It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.

It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in western philosophy.

This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superceded.

If there is a current equivalent we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.

Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bernard Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst now left wing academics ware most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.

A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.

The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major western states.

They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930’s.

The great irony of course is that it is the western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the west was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.

Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a western backed government been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably zionist Anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.

The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively immigrants viewed as on the West’s sides side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.

Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.

Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline
a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.

Incredibly, for a year the entire western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.

We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by zionist interests – itself a consequence in the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support for the western establishment.

It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the western “democracies”.

It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.

The zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.

I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.

The UK, US and other first world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the western world in my youth involved much dull compromise: but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.

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We were searching for a site in the northern Bekaa valley recently bombed by Israel. Hadi knew near which village it was located but, as we drove between large expanses of fertile, well-cultivated fields, it was plain his information was vague.

We pulled up at a garage to ask the way. Lebanon has not gone the way of Western economies in making consumers perform the very service for which they are paying, and in Lebanese service stations they still have attendants. A scruffily dressed old man sat on the front step of a dilapidated and very basic kiosk constructed of concrete blocks. He came over to the driver’s window.

First Hadi ordered fuel, and the old man filled the car, washed the windscreen and took payment. His hair was white and his beard short, but not from the obsessively neat trimming that is universal in Beirut. When he returned with change, Hadi asked him if he knew where to find the bomb site.

The old man replied with questions. I did not understand the Arabic, but from the body language there was a marked shift in the interaction between the two, from the man serving Hadi to the man interrogating Hadi. He lost his shuffle, notably straightened his back and stood taller.

They were talking through the driver’s window, and with a very definite movement the man moved forward and rested his forearm on the sill, intruding his head into the vehicle assertively. He looked at me with searching eyes, and looked at Niels sitting in the back seat with his camera equipment. His questioning of Hadi became terse.

I looked into his eyes. He had the distinct, piercing gaze that I used to note in the special forces officers I occasionally came across in my Foreign Office career. He then walked away from the car, took out his phone and made a call.

After a while he handed the phone to Hadi, who looked both serious and worried. Hadi listened, handed the phone back to the attendant, said goodbye and thank you, and reversed out of the garage. Hadi told us we were not permitted to go to the bomb site.

We had just encountered Hezbollah. The important thing to understand in this encounter is that it is not that the man was an undercover Hezbollah operative posing as a garage attendant. He was a garage attendant who was a Hezbollah operative.

Hezbollah is not an organisation comparable to the IRA, in which a relatively small number of members operated within the context of a community in which they enjoyed very large sympathy. Hezbollah operates in a community in which almost everybody is an activist and pretty well every adult is prepared to pick up a gun or an RPG and knows how to use it.

This is a key to understanding how Hezbollah became the only military force that has ever been able to defeat the IDF in pitched ground warfare. In this respect, Hezbollah’s crucial advantage compared to Hamas is that it has had practical access to weapons deliveries to build its arsenal, whereas Hamas has been greatly constricted by Israel’s control of goods entering Gaza.

Ending the weapons supply to Hezbollah has been a key US/Israeli strategic objective this last year, and they have in large part achieved it. I shall return to that.

On a personal level, this encounter with the garage attendant was fairly typical of my interactions with Hezbollah in my four months in Lebanon. They had detained me in a rather frightening manner on first encounter, and in general treated me with a suspicion which is understandable given my British diplomatic background.

I saw literally thousands of buildings in Lebanon that Israel had destroyed. The most haunting part of the entire experience was the frequent event of finding the clothing and toys of small children among the rubble: I still have bad dreams about it.

However this was the second of the two occasions when we were able to identify that Israel had struck an actual Hezbollah military installation, rather than a civilian building. Both times Hezbollah prevented me from going to see. In terms of maintaining the security of the military site, this strikes me as shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Having been denied access to that particular bomb site, we drove on into the village and met with some locals Hadi knew. In this small village there had been over 70 Israeli bombings, 8 of them since the ceasefire.

They took me to one large house which had been completely destroyed, a pile of rubble spread over a large area. Twelve members of the same family had been killed in this house, seven of them children. The head of the family had left in late afternoon to go to the butcher’s to buy dinner, when his home and family was destroyed behind him.

The explosion was so enormous that the body of one of the children was found in the neighbouring orchard of olive trees, clean across the road, about seventy yards away. Many of the olive trees had been shredded and debris from the house was strewn across the field and beyond.

The next house was not greatly damaged, but there a father and his two daughters were killed by the shock wave as they sat on their terrace drinking coffee.

There are so many important points to make about Hezbollah, but let me start with these three.

The first is that support for Hezbollah among their own Shia communities in Lebanon is extremely strong. They are far more than a military organisation. They are Lebanon’s largest legitimate political party.

At the 2022 election Hezbollah received 19.9% of the vote, and their close ally the Amal Movement received another 10.5%. The party with the second highest vote behind Hezbollah, the neo-fascist Lebanese Forces, received 11.6% of the vote.

[The Lebanese Forces political party should not be confused with the Lebanese Armed Forces, with which it has no connection. The Lebanese Armed Forces remain under effective US control and fired not a shot against the Israeli invasion and occupation. But like so much in Lebanon, the situation should not be simplified and the majority of the rank and file of the LAF are Shia Muslims sympathetic to Hezbollah, and a large majority of the rank and file of any denomination would be happy to fight the Israelis were they ever allowed to do so.]

Under Lebanon’s extraordinary constitution, Lebanese Forces with 11.6% received 19 seats in parliament while Hezbollah with 19.9% received 15 seats. Of which again more later.

But when it comes to political legitimacy, it is worth noting that the combined Hezbollah/Amal vote percentage is equal to the Labour Party percentage at the last General Election in the UK. There is no argument that Hezbollah are not a legitimate democratic political force.

The second point is that it is absolutely wrong to see Lebanon in purely sectarian terms. Hezbollah has supporters and allies across all religions in Lebanon and, in a country where politics is officially and constitutionally organised on religious lines (a “confessional” constitution), there are minor parties of all religions aligned with Hezbollah, of which several had ministers until appointment of the new Cabinet last month (of which again, more later).

Perhaps a quarter of those at the funeral for Nasrallah were not Shia Muslims.

The third point is that Hezbollah is much more than a political party with a military wing. In a country in which central government has all but collapsed (Lebanon has no income tax), Hezbollah provides hospitals, schools, banking, pensions and welfare benefits.

When Niels and I witnessed refugee returns to evacuated areas following the “ceasefire”, a very substantial percentage of the population were waving Hezbollah flags or Lebanese flags, with some waving both. Hezbollah is an integral part of Lebanese society, entirely born within the country out of the resistance to Israel’s 1982 occupation, and is in no sense alien or anti-Lebanese.

The elephant in the room is that in the UK and other Western states, this highly complex social and political movement is designated as a terrorist organisation in its entirety. Ironically, the justification for this given in Westminster in 2019 was that Hezbollah was destabilising the Middle East and prolonging the conflict in Syria – where the very Western powers that proscribed Hezbollah have just assisted another proscribed terrorist group into power.

The truth is that terrorist proscription by the NATO powers of organisations in the Middle East is simply a tool for taking whatever decisions are expedient at that moment to promote the interests of apartheid Israel. The “terrorist acts” of Hezbollah that led to proscription of the entire organisation in 2019 consisted of fighting ISIS, Al Qaeda and Al Nusra in Syria.

We all suffer from the temptation of assuming that others share our prejudices. I assume that like me, many in the West find it difficult to empathise with Hezbollah because of its Islamic philosophy and – I know this is petty – appearance.

Hassan Nasrallah was the most important and steadfast leader of resistance to the mass murderous Zionist project of the last forty years. He was also, by all accounts, a hugely charismatic figure to Arabic speakers. But his very appearance made it easy for him to be represented to Western audiences as an alienating, even evil, character, due to the state-promoted Islamophobia in the Western world which has been universally projected in the media this last quarter century.

But here honesty is required. I myself do not like to see political leaders with a religious function and am simply against theocratic rule. I am entirely in favour of freedom of religion, but utterly opposed to religion ruling any state.

There is an element of smoke and mirrors here. In the glorious mosaic of Lebanon, Hezbollah exist jumbled with those of other sects and religions, and in practice rub along very well.

Nasrallah spoke like all committed Islamists of his desire to seeing a united Muslim rule over Muslim lands, with the state under firmly religious leadership and Sharia law. But in practice Hezbollah are highly tolerant.

In those large areas of Lebanon where they both have physical military control and dominate the elected local authority, Hezbollah do not ban the sale of alcohol by the Christian minority or enforce hair covering, even on Muslims.

This is an area where my prejudices were disabused. I did not expect to find this.

All this caused me some difficulty in Lebanon. I was frequently asked whether I supported Hezbollah. As I was spending much of my time in those areas attacked by Israel – which largely are the Hezbollah areas – in general the question came from Hezbollah supporters.

I would always reply that I supported absolutely the right of occupied people to conduct armed resistance, and the duty to do everything possible to prevent genocide. Both are established principles of international law. But I did not support Hezbollah per se, and would not vote for it were I Lebanese, because it is an openly Islamist organisation and I am opposed to theocratic rule and religious legal codes.

Being in Lebanon did however allow me to overcome some of the gulf of my cultural understanding. The practice of calling those killed by Israel “martyrs” and frequently referring to them as such in conversation, is alien to a Western ear where the word has largely outdated religious connotations.

When you live amongst a community where everybody has friends or relatives who have been killed in the decades-long aggression of Israel, the revering of the fallen as martyrs, and their omnipresence in everyday thought, starts to make much more sense.

Similarly to Western eyes the widespread display of large images of the “martyrs” is peculiar. These are along every roadside and atop every ruin. There are always posters at the site where the person was killed, and frequently dozens of other posters of that individual at sites of importance to them.

I overcame my incomprehension of this practice by thinking of it in reference to my own culture, that these were posters of people put up to mark where they fought and died to defend their wee bit hill and glen. In those terms it made sense to me.

I am extremely conscious that religious faith has played a very positive role in both Palestine and South Lebanon in enabling people to endure the unendurable and to maintain Resistance against impossible odds. But it is not possible to ignore the fact that there remain substantial differences between my world view and an Islamist world view.

This has been brought into urgent focus by the attitude of many Sunni Muslims to the overthrow of Assad in Syria. In my world view, this has been a disaster for the Palestinians. It has seriously and perhaps permanently damaged the flow of arms and other resources to Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ most important ally. And it has enabled the Greater Israel project to expand substantially into Syria.

Try now to imagine that you are a Sunni Muslim scholar who believes that only by becoming Sunni Muslim can people obey God. You believe that the benefit to mankind of bringing Sunni Muslim rule to most of Syria outweighs the loss of part of Syria to Israel. You believe that Palestinian martyrs killed by Israel are going immediately to Heaven anyway, so in spiritual terms there is no real loss to the “martyrs”.

That really is the position of many of the leaders of the Saudi- and Gulf-sponsored Muslim religious community. Just like there are a great many shades of Christian, there are a great many shades of Islam and there are many Muslims, including Sunni Muslims, who would not share that viewpoint. But to a religious Islamist it makes perfect sense.

I cannot find it again because it was deep in replies on a thread, but I had a very interesting exchange with a Muslim intellectual on Twitter on precisely this topic. He accused me of “orientalism” for denigrating an Eastern spiritual viewpoint in favour of a Western secularist narrative, in seeing the installation of HTS as a reverse for Palestine. He pointed out that Hamas, a fellow Sunni Islamist movement, had welcomed the triumph of HTS.

The exchange was welcome for its honesty and intellectual acuity. I said I did not believe Edward Said would have welcomed the accompanying expansion of Israel into Syria or cutting off of supplies to Hezbollah. He called in a nephew of Said to bolster his view that my viewpoint is orientalist.

I have thought about this deeply; I do not think my viewpoint can fairly be described as orientalist. The truth is that all mainstream Western thought would have entirely concurred with the view that the expansion of rule by a particular religious sect was more important than associated temporal reverses that did not affect the faith of the people: but Western thought was exactly that 500 years ago.

I do not see my view as orientalist. I see it as anti-medievalist.

The fall of the Assad regime was deeply desired by western neoliberals and Zionists in order to replace it with a western democratic model, and they are desperately pretending that is what they have got in al-Jolani. As atrocities against Shia, Alaouites and Christians in Syria mount, the one thing that cannot be disputed is that al-Jolani is steadfastly Zionist, as he allows Israel daily to occupy more of Syria and destroy more of its infrastructure, without a single shot fired in response.

There is no doubt that the position of the Resistance to an expansionist apartheid Israeli colonial project has worsened considerably since my arrival in Lebanon in October. While Israel could not progress a ground offensive, the almost total absence of any air defences for Lebanon meant it could murder and destroy with impunity from the air.

Israel embarked on a campaign of devastation of purely civilian areas by aerial bombardment. Of that I am an eye witness. I can say from personal inspection that the claims that the tens of thousands of homes destroyed had any military use are a massive lie.

With no defence against a relentless bombing campaign, and with most of their leadership eliminated, Hezbollah were obliged to accede to a suicidally unbalanced “ceasefire agreement”. It is plain on the actual face of the agreement that only one side will cease fire.

All Lebanese groups are to cease fire without qualification whereas Israel is only to cease “offensive” operations. Israel of course claims all its attacks as defensive. This is absolute nonsense, but despite over 500 violations of the ceasefire agreement, killing hundreds of people, Israel has not been held accountable because Hezbollah acceded to a ceasefire guaranteed by a “Mechanism” which is chaired by a United States General.

I think my discussion on this point with the UN Spokesman in Lebanon was extremely important, especially where he explicitly states that the Ceasefire Agreement was drafted by the USA. This link takes you to the key point in the interview.

The members of the “Mechanism” overseeing the ceasefire are the United States, France, Israel (sic), and the Lebanese government of General Aoun, a total US puppet.

Furthermore while the Ceasefire Agreement provides for a zone south of the Litani river from which Hezbollah must remove its weapons, it also calls for Hezbollah disarmament throughout the whole of Lebanon, which the Israelis and Americans have used to justify numerous continuing Israeli strikes in the Bekaa Valley, the Syrian border and even Beirut.

Hezbollah are not a formal party to the Agreement but it was sanctioned by them before signature. Personally I find it difficult to imagine that Nasrallah would ever have accepted such a position.

At the same time, Hezbollah’s domestic political position has been also greatly weakened. They were obliged to accept effectively the US imposition of General Aoun as President, which they had been resisting for over two years. They also then found themselves accepting his nomination of the openly anti-Hezbollah Nawaf Salam as Prime Minister.

I referred earlier to Lebanon’s “confessional” constitutional arrangements, and said I would give more detail. The President must be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni and the Speaker of Parliament a Shiite.

But it does not stop there. The governing agreement specifies the division of ministerial positions too. Not only between Sunni, Shia and Christian, but to include several other groupings, of which the best known is Druze and there are others, particularly various specific sects of Christianity.

Hezbollah has operated through the Amal movement in providing the Shiite ministers, but it is a key fact that it has always had important allies among Christian anti-Israeli occupation factions who have filled important ministerial posts.

The loss of Hezbollah power within Lebanon is to be found within the detail of all these ministries. In claiming to appoint a “technocratic”, apolitical administration, Aoun and Salam have in fact excluded most of Hezbollah’s support.

It is in practice almost impossible to find a Shiite in Lebanon who is not pro-Hezbollah, but Aoun and Salam have certainly done their best. More pertinently, they have almost totally excluded Hezbollah and anti-Zionist sympathisers from the ministerial representation of Sunni and the assorted minority and smaller Christian groups, while simultaneously boosting the de facto influence of the fascist Lebanese Forces sympathisers.

Hezbollah has not been this politically weak in the Lebanese institutions for 20 years, which is why the show of mass popular support at Nasrallah’s funeral was so important to them. However, given Lebanon’s electoral system with its deliberate Christian bias, piling up popular support is of little use to Hezbollah electorally. There are Christian MPs in parliament elected with under 500 votes, while Hezbollah could put on another 100,000 votes without significantly increasing their representation.

Crucially the “Ministerial statement” of the aims of the new government excluded resistance to Israel as an objective – a key change – and specified the state’s monopoly on carrying arms, a reference to the full disarmament of Hezbollah.

Finally, of course, Hezbollah’s archenemies, HTS, are now in power in Damascus. Hezbollah fought off repeated Al Qaeda/Al Nusra/ISIS attempts to invade Lebanon and also intervened against these forces within Syria. Al-Jolani coming to power represents a major disruption to Hezbollah’s supply lines from Iran.

The US and Israel are attempting to turn up this pressure by frequent aerial attacks on border crossings from Syria and on Hezbollah individuals within Lebanon. Recently they took the additional measure of banning pilgrimage flights to and from Iran, which greatly angered the Shia community and was aimed at cutting off a route for physical supplies of cash.

What is uncertain is what secret accommodations General Aoun may have reached with Hezbollah, over whether their physical disarmament throughout Lebanon under SCR 1701 and the Ceasefire Agreement is a genuine process or a show. Politically, Aoun and Salam have strongly planted their banner for real disarmament of Hezbollah.

What appears beyond dispute is that the Israelis receive a continued flow of intelligence from Lebanese sources on Hezbollah personnel movements and sites, and the US-sanctioned intense Israeli bombing campaign shows no sign of abating.

We can add to this sad fact that Israel was able to use the Ceasefire Agreement to occupy parts of Southern Lebanon which Hezbollah had successfully defended during the war, and that Israel has destroyed by demolition thousands of homes and other civilian buildings under cover of the ceasefire to add to those destroyed during the war.

Indeed Israel demolishes more buildings in Southern Lebanon every day still, and has now destroyed over 90,000 buildings in Lebanon in total. As I predicted, Israel is building 5 permanent military outposts in Southern Lebanon and has made plain it has no intention of leaving.

The US puppet government in Beirut, like the US puppet government in Damascus, plainly has no intention of any realistic action against de facto Israeli annexation of its land. While Hezbollah has signalled a reversion to past tactics of guerilla warfare, I have serious doubts about both its current capacity, both political and military.

Of the enduring heroism of the people of South Lebanon I have no doubt, and I also have no doubt that as Israel is maintaining an illegal occupation, their legal right of armed resistance in unimpeachable.

It is however foolish not to acknowledge that with Israel expanding into Lebanon and Syria, with US puppet regimes in Syria and Damascus, with genocide about to restart in Gaza and spreading into the West Bank, and with an apparently crazed level of open Zionist support from Trump that is in fact only more honest than the pro-Genocide positions of the large majority of Western governments, the current position looks bleak indeed.

The only grounds for hope is that I cannot imagine that the people of the region are going to tolerate Israeli collaborationist regimes in Damascus, Beirut and Ramallah much longer. Indeed with slight variations you might say the same of the entire Arab world.

I hope you will forgive this being a very personal post as I try to make sense of my experiences and assimilate much new knowledge into my view of the world.

I went to Lebanon knowing literally nobody in the country, and with an introduction to just one person who helped us through immigration, but whose assistance thereafter did not work out. I did so accompanied by Niels as cinematographer, despite my never really having worked in video before, and my not being very accomplished at it. On top of which we had no financial resources except for our crowdfunding, which was not going well.

I now realise just how deeply ignorant I was about Lebanon before arriving.

The truth is, I wanted to go to Gaza but could find no way to get in. I had then had applied to Israel for the required permission from COGAT to enter the West Bank, but had been refused. So Lebanon was the one place under Israeli aggression where I could actually hope to get in to document and report on Israeli atrocities.

This venture was also born out of a rather desperate feeling that I must try to do something. I had been involved in the genesis of the ICJ case and in international campaigning for Palestine, but felt so helpless watching murdered children in Gaza every day on social media, that I felt compelled to do more.

With war against the Israeli invaders raging in Lebanon, I admit I also had a compulsion to share at least some of the danger of those putting their lives at stake. In truth, I felt something of a fraud to be writing about it from home if I was not prepared to experience it.

Well, at times Lebanon really was dangerous for us, but I am extremely proud of what Niels and I achieved. The six mini-documentaries reached millions of people and I think genuinely informed the Western public. I think the interview with the UN was extremely revealing and important and wish I had been able to get a rather wider audience for it. On top of which we produced numerous shorter video pieces, written articles and interviews with alternative media outlets across the globe, as well as doing a lot of Arab mainstream media.

In the end we had to leave because it proved simply not possible to meet the substantial costs of the venture by individual subscriptions and donations, and I ran out of money. It was a bold experiment in being able to do the kind of real, on-the-ground journalism that legacy media has abandoned, but to continue would require more fundraising ability or organisational ability than I possess.

There is no doubt that we suffered – and still suffer – massive social media suppression, and this limitation of reach is what crippled fundraising efforts. Essentially we were asking the same people for donations again and again, which is both impractical and, I admit, I found personally difficult and undignified.

So I shall continue reporting from my base in Scotland, travelling the world as occasion demands. My knowledge has been hugely expanded by my time in Beirut. I will now largely revert to written rather than video format. The struggle for justice goes on, and my commitment to it remains.

———————————

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Israel isn't eradicating 'the terrorists'. It's turning Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, where doctors no longer exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion a liability

[First published by Middle East Eye]

If there was an image from 2024 that captured the year’s news, it was this one: Dr Hussam Abu Safiya, in a white lab coat, picking his way through the wreckage of the Kamal Adwan hospital he ran – the last surviving major medical facility in northern Gaza – towards two Israeli tanks, their gun barrels aimed at him.

The past year has been dominated by the death and destruction Israel has wrought throughout the tiny enclave.

It has been marked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians – the deaths we know about – and the maiming of at least 100,000 more; the starvation of the entire population; the levelling of the urban and agricultural landscape; and the systematic erasure of Gaza’s hospitals and health sector, including the killing, mass arrest and torture of Palestinian medics.

2024 was dominated, too, by a growing consensus from international legal and human rights authorities that all this amounts to genocide.

Here was an image, from the very final days of the year, that said it all. It showed a lone doctor – one who had risked his life to keep his hospital operational as it was besieged by Israeli forces, battered by Israeli shells and drones, and had its staff picked off by Israeli snipers – bravely heading towards his, and his people’s, exterminators.

He had paid a personal price, just as much as his patients and staff. In October, his 15-year-old son, Ibrahim, was executed during an Israeli raid on the hospital. A month later, he himself was wounded by shrapnel from an Israeli strike on the building.

By 27 December, the hospital could no longer withstand Israel’s savage onslaught. When a loudspeaker demanded that Abu Safiya come towards the tanks, he set off grimly across the rubble.

It was the moment that the Kamal Adwan hospital’s fight to protect life was brought to a sudden end; when the genocidal Israeli war machine notched an inevitable victory against the last outpost of humanity in northern Gaza.

Held in torture camp

The image was also the last known one of Abu Safiya, taken minutes before his so-called “arrest” – his abduction – by Israeli soldiers, and his disappearance into Israel’s system of torture camps.

After days of claiming it had no knowledge of his whereabouts, the Israeli military finally confirmed it was holding him incommunicado. The admission appears to have come only because of a petition to the Israeli courts from a local medical rights group.

According to a growing number of reports, Abu Safiya is now in the most notorious of Israel’s torture facilities, Sde Teiman, where soldiers were caught on video last year raping a Palestinian inmate with a baton until his insides ruptured.

The hope is that Abu Safiya will not suffer the fate of his colleague, Dr Adnan al-Bursh, the former head of orthopaedics at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital. After four months of abuse at Ofer prison, Bursh was dumped by guards in its yard, naked from the waist down, bleeding and unable to stand. He died a short time later.

Reports by human rights agencies and the United Nations – as well as testimonies from whistleblowing camp guards – tell of the systematic beating, starvation, sexual abuse and rape of Palestinian prisoners.

Israel has accused Abu Safiya, Gaza’s best-known paediatrician, of being a Hamas “terrorist”. It has abducted a further 240 people from Kamal Adwan Hospital who it claims are “terror suspects” – presumably chiefly among them patients and medical staff – and they are being held in similarly horrifying conditions.

Psychotic logic

According to Israel’s psychotic logic, anyone who works for Gaza’s Hamas government – meaning anyone like Abu Safiya employed in one of the enclave’s major institutions, such as a hospital – counts as a terrorist.

By extension, any hospital – because it falls under the Hamas government’s authority – can be treated as a “Hamas terrorist stronghold”, as Israel has termed Kamal Adwan. Ergo, all medical facilities should be destroyed, all doctors “arrested” and tortured, and all patients forcibly “evacuated”.

In Kamal Adwan’s case, the wounded, the seriously ill and those about to give birth were allowed 15 minutes to unhook their drips, get out of their sickbeds and make their way into the wrecked courtyard. Then the Israeli army set the hospital on fire.

An “evacuation” of this kind means only one thing: patients being left to die of their wounds, illnesses or malnourishment – and increasingly from the cold, too.

A growing number of babies have been dying of hypothermia as their families huddle through winter nights under canvas, without blankets or proper clothing, in the tent encampments that have become home to most of Gaza’s population.

The photograph of Abu Safiya’s surrender made it only too clear who is David and who Goliath; who is the humanitarian and who the terrorist.

Most of all, it demonstrated how the West’s political and media classes have spent the past 15 months promoting a grand lie about Gaza. They have not been seeking to end the bloodshed, but to cover it up – to excuse it.

This might explain why the most defining image of 2024 was barely visible in establishment media outlets, let alone on their front pages, as Abu Safiya was abducted by Israel and his hospital destroyed.

Most foreign editors and picture editors – dependent on salaries from their billionaire owners – appeared to prefer to pass on the news photograph of the year. Social media, however, did not. Ordinary users spread it far and wide. They understood what it showed and what it meant.

'Consciousness warfare'

Late last month, Israel announced that this coming year, it would be spending an extra $150m on what it has termed “consciousness warfare”.

That is, Israel is upping its budget 20-fold to improve its media disinformation campaigns – to whitewash its image as the slaughter in Gaza continues.

Israel has killed many of Gaza’s journalists and barred foreign correspondents from its undeclared “kill zones”. But in an era of live-streaming on phones, concealing a genocide is proving far harder than Israel imagined. It is not enough, it seems, to have the western establishment peddling your disinformation.

Israel is particularly concerned about young people – such as students on campuses – who do not consume news filtered through the BBC or CNN, and thus have a much clearer grasp of what is happening. Their senses and sensibilities have not been dulled by years of western corporate propaganda.

They are much less likely, for example, to fall for the Israeli fake news – recycled and given credence by western media – that has justified over the past 15 months the complete destruction of Gaza’s hospitals, or the kind of disinformation that entertains the idea that an esteemed physician like Abu Safiya is secretly a terrorist.

The genesis of Israel’s campaign to erase Gaza’s health sector started within days of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack. Less than two weeks later, Israel fired a powerful missile at the courtyard of Gaza City’s al-Ahli hospital; dozens of Palestinian families who had fled there, seeking protection from Israel’s military rampage, were caught in the explosion.

But the media laundered this opening shot in the war on Gaza’s hospitals by credulously echoing Israel’s preposterous assertion that a misfired Palestinian rocket, rather than an Israeli missile, had done the damage.

The attack on al-Ahli set out Israel’s blueprint for genocide, one it has followed closely over the past 15 months. It made clear to Palestinians that nowhere would be safe from Israel’s onslaught, not even established sites of sanctuary such as hospitals, mosques and churches. There would be no place to escape its wrath.

And it made clear to western leaders and media that Israel was ready to breach every known precept of international humanitarian law. There was no atrocity, no war crime it would not commit, including destroying Gaza’s medical system. Israel’s patrons were expected to give their full backing to the war, however far Israel went.

And that is exactly what they did.

Red herrings

Looking back, the brief furore over whether Israel was responsible for the attack on al-Ahli seems nightmarishly quaint now. With the lack of any pushback, Israel intensified its “consciousness warfare”, creating a bubble of fake news to connect Gaza’s hospitals to Hamas terrorism.

