
with PLO leader Yasser Arafat... [But] Peace
won’t come by military means. Mr. Sharon should know that. The biblical
concept of shalom means nothing other than the experience of justice. No
justice, no peace.”[9] McGovern’s analysis is precisely upside down. But
before I examine that, let me point out again what a fraud McGovern is. He claims total ignorance about Vietnam, and as a
result he says that “our leaders” were able to dupe him and also the rest of
the US citizenry. “Most of us,” he writes, “had no idea that the Vietnamese
‘terrorists’ had thrown off invaders from China, France, and Japan, and that
millions of Vietnamese were again ready to drive off others.” But why does
Raymond MGovern include himself in the ignorant and duped masses? “Ray
McGovern” I remind you, “was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990, [and] during
the ’60s his responsibilities included analysis of Soviet policy toward
Vietnam.”[10] I remind you
also that “Mr. McGovern worked near the very top of his profession, giving
direct advice to Henry Kissinger during the Nixon era.”[11] That would be the same Henry Kissinger and the same
Richard Nixon who carried out the war against Vietnam. So nobody duped Raymond McGovern about Vietnam. He
was one of the intelligence experts on Vietnam who were busy duping the US
citizenry! Now, according to McGovern, the reason there is an
Arab-Israeli conflict is that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are victims
of Israeli injustice, just as the North Vietnamese were victims of US
injustice. This is false. The West Bank and Gaza Arabs are oppressed by
the PLO, which is why they themselves have nicknamed the PLO police the
“death squad.”[12] Before the
PLO was brought to the West Bank and Gaza, the Arabs living there were the
luckiest Arabs in the world. This is easily demonstrated. Israel’s administration of the West Bank and Gaza
followed a war provoked by the Arab states in 1967 with the purpose of
exterminating the Israeli Jewish population. As the tension increased, before
that war, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser promised: “We shall not enter
Palestine with its soil covered in sand. We shall enter it with its soil
saturated in blood.”[13] In this war,
the West Bank and Gaza Arabs (the so-called ‘Palestinians’) were an enemy
population, which they remain; and yet despite that, Israel’s administration
of these territories, which Israel acquired after defending itself
successfully in 1967, was quite benign. This is Newsweek, writing ten years
later in 1977: “Arab living
standards [in the West Bank] have jumped more than 50 per cent in the past
ten years, and employment has nearly doubled, largely because of the $250
million annual trade that has grown up between the West Bank and Israel. The
Israelis have also kept the Jordan River bridges open, allowing 1 million
Arabs a year to cross and to keep their markets in Jordan for such products
as olive oil, soap and farm produce. The Israelis also allow the Arabs to elect
their own officials, even though the winners are often radical activists
[meaning antisemites]. Still, the Arabs say they have never been more
unhappy. . .”[14] So consider again Raymond McGovern’s argument. Using
his false premise that the West Bank and Gaza Arabs have supposedly been
victimized by the Israelis, McGovern defends the PLO’s violence, comparing it
to the North Vietnamese struggle to defend themselves from the widespread
terrorist attacks of the United States, which were meant to prop up the right
wing South Vietnamese regime, which was extremely repressive. If McGovern
convinces you that Israel is like the US in Vietnam, you will learn to think
of the Israelis as the supposed real terrorists. He does not want you to see
the killing of innocent Israeli civilians as objectionable; to McGovern, what
is objectionable is the quite lukewarm Israeli counter-response. This stance
has everything in common with Vincent Cannistraro’s views on the Arab-Israeli
conflict, for Cannistraro defends the Palestinian Arab terrorists and blames
the Israelis, as we saw. Two months later, Raymond McGovern fired away again
on the pages of USA Today: “Where are the
sober voices to explain why so many Palestinians are eager to sacrifice their
lives in causing havoc in Israel? Religious fanaticism? Too facile an answer.