Within weeks, Israel was claiming to have discovered a Hamas terrorist base under Gaza’s al-Rantisi children’s hospital, with weapons stashes and a guard duty rota in Arabic for the Israeli hostages – except the rota was quickly shown to be nothing more than an innocuous calendar.

Israel’s biggest target was al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s most important medical facility. Israel released a CGI-generated video showing it sitting atop an underground “Hamas command and control centre”. The claims were once again credulously aired by western media, though the Hamas bunker was never found.

These lies served their purpose, nonetheless. Even as Israel wrecked Gaza’s hospitals and denied entry to medical aid, leaving Gaza without any way to treat the men, women and children maimed by Israel’s relentless bombing, the media turned its focus away from these all-too-obvious crimes against humanity.

Instead, as Israel hoped, journalists expended their energies chasing after red herrings, trying to verify each individual lie.

The media’s working premise appeared to be that, should the faintest hint of complicity between Hamas and a single hospital, or doctor, in Gaza be confirmed, Israel’s campaign to erase all medical facilities in the enclave and deny healthcare to 2.3 million people caught in its killing fields would be justified.

Mass graves

Notably, none of the stream of senior western doctors who volunteered in Gaza reported upon their return home having seen any sign of the armed “Hamas terrorists” who were supposedly crawling all over the hospitals in which they had worked.

These western doctors were rarely interviewed by the media as a counterpoint to Israel’s endless disinformation, which created the rationalisation for Israel to lay waste to Gaza’s hospitals and medical centres with utter abandon.

Soldiers invaded the hospitals one after another, destroying the wards, operating rooms and intensive care units.

Each forcible “evacuation” created its own trail of misery. Premature babies were left to starve or freeze to death inside their incubators. The critically ill were forced from their beds. Ambulances that tried to collect them were blown up. And each time, Gaza’s medical staff were rounded up, stripped of their clothing and disappeared.

Western journalists showed little interest, too, in the discovery of unidentified corpses in makeshift mass graves on hospital grounds after Israeli soldiers had finished their assaults – bodies that had been decapitated or mutilated, or showed indications of having been buried alive.

For these reasons and more, the UN Human Rights Office concluded last week that Gaza’s hospitals, “the one sanctuary where Palestinians should have felt safe, in fact, became a death trap”.

Similarly, a World Health Organisation official, Rik Pepperkorn, observed: "The health sector is being systematically dismantled." The WHO is seeking urgent, life-saving treatment abroad for more than 12,000 people, he added. "At the current rate, it would take five to 10 years to evacuate all these critically ill patients."

In another statement last week, two UN experts warned that Abu Safiya’s arbitrary detention was “part of a pattern by Israel to continuously bombard, destroy and fully annihilate the realization of the right to health in Gaza”.

They noted that, in addition to the mass round-ups, at least 1,057 Palestinian health and medical professionals had been killed so far.

Trajectory to genocide

The truth is that Israel’s new, better-funded disinformation campaign will prove no more effective than its existing ones.

Avi Cohen-Scali, the head of Israel’s ministry for combating antisemitism, said a decade of such programmes against what Israel calls its “delegitimisation” – that is, the exposure of its apartheid and now genocidal character – had yielded “nearly zero results”.

He told Israeli media: “This activity has failed by every conceivable parameter.”

The reality of a genocide will be impossible to airbrush away. Over the coming months, more Israeli atrocities – new and historic – will come to light. More legal and human rights organisations and scholars will conclude that Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will issue more arrest warrants for war crimes, following those against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

At the weekend, an Israeli soldier on holiday in Brazil was forced to flee the country after he was warned he was under investigation.

But there is more. Leading rights organisations and scholars will have to reformulate their historical understanding of both Israel and its founding ideology of Zionism. They will need to acknowledge that this genocide did not come out of nowhere.

The trajectory began when Zionism was established as a settler-colonial movement more than a century ago. It continued when Israel was created through a mass ethnic cleansing operation against the native Palestinian population in 1948. And it gathered speed in 1967 as Israel formalised its apartheid system, engineering separate rights for Jews and Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettoes.

Unchecked, Israel’s ultimate destination was always towards genocide. It is an ideological compulsion embedded in Israel’s notions of ethnic supremacy and chosen-ness.

Mad Max vision

Even after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant in November, Israeli leaders continued their explicit incitement to genocide.

Last week, eight legislators from the Israeli parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee wrote to the new defence minister, Israel Katz, demanding that he order the destruction of the last sources of water, food and energy in northern Gaza.

It was precisely Israel’s current starvation of Gaza’s population that led to Netanyahu and Gallant being charged with crimes against humanity.

Meanwhile, the destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital clears the ground for a new policy in northern Gaza: what Israel is chillingly calling “Chernobylisation”.

Named after the Soviet nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the policy views the Palestinian presence in Gaza as a comparable threat to the 1986 radioactive leak. The military’s goal is to erase all Palestinian infrastructure above and below ground, echoing Soviet emergency efforts to contain Chernobyl’s radiation.

Where does this lead?

Louise Wateridge, the senior emergency officer for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, noted at the weekend that Israel was accelerating Gaza’s complete social collapse by driving Unrwa out of the enclave.

Israeli legislation coming into effect at the end of this month will bar the refugee agency from operating in Gaza to provide families with what little food and shelter is available, given Israel’s aid blockade.

It will also, in the absence of hospitals, deprive Gaza of its last meaningful health services. Wateridge noted: “Unrwa does something like 17,000 health consultations a day in the Gaza Strip. It’s impossible for another agency to replace that.”

The danger she underscores is that Gaza will become completely lawless. Families will face not only Israel’s bombs, assassination drones and starvation programme, but also the dystopian rule of criminal gangs.

This is exactly what Israel intends for Gaza. As a report in Haaretz last week revealed, following the “Chernobylisation” of northern Gaza, Israel is mulling plans to let two big Palestinian crime families rule the south. These are likely to be the same gangs that are looting the few aid trucks that Israel allows into Gaza, assisting Israel in depriving the population of food and water.

Israel’s vision for Gaza’s future is a post-apocalyptic cross between the Mad Max film franchise and Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.

Cover story

The trajectory to genocide might have been hardwired into Zionism’s coding, but it has been the task of western leaders, media outlets, academia, think tanks and even human rights organisations to pretend otherwise.

They have spent decades holding the line on what should long ago have been a thoroughly discredited western narrative: that Israel was only ever a sanctuary for Jews from antisemitism, that it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, that its occupation is largely benign and its illegal settlements a necessary security measure, and that the Israeli army is “the most moral in the world”.

Those fictions are unravelling faster than Israel’s disinformation can ever hope to stitch them back together.

So why do more of it? Because Israel’s “consciousness warfare” is not primarily directed at you and me. It is directed at western leaders. This is not to persuade them of anything; British Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows full well there is a genocide going on in Gaza, as does Donald Trump, the incoming US president.

They simply do not care – not least because you cannot reach the summit of a western political system unless you are prepared to think sociopathically about the world. There is a western military industrial complex to placate, and western corporations to service that expect to maintain their dominion over global resource extraction.

This is why in the dying days of his presidency, with no votes to win, Joe Biden has dropped the pretence of “tirelessly working for a ceasefire” or demanding that Israel send in at least 350 aid trucks a day. Instead, he has announced as a parting gift to Israel a further $8bn in arms, including munitions for fighter jets and attack helicopters.

No, the goal of Israel’s disinformation campaign is to provide a cover story. It is to muddy the waters just enough to obscure western leaders’ support for genocide; to give them an excuse for continuing to send weapons, and to help them evade a war crimes trial at The Hague.

The goal is “plausible deniability”: to be able to claim that what was obvious was not too obvious, that what was known to ordinary onlookers was unclear to those directly participating.

Western leaders know that Israel has dragged off Abu Safiya – one of Gaza’s great healers – to one of its torture camps, where he is almost certainly being starved, intermittently beaten, humiliated and terrorised, like the other inmates.

Israel’s work now is to weaken and destroy his physical and mental resilience, just as it has dismantled Gaza’s hospitals.

Israel’s goal is not to eradicate “the terrorists”. It is to turn Gaza into a wasteland, a hellscape, in which no one good, no one who cares, no one trying to cling on to their humanity can survive. A place where doctors do not exist, aid workers are a memory, and compassion is a liability; a place where tanks and criminal gangs rule.

The job of the western political and media class is to make all this appear as routine and normal as possible. Their job is to deaden us inside, to hollow out our ability to care or resist, to leave us numb. We must prove them wrong – for Dr Abu Safiya’s sake, and for our own.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

The Genocide of the Palestinian people began 76 years ago. What may be drawing to a close is merely a particularly intense phase in the Genocide.

Gaza is destroyed. 92% of its housing has gone. Its water treatment and sanitation, electricity generation, food processing, farming, and fishing are all now incapable of sustaining much life. Its hospitals, health centres, universities, colleges, and schools are all now destroyed, as are its municipal buildings, waste disposal, road surfaces, drainage channels, theatres, cultural centres, cinemas, cafés.

What is left is 1.8 million cold and starving people, malnourished, soaked, ill-clothed, living in tents and defecating in trenches. Tens of thousands will die in these conditions however fast aid comes – and you can be 100% certain Israeli obstructionism will prevent it from coming fast.

But even if they can be physically saved, the culture and fabric of society are damaged beyond repair. The psychological damage is immense. The institutions of normality that might permit recovery are non-existent.

Nobody really knows the true number killed so far in the genocide. The Palestinian health authorities, run by the elected Hamas representatives, have been scrupulous in giving out numbers only of those officially certified dead following the recovery and identification of their bodies.

Given the almost total destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the unavailability of rescue equipment and the lack of ceasefire for body recovery, I suspect the 46,707 official death toll as of last night (and the Israelis already killed over 80 again today) may prove to be way short of the truth, which could be double or more from unaccounted bodies.

That is without the Lancet study suggesting that 50% again may have died subsequently from wounds. A similar number to the dead are permanently maimed.

The worst effects may not in the long term even be in Palestine at all. The Western world has, in the support of its rulers for Israel as it commits Genocide, abandoned any pretence to wish to maintain the system of international law that had been extended and developed post World War 2. Untold horrors of war may be unleashed as a result in the next decade.

In both the USA and the UK, governments ignored their own senior officials and legal advisers to break the human rights constraints which those nations had imposed upon their foreign policy, particularly with regard to the supply of weapons.

In Poland, France and several other NATO countries, the governments have openly repudiated their duty to enforce warrants of the International Criminal Court.

In the UK, Germany, USA, France and throughout the Western world, there has been a massive rolling back of long-cherished and hard-won rights of freedom of expression and assembly, explicitly to prevent criticism of Israel and support for Palestine.

There has been concerted social media suppression to the same end on all major online platforms, and a seizure of Tik Tok in the USA avowedly because of its failure to repress speech critical of Israel.

The unanimity of mainstream media support for Israel, and the tiny or no space for any dissenting view, has become so established a part of the political landscape it can go unnoticed. But it needs to be highlighted.

In his closing address, the one useful thing Biden said was the correct observation about the USA becoming an oligarchy. The whole world is becoming intensely oligarchic, with an astronomical expansion of the wealth gap between rulers and ruled these past twenty years.

The impunity of Israel, and the decline of international law, is a direct consequence of this. There is a particular truth that encompasses almost every Western country and, interestingly, unites both the Arab and the Western worlds.

That truth is this. The wealthy oligarchic elites who control media and politics are extremely pro-Israel. The people are not.

The gap between the support for Israel among the super wealthy and powerful, and the view of the majority of normal people, really deserves serious study to explain it. Not the least interesting is the fact that not even the almost 100% mainstream media pro-Israeli propaganda has been enough to convince the peoples of the world to support the Genocide, outwith the special cases of Germany and the US religious Zionists.

So, what happens now? Well, I was in Beirut when it was carpet bombed in the hours immediately before the ceasefire here took effect, and I expect Israel to massively bomb Gaza’s tent cities in the next three days.

I have also seen Israel break the ceasefire in Lebanon every single day, and I expect them to do that in Gaza too.

Israel daily breaches the ‘ceasefire’ in Lebanon both inside and outside the demilitarised zone. Three days ago they killed 5 civilians. pic.twitter.com/MiAQpZ4AZI

— Craig Murray (@CraigMurrayOrg) January 15, 2025

So long as the USA and Israel designate Hamas as a terrorist organisation, they will claim the right to bomb and kill at any time as a “counter-terrorism operation”, irrespective of any ceasefire agreement. That is their formal position, just as it is their formal position with regard to Hezbollah and the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon.

The Israelis did not start killing Palestinians on 8 October 2023 and they will not stop killing them now.

I expect the ceasefire agreement to go ahead as projected, with occasional Israeli “anti-terrorist” attacks continuing in Gaza. The prisoner exchanges will happen. The Israelis will continually delay and renege on the provisions on aid access and on withdrawal of troops. Palestinians in Gaza will die in large numbers of disease, hunger and poor sanitation.

Just as the ceasefire in Lebanon led to Israel immediately invading Southern Syria, Israel will now increase its activity in the West Bank, suppressing resistance together with its proxy “Palestinian Authority” forces and continually seizing land from Palestinians.

I do not doubt that it is true that the Gaza ceasefire is due to Trump telling Netanyahu to stop. As I continually said, Biden’s attempts to restrain Netanyahu were a complete subterfuge and Biden was absolutely committed to the Genocide.

Trump is very difficult to read. When he was elected in 2016, I believed he was less hawkish in foreign policy than Hillary Clinton. Had Clinton been elected, for example, I am sure that she would have immediately laid waste to Syria, which would have been destroyed like Libya – eventually achieved by Biden.

Trump II had seemed an altogether more aggressive persona than Trump I, particularly as regards the Middle East. Yet Trump II has told Netanyahu to stop the Genocide – confirming incidentally that Biden could have done so had he wished.

Biden wanted Genocide.

The myth of Western support for international law and human rights died in Gaza, along with the myth of Western support for the “two-state solution”. There never was a viable two-state solution and it was those states who were loudest in pretending to support it, who vehemently refused to recognise the Palestinian state.

The “two-state solution” was only ever a cover for Zionism. With Gaza now utterly smashed and its population ruined, and the West Bank almost totally expropriated, the pretence of a “two-state solution” has to be finally killed off.

Israel has lost any moral authority for its continued existence. It has proven itself to be a genocidal entity driven by ethno-supremacism. (A people who believe themselves to be a superior or divinely favoured race are ethno-supremacists, regardless of whether their claim of ethnic homogeneity is founded or not.)

Within 48 hours of the Hamas breakout on 7 October I wrote my first piece about it. Often in retrospect reactions to a major incident are too influenced by the emotion of the moment, but actually I am as proud of this as of anything I ever wrote.

Asymmetric warfare tends to be vile. Oppressed and colonised peoples don’t have the luxury of lining up soldiers in neatly pressed uniforms and polished boots, to face off against the opposing army in an equality of arms.

A colonised and oppressed people tends, given the chance, to mirror the atrocities perpetrated on them by their oppressor.

This of course feeds in, always, to the propaganda of the Imperialist. A paroxysm of resistance by the oppressed always ends up portrayed by the Imperialist as evidence of the bestiality of the colonised people and in itself justifying the “civilising mission” of the coloniser.

Which is not to say I relish violence, quite the opposite. I am in fact pleased that Israeli prisoners as well as Palestinian prisoners will be returned as part of a ceasefire deal.

While the Palestinian resistance are fully entitled to take as many IDF members and reserves prisoner as they can, I cannot approve of the illegal practice of taking children and other complete non-combatants prisoner – and yes I know the Israelis do it on a much larger scale.

Behaving better than the Israelis should be a permanent guide in life.

Unfortunately, it is not the case that colonial settler, racist states cannot triumph. The white settlers in the USA, Canada and Australia did manage to permanently subjugate and almost extinguish the local populations. I have spoken to some wonderful Arab intellectuals these last few weeks who all tend to take the view that Israel’s ultimate defeat is inevitable because the colonial settler state will never be accepted by the Arab populations. I wish I were so confident.

Where I agree with them totally is that the abolition of the terrorist state of Israel must be the goal, not an accommodation with it.

Israel’s pariah status is now assured for a generation, it is deeply split internally and it is dependent on a parent state, the USA, which is losing its relative power and hegemony. Yet for now Israel is expanding. It occupies significantly more territory than it did two years ago and in Syria and Lebanon it has seized control of vital regional water sources. Israel currently has full military control of over 30% of Syria’s fresh water.

Trump probably supports Israeli annexation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza and more. But that does not of necessity mean he supports either the expulsion of their populations or an apartheid state. He may see such heavy state interventions as an interference in the freedom of business to make money, and even undesirable per se.

It is impossible to be certain about what Trump sees as the end goal. From this first indication, it is fair to say his influence is, to this point, more benign than feared.

It is all a house of cards. As of today, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon all have leadership which is, broadly speaking, pro-USA and pro-Israel. Will that still be the case in a decade? Because it is the fact on which Israel depends for its existence.

The other point on which Israel relies is the support of Western governments. But throughout the Western world, the electoral and party systems which maintain the neo-liberal consensus and give voters no real choice at elections across issues ranging from economic policy to support for Israel, are fracturing.

This requires an article in itself, but in the UK, France, Germany and countless other states there is a tectonic shift happening with voters demanding a shift away from the tiny window of orthodox policy.

To date, the populist right has been quickest to take advantage of this shift, and of course benefited from mainstream media cooperation. But the fluidity indicates an impending seismic shift in western domestic political alignment.

That coincides with the disillusionment of Eastern Europe with the EU and NATO and the consequent desperate attempts of the NATO powers to subvert democracy in Georgia, Romania and Moldova.

At some stage China will take a more active interest in the Middle East. Once the Ukraine war has concluded, Russia will undoubtedly turn more attention to the Mediterranean again.

The situation is dynamic. I would not know whether to be more surprised if Trump initiated US attacks on Iran or initiated rebooted nuclear talks and the lifting of sanctions. I suspect the latter surprise to be the more likely.

Today there is at least a moment of hope that the horrible deaths and mutilations in Gaza may be slowed. Let us take that for a moment of respite, and feel the sun upon our faces. Then we continue the fight against evil.

———————–

To be blunt, our two months in Lebanon before Christmas made a slight financial loss. I was delighted with the output of four mini-documentaries and numerous short video reports and articles, some of which individually had millions of viewers. But to date the model of reader-sponsored real overseas journalism is not proven nor stable.

If you have not yet contributed financially, I should be grateful if you could do so. If you have contributed, perhaps you could help further by encouraging others to do so. I would as always stress I do not want anybody to contribute if it causes them the slightest financial hardship.

My reporting and advocacy work has no source of finance at all other than your contributions to keep us going. We get nothing from any state nor any billionaire.

Anybody is welcome to republish and reuse, including in translation.

Because some people wish an alternative to PayPal, I have set up new methods of payment including a GoFundMe appeal and a Patreon account.

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A new report from Britain's Sky News provides details of Adnan al-Bursh's death by torture in Israel's Ofer Prison

News Desk

NOV 16, 2024

(Photo credit: CNN)

A Sky News investigation published on 16 November has revealed new details surrounding Israel's torture and murder of the famous Palestinian surgeon from Gaza, Adnan al-Bursh, at Ofer Prison in the occupied Palestinian West Bank last May.

A fellow Palestinian prisoner at Ofer told the British news channel that Israeli guards severely tortured Dr Bursh and then left him to die alone, naked from the waist down, in the prison yard.

The prisoner, who previously knew the doctor in Gaza, provided the new details in a deposition to lawyers from HaMoked, an Israeli human rights organization.

“In mid-April 2024, Dr Adnan Al-Bursh arrived at Section 23 in Ofer Prison. The prison guards brought Dr Adnan Al-Bursh into the section in a deplorable state. He had clearly been assaulted with injuries around his body. He was naked in the lower part of his body,” the prisoner's deposition states.

“The prison guards threw him in the middle of the yard and left him there. Dr Adnan Al-Bursh was unable to stand up. One of the prisoners helped him and accompanied him to one of the rooms. A few minutes later, prisoners were heard screaming from the room they went into, declaring Dr Adnan Al-Bursh (was dead).”

Bursh was widely regarded as one of the best-qualified and well-known surgeons in Gaza.

When Israel's war on Gaza began in October of last year, the renowned surgeon worked at Al-Shifa Hospital as the head of orthopedic surgery. He worked around the clock, performing surgeries on Palestinians injured by Israel's horrific bombing campaign.

When Israeli troops laid siege to Al-Shifa in November, the staff was forced to flee.

Bursh fled by foot to the Indonesian Hospital in Bait Lahia to continue serving wounded patients.

He documented his experiences on video, including when Israel shelled the hospital, killing 12 people.

He was then forced to leave the Indonesia Hospital as well and moved to the Al-Awda Hospital in Gaza's north, where he was abducted by Israeli forces.

After the soldiers surrounded the hospital, "They told [Dr Bursh] that if all men do not come down… they will destroy the Awda Hospital with all the women and children in it," a fellow doctor at Al-Awda, Mohammad Obeid, told Sky News.

After Dr Bursh left the hospital, Israeli soldiers “called his name out” and then “roughly” took him away, Obeid stated.

Bursh was then taken to the notorious Sde Teiman detention camp in the Negev Desert.

The facility became notorious this summer after prison guards, doctors, and former inmates gave testimony of prisoners being tortured and raped there.

Dr Khalid Hamouda, a former inmate at Sde Teiman, told Sky News that of the 100 prisoners in the section of the camp where he was held, at least a quarter were healthcare workers.

Dr Bursh was beaten severely at Sde Teiman.

“He thought he may have broken ribs,” Dr Hamouda said. ”He was unable to even go to the toilet alone.”

The doctor was then transferred to Ofer Prison in the Israeli prison system but was never charged with any crime or terrorism.

Since 7 October 2023, at least 43 prisoners have died in Israeli jails, according to the Palestinian Prisoners Society.

Youtube - How the U.S. Took Over the World: The End of International Law

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 17th, and we’re having Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson with us to talk about U.S. foreign policy. And the title of this video today, Richard and Michael, is over the world, the end of international law. We know whenever they’re talking about the foreign policy of the United States, they’re talking about the rules-based international order. And Michael, let’s start with you. Why have they decided to put an end to international law?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right. That the build-up of this whole U.S.-sponsored aggression from Ukraine to Israel has caused a breakdown of international law. And just as important, what does international law mean when there’s no means of enforcement if there’s laws against genocide, laws against ongoing attacks on civilians? What can anyone do about it? There seems to be a global war, and all of the tactics now are different from all the wars that we’ve seen before, and we’ll get into that.

The basic political issues today in this new Cold War, very much like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (from 1618 to 1648). That Thirty Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia, and that led to the creation of international law that has ruled the world all the way from 1648 until the creation of the United Nations. Until just a few years ago, when the United States replaced it and said, ‘We are no longer following international law. We are following our own law. We call it the rules-based order, and it’s our rules, and our rules of order are the reverse of everything that international law has said before.’

It’s a radical change, and hardly anybody’s talked about this, because what do you do about the fact that you have the United States, Ukraine, Israel, NATO, all of a sudden reversing the principles that were considered to be the very basis of civilization for almost four centuries now? It’s very radical.

The United States has a unipolar drive for control over countries. The whole basis of international law after the Thirty Years’ War was to prevent future wars by saying no country can interfere with the political affairs of other countries. Every country has its own autonomy, and that’s what, essentially, the war was fought over. The Catholic countries were attacking the Protestant countries, and it was the largest and most devastating war that Europe had until World War I. But at the end they got together, and at the Peace of Westphalia they said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?

We’re going to recognize all nations are sovereign, and no country, as I said, permitted to interfere with other countries to bring about regime change.’ There was to be religious and political freedom, and the world was to be multipolar. They didn’t use that word, but that meant there wouldn’t be any single group dominating them, and they were referring specifically to the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy. The Hapsburgs controlled Spain, that had all of the silver coming in from the New World, and was the big military power – as was France – and they were allied against Germany, Sweden, and the northern European Protestant countries.

A multipolar world was the whole basis of international law, and that was supposed to be the basis of the United Nations. And violation of these principles was viewed as if it was an attack on civilization itself. Emmanuel Kant and other German philosophers wrote about how this was finally a universal law, and you needed this universal law of individual freedom for persons, but also for nations.

Well, all this is now being rejected by the United States and its allies, and the proxy state of Israel in the Near East. The world is being separated into blocks between the East and West. In the conflict today, really, is whether the [?] nations, the BRICS – Russia, China, Iran, and the allies that they’ve been putting together – are going to be able to design their own destiny, or whether they’re going to have to be subject to whatever the United States does.

And you’ve seen in the last few days in Ukraine, the non-president Zelensky has just said, ‘We’re going to raise the money to buy arms and to bribe all of our officials to be loyal by selling off Ukraine’s titanium mines, to sell off the natural resources. So even if Russia takes over, the international law that America supports is going to say, wait a minute, we’ve already privatized all these resources.

Yes, you can take them over, Russia, but you won’t have any control over the land, or your ability to tax them, because we’ve privatized it all.’ That’s the kind of transformation of the way the world has organized that nobody could have expected before. So there’s a kind of ideological inquisition that’s taking place throughout the world by the United States that rejects the most basic principles of national sovereignty.

And what’s so remarkable in this is we’re seeing an economically shrinking and deindustrializing – the United States and Europe – trying to prevent the global majority from aiming at its own economic and political independence. The rest of the world has 85% of the world’s population, and it’s trying to recover from over a century of colonialism, and the financial neo-colonialism that the United States put in place after 1945.

The U.S.-centered rules of international trade and investment that sort of forced other countries to supply raw materials instead of industrializing and feeding their own population and their own economies and raising their own living standards. So you have this U.S.-NATO “Golden Billion” waging this new Cold War against most of the Western world, without an army, really, to enforce it.

Its policy makers have followed an entirely different track than was done before. They deem other countries and adversaries to be a different civilization altogether. And I’ll get to that shortly. It’s trying to dominate the world, but it no longer has the military dominance that it had in 1945. It’s lost its former ability to dominate the world monetary system, and by economic means. Its aim of retaining its former unipolar policy has been replaced by a whole different strategy, by escalating it all. We’re dealing with the end of civilization, and the end of civilization is supposed to be the United States taking control of the whole world, by imposing a neo-liberal privatization ethic, Thatcherizing and Reaganizing the whole world.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me come at it. I appreciate very much Michael’s historical framework. I think it’s very helpful to keep that in mind. It avoids all kinds of mistakes. Let me add some comments to the story he’s told. In my view, what is going on is a desperate effort of a declining situation – a declining regime, if you like, a declining historical phase, that doesn’t want to give up, which I understand. They don’t usually go quietly, these empires, when they go down. I think the theory that you’re breaking all the customary rules that were in place – either explicitly or implicitly – for several centuries, is the right way to look at this. It’ll help us understand things that we might not see connected, but that are.

Number one, a level of horror in Gaza. I want to be clear. What was denied by people who could not face what was done to Jews in Europe in the Holocaust. We have the phenomena of people who have to deny it. That’s a way of recognizing how horrible that thing was that you can’t stand it. So you literally erase it.

It’s not the appropriate response – one should recognize it – but it helps you underscore just how horrible it was that people have to do that. It underscores in Gaza that the Israelis don’t want you to call this a genocide because if you do, then the victims of one Holocaust are busily perpetrating another one. This is horrible.

And you can’t have the United States quite deal with it, for a number of reasons. Number one, because Israel is the same settler colonialism that the United States is. We are a country of Europeans who come over to the Western hemisphere and ethnically cleanse the indigenous population out of existence, with the exception of the horrible condition the few remaining ones live out in the so-called reservations scattered across the United States, making their living from gambling, casinos, and so on. It’s this remarkable obliteration.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa: These are horrible examples of settler colonialism, but they were accomplished at a time when that was historically possible. Israel has the unfortunate historical fact that it isn’t possible anymore and trying to do it now is self-destructive – although it might take them a while.

But let me show you some other ways to connect. The international rules were that countries could keep their reserves, the backing for their currency in foreign banks. Russia kept a good part of its dollar and gold holdings in foreign banks. Those were seized early on in this war. That’s a violation.

To this day, there are legal ramifications percolating in Europe, even in England, questioning. For example, they couldn’t, they decided, because they’re torn too, about obliterating existing law. So they didn’t take that money. They froze it, which is already not legal. But when it came to giving the money to Ukraine, they have decided just to give the interest earned by those stolen funds. This is a playing-with-giving-up the rule, the idea, of the sacrosanct private property of Russia. And then you take the interest from it. That’s stealing too. These are lawyerly games. What’s important here is, as Michael says, leaving it.

Then there’s the war in Ukraine itself. Okay. Ukraine says it needs to have security. Russia says it needs to have security. Ukraine is behaving badly towards its Russian minorities. The Russians want to protect their minority. Okay. This has to be worked out. This is not the first time you’ve had this kind of a conflict. There’s nothing unique about that conflict.

You know, there were Germans living in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. There were other examples. This could have been worked out as those others were, but it wasn’t. And that’s what’s interesting. The decision was made not to. Now, yes, it’s the United States flexing its muscle. But I see it a little bit less grandiosely, as – Michael put it – reshaping the world. It is that, but it comes out of a defensive posture. It comes out of desperation. It comes out of, ‘We are losing in the world and we will not tolerate losing again. You will not stop us from doing what we want to do in Ukraine. You will not stop us from having Israel as our secure outpost. You cannot attack it. We don’t care what your issue is. You are Palestinians, you were there, that’s not interesting for us.

For us, we need a reliable agent in the Middle East. Israel has been that, and we will protect it. And we have now controlled Ukraine. We rearranged their politics a few years earlier to make that the case. It’s ours. It’s part of our expansion of NATO.’ And the horror is that the Russians should resist. The Russians should say – and this has nothing to do with whether the Russians are right or wrong in any of this – ‘This is an empire,’ say, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, “So far and no further” (in good Texas English). So, I see the taking of the reserves from Russia, I see the misunderstanding of what’s going on, in terms of Russia’s allies, the power that the BRICS have. Forget, yes, that it takes time to replace the dollar.

The BRICS have made some moves in that direction, but they still have a long way to go. No question. No question. But the reality is the BRICS have made real moves. And one of the most important was supporting Russia against the United States and Europe in the Ukraine. That’s the reality. It’s not about right or wrong or anything else. This is about how you try to handle and understand what’s going on.

The United States is desperate. And, by the way, I want people to see it internally. If it were just external I wouldn’t be saying these things. But it’s internal too. The reason we have a character like Trump in a position to be president, there it is. That’s a symptom. People are so angry with what is happening to their lives here that they want something different and they don’t care who he has abused, or what he has said, or how many times he’s gone bankrupt. These are details.

He says he’s going to change everything and go back to when it was better. That is understood by people whose reality has decreased. When production leaves the United States, as it has. Manufacturing, in huge portion, has left the United States and moved overseas. It took the best jobs, it took the strongest unions, and decimated them by moving. UAW is a shadow of what it once was.

The same is true of the steelworkers, and all the rest of them. That’s a reality. That means jobs are not what they once were. That means the standard of living isn’t what it was, and the security of your job isn’t what it was. And what was done by the relocation of jobs to profit from overseas expansion will now be continued with another technological wave. This time not the computers and robots. This time artificial intelligence, which will be used for profit-making purposes at the expense of the quality and the quantity of jobs. People are correct. The empire that concentrated production and income growth here, is now not here anymore. It left. And the people understand that they are left behind. There is no mystery.

My last point. The media have been obsessing for several years now, with the Democrats, over the problem: The economy is doing well: Why do the mass of people answer every public poll with the statement, the economy is a disaster? The economy is a disaster. I’m in a disaster.

This is not because they are stupid. It’s not because they aren’t educated. None of those things. It’s a different experience. People question me: The stock market is doing well? Well, 85 to 90 percent of stocks are owned by 10 percent of the people. They’re doing well. But the other 90 percent are spectators about a process of prosperity from which they are excluded, and they identify with the shrinking American empire abroad.

For them, they’re losing their status as an American worker and they’re losing their status as an American. In short, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose. No one addresses any of that. The Republicans say, ‘Let’s go backward.’ Okay, that’s a fantasy. That’s not a very good long-term proposal. That won’t go very far. He lost a good bit of the benefit of that the first time when he didn’t do shit (if you pardon my Spanish) to take us back to anything. He’s not going to do it in the second term either.

What you have is a declining situation and the spectacle of a politics that doesn’t either understand, or have any handle whatsoever on any of it. So you’re watching a dysfunctional system run by a dysfunctional government. I want to remind everyone of, what a great tactician once said are, the preconditions for revolution. They are two. Number one, that the people in charge don’t know how to govern anymore. Number two, that the mass of people feel that the people at the top can’t govern anymore. If you have those two conditions met, you’re going to have a revolution. We are getting real close in this country.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you begin by discussing what’s unique in the situation we’re in today. You use the word “desperation.” What you’ve been describing is desperation right along. That indeed is what makes it unique. The United States and the West no longer can mount a war of military occupation. That’s another part of the by-product of what you’ve been describing economically. Ukraine showed that the United States can’t win a war and that NATO needs proxy armies because their own population would resist if there were a draft. So the U.S. and NATO forces have only one policy to use: They can only bomb and shoot missiles. The basic political fact remains that they are too weak to win on the battlefield, according to the rules of war that formerly guided international law, and that made genocide illegal.

I want to focus on the effect of all of what you’ve described on what it means for international law and the global fracture that we’re seeing today. I think the U.S. and NATO fight to control the world – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the United States and England all the way to the China Sea – can only be won in a dirty way – in violation of international law – by focusing on killing civilians, bombing hospitals, schools, and other basic institutions. That’s what makes this war unique.

U.S. naval fighting concentrates on civilian, instead of military, targets. You’ve seen Ukraine, focusing on the Russian-speaking civilian population, hoping that the civilians will say, ‘Please don’t bomb us anymore. We want our own Boris Yeltsin, or some Pinochet or Zelensky, to take over. We’ll do anything for peace.’ But that’s not what they did. They rallied around Russia and say, ‘You know what, you killing us is wrong and we’re not going to submit to you, because if you’re killing us now, what are you going to do if there were peace?’ So this is genocide in Ukraine, just as it’s genocide in Palestine.

The other countries are seeing that it’s a moral evil and it’s an attack on the very principle of civilization and common humanity. So what is the U.S. and NATO to do?

They’re relying on Ukraine and Israel Nazis to uproot or destroy any population that resists its economic or financial and political control, or are simply in their way. It’s a war of extermination – not a military war against armies – but a war of extermination of people, in order to create a neo-colonialism. That’s what the U.S. and NATO are doing. They are trying to create a neo-colonialism to make one world. Not a group of different civilizations. One civilization, that is the U.S. neo-liberal civilization. And other countries in their way are not really an alternative civilization. There’s no plurality of civilizations where each country or region can make its choice. There’s only supposed to be one.

Now this is evil, but it’s historically a characteristic of religious wars and wars of hatred – ethnic, national and even racial hatred – in the case of Europe’s colonialism and America’s war in Asia. Soldiers, and even the domestic civilian population, are propagandized to view the enemy as being sub-human and therefore it can be treated in utterly different ways than the rules of war. That’s the character of Israel’s war against Islamic countries, and against any population that stands in the way of Israel expanding from the sea to the ocean.

That is, all the land, and oil, and natural resources, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. That’s the aim. The broad West Asian area is to be turned into a land without a people. That’s what Netanyahu means. A land without a people, just as what Israel’s settlers did to the Palestinians who lived there for millennia. The occupants are held to be non-people, to be treated as the biblical Amalek whom the Lord directed his religionists to exterminate, along with all their cattle, trees and productive resources capable of sustaining life.

So when Israel goes into Gaza or the West Bank or now into Lebanon, they’re not fighting another army. They’re destroying the hospitals. They’re tearing up the olive trees that take 30 to 50 years to develop. They’re tearing up the infrastructure. They’re making it impossible to continue to live there. That’s what makes this unique, and even more destructive than the earlier wars, which at least left the civilization and the basic infrastructure in place. But it’s destructive because of what you said: Desperation of the West, and the U.S. and Europe, is the only kind of war they can fight.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me tell you a story, even if I’ve done it once before, that I hope we’ll bring it home to an American audience. I once took some European visitors to a town in Massachusetts called Old Deerfield. It is a part of a little town called Deerfield located on the Deerfield River in Western Massachusetts. The town of Old Deerfield is a recreated community that has recreated all the houses in it to look like they did in colonial days, before the United States emerged as an independent country. If you visit this place and you start looking at these interesting old reconstituted houses, and you go inside and you see the colonial furniture and all that, you will be confronted with little plaques on the outside of each house that give you a little thumbnail description of life when this house was occupied by living family, etc.

I went and I looked at it, like my guests, and we all immediately reacted because of what it says on the plaques. To my knowledge, that’s what it says right now, as we’re speaking. It describes the family of John Jones and his wife and the children, and then on this difficult day back in 1691, the savages attacked. And then periodically it’s all about the savages who were then eventually beaten back. And the Europeans looked at each other, and I looked at them and they at me. The Europeans arrived here, killed these people, took their land, and called them savages; shot them like animals because the indigenous people didn’t have guns and gunpowder, and all the rest of that, whereas the Europeans did. So, it was quite easy to shoot them, and to deal with them as animals. They were savage.

When they resisted their land and their animals being taken from them, then they became more savage, and absolutely subject to extermination, which was considered a 100% acceptable social solution. The final solution to the Native American ‘problem,’ you might call it.

But you know, again, this is not about Europeans or Native Americans. It’s about settler colonialism that has a ‘problem.’ That’s why it has to imagine that the land is empty because otherwise it would be confronted with, ‘What are you doing if the land is full?’ Well, you are creating a Them versus Us. If you read the literature of those who support Netanyahu, that’s what they say every day. It’s them or us.

That’s what the colonial people in Old Deerfield felt. It was them or us, and they would celebrate the attack of the savages because it confirmed how savage they were. It didn’t confirm that settler colonialism might be questioned. That never occurred to them. I mean, it’s a study in what can happen to human beings when they trap themselves, or are trapped, in a dead end that they don’t want to confront. Well then, they rethink it, so it isn’t a dead end, it isn’t a problem. It is now [as] understandable as getting rid of these pesky animals that stand in the way of the noble Christian civilization we are constructing.

And in Israel simply substitute Jewish, or Zionist, or whatever word you want. But we do have to understand that this isn’t new. Michael is right. It is a particular historical conjuncture. That’s what’s fading. My fear is if we give it too much uniqueness, you’ll miss the fact that it is a rerun.

Look, the world looks back on those years 1933 to 1945. Twelve years, a long time. Twelve years. Mr. Hitler came to power in January of 1933 and he was finished in World War II. So from ’33 to ’45 – twelve years – he, the Nazis ruled, and the whole world has ever since looked back in horror at what they did, and what they were. For those twelve years it was scary, and people shook their heads and didn’t want to believe it, and turned away from it. But eventually – and it took 75 years for right-wing fascistic types to put their heads up above the sand – and we see them now again. But again, it took a long time.

The Israeli behavior will take a long time, and we will look back on it the way we look back on what the Nazis did in their part of Europe with the same horror, except we will have learned, maybe, something from this time more than we learned the first time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think, Richard, what you’re describing is there is something unique today, and that is that there’s a whole ideology to support something that supports what the settlers did in America – and you’re quite right to draw that parallel – and what settler states are doing elsewhere, and what the United States and NATO are trying to expand other countries. It’s much more than a clash of civilizations, like between the English settlers and the domestic indigenous population here.

It’s an attack on the very principle of what people traditionally have considered to be civilization, and I think America’s policy makers have come to realize that their plan for world dictatorship that they celebrated in 1992 as the “End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, has been a failure. That their idea of civilization, as everyone will funnel Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and will privatize the economy – and now that the Soviet Union is dead there is no alternative?

Well, Fukuyama’s book was very quickly replaced a year later by a book by his teacher at Harvard Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. And Huntington described the real organization, civilization, is U.S. nationalism, a neo-liberalism and its doctrine of a unipolar world, that was his definition of civilization as a universal world. Other civilizations are basically how indigenous populations were treated, and Huntington warned that the United States faced future fights that were not simply a move from a different trade and monetary policy by countries seeking to escape from the legacy of colonialism and U.S. dominance.

He meant a clash of culture and that’s really the key: Not to accept U.S. dominance was deemed to be trying to create a new civilization. So it wasn’t just the fight of the English settlers of America or the Jewish settlers of Palestine to take land. It was a cultural civilizational fight. That’s what made it basically different for all this and the principle of national self-determination and personal religious and political freedom used to be considered the basis of civilization.

Obviously, even though it was during the time of the Thirty Years’ War that what you’re describing was occurring in the settlement of America, but the U.S. neo-cons treated the idea of policy independence of other countries as all of a sudden a new alien civilization that threatens the entire West. The idea that there could be an alternative and that way of framing international relations inverts the whole traditional universal morality.

Well, so did the English settlement of America do it, and the Spanish settlement of America, but it was almost not even discussed by the legal theorists. It seemed to be outside the realm of something that could be discussed in terms of international law. And that gap, that creation of a new international law justifying settler colonialism, justifying the right of one nation to take over and destroy another’s people and culture, as well as just taking their land, is essentially what World War II was fought against, the principle of Nazism.

RICHARD WOLFF: If I could add, the way this is spun nowadays, I think, illustrates what Michael is trying to get us to understand. Only let me show you the words. The clash of civilizations is a very convenient way, and here’s a second way that is being used to make the same point: that one civilization is in favor of, and is roughly the equivalent of democracy, whereas the other civilization is the equivalent or equal to authoritarianism.

This is a wonderful dichotomization because what it allows you to do is to look at China and no matter how many times the Chinese tell you, ‘We have two goals.’ By the way, they’ve been saying this for 50 years. Number one, to end a hundred years of humiliation by which they mean colonialism, because even though China as a whole never became a colony, parts of it did: The cities along the coast were taken over, some by the Germans, some by the British (it was horrible); and they fought the Boxer Rebellion and they were defeated, and all the rest.

The second goal of China was to raise its people out of the worst poverty the world has ever seen. Two goals: not to be humiliated by foreigners and to raise their standard of living, basically. That’s what they set out to do and they have been the most successful in doing that in the history of the world, if you measure the amount of improvement and the time it took to achieve it. By those standards they are a roaring success. Notice I’m not commenting on their internal civil liberties or a whole lot of other qualities that are another conversation. But for the United States, it cannot see what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They don’t anymore have the lingo of a great struggle between Capitalism and Socialism because that really doesn’t fit anymore.

So they have it between Democracy and Authoritarianism, which has no more pull or power of analysis than the old Capitalism versus Socialism ever did. These are ways of handling the rationalization that the United States needs to achieve what, for it, has become security. If you become a world power, then security requires you to control the world. If you don’t want to be worried about the rest of the world then don’t be a world power. Be a real strong power where the hell you are. But the United States has its 700-800 bases around the [world]. That’s the aspirations of a world power. And now it has the problem: How do you rationalize wanting to be perpetually what no empire has achieved? Answer: Everybody else is a threat to all that is good in the world. It is either non-human, or a real bad civilization, or authoritarian.

Last point. The irony here which – either a Hegel as philosopher, or a Bertolt Brecht as a theater writer, or a George Carlin as a comedian – you need that level of brilliance to capture. The most authoritarian political structure exists inside every capitalist corporation. The CEO tells everybody else what to do. And the people he orders about, the employees have absolutely no recall over him whatsoever. They don’t vote for him. They don’t approve anything he does. If he doesn’t like them, they’re fired. Oh my god. Finding other societies authoritarian when this is your reality five out of seven days a week for the vast majority of, that takes extraordinary ideological discipline, because it’s hard to be so blind in one area that you can call another area bad names that apply to you.

This is an extremity and I don’t think these cultures can long sustain it. And if I’m right then that’s another reason for those who run the United States to be very, very worried about their situation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well then, the question is what are we going to do about it? What’s the outcome going to be? When the English attacked the Native Americans, they didn’t have an opportunity to create an alternative. All they could do is retreat further and further westward until they were backed into reservations, or what the Nazis called concentration camps.

Well, U.S. Presidents Biden and Donald Trump both have repeatedly tried to express their great fear that other countries will do what the Native Americans and the Palestinians couldn’t do, that they’d create an alternative. And that’s why they’ve designated China as America’s existential enemy, and to prepare the ground for conquering it, they’ve said, ‘well, that requires weakening Russia and Iran because they’re China’s two great military allies and suppliers of oil of the energy that it needs.’

However U.S. foreign policy suffers from the Hubris that it has always had. It assumes that foreign countries will have no active response. They’ll passively surrender like the Native Americans did to the settlers or, like the Palestinians did when they simply left the country or got killed.

China and Russia have taken the lead in moving to create an alternative world order that is going to defend their independence. And that’s what we’ve been talking about on this show for about a month now. They’ve created a set of alternative organizations to those of the West.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a defensive counterweight to NATO, and the BRICS are creating a full-spectrum alliance to achieve trade and financial self-reliance independent of the U.S. and NATO bloc. Well, NATO’s foray into Ukraine to try to end Russia’s ability to survive as a fiscal state has failed. Russia’s got even stronger and Ukraine’s NATO-backed troops are close to total defeat.

So, the United States has shifted its military support to its long-term aim of gaining control of the world’s oil trade. For instance, well, if we can’t win on the battlefield, let’s control the key organs of control. And its policy here is very similar to that which it followed in Ukraine. It’s backing Israel to conquer the entire Near East, starting with the domestic Palestinian population and extending territory to absorb Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, culminating in the long-expressed hope that they’re going to be able to defeat Iran and pull it into greater Israel and control, as I said, the whole swath of oil, lands, and geography from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And like Ukraine, Israel’s military is focused much more on the population that’s in its way than on military targets. It really doesn’t care about that.

If you can destroy a civilization’s hospitals, infrastructure, its culture, the basis that holds it together politically and culturally, then you don’t need to engage in a military war that you’re sure to lose. Well, it is this focus on attacking civilians and cultural genocide that violates the civilized world’s rules of warfare that I talked about at the beginning. The U.S.-NATO countries don’t have any troops of their own, so their target is extended to include entire populations: ‘Well, we can bomb them. We’re not going to fight them.

All we can do is bomb them, as long as they don’t have a bomb to fight back.’ And the Palestinians have no bombs, and they’re not being supported by other Islamic countries. There’s no religious or ideological support of the countries around the Near East and West Asian area that are willing to realize that they’re all under threat, that this drive for Lebensraum is not simply a Judaic Lebensraum, for its own population, it’s for the Western Lebensraum to control natural resources, sub-soil resources, oil, minerals, the land, infrastructure.

The concept of Lebensraum has morphed into great control of all of the pre-conditions of social survival. That’s why the Israeli soldiers concentrate on killing children and bombing hospitals and schools. If you kill the children, there won’t be any population you have to fight in the future. Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet: Again, ‘that’s why we’re killing children. That’s why we’re bombing hospitals. We don’t want the population to survive.’

Well, that aim is genocide and it’s to prevent other peoples and countries from surviving and living to provide an alternative. Like Ukraine, Israel’s promoting racial hatred to justify its genocide against the Palestinians and Arabs. Just as it calls adversaries sub-human, just as the Ukrainians called the Russian speakers cockroaches, sub-human, the Israelis are treating the Arabs as that. That’s really what Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations means in progress, in practice: There’s really only one civilization in his view, and the other civilizations are the indigenous population in the way of the settlers. What’s this done? It’s reviving World War II Nazi ideology of hatred that was so shocking that it’s driving the whole world into an alliance to defend itself.

That’s what the United States, our planners, didn’t realize: that countries fear that the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s West Bank may be their own fate if the United States seeks to prevent them from following their own independence or achieving their own self-reliance, their own monetary system, their own trade, their ability to tax American corporations or to fine them if they’re polluting their land, if they deviate from the U.S. neoliberal policies. That is basically the U.S.-new religion. If other countries try to escape from their dollar debt or the incessant regime change consequences, they’re going to end up like the victims of the settlers.

So we can think of economic settlement of a country, economic settlement of taking over the rules of a country’s trade, its domestic laws, its ability to tax corporations to control its oil and mineral resources in its own natural interest, instead of letting American and European firms take them over and siphon off all of their output and the economic value of these resources for itself.

So we’re really in a fight for what kind of civilization we’re going to have. And there may be a global fracture, but if there is a global fracture between the 15% of the population that’s U.S.-NATO and the 85% of all the rest of the world, the part of the world that is industrialized, the part of the world that has the natural resources, well then, the fight that we’re seeing today, this new Cold War is really about what civilization’s all about, in contrast to the U.S.-NATO’s really anti-civilization.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add, if I could, because I think there’s another dimension. You get a different insight if you ask yourself, what comes next? Israel presumably is concerned about its security. That’s what it says all the time and I assume that that’s part of the story. Okay.

If you’re a nation worried about your security, here’s what you’re doing: You’re making yourself the absolute enemy of all Arabs and most Muslims by what you are doing, which, in case Americans don’t know, is widely advertised. The destruction in Palestine is front-page news in every Muslim country on this planet, every day. So, not like the United States, this is we, our people, our co-religionists, our brothers and sisters, being slaughtered.

Number one, Israel is going to have to deal with however this ends, whenever it ends, with a level of global isolation and enmity that is going to be expressed in a million big decisions, little decisions and medium decisions made by hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world, every chance they get. It’s not just the Houthis who figured out how they can strike a blow. Everybody else.

Number two and probably more important. This effort is destroying the Israeli economy. They will be dependent on the United States, totally, utterly, for many, many years, if not indefinitely. They will have no independence from the United States. It won’t just be a question of needing weapons all the time, but needing cash infusions, trade deals. You name it, they’re going to need it.

And the United States with whatever regimes come to power in the United States will hold all the strings. In short, Israel is creating by its war a level of insecurity, dependence, uncertainty that will haunt that society indefinitely into the future. This is not a strategy that gets them either security or independence. It is a joke. It’s not a funny joke. It’s a joke on them, by telling themselves it’s us or them, by refusing to try to find a way out. They are creating, they are painting themselves into an international, political, ideological corner. They’re going to be desperate for a long, long time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that Israel is only one of the first arenas in this large international fight. The United States hasn’t said the Palestinians are an existential enemy. They noticed that the other Islamic countries are supporting Israel. Turkey is supporting Israel. Saudi Arabia is supporting Israel. Egypt is especially supporting Israel. They’re not fighting against it because the leaders are essentially bought off and are making money by supporting Israel, and they’re putting the benefit of their own leaders over their whole national destiny.

I’m more concerned about what other countries are going to do that will be able to mount a much stronger response than the Near Eastern countries are doing. Essentially, the response is going to be something that the Near Eastern oil countries haven’t done. The BRICS are moving to decouple from the West in order to create their own multipolar world, mutual benefit and development. This is the same issue that was fought over in the Thirty Years’ War.

The problem is that there seems little chance of the West accepting a Peace of Westphalia, permitting such a world, or at least a world that the United States, Europe, and Israel would want to be a part of. That’s the difference. At least at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe did accept a common interest in ending war and establishing ‘We don’t want more to tear our civilization – if you can call it that – apart.’ That’s not the case today.

The United States’ policy is to tear other countries resisting American policy apart, saying they’re not only a different civilization, they’re actually different species. Each civilization is a species and, somehow, we’re back into the ethnic racial stereotyping that underlay the settler colonialism and the American wars in Asia, Vietnam, Korea, everywhere else. The problem is that they’re not interested in mutual gain. They’re not interested in a world where everybody can live peacefully together. That’s why there’s not going to be a two-state solution to Israel. All the U.S. wants is the ability to use its brute power to control, grab whatever resources and revenue it wants. The aim is conquest without regard for the economic costs and benefits.

So you can’t look at it and say, ‘Well, what’s in the economic interest of the United States and Europe? Isn’t their economic interest to join with Russia and China and all have a prosperous world for mutual gain?’ Its leaders say, ‘No, we don’t care.’ The German leaders are willing to sacrifice the German economy, to destroy its industry, to shrink its GDP, quarter after quarter after quarter, to reduce its living standards, all because that’s the price of preventing an alternative world order to what the United States – which supports us – is interested in.

Andrei Martyanov has suggested that the United States is fighting today the closing years of World War II, in the sense that it’s fighting over the principles, what all of that was about, about what kind of international relations are going to be established, and it’s a fight against all other peoples as if it were a struggle for survival between different species, a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest.

And yet, the West is now the least economically fit, and the least militarily fit, except for its atomic weapons. And there it’s a tie, because both the U.S. and Russia and China all have the power to blow up the whole world and start again with the Neo-Paleolithic age. So this fight treats populations that seek their own policy independence as a species to be exterminated.

That’s the essence of Nazi ideology and it’s being repeated today. So if there is a clash of civilization, where does all this leave the United Nations? All the countries except the U.S.-NATO and Israel want peace. But the United Nations is powerless to exclude the most genocidal violators of international law.

When Israel blocks humanitarian United Nations emergency food from being delivered to the starving victims of Gaza, the United Nations has no military power to just overcome Israel’s blockage. It doesn’t have its own tanks to just say, ‘You want to let their trucks in, we’re going to send the trucks in behind the convoy of tanks and if your Israeli guards block us, we’re just going to shoot you down.’

It doesn’t have any power like that. Egypt has the power, but the Americans manipulated the Arab Spring to put in the chosen successor to Mubarak. The dictator was put in place by the entirely corrupt Egyptian ruling class. And the only question is whether the army somehow is going to have a memory of Abdul Nasser. It doesn’t have to be this way. So far there is no sign that Egypt will not be an applauder of Israel and a backer of Israel, as it’s been right now. It’s not going to help deliver food aid. It has put up just the opposite. It puts up blocks saying, ‘We don’t want any Palestinians here. We want them to be starved instead of coming into Egypt.’ That is utterly contemptible.

I don’t think that arenas further eastward around China, Russia, Central Asia, South Asia are going to be anywhere near as passive and corrupt as you’ve seen in the Islamic states. You can see that they are working very rapidly to create an alternative in which the Islamic countries basically have no interest at all in joining. They’re trying to play it both ways, just as Turkey is trying to say, ‘Well, we’re going to be part of NATO but at the same time going to be part of BRICS.’ As the Chinese say, a man who tries to take two roads at once is going to have a broken hip joint. That’s basically what we have there.

So, if the United States cannot even admit Palestine as a member, what will it do? It was the United Nations that created Israel and it itself bears the responsibility for recognizing Israel and endorsing its explicit aim of genocide against Palestinians from the new settler countries.

In 1948, the United Nations accepted the settler state, even as the Stern Gang was killing all the Palestinians to let its Zionist followers come in, and the United Nations was powerless to stop it. And the United Nations is powerless to act in the very way it’s constructed, with a Security Council that can be blocked by the United States, and where you can have votes to condemn Israel by the only two countries opposing the United States, Israel and a few Pacific Island countries. The whole rest of the world is against them and cannot do anything.

It’s obvious that if there is going to be any way of preventing what we’re describing, this attack on civilization, there has to be a new alternative to the United Nations, and that alternative has to have a military enforcement arm of international law, and it has to realize that this is an existential issue that requires its own ideological doctrine to be spelled out, what the principles are and how these principles are going to be defended. I don’t see any sign of that happening right now.

United Nations officials tend to paper over this problem by expressing the fantasy that somehow, ‘well, we really want a two-state solution but we’re not going to recognize Palestine and we’re not going to do anything at all about Israel’s genocide. We’re not going to order the arrest. We’re not going to isolate Israel. We’re going to let trade with Israel. We’re going to accept Israel genocide because it has its own freedom to do whatever it wants.’ So, the United Nations has essentially become an arm of the U.S. State Department and military, and that’s an impossible way to survive if there’s going to be an alternative to the U.S. kind of order that we’ve been talking about.