Our problem is that we flunk history. Did we never
learn that land that was home to the Palestinians for 1,000 years was taken
from them when the state of Israel was created; that still more was seized in
the 1967 war; that the Israelis continue to build and populate settlements in
what are now casually referred to as the ‘occupied territories’? Did we not
know that in such territories the Palestinians are subjected to oppression
reminiscent of past pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe? The biblical
concept of shalom is nothing more than the experience of justice. No justice,
no peace. . .”[15] Raymond McGovern certainly flunks psychology, because
he pretends that if people send their own children to die as human bombs,
destroying other people’s children, this cannot possibly have anything to do
with religious fanaticism. That would be “too facile an answer,” he says. Why
“too facile”? Palestinian Authority TV has mullhas drill into the heads of
West Bank and Gaza Arabs, every Friday, the message: “Blessings to whoever
waged Jihad for the sake of Allah!; blessings to whoever raided for the sake
of Allah!; blessings to whoever put a belt of explosives on his body or on
his sons’ and plunged into the midst of the Jews crying: ‘Allah Akbar, praise
to Allah!’”[16] McGovern,
however, thinks that blowing up your child is a natural response to the fact
that others unjustly seize your territory. But people who think they have
legitimate territorial grievances, and who are not Muslims, don't do this. But do the so-called 'Palestinian Arabs' have
legitimate grievances? After laying down the judgment that “we flunk
history,” Raymond McGovern asks rhetorically, “Did we not
know that in such territories [West Bank and Gaza] the Palestinians are
subjected to oppression reminiscent of past pogroms against Jews in Eastern
Europe?” It seems to have escaped Raymond McGovern’s attention
that the government over the West Bank and Gaza Arabs since 1994, thanks to
the Oslo agreement, is not Israel but the PLO. This is who oppresses
these Arabs, which is why, as mentioned above, these Arabs call the PLO’s
Palestinian Authority police the “death squad.”[17] The one who flunks history is McGovern. And how. Is
he really serious when he writes about the “land that was home to the
Palestinians for 1,000 years [and] was taken from them when the state of
Israel was created”? Is this the sort of thing you have to say in order to
become, “Ray McGovern. . .CIA chief for the Middle East”?[18] Who are these 1000-year-old ancestral
‘Palestinians’? The name ‘Palestine’ was invented by the ancient
Romans after an anti-Jewish genocide in order to wipe out any connection
between the Jews and their land.[19] ‘Palestine’ means ‘land of the Philistines.’[20] The Romans were cleansing the Jews from their own land.[20a] One cannot invoke this Roman name change as applying
to Arabs, the way McGovern and many others would like, because Arabs are not
Philistines (the Philistines were not even Semites, having been most closely
related to the Greeks). And the Philistines no longer exist. Moreover, the
name ‘Palestine’ fell into ambiguous use/disuse for a long time.[20b] “The name
Palestine was revived after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and
applied to the territory in this region that was placed under the British
Mandate for Palestine.”[21] Shortly after that, however, in 1922, the British
decided to redefine ‘Palestine’ and lopped off what eventually became the
Kindom of Jordan (then baptized ‘Transjordan’ by the British). Thus, almost
immediately, quite a lot of people who, by British colonialist fiat, had just
become ‘Palestinian,’ became non-Palestinian again, and once again by British
colonialist fiat. Remarkable, isn’t it? Making and unmaking ‘Palestinians’ is
the easiest thing in the world. The point of the name change, for the
British, was to sabotage the Zonist project.[22] This shows that the name ‘Palestine,’
re-introduced by the British after the Ottoman Turks lost the Levant, was
still, in 1922, associated with the concept of a Jewish
homeland. This is why, when the Zionist movement was struggling to create
the state of Israel, one of its leaders, Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson)
would express himself like this: "I am a Hebrew. My allegiance is to the
Hebrew nation. My country is Palestine."[23a]
The same point explains the following: "...the
Arab historian Philip Hitti testified in 1946 before the Anglo-American
Committee of Inquiry that ‘There is no such thing as 'Palestine' in history,
absolutely not.’ Earlier, in 1937, a local Arab leader appearing before the
Peel Commission similarly declared, ‘There is no such thing [as Palestine].