President Netanyahu claims that the essence of Judaism itself is to exterminate the non-Jewish population there and he says it to protest against genocide. To claim that the Palestinians are people and should not be killed is anti-Semitic because Israel is a Jewish state and its settlers may suffer retaliation if, as they kill the indigenous population, and because they’ve killed so many Palestinians, it’s only natural that the Palestinians and Arabs would want to fight back.

And it’s that reality that they want to defend themselves that, as you’ve just said, is an existential threat to Israel. And so, any country that fights back against the attacks by the bombs of the United States (they’re the United States’ bombs that Israel is dropping) is anti-Semitic. Germany and the United States then pass laws that any support of the Palestinians, any claim that they are human beings, any demonstrations on campus, any political demonstrations are legally breaking the law.

That’s what’s so contemptible, certainly about Germany, but also about the United States and the other NATO nations. We’re talking about an ideology that is anti-civilizational in principle. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because the wheel was basically already invented, in many ways, after the Thirty Years’ War. That became, I think, the basis for German philosophy and the whole European philosophy of law. They’re trying to reinvent it, but international law needs a means of enforcement. As long as you have the United Nations subject to veto power, you can’t do anything.

So, the principles of the United Nations are pretty clear. The principles, the aims should be similar to those of 1648, aiming to end the opportunities by America’s neo-liberal inquisition to interfere with the policies of other nations. The nation of Georgia has recently made a positive start in all of this. They’ve closed down the NGOs that are being financed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. That is fascism to promote regime change, and to meddle in the internal politics of countries in the hope of creating a local Boris Yeltsin or Zelensky or a Shah. The National Endowment for Democracy wants to make Georgia into another Ukraine fighting to the last Georgian, if they can put in some U.S. puppet to go to war with Russia.

So, here’s the problem that has to be addressed. The West has to go beyond the idea of a clash of civilizations. It’s going beyond this idea of a clash of civilization, it wants to be the only civilization left, in fact. But it’s uncivilized. So its ideology of destroying countries moving to resist its political and economic conquest is the opposition of civilization. It’s barbarism.

So, instead of having a clash of civilization for nations, as in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we’re experiencing a war against civilization itself, and the great question is whether the global majority of civilization is going to realize how truly existential America’s fight to reverse the principles of civilization is for these other countries. And the most immediate short-term test is going to be America’s sponsorship of Israel’s fight against Iran, I think.

What appeared in the 1990s to be the end of civilization is a war of survival for countries seeking to withdraw from the U.S.-NATO orbit and this U.S.-Israeli-Ukrainian policy of dehumanizing the enemy is a military tactic going way back to biblical times, as we’ve discussed – what Israel calls Amalek and U.S. diplomacy calls Autocracy or Socialism.

Russia’s President Putin regrets now how gullible he was in believing that the West would somehow act in a way to avoid war in Ukraine because that was in the West’s interest. It was in Europe’s interest to import Russian oil because that was the basis of its industry and yet it didn’t do that. U.S. officials never had any intention of keeping their promise not to expand NATO eastward.

Likewise, Iran’s newly elected president regrets how gullible he was in believing that if Iran refrained from defending its country against Israel bombing and assassinating its officials, the West would remove, or at least lighten, the trade and financial sanctions against Iran. That didn’t happen so now he’s hardened his position. So, the big question is, where does this leave Chinese foreign policy – since America says China is America’s existential enemy – based on offering a win-win agreement that would benefit both countries for international gain?

But the U.S. leaders have no intention in that kind of policy because it doesn’t want anyone else to have the gains that are to be made from technological and economic progress. They have only one goal: unipolar control of the entire planet and its governments, its economies, its natural resources, its land, and its water. As in a religious war, they’re willing to die for the ideal and to bring all the world down in an atomic war if they fail. That’s what’s being threatened in Ukraine today, and in Israel and Iran this week.

RICHARD WOLFF: One of the questions that a lot of people have about all of this is why governments, particularly in Europe, but also governments elsewhere, remain – most of them – unwilling to challenge what the United States is doing. You have the Houthis – they do – but they’re not even a government. They are a part of Yemen.

Yemen is one thing and the Houthis are a community within Yemen. But you have to look long and far, where else you get people willing to do stuff. I understand, much is done – hidden – that we don’t know about, or we can’t measure, or we can’t see. So, I want to address if I can, in the time we have, why it would be that Olaf Scholz in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron in France, or the E.U. leadership, and on and on and on and on, are willing – as Michael correctly says, and as many have pointed out – to go along with the United States in Ukraine.

And I mean go along: condemn Russia as the total evil here, supply weapons, supply money, all the rest of it, to the Ukrainians; why they basically go along with Israel in the Middle East, some more, some less, I understand, but why are they doing it? And then people ask, well, why would Sweden and Finland join NATO? Why is that happening? Why, even when Germany is in recession? I believe last quarter, and this quarter they came in below zero in GDP growth, so that qualifies (two quarters in a row below zero, you’re in an official recession, at least by the usual standard of that measure).

So here’s my answer. For the last 75 years of United States dominance coming out of World War II, any government that the United States found in power anywhere in the world, but particularly in Europe, that wasn’t aligned with American objectives was considered unacceptable. In the beginning, for example, coming out of World War II – just to remind people since the history of this is so poorly known – the first post-World War II government in France had several members of the French Communist Party in the cabinet of Charles de Gaulle. Okay.

That meant that the United States had to deal with a government of France, a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, which had a Communist Party (which at that time was very pro-Soviet), sitting in the cabinet. The second largest political party for 20 years after World War II was over in Italy, the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party outside of Russia anywhere in the world. So, you developed in Europe, in places like Germany, France, Italy, everywhere, even Britain, you had a version of what in the United States was called McCarthyism. It wasn’t as bad as the United States. You couldn’t do to the Communist and Socialist Parties there what you were able to do in the United States.

That’s because of particular historical cultural differences between them. But you were able to shut them down. What you were able to do was to create a situation in which the heights of political power, the dominant role in the major political parties, was people who were acceptable to the United States. And this became so routine and so normal that you didn’t have to impose it anymore from the outside. It was understood inside. People who sided with the United States saw their careers much more smoothly upward bound than people who had the temerity not to go in that direction. And there’s one after another in every one of these countries that learned that. So now we get to the present.

What you have are dominant political structures overwhelmingly populated by people who have decided, from their own experience, that going with the United States is the way to go, and going against the United States is a recipe for defeat and for decline, for disaster. They’re not unaware of what the Russians and the Chinese are doing, but they’re not yet convinced that the United States won’t be able to impose on those others what they have so successfully imposed on the Europeans. Olaf Scholz can’t think outside that box, neither can Mr. Macron, neither can Jens Stoltenberg, or Josep Borrell, or any of the other leading figures in European politics. And that’s true from Scandinavia to Greece, and from England to the Central European countries. That’s how they see the world.

The effort of the Soviet Union, let’s remember, was shown not to be up to the task by the reversals of 1989, 1990, 1991, and the place where that hasn’t happened – the far east – is far away from Europe. So, here’s what’s going on. The European leadership has decided to go with the United States – that’s the horse they’re betting on to win the race because it always has – but they are very worried, more now than ever, that they may have bet on the wrong horse. Right below the surface in European politics is a movement, partly on the right – that’s the rise of all the quasi-fascists, you know, the government in Italy, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France – but also on the left with the arrival of Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, very clear on her position against the war in Ukraine; Jean-Luc Mélanchon in France, who now is the head of the largest political party in the French Assemblée Nationale, is a Marxist. So is Sarah Wagenknecht on the left, they have been Marxists all of their political lives, and they’re known as such in their countries, very clearly.

Okay. I think you’re going to see, very disturbing to the United States in the months and years ahead, you’re going to see eruptions of difference. You’re going to see emergence of more governments like those of Mr. Orbán on the right in Hungary, the Czech government, and others, that are going to be even less and less sure.

That’s why the United States is desperate. That’s part of why Israel is desperate. They are now convinced that time is not on their side. They’re frightened. They won’t say so, and they’re right to be frightened, because their allies in Europe – the ones they still count on even though they’re disrespectful of them, but they’re convinced they need them – and they do.

It’s very important people understand: Europe is in a terrible, terrible situation and the Europeans kind of know it. They’re caught between the United States and China. It’s not clear what place for Europe will emerge in this new BRICS versus G7. In the G7, Europe is a footnote. In the G7 versus China, Europe is even more of a footnote.
Europe is not used to being a footnote.

Europe is used to being in charge. They have a hard row to hoe, how to manage all of this. It’s going to be tumult, it’s going to be turmoil inside Europe now for a long time, and it’s going to be rough and difficult. And one of the things that may emerge is an attempt, either to make a real third player in the world out of Europe – with its own army, its own nuclear, its own ‘all that’ – or to join with BRICS and China and go after a multipolarity in which the Europeans, by getting in on it, have a place they won’t have if they don’t get in on it.

These are real existential conditions that are going to be fought out over the next period, and the horror of much of it is that – and here I want to take off my hat to you, Nima, for making these conversations happen – this is what has to be talked about. If you believe, à la Aristotle and Plato, that the unexamined life is not worth living; if you think it’s better to understand what’s happening to you than not to; to want to know the good, the bad, the risks, the hopes; then these are the conversations that have to happen, and the mainstream media keeps as far away from them as it is possible to be.

People like you, and these programs, are therefore crucial. It’s not a question about agreeing with what I say, or with what Michael says, it’s not. It’s important to have these questions opened up, to have to contend with the history that Michael reviewed with us and for us today; to have to contend with what that points to, rather than living in a make-believe world in which a clash of civilizations is going on, so you don’t have to face the real issues that are going to shape what happens to us all.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, President Putin said a few months ago that someday Russia and Germany and Europe will trade again, but it may take 30 years.

RICHARD WOLFF: It might. Here’s my guess: From the little I know (and it isn’t much) but I speak German, I read German, you know, so I’m able to access what goes on in that country. I can assure you, whatever else, it will be less than 30 years. Inside Germany is an enormous conversation and debate going on about these issues, with much more blunt honesty than we imagine here in the United States. Just like you have to say inside Israel, there’s more opposition to what Netanyahu is doing than we have allowed here in the United States.

The irony: they have a newspaper, they had access, they can actually have (I’m not saying it’s adequate and I’m not denying what Israel is basically doing not for a minute), but there is an opposition that the Israelis have mounted to the policy of their government. We shouldn’t forget that, and that these political winds can change. Israel is not (let me say this to my American audience) winning in Gaza, is not winning in Lebanon. It may win.

I’m open, I understand, but not yet. And, wow, you know, a year into Hamas, and there’s still a Hamas? After what you’ve done? That’s amazing! I ask my fellow Americans if, in this country, one of our 50 states was subjected to the kind of destruction that Israel has done in Gaza, would there be a strong resistance? Don’t answer so quickly because the truth is we don’t know.

In Israel, we do know. There is a Hamas; they’re still fighting back. That’s amazing, and in the long run, that’s going to be just as important as it turned out after the end of World War II, when we all learned about the Norwegian resistance and the French resistance and the Italian partisans, turned out that there were opponents to the Nazis in every country, including Germany.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I do write a monthly column for the German financial press auf deutsch. So you’re right, there is a resistance.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: I don’t know if you’ve learned that CNN reported that Joe Biden is going to be in Germany to receive Germany’s highest award.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, we see that’s Mr. Scholz trying to play ‘We are on your side, don’t worry, we are loyal, you help me get here, so I’m going to help you get there’. Absolutely. By the way, same relationship between Biden and Netanyahu.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us today, Richard and Michael. See you soon.

Probably the most famous actor and theater man in Germany, Dieter #Hallervorden, has unexpectedly clearly, albeit in subtle lyrics, sided with the people bombed in the #Gaza Strip. The video shows harsh images with a sensitive song, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for a peaceful future for Israel.

According to the Book of Judges, Samson is a Jew consecrated to God. He has vowed never to cut his hair and has fabulous strength. However, his mistress, Delilah, cuts off his braids while he sleeps, depriving him of God’s help and strength. He was taken prisoner by the Philistines, who gouged out his eyes and threw him into prison in Gaza. During a sacrifice to their god, when his hair had begun to grow back, he was placed between two columns in the palace. With his bare hands, he pushed them apart, causing the palace to collapse. He committed suicide, killing several thousand Philistines in the process.

The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have led several leading politicians to compare the current period with the 1930s, and to raise the possibility of a World War. Are these fears justified, or are they just fear-mongering?

To answer this question, we’re going to summarize events that are unknown to everyone, though well known to specialists. We shall do so dispassionately, at the risk of appearing indifferent to these horrors.

First, let’s distinguish between the conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They have only two things in common:

• They represent no significant stakes in themselves, but a defeat for the West, which, after its defeat in Syria, would mark the end of its hegemony over the world.
• They are fueled by a fascist ideology, that of Dmytro Dontsov’s Ukrainian "integral nationalists" [1] and that of Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Israeli "revisionist Zionists" [2]; two groups that have been allies since 1917, but went underground during the Cold War and are unknown to the general public today.

There is, however, one notable difference between them:

The same fury is visible on both battlefields, but the "integral nationalists" sacrifice their own fellow citizens (there are hardly any able-bodied men under thirty left in the Ukraine), while the "revisionist Zionists" sacrifice people who are foreign to them, Arab civilians.

Is there a risk that these wars will become more widespread?

This is the will of both groups. The "integral nationalists" are constantly attacking Russia inside its territory and in Sudan, while the "revisionist Zionists" are bombing Lebanon, Syria and Iran (more precisely, Iranian territory in Syria, since the Damascus consulate is extra-territorialized). But no one responds: not Russia, Egypt or the Emirates in the first case, nor Hezbollah, the Syrian Arab Army or the Revolutionary Guards in the second.

All of them, including Russia, anxious to avoid a brutal retaliation from the "collective West" that would lead to a World War, prefer to take the blows and accept their deaths.

If war were to become widespread, it would no longer be simply conventional, but above all nuclear.

While we all know each other’s conventional capabilities, we are largely unaware of each other’s nuclear capabilities. The most we know is that only the USA used strategic nuclear bombs during the Second World War, and that Russia claims to have hypersonic nuclear launchers with which no other power can compete. However, some Western experts question the reality of these prodigious technical advances. Behind the scenes, what is the strategy of the nuclear powers?

In addition to the five permanent members of the Security Council, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel have strategic atomic bombs. All except Israel see them as a means of deterrence.

The Western media also present Iran as a nuclear power, which Russia and China officially deny.

During the Yemen war, Saudi Arabia bought tactical nuclear bombs from Israel and used them, but it does not seem to have them permanently at its disposal, nor to have mastered the technique.

Only Russia regularly conducts Nuclear War exercises. During last October’s exercises, Russia admitted to losing a third of its population in the space of a few hours, then simulated combat and emerged victorious.

Ultimately, all the nuclear powers have no intention of firing first, as this would undoubtedly lead to their destruction. The exception is Israel, which seems to have adopted the "Sanson doctrine" ("Let me die with the Philistines"). It would thus be the only power to imagine the ultimate sacrifice, the "Twilight of the Gods", dear to the Nazis.

Two critical works have been devoted to the Israeli military atom: The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Seymour M. Hersh (Random House, 1991) and Israel and the Bomb by Avner Cohen (Columbia University Press, 1998).

The military atom was never envisaged as a classic form of deterrence, but as an assurance that Israel would not hesitate to commit suicide to kill its enemies rather than be defeated. This is the Masada complex [3]. This way of thinking is in line with the "Hannibal Directive", according to which the IDF must kill its own soldiers rather than let them become prisoners of the enemy [4].

During the Six-Day War, the Israeli Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Levi Eshkol, ordered one of the two bombs Israel had at its disposal at the time to be prepared and detonated near an Egyptian military base on Mount Sinai. This plan was not carried out, as the IDF quickly won the conventional war. Had it gone ahead, the fallout would have killed not only Egyptians, but Israelis too [5].

During the October 1973 war (known in the West as the "Yom Kippur War"), the Defense Minister, the Ukrainian-born Israeli Moshe Dayan, and the Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Golda Meir, again considered the use of 13 atomic bombs [6].

Mordechai Vanunu’s revelations on the front page of the Sunday Times.

In 1986, a nuclear technician from the Dimona power plant, the Moroccan Mordechai Vanunu, revealed Israel’s secret military nuclear program to the Sunday Times [7]. He was kidnapped by Mossad in Rome, on the orders of the Israeli Prime Minister and father of the atomic bomb, Shimon Peres of Belarus. He was tried in camera and sentenced to 18 years in prison, 11 of which were spent in total isolation. He was again sentenced to 6 months’ imprisonment for daring to speak to the Voltaire Network.

In 2009, Martin van Creveld, Israel’s chief strategist, declared: "We have several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can reach our targets in all directions, even Rome. Most European capitals are potential targets for our air force (...) The Palestinians must all be expelled. The people fighting for this goal are simply waiting for "the right person at the right time" to come along. Only two years ago, 7 or 8% of Israelis thought this would be the best solution, two months ago it was 33%, and now, according to a Gallup Poll, the figure is 44% in favor.

So it’s reasonable to assume that no nuclear power, except Israel, will dare commit the irreparable.

This is precisely what Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu (Otzma Yehudit/Jewish Force) envisaged on Radio Kol Berama on November 5. Referring to atomic weapons against Gaza, he declared: "It’s a solution... it’s an option". He then compared the residents of the Gaza Strip to "Nazis", assuring that "there are no non-combatants in Gaza" and that this territory does not deserve humanitarian aid. "There are no uninvolved people in Gaza".

These remarks provoked indignation in the West. Only Moscow was surprised that the International Atomic Energy Agency did not take up the matter [8].

It is very likely that this is the reason why Washington continues to arm Israel, even though it is calling for an immediate ceasefire: if the United States no longer supplies Tel Aviv with weapons to massacre the Gazans, the latter could use nuclear weapons against all the peoples of the region, including the Israelis.

In Ukraine, the "integral nationalists" planned to blackmail the United States with the same argument: the threat of nuclear or, failing that, biological weapons [9]. In 1994, Ukraine, which had a vast stockpile of Soviet atomic bombs, signed the Budapest Memorandum. The United States, the United Kingdom and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for the transfer of all its nuclear weapons to Russia and signature of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). However, after the overthrow of elected president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 (EuroMaidan), the "integral nationalists" worked to re-nuclearize the country, which they saw as essential to eradicating Russia from the face of the earth.

On February 19, 2022, Ukrainian President Voloymyr Zelensky announced at the annual Munich Security Conference that he would challenge the Budapest Memorandum in order to rearm his country with nuclear weapons. Five days later, on February 24, 2022, Russia launched its special operation against the Kiev government to implement Resolution 2202. Its top priority was to seize Ukraine’s secret and illegal reserves of enriched uranium. After eight days of fighting, the civilian nuclear power plant at Zaporijjia was occupied by the Russian army.

Laurence Norman, the Wall Street Journal’s special envoy to the Davos forum on the Iranian nuclear issue, reported Rafael Grossi’s statement on the Ukrainian nuclear issue on Twitter, but did not publish an article on the subject. The information was confirmed by another journalist, this time from the New York Times, also on Twitter.

According to Argentina’s Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who spoke three months later on May 25 at the Davos Forum, Ukraine had secretly stored 30 tons of plutonium and 40 tons of uranium at Zaporijjia. At market prices, this stockpile was worth at least $150 billion. Russian President Vladimir Putin declared: "The only thing [Ukraine] lacks is a uranium enrichment system. But that’s a technical question, and for Ukraine it’s not an insoluble problem". However, his army had already removed a large part of this stock from the plant. Fighting continued for months. If the integral nationalists had still had them, they would have done what the "revisionist Zionists" are doing today: they would have demanded more and more weapons and, if refused, threatened to use them, i.e. to launch Armageddon.

Back to today’s battlefields. What are we seeing? In Ukraine and Palestine, the West continues to provide the "integral nationalists" and, to a lesser extent, the "revisionist Zionists" with an impressive arsenal. However, they have no reasonable hope of getting the Russians to back down, or of massacring all the Gazans. At worst, they can lead their allies to empty their arsenals, sacrifice all Ukrainians of fighting age and diplomatically isolate the puppet-state of Israel. As Moshe Dayan once said, "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to control".

Let’s imagine that these apparently catastrophic consequences are in fact their goal.

The world would then be divided in two, as it was during the Cold War, except that Israel would have become uninviting. In the West, the Anglo-Saxons would still be the masters, especially as they would be the only ones with weapons, their allies having exhausted theirs in Ukraine. Israel, isolated as it was in the late 70s and early 80s when it was only really recognized by the apartheid regime of South Africa, would still be fulfilling the mission it was originally entrusted with: to mobilize the Jewish diaspora in the service of the Empire, fearing a new wave of anti-Semitism.

This bleak vision is the only one that can keep the Anglo-Saxons from collapsing, and ensure that they will always have vassals, even if this will bear little relation to their power in the days of the "global world". This is why they have placed themselves in the current inextricable situation. The "integral nationalists" and "revisionist Zionists" are blackmailing them, but they intend to manipulate them to divide the world in two and preserve what they can of their supremacy.

Mainstream Western journalists are just as guilty as the henchmen who did this. #GazaHolocaust pic.twitter.com/W0WlFl4ADK

— Seyed Mohammad Marandi (@s_m_marandi) March 11, 2024

Merch 10, 2024, RT.com

*(blog title updated from original published; blog version slightly longer)

-Eva Karene Bartlett

Following the February 29 Israeli slaughter of at least 115 starving Palestinians lined up for food aid, there was little or no outrage by the same Western media which would have howled if the perpetrator were Russia or Syria.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, early morning on Thursday, February 29, Israeli forces opened fire on unarmed Palestinians waiting just southwest of Gaza City for desperately needed food aid. As a result, at least 115 civilians were killed and over 750 wounded.

Popular US commenter Judge Andrew Napolitano said in a recent interview with award-winning analyst Professor Jeffery Sachs, “Innocent Gaza civilians were lined up to receive flour and water from an aid truck, and more than 100 were slaughtered, mowed down, by Israeli troops. This has got to be one of the most reprehensible and public slaughterings that they’ve engaged in.”

The official Israeli version of events, unsurprisingly, puts the blame on the Palestinians themselves. The deaths and injuries were supposedly caused by a stampede, and the Israeli soldiers only fired when they felt they were endangered by the crowd. The BBC even cited one army lieutenant as saying that troops had “cautiously [tried] to disperse the mob with a few warning shots.” Mark Regev, a special adviser to the Israeli prime minister, went as far as to tell CNN that Israeli troops had not been involved directly in any way and that the gunfire had come from “Palestinian armed groups.”

Testimonies from survivors and doctors tell a different story, though, saying the majority of those treated after the incident had been shot by Israeli forces. Legacy media reports, however, use characteristically neutral wording when evidence starts to stack up against Israel. “112 dead in chaotic scenes as Israeli troops open fire near aid trucks, say Gaza officials,” a Guardian headline reads. Palestinians always seem to just “die,” not get killed, and Israeli troops seem to have just “opened fire” nearby. The skewed wording conventions persist even despite the attribution to Palestinian officials present in that same headline – officials like the Palestinian Foreign Ministry, which was quite clear in accusing Israel of perpetrating a ”massacre” as part of a “genocidal war.”

“Chaos” and “die” in the headline. Israel’s denial (lies) in the sub-heading. A lesson in how to both report on and deny a cold-blooded massacre simultaneously: https://t.co/rzWeLX0Mrt

— Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) March 1, 2024

The article does eventually cite the acting Director of al-Awda hospital as saying most of the 161 casualties treated appeared to have been shot. The confusing headline was likely intentional, counting on most people not bothering to read the article in full.

In a report published on March 3, Euro-Med stated members of its field team were present at the time of the incident and “documented Israeli tanks firing heavily towards Palestinian civilians while trying to receive humanitarian aid.” The report goes on to cite Dr Jadallah Al-Shafi’i, head of nursing at Shifa, Gaza’s main hospital, saying, “paramedics and rescue workers were among the victims,” and that at Shifa “they observed dozens of dead and injured, hit by Israeli gunfire.”

The report also cites Dr Amjad Aliwa, an emergency specialist at Shifa who was also on site when Israel opened fire. According to Aliwa, the Israeli fire began, “as soon as the trucks arrived on Thursday at 4 am”

But the February 29 massacre, tragic as it is, is only a part of the current stage of Israel’s war on Gaza: the deliberate starvation of Palestinians. And like the massacre itself, the whole issue is being subjected to the hands-off wording treatment by establishment media.

Fadi Al-Zalat, a six-year-old Palestinian child, is currently battling malnutrition and dehydration at Kamal Adwan Hospital, a consequence of the Israeli blockade in northern Gaza. pic.twitter.com/PGL0psGDsi

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 11, 2024

On February 29, the New York Times published an article whose headline, “Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children,” suggests starvation is a mysterious malicious force with a will of its own, skirting the mention of the Israeli siege as its obvious cause.

Again, as with the Guardian article, a few paragraphs in, the NYT piece does state that the “hunger is a man-made catastrophe,” describing how Israeli forces prevent food delivery and how Israeli bombardments make aid distribution dangerous.

It mentions the hunger, “is caused but also partly hidden by a pitiless war that has obliterated hospitals, flooded morgues and damaged communication networks, leaving us to cobble together what’s happening from scraps of information.”

The pitiless Israeli war on Gaza has been documented live since October 7. Cobbling scraps of information is not necessary; Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been done with the whole world watching.

As Professor Sachs stated, ”…Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. Starved! I’m not using an exaggeration, I’m talking literally starving a population. Israel is a criminal, is in non-stop, war crime, status now. I believe in genocidal status.”

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the February 29 massacre was not the first such incident, and likely not the last. A thread on Twitter/X outlines this, noting, ”Before yesterday’s “Flour Massacre”, the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!”

Before yesterday's "Flour Massacre", the IDF has been shooting indiscriminately for WEEKS at starved Gazans awaiting aid trucks at the exact same spot, virtually every single day!

A 🧵of some of these incidents:

Feb 28: IDF soldiers take potshots at famished desperate Gazans pic.twitter.com/8dOztIzvdk

— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) March 1, 2024

The thread (warning: graphic images!), compiled by Gazan analyst and Euro-Med chief of communications Muhammad Shehada, gives examples of Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinians every single day in the week prior to February 29.

The final post in the thread, referencing February 18, shows a Palestinian man splayed on the ground, “shot in the head by the IDF at the Rasheed street as he came looking for food.”

You can bet that, were these Syrian or Russian soldiers firing on starving civilians, the outrage would be front page, 24/7, for weeks. Scratch that, they wouldn’t even have to do it – just a hint of an accusation would have been enough to get the presses going.

Starvation in Syria was a media trope

The NYT article mentioned above notes that “Reports of death by starvation are difficult to verify from a distance.” But ‘verifying from a distance’ is precisely what the NYT and other Western media did repeatedly in Syria over the years.

In areas occupied by (then) al-Nusra, Jaysh al-Islam, and the other extremist terrorist gangs which the West and corporate media dubbed “rebels,” food aid was always taken by the respective terrorists and withheld from the civilian population, causing starvation in some districts. Madaya, to the west of Damascus, eastern Aleppo, and later eastern Ghouta were districts most loudly campaigned over in legacy media, providing covering fire for the broader US-led campaign to overthrow the Syria government.

Palestinians are starving to death, preventable starvation orchestrated by the genocidal Israeli regime & enabled by the majority of Western states.

Western media was outraged over starvation in Madaya, which media blamed on the Syrian government…https://t.co/K0VNG40xUP https://t.co/epKQhfi667

— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) January 26, 2024

Backing the claims that the government was starving civilians were mostly “unnamed activists” or activists whose allegiance to Nusra, or even ISIS, was very overt.

As I would see and hear whenever one of these regions was liberated, ample food and medicine had been sent in, but civilians never saw it. Time and again, in eastern Aleppo, Madaya, al-Waer, eastern Ghouta, to name key areas, civilians complained that terrorist factions hoarded food and medicine, and if they sold it to the population, it was at extortionist prices people couldn’t afford.

In the old city of Homs in 2014, back then dubbed by legacy media as the “capital of the revolution,” starved residents I met told me the West’s precious “rebels” had stolen every morsel of food from them, stealing anything of value as well.

Yet, media headlines about these regions screamed about starvation, outright blaming the Syrian government, and were accompanied by disturbing images of emaciated civilians (some of which were not even from Syria) meant to evoke strong emotions among readers and viewers. The same media largely opts not to show you gaunt, starving, Palestinians in Gaza.

(it wasn't the government which caused the starvation, the govt sent aid into Madaya, it was the West's terrorists within Madaya who hoarded food).

Media were SO outraged..& used photos from places outside of Syria to claim it was in Madaya.https://t.co/GMnh6pDjB0

— Eva Karene Bartlett (@EvaKBartlett) January 26, 2024

Tellingly, Syrian towns surrounded by terrorist forces, besieged, bombed, sniped and starved, got virtually no media coverage. It didn’t fit NATO’s narrative of “rebels”\=good, Assad=bad.

But in Gaza the world watches in real time as Palestinians die from the ongoing, preventable, starvation.

*Source

Open the borders

Some days ago, the CEO of Medical aid for Palestinians, Melanie Ward, in an interview with CNN, named Israel as the cause of starvation in Gaza.

“It’s very simple: it’s because the Israeli military won’t let it in. We could end this starvation tomorrow very simply if they would just let us have access to people there. But it’s not being allowed. This is what they said [on October 9], ‘Nothing will go in’,” Ward said.

"This is the fastest decline in a population's nutrition status ever recorded. That means children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen."@melanie_ward speaks with @IsaCNN about the catastrophic levels of hunger that Israel's blockade is causing in Gaza pic.twitter.com/FthwccFEBG

— Medical Aid for Palestinians (@MedicalAidPal) February 29, 2024

She described the starvation as “the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded. What that means is that children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen. And we could finish it tomorrow, we could save them all. But we’re not being able to.”

This is echoed by UNICEF. The press-release for its February 2024 report notes that 15.6 % (one in six children) under two years of age are “acutely malnourished” in Gaza’s north. “Of these, almost 3% suffer from severe wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition, which puts young children at highest risk of medical complications and death unless they receive urgent treatment,” UNICEF notes.

Even worse, “since the data were collected in January, the situation is likely to be even graver today,” UNICEF warns, likewise noting the rapid increase of malnutrition is “dangerous and entirely preventable.”

Professor Sachs made an important point: “This will stop when the United States stops providing the munitions to Israel. It will not stop by any self control in Israel, there is none…They believe in ethnic cleansing or worse. And it is the United States which is the sole support…that is not stopping this slaughter.”

Air-dropping paltry amounts of food aid into Gaza is not the answer. It both legitimizes Israel’s deliberate starvation of Gaza and also makes those Palestinians who run toward the aid sitting ducks for the Israeli army to maim or kill. The only solution is to immediately open the borders and allow in the hundreds of aid trucks parked in Egypt. And end the Israeli bombardment of Gaza.

The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that the death toll of the Israeli aggression has reached 31,045, with 72,654 injuries since October 7 last year. pic.twitter.com/JXDIDEtha5

— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) March 10, 2024

Mike Pompeo, the former US secretary of state, visited Israel in February 2024, a few months after leaving office. He came to show his solidarity with Israel during its war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and to praise its rescue of two hostages from Gaza. He also met with senior Israeli officials and military commanders to discuss the security situation and the US-backed plan to annex parts of the West Bank

Pompeo is a staunch supporter of Israel and its right to defend itself. He played a key role in the Trump administration’s policies that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and rejected the notion that the settlements in the West Bank are illegal. He also helped broker four Arab-Israeli peace deals known as the Abraham Accords.

“I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do,” Refaat Alareer vowed in one of his final interviews.

My friend Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israeli invaders in Shujaiya, east of Gaza City, on December 6. He is now among the more than 16,000 civilians killed by Israel in the besieged enclave since October 7.

Our correspondence continued off-and-on for the past nine years. In our final exchange, on November 27, as the bombing grew closer to his home, he told me, “Everything is running out. Food. Water. Cooking gas. Israel is bombing all sources of life. Solar panels, water tanks and pipes. Not one bakery is functioning.” 

Refaat was an author and educator who taught English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, which has been completely destroyed. “Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” he explained to me. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

In one of his last public interviews, with Electronic Intifada, Refaat vowed that, if necessary, he would die by the same pen by which he lived: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”

Refaat was a model of the resistance which Israel and its patrons aim to destroy. I tell his story in the passages below, which are excerpted from my 2015 book, The 51 Day War: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.

The Teacher

Just a few months before I traveled to Gaza to cover the 51 Day War, I was dining with the literature professor Refaat Alareer, who usually lives in Gaza City, at an upscale Italian restaurant in Berkeley, California. We had been invited there by the Lannan Foundation, a Santa Fe, New Mexico–based foundation that supports a mix of artistic endeavors and progressive political causes. I had just delivered a talk on my book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, in San Francisco, beside the Palestinian-American author and journalist Ali Abunimah. For his part, Refaat had been touring the US with a group of Palestinian authors from Gaza to promote the compilation of essays he had edited, Gaza Writes Back.

We had followed closely on each other’s heels throughout our book tours that spring. When I spoke at Western Washington University, a picturesque campus on the US border with Canada, I was peppered with questions by a Jewish-American undergrad who seemed to have never encountered a critical analysis of Israel and Zionism. A week later, I learned from Refaat that the student had cried openly as he and two other young writers from Gaza, Yousef Aljamal and Rawan Yaghi, described growing up under siege to the campus audience.

By the time we gathered at the long dining table in downtown Berkeley, everyone seemed to be struggling with varying levels exhaustion and bewilderment from our long cross-country tours. I felt slightly uncomfortable seated beside three young people on a brief furlough from the Gaza ghetto before white tablecloths spread with crystal goblets of Merlot and smooth wooden boards of artisanal cheeses. But I quickly forgot my discomfort as I fell into conversation with Refaat.

We spent the next hour chatting about his impressions of the vast and blindingly colorful country he had just barnstormed across. The American landscape had offered Refaat the chance to meet Jews who did not greet him from behind the barrel of an M-16, from inside the cockpit of an F-16, from the turret of a Merkava tank, or behind an occupation administrator’s desk. Refaat described it as his “Malcolm X moment.”

“When Malcolm X was in prison, his sister told him, ‘Elijah Muhammad said Islam is the true religion of black people and the white man is the Devil.’ He thought of every white person he had ever met in his life and realized that he had been harmed in one way or another by every one of them,” Refaat explained. “This is what’s happening to us in Palestine, because you never come face-to-face with a Jewish person who’s not armed to the teeth trying to kill you. And that makes it very hard to break with your prejudice.”

It was not until Refaat visited the United States that he came face-to-face with a Jew who sympathized with his plight as a Palestinian. “When you talk to Jewish people about their lives, they host you in their homes, you spend time with their families, they can educate you in ways beyond imagination because they know about Israel, about Jewish life, about Zionism,” he marveled. “You learn so much because they are insiders. It was the tour to America that changed me in so many ways.”

Even as it stimulated his imagination and broadened his perspective, Refaat’s trip to the US summoned pangs of regret. Like any other Palestinian academic, the occupation had cost him countless opportunities to study abroad and form relationships with his intellectual counterparts. In 2005, Israeli authorities refused to allow him to complete his master’s degree in the UK. He lost an entire year of his studies along with his scholarship. Over the following two years, the Israelis refused to allow him to leave Gaza on ten separate occasions. He remembered telling them, “If you have something against me, just put me in prison!”

When Refaat finally managed to secure permission to travel to the US in 2014, Sarah Ali, a twenty-two-year-old English literature student and teaching assistant at Islamic University who had contributed to Gaza Writes Back, was refused a permit to join him on the book tour. Thus, at events around the country, Refaat and his fellow Gaza writers, Yousef and Rawan, delivered lectures next to a chair with a cardboard cutout that read: “Sarah Ali Should Be Here.”

“Israel wants us to be closed, isolated—to push us to the extreme,” Refaat reflected. “It doesn’t want us to be educated. It doesn’t want us to see ourselves as part of a universal struggle against oppression. They don’t want us to be educated or to be educators.”

When Refaat returned to Gaza from the US, he redoubled his efforts to educate Gaza youth out of the narrow prejudices spawned in the seedbed of siege and occupation. At Islamic University, the conservative higher education institution co-founded by the assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1978, Refaat introduced his students to Hebrew literature. Among the Jewish Israeli writers he assigned them was Yehuda Amichai, the legendary poet whose famed work, “God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children,” tells of short lives consumed in war and punctuated by intimate encounters with violence. The poem’s opening stanzas resonated easily with Refaat’s students:

God has pity on kindergarten children,
He pities school children — less.
But adults he pities not at all.
He abandons them,
And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours
In the scorching sand
To reach the dressing station,
Streaming with blood.

Refaat also assigned his students The Merchant of Venice. He encouraged the class to view Shylock, Shakespeare’s Orientalized, avaricious Jewish character, as a sympathetic figure who was struggling to retain a modicum of dignity under an apartheid-like regime.

When his students completed the play, Refaat asked them which Shakespearean character they sympathized with more: Othello, the Venetian general of Arab origin, or Shylock, the Jew. He described their response as the most emotional moment of his six-year teaching career: One by one, his students declared an almost visceral identification with Shylock.

In her final paper, one of the Refaat’s students reworked Shylock’s famous cri de coeur into an appeal to the conscience of her own oppressors:

Hath not a Palestinian eyes? Hath not a Palestinian hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means,
warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer
as a Christian or a Jew is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us,
do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

Refaat stored his students’ papers in his desk at Islamic University’s English Department like small treasures. Then, on August 2, the Israeli military bombed his department along with the university’s administrative offices, sending those papers up in flames. The office where students met him during office hours was pulverized and the student library next door was decimated. When Israeli army spokesman Peter Lerner claimed that the air force had targeted a “weapons development center” in the school, Refaat’s students responded with a wave of jokes about PMDs, or Poems of Mass Destruction. “Open minded Palestinians are more dangerous,” Refaat said. “That’s why [Israel] attacks the Islamic University. That’s why it attacks other colleges. Of course, they lied when they attacked it.”

  Refaat had seen his school attacked by Israeli forces before, and he watched it be rebuilt. But there was little that could console him over the violence that sheared branch after branch from his family tree. During the war, he lost his brother-in-law, who also happened to be his best friend. He learned that his cousins were massacred in Shujaiya — Fathi al-Areer was among the survivors of Refaat’s extended family whom I interviewed in the rubble on August 14. Next, he received news that his brother was killed.

In the months after the war, his brother’s young son, Ranim, slipped into desolation. “I hate Dad,” Ranim muttered on a routine basis. “He won’t come back.”

Holy work

In early 2015, as electricity shortages plagued Gaza, I struggled to stay in touch with Refaat. His electricity came on for less than six hours at varying times depending on which day it was, leaving us with only a brief window of time to connect on Skype. When I finally reached him in late January, I found him coping with the malaise spreading through Gaza after the war. His house and his neighbor’s house had been bombed, forcing him to spend days at UNRWA offices attempting to negotiate the reconstruction process. It had taken three months to demolish a section of his family’s home that threatened to collapse atop passersby. “If it took that long, imagine how long the bureaucracy of getting it built again will take,” Reefat sighed.

One of Refaat’s brothers lost his job when the ice cream factory he worked in was bombed by Israel. He was left to scramble to collect enough money just to pay his monthly rent. His father, who had not been able to find work in twenty years, depended on help from his unmarried sons. But they considered themselves lucky compared to the thousands of government employees who had not worked in months and had no family assistance. “We always ask ourselves how they survive,” Refaat said of the unpaid workers. “You get to the point that you will do anything for a buck. It’s no surprise that crime is up, that domestic violence is up, that divorce is skyrocketing. Does the PA or Israel understand that sooner or later this will lead to an explosion?”

With the Rafah border crossing almost hermetically sealed by the Egyptian junta, Refaat had little chance of escaping Gaza to complete his PhD. His only release from frustration was in the classroom. As the siege tightened in the immediate aftermath of the war, he returned to Islamic University and redoubled his efforts to expand his students’ intellectual horizons. “I find myself releasing most of my anger at the situation by teaching young people about the struggle and about being creative in the way we fight for our rights and freedom,” Reefat said. “It’s very rewarding.”

In December 2014, Refaat’s class played host to my colleague Dan Cohen. Dan observed as Refaat presented his class with a story by one of his students, Noor Elborno, written from the perspective of an Israeli veteran of an assault on the Gaza Strip. The soldier had returned to his family in Israel plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder and consumed with nightmares about the children he had killed back in Gaza. As the Palestinian children in his nightmares turned to his own, the soldier descended into madness. If the story had been written by an Israeli, it would have fit neatly into the country’s hackneyed shooting-and-crying literary sub-genre, the most notable example being Waltz With Bashir, in which soldiers sought personal absolution through anguished confessions of crimes they committed against Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. Authored by a young Palestinian in Gaza taking on the perspective of an Israeli directly engaged in violence against her society, however, it reflected an unusual yearning to understand the psyche of the occupier.

Refaat turned to his class and asked them if they could sympathize with the soldier in the story. Some among the class said they might be able to, but only on the condition that they were released from the bonds of occupation. Others protested that the soldier was complicit in their oppression, and that he was a baby killer who deserved to suffer for his crimes. The angry voice of a young woman suddenly rose above those of her classmates. “I hate them all!” she exclaimed. She emphasized that she was referring to all Jews.

Refaat emphasized to the class that not all Jews were Zionists, and challenged them not to implicate an entire group for the cruelty of a state that claimed to be acting in their name. “I told my students about my time in the US staying with Jewish friends, being with their families, about seeing them defend Palestinians,” he recalled. “It’s abstract to them because Israel won’t even let my students travel to meet other people. Actually, three of my students have been prevented from leaving recently. But if these kinds of discussions help ten percent that’s wonderful, because later on, when they get to break the walls of isolation the occupation and Egypt are creating, when they meet Jewish people who are working for our cause, it’s going to make all the difference.”

Towards the end of the class, Refaat asked his students to raise their hands if they had lost their home or friends and family during the war. Most in the room threw a hand in the air. The young woman who declared her hatred for Jews had, in fact, lost her home in Shujaiya and witnessed the death of family members and neighbors. “It clearly showed how Israeli violence is pushing everyone to the extreme,” Refaat remarked. “This war was so horrible, it really touched everyone.”

When class was over, fifteen young women in colorful headscarves and long dresses approached Dan all at once, peppering him with questions. “The class had apparently known that I was a Jew,” Dan told me, “and they wanted to know what I thought about them, about Gaza, about my life in the US. They had never met a Jew before and they really showed me a lot of respect.”

The following day, the young woman who declared her hatred for Jews approached Refaat to express regret. Hearing herself verbalize her resentment left her feeling ashamed, she told him. And the meeting with Dan after class had provoked her to consider redirecting the anger that had gripped her after the war.

“Gaza is the most maligned place in the world, and if we were to believe what we’re told by established Jewish groups in the US and mainstream media, we would think that a Jew in Gaza would be ripped apart, that Gazans are running around looking for a Jew to kill,” Dan reflected later. “In this supposed hotbed of anti-Semitism, everything was completely the opposite of the way I was told it was going to be. What I found were people like Refaat fighting to keep the violence that had consumed the physical lives of his students from consuming them internally. What he’s doing is holy work.”

Days before his death, Refaat pinned the following poem he wrote to the top of his Twitter/X timeline:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

RIP Refaat in Gaza

Sad news:

Muhammad Shehada @muhammadshehad2 - 19:52 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

Israel killed Prof. Refaat al-Areer, one of Gaza's most prominent writers, poets & activists who spent his life trying to get Gaza's voice to the outside world.

He was killed in a targeted airstrike on his sister's home that also killed his brother, sister & her 4 kids...

Refaat's pinned tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 13:01 UTC · Nov 1, 2023

If I must die, let it be a tale.

#FreePalestine
#Gaza

bigger

Refaat's last tweet:

Refaat in Gaza 🇵🇸 @itranslate123 - 5:00 UTC · Dec 4, 2023

The Democratic Party and Biden are responsible for the Gaza genocide perpetrated by Israel.

Quote
Vice President Kamala Harris ...
Embedded video

His writing:

My Child Asks, ‘Can Israel Destroy Our Building if the Power Is Out?’ - NY Times - May 13, 2021

By Refaat Alareer
Mr. Alareer lives in Gaza and is the editor of “Gaza Writes Back,” a collection of short stories.
...
On Tuesday, Linah asked her question again after my wife and I didn’t answer it the first time: Can they destroy our building if the power is out? I wanted to say: “Yes, little Linah, Israel can still destroy the beautiful al-Jawharah building, or any of our buildings, even in the darkness. Each of our homes is full of tales and stories that must be told. Our homes annoy the Israeli war machine, mock it, haunt it, even in the darkness. It can’t abide their existence. And, with American tax dollars and international immunity, Israel presumably will go on destroying our buildings until there is nothing left.”

But I can’t tell Linah any of this. So I lie: “No, sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”

Lectures:

English Poetry Lecture 1/28: An Introduction to Poetry (video) - Refaat Alareer / eLearning Centre - IUG

On air:

_Palestine voices on Israel's war against Gaza - Usefull Idiots - Oct 13, 2023
This week’s interview with Refaat Alareer, Yumna Patel, and Muhammad Shehada
video_

How Refaat was murdered:

شهداء غزّة Gaza martyrs @Gaza_Shaheed - 12:54 UTC · Dec 8, 2023

Important information on Refaat’s assassination:
The day before yesterday, Refaat received a phone call from the Israeli intelligence about locating him in the school where he took refuge. They informed him that they were going to kill him. He left the school not wanting to endanger the others, and at 6 p.m. his sister's apartment was bombed, where he was killed, his sister and her four children

Obits:

In memory of Dr. Refaat Alareer - The Electronic Intifada - 7 December 2023

‘If I must die, let it be a tale’: a tribute to Refaat Alareer - Max Blumenthal - December 7, 2023

Related:

The “Hunt for Hamas” Narrative Is Obscuring Israel’s Real Plans for Gaza - Adam Johnson / The Nation - Dec 7 2023
The US press and politicians are trying to fit the attacks on Gaza into a Zero Dark Thirty mold, but it’s something much simpler—and sinister.

> America’s media and political class is analyzing, debating, and shaping a narrative in Gaza that’s entirely different from the one being discussed in Israeli media and among Israeli political leaders. This gap, born from casual racism, deliberate credulity, and reflexive alignment with the US government’s party line, is creating a media failure the likes of which we haven’t seen since the run-up to the Iraq War. ... <

A dear friend of Moon of Alabama tweets:

annie fofani🇵🇸 @anniefofani - 22:08 UTC · Dec 7, 2023

I miss you so much Refaat. i assume you sent me this so i could pass it on after your death. so, here it for the world. click, the date is at the base.

bigger

Rest in peace.

Posted by b on December 8, 2023 at 10:44 UTC | Permalink

Israel ישראל 🇮🇱 on X:

The first ever pride flag raised in Gaza 🏳️‍🌈 Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.

Religious fundamentalists think that because God is on their side – more, that God has Chosen Them to be His People — they can leave it to Him to keep tabs on history, remember the lessons of the past, count the years, tote up the gains, costs,  and losses.   So long as God doesn’t issue any red alerts or insolvency notices during their prayers, when the Chosen People get up they can concentrate their minds and resources on preparing for the future. When the murder of a million or two Palestinians is the future which the Israelis and Americans are concentrating on now, it’s obvious that they and their God have not been re-reading the Melian Dialogue, if He did in the first place.

That’s Sections 84 to 116 of Book Five of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which he wrote over twenty years of the war, from 431 to 411 BC, leaving off before Athens and its army were defeated and lost everything they thought they had won.

It was in 416 that the Athenian army laid a starvation siege to Melos; then when the Melians surrendered, the Athenians murdered every man and enslaved every woman and child. After that, the Athenian empire of Melos lasted just eleven years before the Athenians were driven off the island by a Spartan force the Hellenes had become too weak to resist. The German empire of the island didn’t murder as many; they were driven off after just two years, from 1943 to 1945.

What Thucydides has reproduced in his book is the argument for genocide if you think you are strong enough to get away with it.  

Its main point — the most remembered today of the lines from the book — is the Athenian declaration: “When these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they must.”  

This is what US President Joseph Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are insisting upon. It’s what Biden means to demonstrate with his fleets in the eastern Mediterranean, northern Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf.  

This is slaughter of everybody in Gaza because the Americans and the Israelis have the power,  for the time being.

Practical people is the phrase Thucydides put in the mouth of the Athenian side in the dialogue.

ATHENIANS

These days it means politicians running for election. They are Vladimir Putin in March 2024; Olaf Scholz in June 2024; Biden in November 2024; Rishi Sunak in January 2025; the French election is in 2027 but Emmanuel Macron cannot run for a third term. Netanyahu’s term is likely to run out as soon as the war against the Palestinians of Gaza ends. If all of them are dead or gone, Netanyahu may win.

The only certain winner on this list of practical people is Putin; he has now agreed with the Russian Army to concentrate their force against the US on the Ukrainian battlefield. The terms of this agreement can be found on, and also between, the lines of Putin’s speech of October 30.  Read between the lines here.  

In Thucydides’s reconstruction and dramatisation of the negotiations between the attacking and the defending sides,  the Melians acknowledged it was pointless appealing to commonly held ideas of justice, morality, and  fair play because the Athenians made clear they didn’t share them. Worse, the Athenians said they were convinced that only by demonstrating their superior force against the weaker Melians could they deter others, including their own critical and restive fellow citizens at home. “It is not so much your hostility that injures us,” the Athenians said. “It is rather the case that if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of weakness, whereas your hatred is a sign of our power.”

So the Melians tried arguing instead that there were common and shared political and economic interests which should spare them from the Athenians’ liquidation plan. “If yours and ours happen to coincide, we must try to persuade you of the fact. Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral, when they see what is happening here and naturally conclude that in the course of time you will attack them too?”

Forget it – there is only the present for you, leave the future to us, the Athenians replied. “This is no fair fight , with honour on one side and shame on the other. It is rather a question of saving your lives and not resisting those who are far too strong for you.”

Death-dealing is the power – for those who are victims, and even more for those who are witnesses. Hope for another outcome which the Melians expressed, “is by nature”, said the Athenians, “an expensive commodity, and those who are risking all on one cast find out what it means only when they are already ruined.”

The Melians tried the Chosen People line. That wasn’t because they were Semites, although  God had  sailed westward from ancient Palestine to make landfall on the island. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people but not a Jewish one, had established trading posts on Melos and intermarried with the Caucasian arrivals from Sparta, on the Hellenic mainland. The Athenians dismissed the theology – God, like history and warfare, chooses winners, not losers. “So far as the favour of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have,” the Melians were told. “Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.”

The Melians then tried to argue that if they fought on for long enough, their ethnic allies, the Spartans, would come to their rescue, break the Athenian siege, defeat Athens. “Where danger is concerned,” came the Athenian reply, “the Spartans are not as a rule very venturesome.”

The force calculus would prevail on the Spartans, the Athenians were confident – Melos was too small and was surrounded, so a Spartan relief operation was out of the question. “What is looked for is a positive preponderance of power in action. And the Spartans pay attention to this point even more than others do.”

Inferiority wasn’t so dishonourable, the Athenians offered as they prepared to wind up the talks.  “There is nothing disgraceful in giving way to the greatest city in Hellas when she is offering you such reasonable terms – alliance on a tribute-paying basis and liberty to enjoy your own property…And when you are allowed to choose between war and safety…this is the safe rule – to stand up to one’s equals, to behave with deference to one’s superiors, and to treat one’s inferiors with moderation.”

MELIANS

The two sides then adjourned for internal consultations; later they returned to the table for the last round. The Melians said they had decided not to surrender their seven-hundred year old city state. “We put our trust in the fortune that the gods will send and which has saved us up to now, and in the help of men — that is of the Spartans; and so we shall try to save ourselves.” They added they were still open to negotiating terms of “a treaty which shall be agreeable to both you and us”. One condition was non-negotiable — the Athenians must “leave our country”.

The Athenian negotiators stood up. “As you have staked most on and trusted most in Spartans, luck, and hopes, so in all these you will find yourselves most deluded.”

The Athenian army built a new wall completely cutting off the Melians inside their city from the outside. Several months of siege followed while the Athenians withdrew their heavy forces to fight elsewhere. The Melians made sallies to capture food. Then the Athenians returned in force; but even then they didn’t risk a frontal assault. Instead, they bribed several Melians inside the city to betray the others. “As there was also some treachery from inside,” Thucydides concluded his account without more detail, “the Melians surrendered unconditionally to the Athenians, who put to death all the men of military age whom they took, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos itself they took over for themselves, sending out later a colony of 500 men.” Book Five ends at this point.

That was almost two thousand five hundred years ago.

It’s near-certain that Biden and Netanyahu haven’t read the Melian Dialogue. If men like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jacob Sullivan were required to read the book during their undergraduate studies at Harvard and Yale, they have forgotten that after the genocide of the Melians, the Athenians were defeated – first their army and foreign empire, then their domestic democracy.

These practical men can hear the political clock ticking. They can’t hear the gods counting down.

By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s. 

Diego did his disturbing work. The video he forwarded outdoes it all so far by provoking a disgust as profound as any I have ever felt. It features a number of scenes wherein Israelis record themselves sadistically ridiculing Palestinians in the most cravenly cruel manner. They imitate Palestinian children dying or starving. They apply racially offensive makeup. They laugh and dance while switching lights on and off and while ostentatiously drinking water from taps—this last to mock Gazans as Israel deprives them of power, potable water, food and much else.

And I am describing the children in these videos, ranging in age from, maybe, six or seven to somewhere in their teens or early twenties. The mothers stand behind them, smiling with approval and delight. Here is the video as posted by Al Jazeera English last Thursday. I have since seen several others like it.

By common agreement among many lawyers, scholars of international law, special rapporteurs, and the like—including Israelis in these fields—what we witness daily now is by all acceptable definitions a genocide. Whether or not Israel is committing war crimes by the hour is not even worth debating. But I am taken up now by the spectacle of human beings who have allowed themselves to be destroyed in the name of an ideology that proves every bit as racist as it was when, in 1975, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism to be so. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991; it should not have been.

I am reminded of what I learned years ago when studying the Japanese Imperial Army’s conduct in China and Korea before and during World War II and the long record of the Kempeitai, commonly known as Imperial Japan’s Thought Police. Victimizers, I came to conclude with conviction, are victims, too. This holds for the people in the videos I have recently viewed and for every Israeli wearing an IDF uniform. They have been stripped of all ordinary decency by the radical ideologues of “the Jewish state.” They can laugh or sneer or pull all the triggers they like: Their lives, too, have been destroyed. Look at the videos: The evidence of this is in every frame.  

“Nothing human disgusts me” is a line I remember well from The Night of the Iguana, the 1961 play by the superbly human Tennessee Williams. I hold to this thought (even while reading the foreign pages of The New York Times). What has happened to the people in the videos must disgust us. But what they suffer as victims could happen to all but the strongest among us. They are appalling specimens of humanity, but they are human. As we find our way to some morally, intellectually defensible high ground during the atrocities we witness daily, we need to bear this in mind.