'Palestine' is a term the Zionists invented.’ ...During the Jordanian
occupation of the West Bank and the Egyptian occupation of Gaza, the
[so-called] Palestinian Arabs had not claimed a distinct peoplehood or sued
for self-determination."[23b] So, who would Raymond McGovern’s 1000-year-old
ancestral ‘Palestinians’ be, then? Even according to Arab historians
testifying in the mid-20th c., there
was never any such thing as an Arab Palestinian people. This is not -- mind you -- to deny that many Muslims
lived there. But they were simply Arabs, or else non-Arab Muslims -- they were
not ‘Palestinians.’ And, in fact, many of the so-called ‘Palestinians’
immigrated into this area around the same time that Zionist Jews also began
immigrating, because the Turkish Sultan was resettling Muslims in this area
in a deliberate attempt to defeat Zionism.[23bb] By 1948, when the state of Israel was declared, an
additional great multitude of Muslim immigrants had come there from other
parts of the Arab due to the economic boom that the Jews, many of them also
immigrants, had created.[23d] People such
as Raymond McGovern now pretend that these Muslim immigrants are native
‘Palestinians’; but in that case so are the Jewish immigrants. And the Jews were not all immigrating, mind you. Although
the Romans reduced the Jews dramatically in the horrific first and second
century slaughters, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Jerusalem
and surrounding areas since before the Romans. In 1841, before Zionist
immigration began,
By the mid-19th century, in fact, Jerusalem was
already a majority-Jewish city.[24] Raymond McGovern’s claim that the Israeli Jews
unjustly took anything away from anybody when the State of Israel was created
is also false. The Zionist immigrants had been buying land at market
prices from the Arab title holders, who freely sold their land and enriched
themselves fabulously by selling swamp and desert that had not been looked
after for years, and which was in an atrocious state of decay, disuse, and/or
frank abandonment.[25] Only the
Jews wanted this land, and they made it flourish. Following the Holocaust, the United Nations voted to
create the State of Israel so that the Jewish people could have a state of
their own, where they could be safe from extermination. In other words, the
State of Israel was created by a perfectly legal United Nations vote in 1947,
which vote gave a fraction of what had been British Mandate ‘Palestine’ for
the creation of a Jewish state, and the rest for the creation of an Arab
state. The land specified by the UN for a Jewish state had borders drawn only
around those areas that had a majority Jewish population, plus the Negev
desert. Many Jews were therefore left outside of Israel, in what was supposed
to become an Arab state. The Jews accepted the 1947 UN vote despite the fact
that Israeli territory was cut up into three absurdly non-contiguous
territories.[26] By contrast,
the Arabs in the former British Mandate territory, together with the
surrounding Arab states, illegally declared war. Their publicly stated
objective was to finish Adolf Hitler’s job (interrupted only three years
before) and exterminate the Israeli Jews, as announced by Azzam Pasha,
Secretary General of the Arab League: “This will be
a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like
the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[27] Raymond McGovern would like you to think that the
Arab states which attacked nascent Israel in 1948 were fighting for land for
the supposedly ancestral ‘Palestinian Arabs,’ but that’s impossible. The
enemies of Israel announced the genocidal point of their attack -- they were
not fighting to get land that had in fact not been stolen from the
nonexistent ‘Palestinian Arabs,’ but to exterminate a people who had bought
this land and wanted only to live peacefully on it. In the 1948 war the Israelis pulled off a miracle against
all odds by winning against their multiple Arab enemies, and at the end
Israel in fact controlled just a bit more land than what had been allotted to
her in the UN partition.[29] But this was
territory gained fighting a defensive war against a genocidal enemy, so
McGovern cannot argue that there has been an injustice here; this territory
was theirs to keep. If the Arab states and the Arabs who had lived in British
Mandate ‘Palestine’ did not like that, they had themselves to blame for
having launched an illegal war of aggression with the purpose of
exterminating another people. Raymond McGovern also claims that the Israelis committed an injustice when they acquired more land in 1967, supposedly at the expense of the ‘Palestinians.’ This is a reference to the Israeli acquisition of the disputed territories of the West Bank and Gaza. But contrary to what McGovern writes, these territories also belong rightfully to Israel now, because they were also gained fighting a defensive war against Arab attackers who once again meant to exterminate the Israeli Jews.[13] Plus: the states that previously controlled these territories had been illegally squatting on them. Plus: a 1967 Pentagon study determined that Israel cannot survive unless it holds on to these territories.[30] Plus: Israel offered to give these territories back in exchange for a mere Arab promise of peace, and... the Arabs refused![31]