And this, too: Those videos were not shot in isolation. They reflect a culture of racism, xenophobia, hatred, and—we see this now—sadism that has taken pride in itself for many years. These sentiments are instruments of the state, carefully cultivated. You may remember the videos shot at the time of the al–Aqsa crisis two years ago. Young Israelis in sparkling school uniforms or stylish clothes leapt up and down in a sort of frenzy in the streets of Jerusalem while shouting, “Death to all Arabs.” I read those images looking back and forward: They were the flowers of the Israeli state’s century of official indoctrination and a prelude to the videos coming out now.

Arnold Toynbee, the great if no longer fashionable historian, argued in his 12–volume “A Study of History” that civilizations rise when creative elites respond to new circumstances with imagination and courage, while they decline, in turn, not in consequence of external factors but due to spiritual collapses within. This is the Israel of Bibi Netanyahu, the Israel whose plan, we know by way of an official document leaked over the weekend, is to ethnic-cleanse Gaza and incorporate it into the Jewish state. Its leaders are brutes and—as the videos I reference show—they have destroyed Israel’s human spirit. 

I saw an interview Sunday with a Defense Department contractor who has visited Israel dozens of times over many years on DoD work. He recounted the steady decline in any belief in a peaceful settlement of the Israel–Palestine crisis that he has detected since 2007. For most Israelis, he observed, it is down to violence now. A headline in Monday’s editions of The Times, recording these changing desires and expectations: “I Don’t Have That Empathy. It’s Not Me Anymore.” This is the voice of a nation that has demolished itself in its attempts to destroy others. 

A couple of weeks ago in this space I published a commentary asserting that the two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine question is dead, and a single, secular state is the only way forward. I had some mail afterward to the effect that a one-state solution is too far from reality to think about. I will reply here that these readers have it upside-down. A one-state solution is now the only realistic idea worth considering. Until Israelis accept that they must live in a single nation wherein Palestinians dwell as equal citizens, there is no more future for them than there is for Palestinians. They, Israelis, will be condemned to live in a walled-off garrison state that will come to look ever more like a commodious version of the “open-air prison” we speak of when we speak of Gaza. 

“We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness,” Netanyahu said in a much-remarked speech to the nation last Wednesday, “and light shall triumph over darkness.” This is the utterance of a destroyer—of people, of hope—a man who cannot find his way out of the Old Testament and nonsensically demands we live in it with him, a man who simply should not be leading anything in the 21st century. 

And we, we Americans, are urged daily to support the depravity into which this man leads Israel ever more deeply. Netanyahu’s depravity, Israel’s, must be ours, too. We are urged now to openly endorse war crimes and a genocide. And so we, too, are in consequence letting an apartheid state’s intentionally terrorizing campaign against Palestinians accelerate our none-too-sturdy nation into the kind of internal collapse Toynbee described as the dynamic of decline.

Across the country you find confrontations between those who argue in behalf of their consciences and those who censure, name-call, deplatform, or otherwise attempt to ruin them for not supporting open-and-shut murder. At the University of Pennsylvania, wealthy donors threaten to withhold their support if the administration does not come out in favor of this savagery. The Writers Guild of America West is under attack for similarly refraining. Artforum, the monthly chronicler of the gallery scene, fired its editor for signing an open letter calling for a ceasefire, whereupon collectors now threaten to “deaccession” the works of artists who also signed. Let us add to this a 71–year old man’s murder of a 6–year-old Palestinian boy near Chicago two weeks ago, an incident that left his mother in critical condition. 

These implicit defenses of systematic savagery must be dressed up, of course. And so America plunges into the disgracefully cynical argument that to oppose the Israeli operation in Gaza is anti–Semitic. The Chinese put their hands up to contribute to a ceasefire and talks toward an enduring settlement of one or another kind, but China is anti–Semitic because it has not condemned the Hamas assault. 

A museum bureaucrat named Sarah Lehat Blumenstein is now going after artists who signed the letter that got Artforum’s editor fired. She threatens them with “a deaccession plan to dimmish the artists’ status.” Explaining herself in an interview with The Times, she said her efforts reflect “a fear that rising anti–Semitism was endangering her right to exist.”

The ADL may wish to come after me for this one, such have things come to, but this statement proposes a patently ridiculous equivalence, albeit one emblematic of the post–October 7 climate. If you oppose the Israelis’ genocide operation and merely call for a ceasefire, some museum functionary is frightened that her life is under threat? I view this as more than a vulgar misuse of history and a contemptuous use of the victim card. This reflects a nation that no longer knows how to make sense of itself. 

I loved, in this connection, a piece The Times ran in last Saturday’s editions to dress up, as a matter of personal affection, what has to be the Biden regime’s worst policy failure to date. Joe Biden just loves Israel, Peter Baker, The Times’s White House correspondent, wants us to know, and we should understand this—and along the way accept his “unwavering support.” “Some confidants,” Baker then writes, “said that Mr. Biden’s Irish heritage makes him relate to the plight of historically marginalized people and that his own family tragedy connects him to the grief of those who have lost so much.”

Readers, take as much time as you wish lingering over this, among the most preposterous sentences written to explain U.S. policy since violence erupted October 7. 

We propose to ban the exercise of conscience, condemnations of the out-of-control violence of an openly racist nation. No, you cannot think that. No, you cannot say that. You must think and say this. We tell ourselves stories about what good, well-intended fellows are those who support atrocities. U.S. foreign policy has not for many decades had much to do with the ideals of Western civilization as we were taught to think of them. Now we whose taxes pay for policy are urged to come right out with it: Yes, we approve of war crimes, violence against noncombatants, ethnic cleansing. What is Israel costing us? Ourselves and our self-respect, our psychological coherence, our regard of history, our culture, our humanity. 

Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. See the Toynbee reference above: Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it. And so Israel will continue to pull us in the wrong direction—or further in the wrong direction, I ought to say. I hope I am not around if ever Americans start in with the sadistic videos.

TO MY READERS. Independent publications and those who write for them reach a moment that is difficult and full of promise all at once. On one hand, we assume ever greater responsibilities in the face of mainstream media’s mounting derelictions. I take up this very topic in the commentary you have just read. On the other, we have found no sustaining revenue model and so must turn directly to our readers for support. I am committed to independent journalism for the duration: I see no other future for American media. But the path grows steeper, and as it does I need your help. This grows urgent now. If you are already a supporter, big thanks. If you aren’t, please, to sustain my continued contributions to ScheerPost and in recognition of the commitment to independent journalism I share with this superb publication, join in by subscribing to The Floutist, or via my Patreon account.

Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored without explanation.

Editors Note:
She describes what the border fence security system is like, what the guards saw, what was reported, over what period of time. You, dear reader, can decide if the attack was a "surprise".

Contrary to what I wrote last week based on dispatches from Western and Arab news agencies filtered by Israeli military censorship, Israel’s attack on October 7, 2023 (operation “Al-Aqsa Flood) “) was not perpetrated by Hamas alone. Its triggering was decided by a unitary operation chamber of the entire Palestinian Resistance. Hamas, which is by far the main component, provided the bulk of the troops, but three other groups participated:
- Islamic Jihad (Sunni and Khomeinist),
- the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Marxist)
- and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-CG).

The Western press reported on the barbaric crimes committed by some of the attackers, but not on the respect of others. Once verified, the accusations of rape and decapitation of babies [1] constitute war propaganda. This one-eyed and lying journalism should no longer surprise us.

This clarification modifies the interpretation of the event. This is no longer a jihadist operation by the Muslim Brotherhood, but an attack by all Palestinians in Gaza. Only West Bank Fatah, which stands apart from the aforementioned groups and whose president, Mahmoud Abbas, is seriously ill, did not participate.

The aim of this operation was not to “kill Jews”, even if some Hamas jihadists did so (the Israelis count 2,700 dead in total), but to take prisoners, civilians and soldiers, to exchange them. with Arab detainees in Israeli high security prisons [2]. These are not necessarily combatants, but also civilians. The prisoners were taken away without being able to change clothes in a reminder of how the Israeli army treated Egyptian prisoners at the end of the Six-Day War.

Let us remember that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not oppose two States (that of Israel still has no borders and that of Palestine is still not recognized), but two populations. This is a special situation: the Palestinians are not represented by a state and the Israelis have additional responsibilities as the occupying power.

These events come as, on May 15, 2023, the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Group of 77, the League of Arab States, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and China called for the suspension of Israel from the United Nations as that Tel Aviv will not respect its own commitments [3]

1. Did Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” surprise Israel?

Contrary to what Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government claimed, the “Al-Aqsa Flood” did not surprise Israel. This attack had been planned since the clashes of May 2021.

According to CNN, Hamas trained its fighters for this operation for a year and a half [4] . He built six training camps in Gaza and made promotional films there. Videos of these workouts were released weeks before the attack. [ 5 ]

In March 2023, Hamas sent a strong delegation to Russia. On this occasion, he warned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that his patience was running out and his anger was “on the march”.

In 2023, Iran hosted talks between the region’s various pro-independence forces, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. They were held in Beirut (Lebanon) under the presidency of General Ismaïl Qaani, commander of the al-Quds brigades of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Their aim was to reconcile these actors who had fought a ferocious war in Gaza, then in Syria. These meetings were made public in May 2023. On this occasion the Lebanese press discussed the preparation of the unitary operation which was carried out on October 7. Iran is therefore responsible for reconciling the Palestinian factions.

On September 30, the Egyptian Minister of Intelligence, Kamel Abbas, telephoned the Israeli Prime Minister to warn him against a major Hamas operation against Israel [5]. Egypt, which is fighting the Muslim Brotherhood, was worried that Israel would allow it to expand further.

On October 5, the CIA warned the Mossad of a major operation by the United Palestinian Resistance. The United States was worried about its scale. However, according to the New York Times , the CIA reports (September 28 and October 5), still classified, did not mention the use of new combat techniques by the Palestinian Resistance. Israeli intelligence services then held a meeting to assess the threat. The Shin Bet (counterespionage) and Amman (military intelligence) participated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his office therefore lied to their citizens by claiming to have been surprised by Hamas.

2. Why did Israel allow its own people to be killed?

Several hypotheses are possible. Here are four:

- Settlers residing illegally in the West Bank are omnipresent in the Israeli coalition government. They were deaf and blind to what was happening in Gaza.

- Benjamin Netanyahu, reconnecting with the ideology of his father Benzion Netanyahu and his mentor, the Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky, intended to put an end to the Palestinian presence both in Gaza and in the West Bank. It was he who described geographic Palestine as “A land without a people, for a people without a land”.

- Benjamin Netanyahu, reviving an old project, wanted to create a pretext to justify a war against Iran and extend Israel’s influence in the Middle East.

- The American followers of German fascist Leo Strauss, continuing what they are already doing in Ukraine, wanted to create a pretext to justify a broader war against Russia.

These four hypotheses are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive.

3. The parallel of September 11

Israeli leaders have drawn a parallel between the official version of the Hamas attack and the official version of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States. For them, it is a question of emphasizing the barbarity of the adversary, the surprise of the camp of Good and of justifying the wars which will follow.

This parallel is nourished by the fact that Hamas claims to be the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, while Osama Bin Laden was trained by Mohammad Qutb, the blood brother of the Brotherhood thinker, Sayyid Qutb.

This parallel does not hold: it is impossible that the September 11 attacks were perpetrated by al-Qaeda. The US authorities have never been able to respond to my objections [6] to their version. In addition, new elements have emerged since these events contradicting the administration of President George W. Bush. Today, 54% of Americans do not believe the version of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry.

However, while it is still unclear precisely who organized the September 11 attacks, we have identified a group that is involved, the Project for a New American Century. However, one of its main members, Elliott Abrams, is the organizer of the regime change that Benjamin Netanyahu carried out in Israel and which his opposition described as a “coup d’état” [7]. However, this man has a serious criminal past (he is notably involved in the genocide of the Mayans organized by the Israeli terrorist Yitzhak Shamir and the Guatemalan general Efraín Ríos Montt [8]. He was convicted in the United States for his lies [9] and for its role in the Iran-Contras affair), we can reasonably wonder about its possible role in Israel’s passivity in the face of the preparation of the Hamas attack.

Last July, President Joe Biden appointed this controversial Republican to the bipartisan United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, that is to say, to the supervision of US propaganda around the world.

4. Who armed Hamas?

Such a sophisticated operation requires resources and information that only a state can have. The weapons he used were from the United States, the Soviet Union and North Korea. They circulate in Lebanon and Palestine.

Three hypotheses were formulated:

• The hypothesis of Iranian responsibility must be rejected because of the agreement concluded between Hassan el-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Rouhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Moreover, Iran has already vehemently denied any responsibility to the United Nations. However, this is the theory defended by Elliott Abrams [10]. Iran is not responsible for the “Al-Aqsa Flood”, but for the reconciliation of Palestinian factions.

• The hypothesis of Russian responsibility is not based on any evidence. At most, we can note that the conflict in Palestine will absorb Western resources and therefore reduce their pressure against Russia in Ukraine. Likewise, we can anticipate an increase in hydrocarbon prices, favorable to Moscow. However, Russia does not have the means to initiate a new front as it fights in Ukraine. In addition, Moscow has continued to fight militias from the Muslim Brotherhood since the creation of the Russian Federation. However, this is the theory that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky argued before the 31 NATO Defense Ministers in Brussels on October 11 [11]. The Israeli Minister of Defense, Yoav Galant, spoke by video during this meeting, to the same effect [12].

• The hypothesis of Turkish responsibility, on the other hand, still holds. In addition to the fact that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan organized the last Hamas congress in Istanbul, the main leaders of Hamas now reside in Türkiye, while those of the Muslim Brotherhood as an international body are divided between the United Kingdom. United, Qatar and Türkiye.
  However, knowing that the CIA was following the preparation of the Hamas operation, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken telephoned his Turkish counterpart and former head of the secret service, Hakan Fidan, on the night of October 6 to 7 [13], that is to say at the time when Hamas launched its attack and even before the Israeli army woke up. Subsequently, Antony Blinken telephoned his counterparts in Israel and Palestine, then again [14] and again [15] in Türkiye.
  Finally, during the summit of NATO defense ministers, Secretary Loyd Austin revealed that the United States had asked Turkey to intervene to free the US hostages. However, he did not specify whether this decision was made before or after the dispatch of the USS Gerald Ford naval group .

5. What does international law say about the Israeli-Palestinian difference?

According to the United Nations, Palestinians have the right to a sovereign state within the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. This formula implies that:

• The State of Palestine has the right to have its own army (which Israel relentlessly opposes);
• All post-1967 Jewish settlements and East Jerusalem must be returned to the State of Palestine.
• Every Palestinian, or right-holder, will have the right to return to Israel and settle in their home (right of return). Israel will have to compensate those whose property was recycled or destroyed.

According to the United Nations, Israelis have the right to a sovereign state within the 1967 borders with West Jerusalem as its capital. This formula implies that:

• Israel has the right to have its own army (which it already has)
• All post-1967 Jewish settlements and East Jerusalem must be returned to the State of Palestine. It is not impossible that Israelis will continue to live there, but it will be as foreigners.
• Israel must grant the right of residence to each Palestinian, or beneficiary, expelled in 1948, who requests it. Israel must return their property or compensate them (right of return).

Initially, these two states (Palestine and Israel) were to be federated within a binational supranational state where each citizen would have an equal voice. This is clearly impossible at the moment. We can envisage an international peace force coming to intervene between the two States of Palestine and Israel. Again this seems difficult. On the one hand because no one will want to be part of it and on the other hand because this is not what the United Nations originally planned. These envisaged peacekeeping observers, but not a military interposition force. Finally, we can consider demilitarizing the two states and giving them guarantees of non-aggression by their neighbors.

Everyone understands that international law imposes considerable losses of territory and property for Israel, whereas it only involves the abandonment of claims for Palestine. But it is the price of justice and peace.

6. What is Israel’s reaction?

Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes Jewish supremacists comparable to the Muslim supremacists of Hamas, changed the basic laws of Israel, a state without a Constitution, in August. In the opinion of observers, particularly the American press, the government carried out a “coup d’état” by suppressing the independence of the judiciary. Massive demonstrations have shaken Israel for several months.

Faced with the attack it is undergoing, Israel can only survive by agreeing to unify its ruling class. Former Prime Minister Yair Lapid demanded that Jewish supremacist ministers resign so that he could participate in a national unity government. Itamar Ben-Gvir (Minister of Internal Security) and Bezalel Smotrich (Minister of Finance) have supported, since they were in government, three anti-Arab pogroms, notably that of Huwarrah [16] . However, former Defense Minister General Benny Ganz did not set the same condition. Ultimately, the current Prime Minister decided to include both of them in his government, without dismissing the Jewish supremacists. But he created a war council, from which Jewish supremacists are excluded.

At that moment, military censorship came into play. It was so strong that the Minister of Information, Distel Atbaryan, resigned in the middle of the war.

It is not possible to know the exact composition of the war council, whose deliberations were very stormy. We just know that the Minister of Defense, General Yoav Gallant, is not at all on the same wavelength as his predecessor, General Benny Ganz. To the point that the Prime Minister called for help the former chief of staff, General Gadi Eisenkot, a supporter of massive bombings of civilians, so that he could participate in the council’s deliberations as an observer. Under no circumstances should Israelis and the rest of the world know how each other reacts to Benjamin Netanyahu’s passivity in the preparation of Operation “Al-Aqsa Flood” and in the early hours of its implementation. . Likewise, no one knows what the war council decided. President Isaac Herzog himself was kept out of the deliberations.

It seems that the debates discussed the expulsion to Egypt or the massacre of the two million inhabitants of Gaza. This is why the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, urgently went to Tel Aviv to call for calm.

7. How can things evolve?

International law grants Israel the right to defend itself against the attack it is suffering. This is what he did for five days while chasing the attackers who had entered his territory. Subsequently, Israel began the siege of Gaza, while the Israeli army bombarded Gaza City (but not the southern Gaza Strip). This operation once again violates international law. If we can accept that Israel has a right to follow up on Palestinian fighters in Gaza, the siege of the Gaza Strip and the bombing of civilian buildings are war crimes. At a press conference, it emerged that Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, does not know what his army is planning.

Referring to the position of the Arab League since the Six-Day War, Egypt closed its border with Gaza. The League intends to support Palestinian demands and therefore refuses any transfer of population and any naturalization. Furthermore, Cairo does not intend to take responsibility for 2 million immigrants and especially not for Hamas, whose parent company, the Muslim Brotherhood, is banned in Egypt.

The Israeli army stands ready to reoccupy the Gaza Strip. It is massing all around. The occupation of Gaza would constitute a violation of international law, while a counter-insurgency war would, in itself, be a war crime.

The United States has shipped weapons and ammunition to Israel. They deployed a naval group off the coast of Gaza (the aircraft carrier USS Gerald Ford , the guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy and the four guided-missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt ), then a second naval group (the aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower , the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea , and the three guided-missile destroyers USS Laboon, USS Mason, and USS Gravely ). However, they called on Israel to exercise restraint.

It seems impossible that Israel could carry out Vladimir Jabotinsky’s project and forcefully empty the Gaza Strip of its two million inhabitants, without international intervention, starting with that of Hezbollah. A withdrawal of the army is more likely.

by Livia Rokach, Third Edition

A study based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary, and other documents. Foreword by Noam Chomsky

Index and Foreword

 To all the Palestinian victims of Israel's unholy terrorism, whose sacrifice, suffering and ongoing struggle will yet prove to be the pangs of the rebirth of Palestine...

AAUG PRESS ASSOCIATION OF ARAB-AMERICAN UNIVERSITY GRADUATES, INC., Belmont, Massachusetts
 
First published in the United States of America by AAUG Press c1980, 1982, 1986 by the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. All rights reserved in the U.S. Published 1980. Third Edition 1986
 
Printed in the United States of America
 
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rokach, Livia. lsrael's sacred terrorism. (AAUG information paper series: no. 23) ISBN 0-937694-70-3

Contents

• Foreword by Noam Chomsky

• Preface To This Edition

• Introduction

• Chapters

  1. Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary
  2. Ben Gurion Goes to Sdeh Boker: Spiritual Retreat as a Tactic]
  3. Retaliation for War
  4. "A Historical Opportunity" to Occupy Southern Syria
  5. Let Us Create a Maronite State in Lebanon
  6. Sacred Terrorism
  7. The Lavon Affair: Terrorism to Coerce the West
  8. Nasser: Coexistence with Israel is Possible. Ben Gurion's Reply: Operation Gaza
  9. Disperse the Palestinian Refugees
  10. ... and Topple Nasser's Regime

• Appendices

  • Operation Kibya
  • And Then There was Kafr Qasim
  • "Soon the Singing Will Turn Into a Death Moan"
  • The Lavon Affair
  • Israeli Newspaper Reveals Government's Attempt to Stop Publication of Israel's Sacred Terrorism

• Notes

• • *

Foreword

HISTORY, particularly recent history, is characteristically presented to the general public within the framework of a doctrinal system based on certain fundamental dogmas. In the case of the totalitarian societies, the point is too obvious to require comment. The situation is more intriguing in societies that lack cruder forms of repression and ideological control. The United States, for example, is surely one of the least repressive societies of past or present history with respect to freedom of inquiry and expression. Yet only rarely will an analysis of crucial historical events reach a wide audience unless it conforms to certain doctrines of the faith.

"The United States always starts out with good intentions." With this ritual incantation, a liberal critic of American interventionism enters the area of permissible debate, of thinkable thoughts (in this case, William Pfaff, "Penalty of Interventionism," International Herald Tribune, February 1979). To accept the dogma, a person who is unable to tolerate more than a limited degree of internal contradiction must studiously avoid the documentary record, which is ample in a free society- for example, the record of high-level planning exhibited in the Pentagon Papers, particularly the record of the early years of U.S. involvement in the 1940s and early 1950s when the basic outlines of strategy were developed and formulated. Within the scholarly professions and the media the intelligentsia can generally be counted on to close ranks; they will refuse to submit to critical analysis the doctrines of the faith, prune the historical and documentary record so as to insulate these doctrines from examination, and proceed to present a version of history that is safely free from institutional critique or analysis. Occasional departures from orthodoxy are of little moment as long as they are confined to narrow circles that can be ignored, or dismissed as "irresponsible" or "naive" or "failing to comprehend the complexities of history," or otherwise identified with familiar code-words as beyond the pale.

Though relations between Israel and the United States have not been devoid of conflict, still there is no doubt that there has been, as is often said, a "special relationship." This is obvious at the material level, as measured by flow of capital and armaments, or as measured by diplomatic support, or by joint operations, as when Israel acted to defend crucial U.S. interests in the Middle Last at the time of the 1970 crisis involving Jordan, Syria and the Palestinians. The special relationship appears at the ideological level as well. Again with rare exceptions, one must adopt certain doctrines of the faith to enter the arena of debate, at least before any substantial segment of the public.

The basic doctrine is that Israel has been a hapless victim-of terrorism, of military attack, of implacable and irrational hatred. It is not uncommon for well-informed American political analysts to write that Israel has been attacked four times by its neighbors, including even 1956. Israel is sometimes chided for its response to terrorist attack, a reaction that is deemed wrong though understandable. The belief that Israel may have had a substantial role in initiating and perpetuating violence and conflict is expressed only far from the mainstream, as a general rule. In discussing the backgrounds of the 1956 war, Nadav Safran of Harvard University, in a work that is fairer than most, explains that Nasser "seemed bent on mobilizing Egypt's military resources and leading the Arab countries in an assault on Israel." The Israeli raid in Gaza in February 1955 was "retaliation" for the hanging of Israeli saboteurs in Egypt-it was only six years later, Safran claims, that it became known that they were indeed Israeli agents. The immediate background for the conflict is described in terms of fedayeen terror raids and Israeli retaliation. The terror organized by Egyptian intelligence "contributed significantly to Israel's decision to go to war in 1956 and was the principal reason for its refusal to evacuate the Gaza Strip" (Israel- The Embattled Ally, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

To maintain such doctrines as these, or the analysis of alleged fact that conform to them, it is necessary scrupulously to avoid crucial documentation. Safran, in his 600-page study, makes no use of major sources such as the diaries that Livia Rokach reviews here, relevant parts of which had been made public in 1974, or the captured Egyptian documents published in Israel in 1975, or other sources that undermine these analyses (see footnotes 19, 20). Much the same is true of the mainstream scholarly literature and journalism fairly generally.

Moshe Sharett's diary, to which Livia Rokach's monograph is devoted, is undoubtedly a major documentary source. It remains outside of "official history"-that version of history that reaches more than a tiny audience of people unsatisfied by conventional doctrine. It is only reasonable to predict that this will remain true in the United States as long as the "special relationship" persists. If, on the other hand, Israel had been, say, an ally of the Soviet Union, then Sharett's revelations would quickly become common knowledge, just as no one would speak of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1956.

In studying the process of policy formation in any state, it is common to find a rough division between relatively hard-line positions that urge the use of force and violence to attain state ends, and "softer" approaches that advocate diplomatic or commercial methods to attain the same objectives- a distinction between "the Prussians" and "the traders," to borrow terms that Michael Klare has suggested in his work on U.S. foreign policy. The goals are basically the same; the measures advocated differ, at least to a degree, a fact that may ultimately bear on the nature of the ends pursued. Sharett was an advocate of the "soft" approach. His defeat in internal Israeli politics reflected the ascendancy of the positions of Ben Gurion, Dayan and others who were not reluctant to use force to attain their goals. His diaries give a very revealing picture of the developing conflict, as he perceived it, and offer an illuminating insight into the early history of the state of Israel, with ramifications that reach to the present, and beyond. Livia Rokach has performed a valuable service in making this material readily available, for the first time, to those who are interested in discovering the real world that lies behind "official history."
 

Noam Chomsky, January 1, 1980

Preface

Preface to this edition

IN PURSUIT of its objectives of disseminating accurate information about the Middle East, the Association of Arab-American University Graduates, Inc. thought it in the public interest to publish this study, which analyzes Israeli-Arab relations in the late 1940s and 1950s in the light of the personal diary of Moshe Sharett. 1 Head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department from 1933 to 1948, Sharett became Israel's first foreign minister ( 1948 1956), under David Ben Gurion), and was prime minister in 1954 and 1955.

Since this book was first published five years ago, a number of occurrences have taken place that point up its enduring significance. Although this work deals primarily with events of the 1950s, it is of more than historical interest. Indeed, the information it provides makes it clear that the record of the past quarter century could easily have been predicted; the only novel quality is the ferocity with which the Zionist strategy of the fifties has been carried out in the decades that followed.No longer does the Zionist movement feel compelled to hide its true intentions. Its regional alliances with the Phalanges party and other right-wing elements in South Lebanon, and its special relationship with the United States, propel it like a juggernaut in pursuit of imperial goals.

The first edition of this book appeared when the Middle East and the United States were preoccupied with the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations that led to the 1978 Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of March 1 979, and with the Israeli Invasion of South Lebanon of March 1978. Subsequently,the Camp David formula not only has failed to produce the comprehensive settlement promised by President Jimmy Carter, it in fact contributed to a second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in, June 1982. By neutralizing Egypt, the Egyptian-Israeli treaty allowed Israel to proceed confidently with its plans to crush Palestinian resistance and obliterate the Palestinian national identity, with a view to perpetuating its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Today, the Palestine question is further from a peaceful and just resolution thin at any time in the past, while Lebanon continues to hemorrhage and to divide along sectarian lines.

The Camp David Accords, and the subsequent Reagan Plan introduced in September 1982, were grounded in flawed assumptions about lsrael's"security" and Arab threats to that security. Recent developments in the region have exposed the Reagan administration's complicity in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon,2 which was calculated to produce results deemed beneficial both to American strategic interests and to Israeli expansionist goals. The interests of the Reagan administration and lsrael's Likud government coalesced around three objectives: the destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure in Lebanon, the redrawing of the political map in Lebanon, and the reduction of Syria to manageable proportions. Pax Americana and pax Israelica were to be realized through the campaign cynically dubbed "Peace for Galilee."