In any case, McGovern cannot be right, under any
interpretation, that the West Bank and Gaza are ‘Palestinian’ lands, because
the leaders of the supposed ‘Palestinians’ originally made it perfectly clear
that the West Bank and Gaza were not ‘Palestinian’ territories. In
fact the PLO went quite out of its way, in 1964, to take this position.[32]
The PLO first laid a claim to the West Bank and Gaza after 1967, when
Israel acquired these territories and Jews returned to live in the West
Bank and Gaza. Just as there is no such thing as an Palestinian Arab,
there is no such thing as a fixed Palestinian land. There is just land that Jews
live on. This is what the PLO lays claim to because the PLO's purpose is
to exterminate the Israeli Jews, as specified most explicitly in the 1968 PLO
Charter, which calls for “liquidating the Zionist. . .presence” and explains
that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.”[35] Wherever Jews live in the Middle East, then, the PLO
will claim that this is ‘Palestinian’ land that may be ‘liberated’ only in
the process of wiping out the Jews. (Any appearance that the PLO is
conducting peaceful negotiations is merely a front.[36])
If you believe that the US government is pro-Jewish and pro-Israel,
here is an obvious question: Why doesn’t the US government expose McGovern and
Cannistraro, who are contributing to the above anti-Jewish slanders, which
prepare the next antisemitic genocide, and who moreover incessantly attack
the US government? I turn to this next. Continue to part 6: Footnotes and Further Reading [1] BATTLING THE
BOMBERS: FACE TO FACE WITH TERROR, The Observer, August 4, 1996, Sunday, THE
OBSERVER NEWS PAGE; Pg. 19, 2707 words, Peter Beaumont [2] Assassination
Is Wrong -- and Dumb, The Washington Post, August 30, 2001 Thursday,
Final Edition, EDITORIAL; Pg. A29, 820 words, Vincent Cannistraro [3] To
understand the ideology of the terrorists who kill Israeli civilians, read:
Some of this material was originally published here:
[4] To read the
Frontline Interview go to: [5] To read
about the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon, see:
To read about how the US twisted Israel’s arm and
forced it to accept the PLO terrorists into Israeli territory, see:
[6] To read
about how the US protected the PLO terrorists in Lebanon, see:
[7] “‘This is
more political and symbolic than it is real and relevant. . . . No one fund
raises for guns and bullets,’ says former CIA counterterrorism director Vince
Cannistraro. At best, funding for Hamas and other groups in the
USA is in ‘the low millions’ and mostly designated for Islamic charities in
such areas as the semi-autonomous Gaza Strip, Cannistraro says.” SOURCE: Clinton strikes at terrorism / Freezes
assets of Mideast groups, USA TODAY, January 25, 1995, Wednesday, FINAL
EDITION, NEWS; Pg. 8A, 503 words, Juan J. Walte; Lee Michael Katz [9] A defining
moment in history, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), September 17,
2001, Monday, OPINION; Pg. 20, 2484 words [10] How lies
replaced intelligence at the CIA; RAY McGOVERN; Ray McGovern was a CIA
analyst from 1963 to 1990. During the ‘60s his responsibilities included
analysis of Soviet policy toward Vietnam. , The Boston Globe, October 7,
1999, Thursday, ,City Edition, OP-ED; Pg. A27, 822 words, By Ray McGovern [11] NO PRESIDENT
HAS LIED SO BALDLY AND SO OFTEN AND SO DEMONSTRABLY’ Ray McGovern: voicing
the concerns of the CIA, Independent on Sunday (London), November 9, 2003,
Sunday, FOREIGN NEWS; Pg. 19, 469 words [12] To read
about how the PLO oppresses the Palestinian Arabs it governs, read: “The CIA trained the PLO, knowing it would use this
training to oppress Arabs and kill Jews”; From, “Is the US an Ally of
Israel?”; Investigative and Historical Research; by Francisco Gil-White. [13] “. . .Syria
used the Golan Heights, which tower 3,000 feet above the Galilee, to shell
Israeli farms and villages. Syria’s attacks grew more frequent in 1965 and
1966, while Nasser’s rhetoric became increasingly bellicose: ‘We shall not
enter Palestine with its soil covered in sand,’ he said on March 8, 1965. ‘We
shall enter it with its soil saturated in blood.’” SOURCE: Howard Sachar, A History of Israel: From the
Rise of Zionism to Our Time, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 616. To read more about the goals of the Arab enemies of
Israel in the 1967 Six Day War, read: “Although Israel suffered terrorist attacks from its
Arab neighbors during the years 1964-67, when they staged a full-scale
military provocation, the US refused to help”; From, “Is the US an Ally of
Israel?”; Investigative and Historical Research; by Francisco Gil-White. [14] Newsweek,
June 13, 1977, UNITED STATES EDITION, INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 55, 849 words, The
West Bank Today, Milan J. Kubic [15] Land-for-peace
policy doesn't work, USA TODAY, December 4, 2001, Tuesday,, FINAL EDITION,
NEWS;, Pg. 12A, 392 words [16] At the
following address: you will find a collection of televised Friday
sermons, with translation, put together by the Middle East Media Research.
Look for the heading: “Palestinian Authority Sermons 2000-2003.” The
quotation in the text, conveniently, is the first in the collection. [17] To read
about how the PLO oppresses the Palestinian Arabs it governs, read: “The CIA trained the PLO, knowing it would use this
training to oppress Arabs and kill Jews”; From, “Is the US an Ally of
Israel?”; Investigative and Historical Research; by Francisco Gil-White. [18] Comment&Analysis:
There was no failure of intelligence: US spies were ignored, or worse, if
they failed to make the case for war, The Guardian (London) - Final Edition,
February 5, 2004, Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 26, 1185 words, Sidney
Blumenthal [19] “. . .the
climactic war of 66-73 CE [‘First Jewish War’], when Jerusalem was laid waste
and hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed, (Josephus and Tacitus put the
number of Jewish dead in this first war at around 600,000; in the second
‘Jewish war’ sixty years later, the tally of Jewish victims is put at
850,000), traumatized all Jews. . . Whatever the actual totals. . .the vast
number of victims were killed without the mechanized methods that make modern
wars so lethal, which is why analogies between Rome and the worst of
twentieth-century dictators may not be misplaced here. . . .if the [Roman]
legions had had machine guns, bombs, railroads and gas at their disposal, who
is to say any Jew would have survived the second century?” SOURCE: Carroll, J. 2001. Constantine's Sword:
The Church and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (p.90) Historian Robert Wolfe (2003:58-59) explains: “The Romans and their Greek allies killed something
like 2 or 3 million Jews during this period out of a total Jewish population
of approximately 7 million within the boundaries of the so-called ‘Roman
empire.’ The total number of Jewish casualties reported by Josephus for the
‘First Jewish War’ add up to approximately 1,300,000. The Roman historian Dio
Cassius states that 580,000 Jews were killed during the ‘Second Jewish War.’
Historians estimate that many hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by
the Romans and Greeks during the ‘Diaspora Revolt’ of 115-17 CE. There were
close to 1 million Jews in Egypt alone at the start of this period, yet
hardly any remaining by the end of the 2nd century CE. The large Jewish
communities in Syria and Turkey were likewise decimated. . . By the end of
the 2nd century CE, only 750,000 Jews remained in Judah, home of something
like 4 million Jews prior to the Roman onslaught.” SOURCE: Wolfe, R. 2003. The origins of the
messianic ideal. New York: J-Rep. [20] “. . .the
Philistines came from Caphtor (possibly Crete). They are mentioned in
Egyptian records as one of the Sea Peoples that invaded Egypt in about 1190
BC after ravaging Anatolia, Cyprus, and Syria. After being repulsed by the
Egyptians, they occupied the coastal plain of Palestine from Joppa (modern
Tel Aviv–Yafo) southward to the Gaza Strip. The area contained the five
cities (the Pentapolis) of the Philistine confederacy (Gaza, Ashkelon
[Ascalon], Ashdod, Gath, and Ekron) and was known as Philistia, or the Land
of the Philistines. It was from this designation that the whole of the country
was later called Palestine by the Greeks.” "Philistine." Encyclopædia Britannica from
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. [20a] The final genocidal onslaught of the Romans against the
Jews was simply breathtaking.
SOURCE: Johnson, P. 1987. A History of the Jews. New
York: Harper & Row. (pp.142-143) [20b] Historian Nathan Weinstock, writing as an anti-Zionist
in his book Zionism, False Messiah, where he claims that there
supposedly was such a thing as a “specific Palestinian identity,”
nevertheless concedes the following: “When the
first Zionist immigrants arrived in the Holy Land, Palestine did not exist as
a distinct political entity. The territory which corresponded to this name
was composed, roughly speaking, of the western provinces of the region which
was traditionally known as ‘Syria.’ There were no borders to delimit it
precisely. In fact, the definitive borders of the country, which covers about
17,000 square miles, were established by a series of agreements and treaties
concluded between 1906 and 1922. The vagueness of the word ‘Palestine’ in the
19th century is illustrated by the vocabulary of the first Zionists, who used
the expressions ‘Syria’ and ‘Palestine’ interchangeably.” SOURCE: Weinstock, N. 1979. Zionism: False
Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (p.51) [21] “Where did
the name Palestine come from?”; Early History, Palestine Origin; Palestine
Facts. [22] The British,
in the Balfour Declaration, had officially committed themselves to helping
create a Jewish homeland in ‘Palestine,’ which as mentioned above was at
first a larger territory, including all of what was later named ‘Transjordan’
(present-day Jordan). This commitment then received the highest international
legal sanction when the League of Nations passed the Palestine Mandate, which
ordered the British to "secure the establishment of the Jewish national
home" there.