The 1982 "operation," as well as its predecessor, the "Litani Operation" of 1978, were part of the long-standing Zionist strategy for Lebanon and Palestine, which this transition of the Sharett diary illuminates. In fact,that strategy, formulated and applied during the 1950s, had been envisaged at least four decades earlier, and attempts to implement it are still being carried out three decades later. On November 6, 1918, a committee of British mandate officials and Zionist leaders put forth a suggested northern boundary for a Jewish Palestine "from the North Litani River up to Banias." In the following year, at the Paris peace conference, the Zionist movement proposed boundaries that would have included the Lebanese district of Bint Jubayl and all the territories up to the Litani River. The proposal emphasized the "vital importance of controlling all water resources up to their sources."

During the Paris conference, Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion (who later became, respectively, lsrael's first president and first prime minister) attempted to persuade Patriarch Hayik, who headed the Lebanese delegation, to abandon South Lebanon in return for a promise of technical and financial assistance to develop the area to the north, which they hoped, would become a Christian state.

The Zionist military forces that invaded Palestine in 1948 also occupied part of the district of Marjayun and Bint Jubayl, and reached the vicinity of the Litani River, but were forced to withdraw under international pressure. Then, in 1954, the leaders of the newly established state of Israel renewed Zionist claims on Lebanese water when President Eisenhower's envoy Eric Johnston proposed a formula of sharing the Litani waters among Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Israel, in fact, threatened to use force against Lebanon to prevent the utilization of the Litani waters to develop South Lebanon.

While these threats were made during the period covered in the Sharett diary, consider what actually happened later, during the 1960s, '70s, '80s: In 1967, lsrael's war against three Arab states not only gave Israel possession of eastern Palestine (the West Bank), Gaza, the Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights, but also enabled Israel to capture the headwaters of the Jordan and Manias rivers. In addition, Israel destroyed Jordan's East Ghor Canal and its Khaled Dam on the Yarmuk River, which flows into lsrael's Nahariva Pool. In the 1978 "Litani Operation," Israel established firm control over the Wazzani River, which flows into the Jordan, as well as almost the entire length of the Hasbani River. And in the 1982 "Operation Peace for Galilee," the entire length of the Litani River came under Israeli control."

The goal of profoundly altering water distribution in the region could be achieved only within the context of a vassal state in Lebanon with a puppet government, an endeavor about which the Sharett diary has much to say (p.22 ff.). In fact, Ben Gurion's plan, in 1954, to establish such a puppet governments plan enthusiastically endorsed by Moshe Dayan was finally put in motion nearly a quarter of a century later. Dayan's "officer" did indeed emerge, even bearing the same rank of "just a major" Major Sa'd Haddad,whom Israel encouraged to proclaim secession from Lebanon in April 1979.lsrael's defense minister, Ezer Weizmann, announced his government's support of Haddad's canton of "Free Lebanon": "I consider Haddad a Lebanese nationalist and as far as I know he wants Beirut to become the capital of a free independent Lebanon once more without interference from the Syrians or the Palestinians."4 Support for Haddad, and by implication for a Zionist-Phalangist alliance, was also voiced by right-wing Lebanese politicians. Stated Camille Chamoun, "We need such a Lebanese force to struggle in the South for the liberation of Lebanon, and not just a part of Lebanon, and Sa'd Haddad is not a traitor."

But the Zionist proxy "mini-state," which was set up in a border strip six miles wide and sixty miles long, was repudiated by the world community. A United Nations force, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), was mandated to help reestablish the authority of the central Lebanese government in the South. Israel, however, defied the relevant United Nations resolution (which was supported even by the Carter administration) and persisted in its support of Haddad. After a March 1981 agreement by the Syrian and Lebanese presidents to reassert - in cooperation with UNIFIL - the authority of the Beirut government in the South, Israel and Haddad's militia bombarded a UNIFIL position, killing three Nigerian soldiers (March 16, 1981).

Israel's destabilization of Lebanon, in pursuit of a Maronite-dominated client state, has taken several forms, ranging from extending the Camp David formula to Lebanon, to its full-scale invasion of 1982. With regard to imposing a Camp David solution on Lebanon, Menachem Begin made a statement to the Israeli parliament on May 7, 1979, inviting Lebanon to enter into negotiations with Israel on the basis of Syrian withdrawal and expulsion of the Palestinians from Lebanon. This proposal evoked an enthusiastic response from Bashir Gemayel, commander of the Phalangist Lebanese Forces, who told Beirut's Monday Morning on May 28, 1979:

"These principles are sound and should be accepted is the basis for any Lebanese endeavor to find a solution. . . . President Sadat accepted a similar proposal and he is now leading Egypt to an era of welfare and prosperity. When shall Lebanon be allowed the right to seek its own welfare?"

The elder Gemayel, Pierre, added:

"You shall say that I am defending Sadat as I defended Sa'd Haddad; my dear, I would be a coward and without honor if I did not defend my point of view" (Al-Safir, August 2, 1979)

Israel's aggression against Lebanon in 1982 was clearly designed to cement these alliances between Israel and the "Major" in the South and with the Gemayels and Chamouns to the North - all in an effort to secure the balkanization and vassalization of Lebanon, the eradication of Palestinian nationalism, and the intimidation of Syria. To attain these goals, Israeli leaders were willing to risk a wider regional war, and indeed to push the world to what is in every respect a "pre-nuclear" situation. This alone should give the American people cause for concern and action. In addition,the United States has provided Israel with the economic and military means to invade Lebanon, to bomb Baghdad, and to perpetuate the occupation of Palestine and of Syrian territory in clear violation of U.S. law, including the Arms Export Control Act of 1976 and the Israel-U.S. Mutual Defense Agreement of 1952.

The 1982 Israeli invasion so tipped the domestic balance in favor of Israel's Lebanese allies that the majority of Muslims, nationalists and other anti-Israel groups were left in a clearly submissive condition. The terms of the victor were dictated to the vanquished. lsrael's new ally,Bashir Gemayel, was to be president/viceroy of Lebanon, although according to noted American journalist Jonathan Randal, Bashir himself, who owed his presidency to Begin and Sharon, complained that these two treated him like a "vassal."'. The Shultz agreement of May 17, 1983 was to be Lebanon's Versailles, which would realize the long-standing Zionist dream described in the Sharett diaries a "Christian" state that would ally itself with Israel.

Despite the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel before he could take office, initially matters developed in accordance with Israel's strategy for Lebanon. The negotiations, handled by civilians from the two countries' foreign ministries, appeared to be headed towards normalization along Camp David lines; Israel secured a liaison office in Beirut, the next thing to an embassy; the Phalanges party and its leader's son, Amin Gemayel, now the president of Lebanon, began to reshape the country in their own image. But it soon became clear that sectarian hegemony, sponsored by Israel and supported by the United States, was a poor substitute for even the antiquated confessional system of 1943. By fall 1983, Israeli troops were forced to withdraw to the Allah River. By February 1984, President Reagan ordered U.S. troops to withdraw, while Druze and Shiite fighters made a triumphant entry into Beirut (February 10,1984). President Amin Gemayel, who owed his presidency to the Israeli invasion, was forced under new political and military conditions to repudiate the Shultz agreement (March 1984) and to close Israel's "embassy" in Beirut (July of the same year).

Not only did the Israeli invasion of 1982 fail to achieve most of its objectives: It pushed the right-wing Lebanese Forces to a position that borders on fascism and renders reunification and reintegration a remote possibility. It has exacerbated the Lebanese civil war at an unbearable cost in human lives and property.

This human tragedy compels us to examine the Israeli rationale of "security," a rubric that has covered a curiously large number of Israeli violations of international law and human rights, recently and in the past. Why, we must ask, does Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip close universities, shoot students in classrooms and on the street, deport leaders, dismiss mayors, create colonial settlements and encourage terrorist acts by settlers all in the name of' "security?". Why, when confronted with massive popular resistance to its occupation of South Lebanon, did Israel react with the same "Iron Fist," initiating raids on villages, mass arrests of civilians, wide-scale destruction of homes and property, and assassinations even though this policy could only further alienate the population."

The personal diary of Moshe Sharett sheds light on this question by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of lsrael's "Arab policy" in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett's records document this policy of "sacred terrorism" and expose the myths of Israel's "security needs" and the "Arab threat" that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard "Israel's security" against an "Arab threat," but by a drive for lebensraum.

Referring to the terrorist bombings that crippled two prominent West Bank mayors and injured other civilians on June 2, 1980, William Browser, in an article for the New York Times (June 5, 1980), explained the apprehension of West Bank Palestinians: although military occupation is not new to them, Israeli terrorism-if that is what it was- is virtually without precedent in the last thirty years." It behooves Mr. Browser and the attentive public who reads the "news that's fit to print," to examine the many precedents amply documented and occasionally decried by a bewildered Israeli prime minister who worried about the moral deterioration in Israeli society in the 1950s that first prompted revenge as a "sacred" principle. In a passage quoted in Rokach's study, Sharett wrote:

"In the thirties we restrained the emotions of revenge. . . . Now, on the contrary, we justify the system of reprisal ... we have eliminated the mental and moral brake on this instinct and made it possible ... to uphold revenge as a moral value.... a sacred principle" (p. 33).

The undisguised satisfaction that the maiming of the two Palestinian mayors evoked among many Jewish settlers in the West Bank is reminiscent of the feeling in Israel in the 1950s that caused Sharett so much anguish, and challenged his conscience. In fact, the private armies now being organized by Jewish vigilante groups determined to keep the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip under permanent Israeli control, have openly advocated the removal of all Arabs from occupied Palestine. Although these ultra-nationalists consider former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir (former members of the terrorist Irgun and Stern gangs) to have become patsies, fools and traitors, and although Begin condemned the attacks on the Palestinian mayors as "crimes of the worst kind," the fact remains that the settlers of Gush Emunim and Kach are carrying out the settlement policies of the Israeli government. This government provides them with the protection and economic benefits and equips them with legitimacy. By the same token, it ensures that their victims will be defenseless and powerless. The 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, committed by Begin's Irgun Zvei Leumi, and the June 2, 1980 bombing, committed by another vigilante group, are products of the same type of "sacred terrorism."

The thirty-two years that have lapsed in the interim have witnessed innumerable acts of Israeli terror: it hardly seems necessary to recall the aerial bombardment of vital civilian infrastructures in Egypt and Syria in the late 1960s,7 or the destruction of southern Lebanon in the 1970S and'80s, nor to mention the brutality with which the occupation regime treats the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, or the many assassinations of Palestinian intellectuals in various European capitals in the early 1970s.

A most disturbing phenomenon, which will continue to inhibit the prospects for Palestinian-Israeli coexistence, is the ascendancy of the radical right in Israel. Its orientation towards brute force, its attitude towards Arabs, and its contempt for debate and dissent, leave little room for coexistence. Justifications of acts of terrorism against Palestinian civilians are rampant among members of the political establishment and Jewish settlers. Israel's former Minister of Science and Energy, Yuval Neeman, Knesset member Haim Druckman, former chief of staff Raphael Eytan, and Sephardic chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliahu are on record justifying that kind of terrorism.8 In July 1985, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed to work for the early release of convicted Jewish terrorists, whom he described as "excellent people who made a mistake" (Jerusalem Post, July 12, 1985). The propensity for violence against Arabs has been clearly established in interviews of settlers, young and old, by Israeli and Western journalists.9

The radical right nowadays speaks outright of dispossession and deportation of Palestinians. Israeli sociologist Yoram Peri wrote in Daivar (May 11,1984) that while Defense Minister Arens and Foreign Minister Shamir speak of annexing the West Bank and Gaza and forging a "pluralistic" society, the extreme right advocates deportation, a term which, four years ago, no one would dare utter. "Hence," he wrote, "the proximity of the right to the Fascist conception of the State."

Another factor that inhibits coexistence is the cavalier manner in which members of the establishment claim sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza. So contemptuous of the need to argue and convince was Foreign Minister Shamir, that his reply to a question of why Israel lay claims to those territories consisted of one word: "Because!" Israel's Chief Rabbi, Shlomo Goren, has remarked that in religious law retaining the occupied territories takes precedence over the duty to save life. Terms such as"Western Eretz Israel" and "Judea and Samaria," which are being used with more frequency and emphasis, represent a revival of the revisionist Zionist notion that the "land of Israel" also includes modern-day Jordan, and underline Israeli leaders' determination never to relinquish the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The more the world tries to understand the situation in the Middle East,the more the Zionist organizations in the United States, acting in concert with Israel, try to fog it up. lsrael's wars against the Arabs in 1967 and 1982 obliterated its David image and confirmed it as the Goliath of the Middle East. No longer was it possible for the Israeli government to escape public scrutiny, despite all the immunity which it enjoys in the American public arena, as its forces, in the name of "security" for Israeli civilians, carried out the most ruthless aerial bombardment since Vietnam.The U.S. ambassador in Lebanon, whose government used its Security Council veto to protest lsrael's war gains in 1982, described their saturation bombing: "There is no pinpoint accuracy against targets in open spaces." The Canadian ambassador said lsrael's bombing "would make Berlin of 1944 look like a tea party. . it is truly a scene from Dante's Inferno." NBC's John Chancellor said: "I kept thinking of the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. ..we are now dealing with an imperial Israel." Indeed, in their pure murderousness, given the frequent use of phosphorus and cluster bombs, the Israeli bombings of Beirut, an advanced form of state terrorism, far outstripped the attacks on Guernica, Coventry and Dresden.

Since this book was first published in 1980, the Zionist movement has responded to the growing criticism of Israeli violence in a hysterical manner. Surveillance, monitoring the activities of lsrael's critics in the media, churches and on the campus, intelligence gathering and blacklisting reminiscent of the McCarthy period in the United States, are among the tactics employed recently by Zionist organizations to stifle criticism of Israel. 10 Pinning the anti-Semitic label on critics his become the standard and easiest tactic to preempt rational discussion of public policy regarding Israel and to intimidate would-be critics. The list of victims includes such distinguished individuals as former Senator Charles Percy, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, former Under Secretary of State George Ball, former Congressman Paul Findley," and many other lesser known individuals who struggle against overwhelming odds to retain a job and secure their livelihood. Menachem Begin's famous remark after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, which defined criticism of Israel as "blood libel against the Jewish people," is a stark example of the trend to equate open criticism with anti-Semitism, even as Israel continues to have trade relations and military cooperation with the most notoriously anti-Semitic regimes in Central and South America." Israel's war against journalists was revealed in the legal suit against NBC's reporting of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, 13 its repeated allegations that journalists who report news detrimental to Israel do so only in response to Arab "threats,"14 and in the killing of CBS crewmen in South Lebanon, who were covering the implementation of Israel's "Iron Fist" policy (March 21, 1985).

Other hysterical responses to increasing knowledge of the facts of the Middle Fast conflict have emerged in the writings of propagandists masquerading as scholars. Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial 13 turns history on its head by claiming that Jews did not replace native Palestinians, who were allegedly no more than illegal Arab immigrant workers who moved to "where they found work." The absurd and indefensible allegation that there were virtually no Arabs in Palestine prior to the Zionist influx, seems intended to provide a veneer of legitimacy for lsrael's increasingly violent efforts to make the myth that there is "no such thing as a Palestinian" a chilling reality.

The Zionist effort to stifle public debate of Israeli actions extended to the present study. After unsuccessful attempts by the Israeli establishment to suppress publication, in Hebrew, of the Sharett diary in Israel,attempts were made by threats of litigation and otherwise to suppress our publication of this study of the diary here in the United States. On April 11, 1980 the AAUG received communication from a well-known law firm in New York requesting in the "firmest manner possible" that we refrain from printing, publishing or otherwise reproducing portions of the diary. The law firm, acting on behalf of the family of the late Moshe Sharett and the Israeli publisher of the diary, threatened to "initiate prompt litigation in a Federal District Court" on the grounds of alleged violation of United States copyright laws.

Subsequently, the AAUG received a telegram from the Sharett family emphasizing that all rights would be vigorously protected if the association published "parts or all of Moshe Sharett's diaries." Anxious transoceanic calls were received by our office from the Israeli media. Our right to publish was questioned, but not on the legal grounds cited by the Sharett family and its legal counsel. Instead, we were hysterically accused of attempting to expose Israel via Sharett in a sensationalist manner. The Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv headlined a front-page story, "Israel's Haters in the U.S.A. translated with No Permission the Diaries of Moshe Sharett" (April 4, 1980). According to former Knesset member Uri Avneri, writing in Haolam Hazeh (September 23, 1980), the Israeli Foreign Ministry initially supported Moshe Sharett's son, Yaqov, who edited the Hebrew publication of the diary, in his attempt to suppress publication of Livia Rokach's study based on the diary. "But to his disappointment, the Foreign Office did not uphold its support for him. The Jerusalem politicians decided that pursuing a legal course in stopping the dissemination of the book would be a mistake of the first order, since this would give it much more publicity."

Needless to say, our accusers not only prejudged our book before its publication and cast aspersion on the organization and the individuals involved in its production; they also assumed that our publication was an unauthorized translation. In fact, the material quoted as verbatim translations from the Sharett diary or substantially paraphrased from that diary comprises only about one percent of the diary. Rokach's study utilizes excerpts from the Sharett diary to reinforce and illustrate her own thesis.

We are under no illusion that the challenge before us was predominantly legal. After all, what Sharett said in his diary, limited as it is to the Hebrew-speaking public, is very revealing; it constitutes an indictment of Zionism by the former prime minister of Israel, and dismantles many erroneous assumptions about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It refutes a three-decade-old dogma and emphasizes the need to reexamine the uncritical support Israel has enjoyed in the West for its policies toward the Arabs. Hence, the Israelis' need to suppress and censor, to withhold relevant and vital information from the public discourse on the Middle Fast. We are painfully reminded of similar attempts to conceal the fraudulent methods which the United States politico-military establishment employed in its pursuit of the war against the Vietnamese. The ability of the establishment to withhold the truth from the American public prolonged the Vietnam War and aggravated the social, economic, and human problems which resulted from that war. It will be hoped that the deceptive strategy of David Ben Gurion,which Moshe Sharett documented in his day-today record, will not be withheld forever from the American public, whose lives are materially affected by events in the Middle East. Thus, in our opinion, Israel's Sacred Terrorism has an indisputable significance in the formulation of a healthy and objective policy towards the Middle East.

It is our considered opinion that Sharett's Personal Diary, is a very important historical resource that sheds much light on Israel's policy towards the Arab world, particularly for all of us in the United States who have such a large stake in Middle Eastern developments and the eventual outcome of the conflict. Therefore, the use of Sharett's historical resource for scholarly study does not infringe the copyright laws.

We have taken particular precautions, however, to ensure that our selections have been translated accurately, have not been taken out of context and are not mitigated or contradicted by anything that Sharett wrote elsewhere in the diary. We are also certain that these selections satisfy the "fair use" criteria of United States copyright law:

1. The AALUG is a non-profit, educational organization, which is not publishing this study for commercial exploitation.
2. The nature of Moshe Sharett's diary relates materially to the "right of the public to know."
3. The amount of the copyrighted material reproduced in this publication amounts to no m ore than one percent of the whole.
4. The economic value of the original work would not suffer from the limited quotations included in our study.

We take comfort in the protection afforded by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution involving freedom of speech and the press and the companion "right of the public to know." The Pentagon Papers were revealed to the public after they had long lain unnoticed in the archives of the American military bureaucracy. The critical nature of their content warranted that they should have been unearthed much earlier than their dramatic appearance. Sharett's startling revelations must not be subjected to the same bureaucratic strangulation, or kept away from the English-reading public so that their usefulness as a factor in Middle East policy is nullified.

NASEER H. ARURI, AAUG Publications Committee November 1985 

Preface Notes

1. Moshe Sharett, Yoman Ishi (Personal Diary), edited by Yaqov Sharett (Tel Aviv: Ma'a 1979).
2. For example, upon his retirement in May 1985, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis revealed that in December 1981 Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon outlined his plans for the impending invasion to U.S. envoy Philip Habib (Washington Post, 24 May 1985).
3. See for example Thomas Stauffer, "Israel Calculates the Price of Peace: Money and Water," Christian Science Monitor, 13 January 1982, and "Israel's Water Needs May Erode Path to Peace in Region," Christian Science Monitor, 20 Januarv 1982; John Cooley, "Syria Links Pull-Out to Guaranteed Access to Water," Washington Post, 8 June 1983; and Leslie C. Schmida, "Israel's Drive for Water," Link, 17, 4 (November 1994).
4. Quoted in al-Nahar and al-Sa ir, 22 April 1979.
5. Quoted in The Isolationist-Israeli Alliance Is a Phenomenon that Threatens the Unity of Lebanon, presented at the World Congress for Solidarity with the Lebanese People, Paris, 16 18 June 1980 (Beirut: Information Bureau of the Lebanese National Movement, 1980), 9.
6. Jonathan C. Randal, Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 10-11.
7. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Israeli bombing reduced the Egyptian cities of Suez, Port Said and Ismailia to ghost towns. During the same period Israel carried out repeated air raids against Syria. Following the killing of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, at least 200 people, almost all civilians, were killed in Israeli "reprisal" raids in Syria alone. David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (London: Futura, 1978), 251-252.
8. See articles by Yoram Peri in Davar, I I May 1984. Ya'acov Rahamim in Ma'ariv, 14 December 1983, and Mary Curtius, "Israeli Debate: Should Settlers Be Pardoned," Christian Science Monitor, 15 Julv 1985.
9. See, for example, Christian Science Monitor, 10 May 1984.
10. At its annual convention in 1984, the Middle East Studies Association called on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Anti-Def'amation League of B'nai B'rith to "disavow and refrain from" blacklisting practices against scholars and students. For more information on efforts by supporters of Israel to quash open debate, see, for example, Naseer Aruri, "The Middle East on the U.S. Campus," Link, 18, 2 (May June 1985).
11. Former Congressman Findley documents the pervasive influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in They Dare to Speak Out (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1985).
12. For a detailed analysis of lsrael's relations with Central American regimes, see Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, It's No Secret: lsrael's Military, Involvement in Central America, forthcoming, AAUG. See also Israel Shahak, Israel's Global Role: Weapons.for Repression (Belmont, Mass.: AAUG, 1982)
13. In May 1994 a pro-Israel group known as Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission to deny renewal of licenses for station WNBC-TV in New York and seven other NBC affiliates, charging that NBC had presented one-sided coverage of the war in Lebanon. See Christian Science Monitor, 14 May 1984. AFSI also commissioned Professor Edward Alexander to write a study, which appeared under the title NBC's War In Lebanon: The Distorting Mirror (1983).
14. An example is Ze'ev Chafets, Double Vision: How the Press Distorts America's Media, of the Middle Last (New York: William Morrow, 1983). Chafets is former head of the Israeli press office in Jerusalem. American journalists have vigorously denied these allegations. (See, e.g., Charles Glass, ABC Beirut correspondent, in CPJ Update [published by the Committee to Protect Journalists], November December 1984).
15. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. For critical reviews of Peter'sbook, see Norman Finklestein, in In These Times, 5 11 September 1984, 12-13, Muhammad Hallaj, "From Time Immemorial: The Resurrection of a Myth," Link, 18, 1(January March 1985); and Ian Gilmour and David Gilmour, in Arab Studies Quarterly, 7, 2 3 (Spring/Summer 1985), 181-195.

AAUG Publications Committee, November 1985 

Introduction

POPULAR SUPPORT of Israel over the last quarter of a century has been based on a number of myths, the most Persistent of which has been the myth of lsrael's security, Implying the permanent existence of grave threats to the survival of Jewish society in Palestine, this myth has been carefully cultivated to evoke anxious images in public opinion to permit, and even encourage, the use of large amounts of public funds to sustain Israel militarily and economically. "Israel's security" is the official argument with which not only Israel but also the U.S. denies the right of self-determination in their own country to the Palestinian people. For the past three decades it has been accepted as a legitimate explanation for lsrael's violation of international resolutions calling for the return of the Palestinian people to their homes. Over the past thirteen years Israel has been allowed to evoke its security to justify its refusal to retreat from the Arab and Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. Security is still the pretext given by successive Israeli governments for widespread massacres of civilian populations in Lebanon, for expropriations of Arab lands, for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, for deportations, and for arbitrary detentions of political prisoners. Although the security of the Arab populations in the whole region has been repeatedly threatened over these years by overt and covert warfare, terrorist plots and subversive designs, and although UN resolutions demand the establishment of secure borders for all states in the region, so far only lsrael's security has been at the center of international discussion.

The persistence of the myth of Israel's security shows that there is considerable public belief in the so-called Arab commitment to eliminate the Jewish state. Most of the distinguished Western writers who present this case derive their arguments from Zionist versions of events in the late 1940s, at the time of the establishment of Israel, and in the mid-1950s, when Nasser came to power. They go on from these arguments to present Israel's so-called struggle for security and survival as a moral issue. The media often furnish politicians, who have other reasons for their political and military support of Israel, with the convenient issue of the West's moral commitment to Israel.

Other versions or approaches to the facts have more often than not been ignored. For example, recent disclosures by Nahum Goldmann (Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1979) have gone practically unnoticed. Goldmann, who for more than thirty years headed the pro-Zionist World .Jewish Congress, charges that the Arabs were not consulted about the partition of Palestine in 1947, and further that their willingness to negotiate a political compromise that might have prevented the 1948 war was vetoed and undermined by Ben Gurion before May 1948.

The recently published Personal Diary of Moshe Sharett (Yoman Ishi. Tel Aviv: Ma'ariv, 1979, in Hebrew) now offers a decisive and authoritative contribution to the demystification of the myth of lsrael's security and its security policies. Between 1933 and 1948 Sharett guided the foreign relations of the Zionist movement, as head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, and from 1948 to 1956 he was lsrael's foreign minister. In 1954 and 1955 he was its prime minister as well. The following pages present extracts from Sharett's diary demonstrating the following points:

1. The Israeli political /military establishment never seriously believed in an Arab threat to the existence of Israel. On the contrary, it sought and applied every means to exacerbate the dilemma of the Arab regimes after the 1948 war. The Arab governments were extremely reluctant to engage in any military confrontation with Israel, yet in order to survive they needed to project to their populations and to the exiled Palestinians in their countries some kind of reaction to lsrael's aggressive policies and continuous acts of harassment. In other words, the Arab threat was an Israeli-invented myth which for internal and inter-Arab reasons the Arab regimes could not completely deny, though they constantly feared Israeli preparations for a new war.

2. The Israeli political/military establishment aimed at pushing the Arab states into military confrontations which the Israeli leaders were invariably certain of winning. The goal of these confrontations was to modify the balance of power in the region radically, transforming the Zionist state into the major power in the Middle East.

3. In order to achieve this strategic purpose the following tactics were used:

   a) Large- and small-scale military operations aimed at civilian populations across the armistice lines, especially in the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, then respectively under the control of Jordan and Egypt. These operations had a double purpose: to terrorize the populations, and to create a permanent destabilization stemming from tensions between the Arab governments and the populations, who felt they were not adequately protected against Israeli aggression.
   b) Military operations against Arab military installations in border areas to undermine the morale of the armies and intensify the regimes' destabilization from inside their military structures.
   c) Covert terrorist operations in depth inside the Arab world, used for both espionage and to create fear, tension and instability.

4. lsrael's achievement of its strategic purpose was to be realized through the following means:
   a) New territorial conquests through war. Although the 1949-50 armistice agreements assigned to Israel a territory one-third larger than had the UN partition plan, the Israeli leadership was still not satisfied with the size of the state, the borders of which it had committed itself to respect on the international level. It sought to recover at least the borders of mandate Palestine. The territorial dimension was considered to be a vital factor in Israel's transformation into a regional power.
   b) Political as well as military efforts to bring about the liquidation of all Arab and Palestinian claims to Palestine through the dispersion of the Palestinian refugees of the 1947-49 war to faraway parts of the Arab world as well as outside the Arab world.
   c) Subversive operations designed to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement, and create puppet regimes which would gravitate to the regional Israeli power.