But the British quickly changed their mind. They made Hajj Amin al Husseini the Mufti of
Jerusalem after he showed in 1920 that he could organize Arab terrorist riots
against Jews living in British Mandate territory. In 1921 he organized
another terrorist wave and the British rewarded him by expanding his budget
and bureaucratic authority. This also became the
excuse to blame the victim and bar Jewish immigrants from entering the
territory east of the river Jordan, which they now named ‘Transjordan.’ Jews
henceforth could only immigrate to the redefined ‘Palestine,’ now restricted to
the territory west of the river Jordan, hugging the Mediterranean
coast. The British shrunk the definition of ‘Palestine’ in
order to appear to stay within the letter of the Balfour Declaration
and yet effectively making the Jewish homeland much smaller. What does this
show? The same thing that the British policy towards Hajj Amin already did:
that the British had an anti-Jewish
policy. “The [1922 British]
White Paper stated that the Balfour Declaration could not be amended and that
the Jews were in Palestine by right, [but] it partitioned the area of the
Mandate by excluding the area east of the Jordan River [now ‘Transjordan’]
from Jewish settlement.” SOURCE: “How
did the Arab territory of Transjordan come into being?”; British Mandate
Transjordan; Palestine Facts. To read about Hajj Amin al Husseini, and his lasting
influence on the Palestinian Arab movement, read: “HOW DID THE
‘PALESTINIAN MOVEMENT’ EMERGE? The British sponsored it. Then the German
Nazis, and the US.”; Historical and Investigative Research; 13 June 2006; by
Francisco Gil-White. [23a] Rapoport, L. 1999. Shake heaven and earth: Peter
Bergson and the struggle to rescue the Jews of Europe. Jerusalem and New
York: Gefen. (p.192) [23b] Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome: Delusions of a
people under siege. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (p.288) [23bb] “...1880...is the last year before the great Jewish
immigration began. ...The Turks had begun the systematic colonization of
non-Palestinian Moslems, notably Circassians and Algerians, in 1878. After
1880, the forces of nascent Jewish nationalism, foreign Moslem colonization
sponsored by the Turks, and spontaneouss Arab immigration prompted by the new
prosperity of Palestine changed the demographic face of the land.”
"Millions of Muhagir (émigrés), Muslims fleeing
the new Christian states in the Balkans after defeats in the 19th century,
abandoned the former Ottoman provinces of Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Rumania,
Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Thessalia, Epirus, and Macedonia. The sultan resorted to
the traditional policy of Islamic colonization and, determined to counter the
Zionist movement, settled the refugees in Judea, Galilee, Samaria and
Transjordan. These were the same Muslims who had combated the rights,
emancipation, and independence of Christian dhimmis (semi-slaves of the
Muslims) in Europe. The sultan had sent some of them to Anatolia, Syria,
Lebanon, and Palestine where they were given collective land grants under
favorable conditions according to the principles of Islamic colonization
imposed on natives ever since the beginning of the Arab conquest. Circassian
tribes fleeing the Russian advance in the Caucasus were sent into the Levant
at the same time; most of them were settled around Armenian villages in
Mesopotamia where they soon began to massacre the local people. Other
Circassian colonists settled in historic Palestine -- today’s Israel,
Cisjordan and Jordan -- establishing villages in Judea, and near Jerusalem
such as Abou Gosh, or in Kuneitra on the Golan. Today their descendents
intermarry. In Jordan they make up the king’s guard. Up until the First World
War 95% of the land in Palestine was in the Ottoman sultan’s domain."
[23d] The excerpt below was written by Nathan Weinstock when
he was an anti-Zionist, so his description of how the Arabs in the
British Mandate area benefited from the economic boom created by the Jewish
immigrants is especially noteworthy:
In
his history of Israel, Howard Sachar notes that the British Peel Commission,
which was established to study a partition plan for ‘Palestine’ in 1937
(following the ‘Arab Revolt’ of 1936), produced a proposal that…
[23e] Blumberg, A. 1985. Zion before Zionism 1838-1880.
Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. [24] This article
contains much footnoted documentation concerning the Jewish population of
Jerusalem in the nineteenth century. It was originally published in Midstream
(New York) September-October, 2000: “THE LAND OF ISRAEL AND JERUSALEM IN 1900,” by
Elliott A. Green [25] Jewish
immigrants were buying land from Arabs in Palestine, and the Arabs
were eagerly selling this land. There were some abuses in this, I
agree, but not by the Jews. The large Arab landowners in Palestine directed
all sorts of political attacks against the small landowners, accusing them of
collaboration with Zionism if they dared sell their land, while at the same
time the big owners sold their properties at exorbitant prices to the same
immigrant Jews, making a killing in the land speculation market. That was not
fair to the small Arab landowners who wanted to make money too, and who got
harassed, sometimes with violence, by the hypocritical, large landowning
families -- also know as the ‘effendis.’ Even
historian Nathan Weinstock, writing as an anti-Zionist in Zionism:
False Messiah, recognized this. Let's take a look:
Take
note that the Mufti Hajj Amin Al Husseini, who (one often hears) supposedly
led an anti-colonial struggle, and in so doing founded the Palestinian
movement, does not really behave like an anti-colonialist or someone looking
after the interests of Palestinian Arabs. With
respect to the first point, he was not bothered that land was being sold to
immigrant Jews so long as it was his family that made a handsome
profit. With respect to the second point, he had no problem with his family
coercing land sales from small Arab landowners at bargain prices so that they
could then resell to immigrant Jews at exorbitant prices. Not only that: he
executed some of these small Arab landowners for a sin no greater than also
trying to make a profit, which activity lowered the price of land on the
market for Hajj Amin’s relatives. Hajj Amin and his relatives were gangsters,
and the first effect of a gangster is always to bring misery to his own
population, which Hajj Amin did, repeatedly. It
is true that the Arab share-cropping laborers -- the fellahin -- who had been
working in lands that were sold to immigrant Jews, were often out of a job
(at least temporarily) after the transactions were concluded, and many
suffered dire poverty. But the immigrant Jews did not cause this situation:
it was already true that these laborers were very poor, completely exploited
by, and chronically indebted to, the effendi class because of the feudal
structure of Palestinian Arab society. What
the Jews did was buy land from people who wanted to sell it. The Jews needed
to buy land on which to farm, and they could only buy it from those people
who had title to the land. A long history of feudal exploitation of the Arab
lower classes by the Arab upper classes in Palestine cannot suddenly become
the fault of “the Jews” just because they buy some land. Anti-Zionists
such as Nathan Weinstock do try to make that argument, however. For
example:
Weinstock
is attacking those who defend the morality of immigrant Jewish land
acquisitions. This is who he criticizes for attempts to “skirt round this
direct consequence of the Zionist enterprise.” But why speak like that? Why
not call it a direct consequence of the feudal nature of Palestinian Arab
society? After
all, the effect of Jewish immigration was to increase the demand for
agricultural land in Palestine, which then created land speculation by the
effendi landowners. Other things can do that, too (and did); for example,
immigration from other parts of the Arab world into Palestine, and the
arrival of technologies that made land more productive, plus a native Arab
agrarian capitalist class that meant to develop this land. In such a case the
results for the poor Arab laborers are the same, and yet I would bet my house
that in such cases nobody rushes here to identify the people buying land
as those creating the problem. The problem was obviously already there. Matters
are different if the land-buyers are Jews. But the difference is not in the
structure of the situation, it has to do with antisemitism. In
this regard, note that, commenting on the impoverishment resulting from the
sale of land, Weinstock writes, “Yet it was not long before popular
discontent reached such a pitch that the British authorities had to offer to
put Crown lands at the disposal of the evicted share-croppers.” In
other words, the British Mandate authority had taken possession of part of
the land. And the British withheld this land from use -- a boon to the big
landowners, of course, since scarcity increases price, but bad for the Jewish
immigrants and the land-starved Arab poor. Why doesn’t Weinstock attribute
the misery of the fellahin to this British policy of grabbing and withholding
land, some of which they released to the poor only when faced with
social disturbances? For Weinstock, the British are not the problem; the big
landowners are not the problem; the Arab social system is not the problem.
Only the Jews are the problem. In other words, for Weinstock and other
anti-Zionists, “the Jews” are The Problem. I
should note that even Nathan Weinstock recognizes that the influx of Jewish
immigrants brought about an economic boom in Palestine, to the benefit of the
same Arab workers who had once slaved on the Arab feudal estates.
Rapid
growth of the Arab economy in Palestine resulted in significant part from the
fact that the influx of Jewish immigrants created demand for the products of
Arab industry. Weinstock states that “Jewish agriculture covered only 15 per
cent of the calorie consumption of the urban Jewish population. Thus, for
example, Jewish cereal production would not possibly have been sufficient to
feed the Yishuv” (p.159). Weinstock raises this point in connection with his
observation that the “compartmentalisation of the Palestinian economy, which
became considerably accentuated after the 1929 [terrorist] disturbances
[against Jewish civilians], was nevertheless in no way absolute” (p.159).
That is to say, the immigrant Jews were making up the deficit by buying from
the Palestinian Arabs, which stimulated the economy, and accelerated the
process of urbanization. So
the arrival of the Jews indirectly had the effect of getting some people laid
off, but also had the effect of creating other sorts of jobs - and many of
the latter were no longer part of a feudal economy. On this basis one could
argue that the immigrant Jews brought about a net benefit to the Palestinian
economy. This
argument has been made. For
example, in his History of Israel, Howard Sachar notes that the Peel
Commission, which was established to study a partition plan for Palestine in
1937 (following the ‘Arab Revolt’ of 1936), produced a proposal that…
If
Arabs, “fellahin and landlords alike, were enjoying unprecedented affluence
in Palestine” in 1937, then the net economic impact of Jewish immigration had
been, in the long run, positive. [27] Source:
Howard M Sachar, A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time,
(New York: Knopf, 1979), p. 333 [28] To read
about all this, consult:
[30] “After the
1967 Six-Day War, the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish the territory
gained, even though it knew it was indispensable to Israeli defense”; From,
“Is the US an Ally of Israel?”; Investigative and Historical Research; by
Francisco Gil-White. [31] "It was
not clear how military victory could be turned into peace. Shortly after the
war's end Israel began that quest, but it would take more than a decade and
involve yet another war before yielding any results. Eshkol's secret offer to
trade much of the newly won territory for peace agreements with Egypt,
Jordan, and Syria was rejected by Nasser, who, supported by an emergency
resupply of Soviet arms, led the Arabs at the Khartoum Arab Summit in The
Sudan in August 1967 in a refusal to negotiate directly with Israel." SOURCE: "Labour Rule After Ben-Gurion: Troubled
victory" "Israel." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2003.
Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2 Nov, 2003 [32] The 1964 PLO Covenant or Charter explicitly states that
the West Bank, Gaza, and Himmah -- which Jordan, Egypt, and Syria
respectively had occupied during the War of 1948 and were still sitting on --
were not part of ‘Palestine.’ These lands had all been part of British
Mandate Palestine. And yet it was quite all right, the PLO stated, for
Jordan, Egypt, and Syria to have those three territories, even though the PLO
was defining ‘Palestine’ as British Mandate Palestine. But this made perfect
sense: the PLO was an Arab League creation, and the states of the Arab League
would not have the PLO contesting their control of the parts of ‘Palestine’
that they had occupied. Which ‘Palestine’ did the PLO mean to ‘liberate,’
then? Answer: whatever land the Jews were living on: Israel. This was
conclusively demonstrated in the rewritten 1968 PLO Charter. In this document
the PLO removed the clause concerning the West Bank and Gaza and from this
point onwards did lay claim now to a ‘Palestine’ that includes the
West Bank and Gaza Evidence:
[35] Translation:
The Associated Press, December 15, 1998, Tuesday, AM cycle, International
News, 1070 words, Clinton meets with Netanyahu, Arafat, appeals for progress,
By TERENCE HUNT, AP White House Correspondent, EREZ CROSSING, Gaza Strip.
[Emphasis added] Article 9. .
.says that “armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.” Article 15
says it is “a national duty to repulse the Zionist imperialist invasion from
the great Arab homeland and to purge the Zionist presence from Palestine.” Article 22
declares that “the liberation of Palestine will liquidate the Zionist and
imperialist presence and bring about the stabilization of peace in the Middle
East.” [36] To
understand how the PLO uses fraudulent talk of ‘peace’ to be in a better
position to kill Israelis, read: “Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2005 is being given total control
over Gaza, is the one who invented the strategy of talking 'peace' the better
to slaughter Israelis. The US ruling elite loves Mahmoud Abbas.” [37] Two
quotations from: Sachar, Howard Morley - A history of Israel : from the rise
of Zionism to our time / Howard M. Sachar. 1982, c1979.
To read more about Hajj Amin al Husseini, and his
lasting influence on the Palestinian Arab movement, visit:
[38] To see just
how hard the US has protected the PLO and pushed for a PLO state, and how it
twisted Israel’s arm so that she would accept one, see the following sections
of: “Is the US an Ally of Israel?”; Investigative and Historical Research; by
Francisco Gil-White. “In 1982, The US military rushed into Lebanon to
protect the PLO from the Israelis.” “The 'First Intifada' was a US-PLO strategy used to
represent the Arabs in West Bank and Gaza as supposedly oppressed
'underdogs.'” “In 1989, with Dick Cheney, the US began supporting
a PLO state in the open as the 'only solution' to the Arab-Israeli conflict.” “In 1991, Bush Sr.'s administration forced Israel to
participate in the Oslo process, which brought the PLO into the West Bank and
Gaza.” “Perhaps as early as 1994, The CIA trained the PLO,
knowing it would use this training to oppress Arabs and kill Jews. “Mahmoud Abbas, who in 2005 is being given total
control over Gaza, is the one who invented the strategy of talking 'peace'
the better to slaughter Israelis. The US ruling elite loves Mahmoud
Abbas.” |
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