In providing documentation on the above points, Sharett's Diary deals a deadly blow to a number of important interpretations which are still being presented as historical truths. Among these are the following items:

1. To this date the majority of scholars and analysts cite the nationalization of the Suez Canal as the chief motivation for the October 1956 war, It is thereby implied that the projected British and French aggression against Egypt provided Israel with an opportunity to achieve the termination of fedayeen attacks from across the armistice lines, and to settle its accounts with Nasser's regime, to which these attacks were attributed.
What Sharett tells us now is that a major war against Egypt aimed at the territorial conquest of Gaza and the Sinai was on the Israeli leadership's agenda at least as early as the autumn of 1953, almost a year before Nasser ousted Neguib and consolidated his leadership. It was agreed then that the international conditions for such a war would mature within a period of about three years. The Israeli military attack on Gaza in February 1955 was consciously undertaken as a preliminary act of war. A couple of months later a government decision to commence a war to conquer the Gaza Strip met with the strenuous opposition of the foreign minister, whose political liquidation was thereupon decided by the supporters of the war policy, headed by Ben Gurion. Had the prospect of the tripartite aggression not appeared on the horizon in later months, Israel would have gone on to attack Egypt according to its own plans, and, moreover, with U.S. consent.

2. The occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 has been described, and is still widely understood today, as an Israeli defensive action in the face of Arab threats. Sharett's Diary offers unequivocable evidence that the occupation of Gaza and also of the West Bank was part of lsrael's plans since the early fifties. American Zionist leaders were informed about these plans in 1954, In 1955, Jewish and Arab lives were sacrificed in a series of provocative attacks undertaken to create a pretext for the occupation of Jordanian territory. The chief obstacle postponing this occupation was Britain's residual presence in Jordan upholding the Hashemite throne.
3. The continuing, violent Israeli aggression in Lebanon still is being attributed, shamelessly, to Israeli security needs. In particular, Israeli spokesmen, echoed by Western media, try to explain lsrael's massive intervention in Lebanon and the Lebanese events in general, with the following historical arguments:
   a) In the struggle between Muslims and Christians, a conflict which would have broken out regardless of outside interference, Israel's role has been limited to the defense of the Christian minority.
   b) The presence of the Palestinian resistance, or in Israeli terminology, of Palestinian terrorism in that country required Israeli intervention.

Sharett's Diary, however, provides the entire documentation of how in 1954 Ben Gurion developed the diabolic plans to "Christianize" Lebanon, i.e., to invent and create from scratch the inter-Lebanese conflict, and of how a detailed blueprint for the partition and subordination of that country to Israel was elaborated by Israel more than fifteen years before the Palestinian presence became a political factor in Lebanon.

The use of terror and aggression to provoke or create the appearance of an Arab threat to lsrael's existence was summed up by the then "number two" of the Zionist state's hierarchy:

"I have been meditating on the long chain of false incidents and hostilities we have invented, and on the many clashes we have provoked which cost us so much blood, and on the violations of the law by our men-all of which brought grave disasters and determined the whole course of events and contributed to the security crisis".

 A week earlier, Moshe Dayan, then lsrael's chief of staff, explained why Israel needed to reject Any border security arrangements offered by the neighboring Arab States, or by the United Nations, as well as the formal security guarantees suggested by the United States. Such guarantees, he predicted, might "tie lsrael's hands." Presumably, that would render unjustifiable or even impossible those attacks and incursions across the armistice lines which through the mid- 1950s went under the euphemistic name of reprisal actions. These actions, Dayan said,

"are our vital lymph. They . . . . help us maintain a high tension among our population and in the army. . . in order to have young men go to the Negev we have to cry out that it is in danger". (26 May 1955, 102 1)

 The creation of a siege mentality in Israeli society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other. Although Israeli society faced a serious risk of social and cultural disintegration under the impact of a mass immigration of Asian and North African Jews into the pre-state's ideologically homogeneous community, the purpose of the siege mentality was not so much that of attaining a defensive cohesiveness in Israel's Jewish society. It was calculated principally to "eliminate the moral brakes" required for a society to fully support a police which constituted a complete reversal of the collective ethical code on which its formal education was based and from which it was supposed to derive its vital strength. Of course, this ethical code had not been respected in the past either. Aggression and terrorism had been exercised by the Zionists before and during the 1947-48 war. The following testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Duelma in 1948 is only the most recently disclosed of a long chain of evidence:

 Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up. . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys". . . became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better. (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)

 But these episodes did not filter through to the society at large. The War of Independence was ritualized, on the contrary, as a miraculous victory of (Jewish) right against (Arab) might. Deir Yassin was (falsely) described by tile ruling Labor establishment as an isolated and even condemnable case, a product of the brutality of the minority lrgun group. Manuals, school textbooks, history books, anthologies and the media placidly glorified the moral quality of the war, the "Puritv of the weapons" used by the army, the Jewish ethos underlying the state.

 The security or reprisals policy of the 1950s represented, in this sense, a qualitative leap. The strategic designs were perceived, by the Israeli leaders themselves, is totally irrational in respect to the regional realities, and especially in respect to the international context to which Israel had formally committed itself. Therefore, the support required for it inside the country had to be total, i.e., emotional, almost instinctive, with no concessions to rationality and no moralistic cover. A strategic goal such as the transformation of Israel into a regional power inevitably presupposed the use of large-scale, open violence, and could not pretend even mythically to be achieved on the basis of the earlier moral superiority doctrine which, therefore, had to be replaced with a new one. Terrorism and "revenge" were now to be glorified as the new "moral. . . and even sacred" values of Israeli society. The resurgent militarism no longer needed the idealistic, socialist varnish of a Paimach: the military symbol was now Unit 101, led by Arik Sharon.

 The process of this cultural even more than political transition was not automatic. In fact, as Dayan admitted in the above quotation, much anxiety had to be generated to encourage it. The lives of Jewish victims also had to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals, especially in those periods in which the Arab governments succeeded in controlling the reactions of the harassed and enraged Arab border populations. A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled by the censors, was directed to feed the Israeli population with images of the monstrosity of the Enemy. More images showed that negotiated security arrangements with the Enemy could only be interpreted as a fatal proof of Israeli weakness.

 The final point of this process which Sharett watched in the 1950s was the election of Menachem Begin as prime minister in 1977. Sharett's Zionist perspective was based on a political/diplomatic alternative to the terror strategy of Ben Gurion and his followers. This, he thought, could consolidate the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and perhaps enlarge it in the future, without major concessions to the surrounding Arab world. Sharett believed his goals could be achieved without disturbing the West. Indeed, he thought Israeli plans could be coordinated with the West's. He lucidly perceived as fascist the logic behind lsrael's security doctrine, and correctly evaluated its consequences of moral corruption on the internal level and increasing violence on the regional level. He opposed it, and was certainly its most illustrious victim. His defeat, however, was inevitable, because his dissent from the strategy was quantitative more than qualitative: on methods rather than substance; on the number, for example, of the victims of a given military action and only vaguely on the ideology behind such actions. Basically, in the light of his unflagging Zionist faith, he was as fascinated as repelled by the strategy, as envious of its immediate successes as he was worried over its longer range consequences and international repercussions for Zionism and Israel.

 The liquidation of his dissenting presence was considered indispensable to the realization of the Israeli political/military leadership's megalomaniac and criminal designs. His intrinsic weakness consisted in his seemingly rational hope that the so-called liberal West would prevent the implementation of his opponents' designs. He relied on the West rather than on the awakening of a local, popular conscience which he had the power and the information to provoke but which as a Zionist he could not and dared not do.

 On the contrary, notwithstanding his scruples and torments he almost invariably ended up collaborating with his adversaries, and with those elements in the security establishment who conspired against him, in the fabrication and diffusion of deliberately distorted versions of events and policies for domestic and international consumption.

 In a historical perspective Sharett's self-portrait as it emerges from his Personal Diary, thus also explains why no so-called moderate Zionist proposal is possible,and how any attempt to liberalize Zionism from the inside could not but-as has repeatedly been the case-end in defeat. A clear, lucid, coherent logic runs through the history of the past three decades. In the early fifties the bases were laid for constructing a state imbued with the principles of sacred terrorism against the surrounding Arab societies on the threshold of the eighties the same state is for the first time denounced by its own intellectuals as being tightly in the deadly grip of fascism.

 This may be just one more reason why Western journalists, scholars sand analysts may find themselves greatly embarrassed by the following document. These commentators still insist on upholding the presumed moral commitment of the West to what they obstinately continue to mystify is Israel's security. In this sense Sharett's Diary, is potentially devastating to Zionist propaganda as the Pentagon Papers were in regard to U.S. aggression in Vietnam.

CHAPTER 1: Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary[](#Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary)

Moshe Sharett and His Personal Diary

Moshe Sharett (Shertok) was born in Harsson, Russia, in 1894. He emigrated with his family his father was a fervent Zionist activist-to Palestine in 1906, at the age of twelve. The family settled in the Arab village of Ein Sinya, near Nablus. Later, Moshe, his brother and three sisters would describe that two-year period, during which they studied Arabic, played with the children of the village and learned fascinating stories from the village's elders as the happiest time of their lives. In 1908 the Shertok family moved to Tel Aviv, where Moshe entered the Hertselyah High School. At the outbreak of World War 1, he was conscripted into the Ottoman army, where he took an officer's course and then served as an officer, mostly in Syria. After the war, while the British Mandate was established in Palestine, he graduated from the London School of Economics, and shortly thereafter entered political activity in the ranks of Labor Zionism. He was a founding member of Mapai (Party of the Workers of Eretz Israel), and became chief editor of Davar, the daily organ of the Histadrut (the trade union federation dominated by Mapai). Later he was appointed as deputy to Haim Arlosorov, the head of the Jewish Agency's Political Department. After Arlosorov was murdered on a Tel Aviv beach in 1933, Sharett was appointed as his successor. The Chairman of the Jewish Agency at that time was David Ben Gurion. According to Sharett, the conflict with Ben Gurion which characterized their twenty-five years of close collaboration at the summit of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel, originated in suspicions on Ben Gurion's part that Sharett was loyal to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization. In the 1940s Ben Gurion accused Sharett, unjustly according to the latter, of collaborating with Weizmann to negotiate, with U.S. mediation, an agreement between the Zionist movement and the Emir Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Sharett claimed that in reality he contributed to the failure of those negotiations. But according to Dr. Nahum Goldmann, Sharett was again involved in 1947-48 with Goldmann in negotiations mediated by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, aimed at obtaining a political solution to the problem of the Zionist presence in Palestine, possibly leading to creating a Middle Eastern Confederation including a Zionist entity. The main negotiator on the Arab side was to be Egyptian Foreign Minister Nukrashi Pasha. These negotiations, which were expected to prevent the first Arab-Israeli war, would have meant postponing the date scheduled for the proclamation of the state of Israel by a few weeks. Ben Gurion vetoed the negotiations, rejected the postponement, and accused Sharett of being opposed to the creation of the state, an accusation he vehemently denied. Fundamentally, Ben Gurion's preference for the use of force, versus Sharett's preference for the diplomatic method to achieve the same goals, was the basis for the conflict between these two Zionist leaders, which lasted until Shtrett was ousted from the Israeli government in June 1956. Moshe Sharett died in Tel Aviv in 1965. The Personal Diary, which Moshe Sharett wrote from October 1953 to November 1956 covers the last years of his political activity as lsrael's first foreign minister, including the two years in which he replaced Ben Gurion as the prime minister. It then extends over the first fifteen months of the tormented inactivity following his political demise. Moshe Sharett stopped writing his diary in the middle of a phrase on November 29, 1957. His last notes identify one of his previous collaborators, considered a close personal and political friend, as one of the conspirators against him. The Diary, a 2,400 page document in eight volumes, contains the daily notes and aide-memoires in which Sharett recorded current events: personal, family, and party happenings, as well as national and international meetings of prime importance, conversations with his wife or other members of the family alongside administrative questions regarding his ministry and comments on cabinet meetings. The intimate nature of the Diary, together with the exceptionally authoritative position of its author, constitutes a rare guarantee of credibility. Unlike other memoirs which have come out of Israel in recent years, and which were written for publication, Sharett's Diary hardly can be suspected of distortion, self glorification or subjectively polemic intentions. It is not surprising at all, therefore, that Sharett's son and his family were subjected to immense pressures to refrain from publication, or at least to submit the document to Labor Party censorship. Sharett's son Ya'acov finally decided to publish the complete writings.

CHAPTER 2 Ben Gurion Goes to Sdeh Boker: Spiritual Retreat as a Tactic

Moshe Sharrett jotted the first of the daily notes in his personal diary on October 9, 1953. Shortly before that, Ben Gurion, who was prime minister and minister of defense, announced his intention to withdraw from government activities. Sharett, who had been second in command to Ben Gurion since the pre-state days, was slated to replace him as Israel's prime minister. He would also retain the foreign ministry.

To public opinion at large, Ben Gurion's intention to retire was presented grandly as a spiritual exercise, a measure capable of galvanizing Israeli and Jewish youth and necessary for leading the Zionist sheep back to the abandoned ideals of pioneering and settlement. In reality, while the state was spending millions of pounds on the construction of a "hut" for Ben Gurion in the kibbutz Sdeh Boker in Negev, and on related security and communications arrangements, the Old Man already knew, and informed his collaborators, that his absence from the government would last for two years. Behind the campaign idealizing his withdrawal was a scenario meticulously prepared by him and his men. Even then, just four years after the 1948-49 war, the security establishment was ready with plans for lsrael's territorial expansion. The armistice lines established in Rhodes, although traced so as to grant Israel over a third more than the territory allotted it by the UN partition resolution in 1947, were considered unsatisfactory by the army, which aspired to recover at least the boundaries of mandate Palestine. Ben Gurion had theorized already about the necessity for Israel to become the regional power in the Middle East. Toward the realization of this goal a strategy for the destabilization of the region also had been drawn: operatively, as we shall see, its pivot for the next quarter of a century was to be the political-military policy known under the false name of "retaliation." The international conditions for the implementation of this strategic design, though, had yet to be prepared.

Economic and military aid from the West, in particular, was an essential condition. At the same time, rapprochement between the West and the Arab world had to be prevented. Toward this aim, the West had to be persuaded that Israel would be its best bet in the region militarily, and this was another of the major objectives of the massive reprisal attacks launched across the borders by the Israeli army. At the same time, though, the West should not be alarmed prematurely about Israel's intentions, because it was not ready yet to support these Israeli aims. Ben Gurion's formal withdrawal, and his (formal) replacement by the "moderate" Sharett, was interpreted by international diplomacy as a sign that Israel was not headed for war. Since the launching of the reprisal actions, such a fear was prevalent in the Arab world.

In the short range, the Israeli design was aimed at slowing down the negotiations between Arab states which were pressing to be armed, and the West, which was reluctant to arm them. In the meantime, the idea that the military actions were intended for no purpose other than their declared one-protecting lsrael's civilian populations against guerrilla-type attacks from Arab territories -would gain in credibility under the premiership of Sharett, a man notoriously devoted to moderation and diplomacy. The myth of Israel's Security, aimed at generating a consensus, would have its strength enhanced to a greater extent in Ben Gurion's absence. Thus, he went off to Sdeh Boker, accompanied by the aura of a pioneer-saint, and Sharett prepared to take over, or so he thought. In fact, Ben Gurion was to keep control of the real channels of command.

Chapter 3 Retaliation for War

On October 11th, 1953, the foreign minister and would-be premier noted in his diary that he had been to see Ben Zvi, the president of the state:

Ben Zvi raised as usual some inspired questions ... such as do we have a chance to occupy the Sinai and how wonderful it would be if the Egyptians started an offensive which we could defeat and follow with an invasion of that desert. He was very disappointed when I told him that the Egyptians show no tendency to facilitate us in this occupation task through a provocative challenge on their side. (11 October 1953, 27)

The next day Ben Gurion informed Sharett that Pinhas Lavon, a staunch supporter of the retaliation policy, would succeed him as the minister of defense, and that he was about to nominate Moshe Dayan as the armed forces chief of staff.

I said immediately that Moshe Dayan is a soldier only at war time but during peace time he is a politician. The nomination means ":politicization": of the headquarters. The new Chief of' Staff's immense capacity for plotting and intrigue-making will yield many complications. Ben Gurion admitted to the truth of these definitions and even added that Dayan himself defined himself this way and sought to disqualify himself for the job, but never mind, it will be all right. I left with a sinking heart. (ibid., 29)

Sharett considered the international climate at that time to be unfavorable to Israel: the U.S. has just decided to supply arms to Syria and Iraq, and to arm Egypt soon after the signature of the Canal Zone Agreement. In addition, lsrael's constant violations of the UN demands that it cease diversion of the Jordan River and adhere to the Johnston Plan were causing increasing consternation in Western capitals. The West had cultivated the hope that an Arab-Israeli agreement on the diversion of the Jordan waters would, if reached and implemented, become the cornerstone for a wider agreement that would take the wind out of growing anti-Western nationalist tensions in the area.2 According to the UN observers' chief, Danish General Wagen Benike, ":the Israelis have worked and are still working on Arab lands. We [the Israelis] are changing the terrain strategically.": (15 October 1955, 39) This, Sharett comments, is really a shameful deed:

I inquired several times, and each time I was solemnly assured that no Arab land has been touched. After Benike told me ... that it was proved to him that our work was begun on Arab land ... I again interrogated Amir [head of the Water Works Dept.] who now admits the facts.... Thus I have been made to appear as a liar in front of the whole world! (31 October 1955, 32)

Fearing that an overdose of Israeli violence at this moment might precipitate a crisis with the West, Sharett tried to block the Kibya reprisal operation which had been endorsed by Ben Gurion on the eve of his departure for a vacation preceding his formal retreat. He pointed out that the minor border incident, which was to have served as a pretext for the planned attack on the West Bank village, had just been publicly condemned by Jordan, and that the Jordanian representatives in the mixed armistice commission had promised to see to it that similar incidents would not be repeated.

I told Lavon that this [attack] will be a grave error, and recalled, citing various precedents, that it was never proved that reprisal actions serve their declared purpose. Lavon smiled ... and kept to his own idea.... Ben Gurion, he said, didn't share my view. (14 October 1953, 37)

According to the first news from the other side, thirty houses have been demolished in one village. This reprisal is unprecedented in its dimensions and in the offensive power used. I walked up and down in my room, helpless and utterly depressed by my feeling of impotence. . . . I was simply horrified by the description in Radio Ramallah's broadcast of the destruction of the Arab village- Tens of houses have been razed to the soil and tens of people killed. I can imagine the storm that will break out tomorrow in the Arab and Western capitals. (15 October 1953, 39)

I must underline that when I opposed the action I didn't even remotely suspect such a bloodbath. I thought that I was opposing one of those actions which have become a routine in the past. Had I even remotely suspected that such a massacre was to be held, I would have raised real hell. (16 October 1953, 44)

Now the army wants to know how we [the foreign ministry] are going to explain the issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say that the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border villages, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation. (16 October 1953)

Yehoshafat Harkabi [then Assistant Chief of Military Intelligence] reported movements of Jordanian troops from Transjordan to the West Bank in two directions ... from Irbid to the Nablus region and from Amman to Jerusalem. I thought that these movements did not indicate preparations for attack but [were] only preparations for aggression on our side. It is impossible that they did not get the impression that the bombing of Kibya means, if not a calculated plan to cause war, then at least willingness to have one starting as a consequence of the action. "Fati" said that according to Radio Ramallah 56 bodies have already been extracted from the ruins. (17 October 1955, 44 45)

At 3 P.m. Russel [U.S. Charge d'At'faires] and Milton Fried [U.S. Attache] came in ... Russel's face was gloomy. Kibya was "in the air" . . . I said I will not say a word to justify the attack on Kibya but I must warn against detaching this action from a chain of events and I blamed the uncontrolled situation on the helplessness or the lack on goodwill on the part of Jordan. From that point onwards I attacked U.S. policy as one of the factors which contributed to the encouragement of the Arabs and the isolation of Israel.... I have condemned the folly of the [U.S.] idea that we want war and all our actions in the South and in the North are directed exclusively to bring it about.... Russel asked ... if we shall disavow Kibya. I said that I cannot answer.... Katriel ("Salmon") [Israel's military attache in London] came up with the idea of a "diversion": the Kibya affair would attract all the attention unless we are able to invent some other dramatic issue. (17 October 1953, 45)

[In the cabinet meeting] I condemned the Kibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres regardless, it seems, of whether their actions may lead to war. I warned that this stain will stick to us and will not be washed away for many years to come. . . . It was decided that a communique on Kibya will be published and Ben Gurion [back from his vacation for the occasion] was to write it. I insisted on including an expression of regret. Ben Gurion insisted on excluding any responsibility of the army (See Appendix 1): the civilian citizens of the border areas, enraged by the constant murders, have taken justice into their hands. After all [he said] the border settlements are full of arms and the settlers are ex-soldiers.... I said that no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars. But I couldn't seriously demand that the communique explicitly affirm the army's responsibility because this would have made it impossible to condemn the act and we will have ended up approving this monstrous bloodbath. (18 October 1953, 51)

For Sharett as well, the army was irreproachable. But then why blame the army when the decision had been taken on a political level? Beyond this, however, emerges a significant detail. Clearly, the security of the Israeli border population could hardly be more jeopardized than by attributing to them the responsibility for a bloodbath such as Kibya's. Encouraging an escalation of acts of revenge and further reprisals clearly had a cynical provocative intent, as did Lavon's smile when Sharett tried to convince him of the fatuousness of the relations in relation to their declared purpose. From the beginning, in fact, the retaliation policy was headed elsewhere: the stronger the tensions in the region, the more demoralized the Arab populations and destabilized the Arab regimes, the stronger the pressures for the transfer of the concentrations of Palestinian refugees from places near the border away into the interior of the Arab world-and the better it was for the preparation of the next war. In the meantime, the army could be kept in training. On October 19 a cabinet meeting was convened where:

Ben Gurion spoke for two and a half hours on the army's preparations for the second round ... [He] presented detailed figures on the growth of the military force of the Arab countries which (he said) will reach its peak in 1956. (19 October 1953, 54)

It was not a prophecy. This meant that Israel would wage war within that date. Sharett added:

As I listened ... I was thinking ... that we should proceed against the danger with non-military means: propose daring and concrete solutions for the Refugee problem through the payment of compensations, improve our relations with the powers, search ceaselessly for an understanding with Egypt.

This was certainly not what the Israeli security establishment was driving at. On October 26, 1953, a group of American Zionist leaders was lectured to, in Israel, by Colonel Matti Peled. The conclusions from that presentation, Sharett noted, were "implicitly clear":

One, that the army considers the present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable. Two, that the army is planning war in order to occupy the rest of Western Eretz Israel.4 (26 October 1953, 81)

Although formulated in very mild terms, the Security Council condemnation of Israel for the Kibya attack pushed Sharett to impose an embargo on reprisal actions unless he personally authorized them. For a while, no spectacular actions were undertaken, but minor, unauthorized Israeli incursions into the West Bank and Gaza continued to make civilian victims. The murder of a Jordanian doctor on the Bethlehem-Hebron road, which was reported by the press, raised the premier's suspicions, for example. Enraged, he learned that this, in fact, was Israeli work. This, and other similar investigations, were to fray the relations between the military and the prime minister. In January 1954, Dayan requested and obtained a meeting with all Mapai's ministers:

Moshe Dayan brought out one plan after the other for "direct action." The first what should be done to force open the blockade in the straits of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should he sent, and if the Egyptians will bomb it we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or [we should] conquer Ras-e-Naqueb or open our way from the south to the Gaza Strip up to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked him, Do you realize this would mean war with Egypt? He said, of course. (31 January 1954, 331)

War with Egypt was to remain a major ambition of Israel's security establishment, but the time was not yet ripe. On February 25, Ben Gurion, himself put the brakes on his collaborators' impatience when he rejected Lavon's proposal "to go ahead immediately with the plan for the separation of the Gaza Strip from Egypt." The Old Man was determined to stick to his timetable. Now, Sharett noted later, "Ben Gurion suggested to concentrate on action against Syria." (27 February 1954, 377)

CHAPTER 4 "A Historical Opportunity to Occupy Southern Syria"

At the above cited meeting on January 31, 1954 Moshe Dayan went on to outline his war plans. Sharett's note for that day continues:

The second plan-action against the interference of the Syrians with our fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. . . .The third-if, due to internal problems in Syria, Iraq invades that country we should advance [militarily, into Syria] and realize a series of "faits accomplis." . . . The interesting conclusion to be drawn from all this regards the direction in which the new Chief of Staff is thinking. I am extremely worried. (31 January 1954, 332)

On February 25, 1954, Syrian troops stationed in Aleppo revolted against Adib Shishakly's regime.

After lunch Lavon took me aside and started trying to persuade me: This is the right moment to act this is the time to move forward and occupy the Syrian border positions beyond the Demilitarized Zone. Syria is disintegrating. A State with whom we signed an armistice agreement exists no more. Its government is about to fall and there is no other power in view. Moreover, Iraq has practically moved into Syria. This is an historical opportunity, we shouldn't miss it.

I was reluctant to approve such a blitz-plan and saw ourselves on the verge of an abyss of disastrous adventure. I asked if he suggests to act immediately and I was shocked when I realized that he does. I said that if indeed Iraq will move into Syria with its army it will be a revolutionary turn which will ... justify far reaching conclusions, but for the time being this is only a danger, not a fact. It is not even clear if Shishakly will fall: he may survive. We ought to wait before making any decision. He repeated that time was precious and we must act so as not to miss an opportunity which otherwise might be lost forever. Again I answered that under the circumstances right now I cannot approve any such action. Finally I said that next Saturday we would be meeting with Ben Gurion ... and we could consult him then on the matter. I saw that he was extremely displeased by the delay. However, he had no choice but to agree. (25 February 1954, 374)

The next day the Shishakly regime actually fell. The following day, February 27, Sharett was present at a meeting where Lavon and Dayan reported to Ben Gurion that what happened in Syria was - "a typical Iraqi action." The two proposed again that the Israeli army be put on the march. Ben Gurion, "electrified," agreed. Sharett reiterated his opposition, pointing to the certainty of a Security Council condemnation, the possibility of the use against Israel of the Tripartite Declaration of 1950, hence the probability of a "shameful failure" The three objected that "our entrance [into Syria] is justified in view of the situation in Syria. This is an act of defense of our border area." Sharett closed the discussion by insisting on the need for further discussion in the cabinet meeting, scheduled for the next morning:

Lavon's face wore a depressed expression. He understood this to be the end of the matter. (27 February 1954, 377)

On Sunday, February 28, the press reported that no Iraqi troops had entered Syria. The situation in Damascus was under the complete control of President Hashem Al Atassi. The cabinet approved Sharett's position and rejected Lavon's vehement appeal not to miss a historical opportunity. Lavon said "The U.S. is about to betray us and ally itself with the Arab world." We should "demonstrate our strength and indicate to the U.S. that our life depends on this so that they will not dare do anything against us." The premier's victory, however, was to be short-lived.

Until that time the Syrian-Israeli border presented no particular problems to the Israelis. When tensions developed, it was almost invariably due to Israeli provocations, such as the irrigation work on lands belonging to Arab farmers, which was condemned by the UN; or the use of military patrol boats against Syrian fishermen fishing in the Lake of Tiberias. No Syrian regime could afford to refrain from offering some minimum protection to its border citizens against Israeli attacks or the taking away of their livelihoods, but neither did the rulers of Damascus feel stable enough to wish to be dragged into a major conflict with their southern neighbor. Clashes were therefore minor, and essentially seasonal. No security arguments could be credibly invoked to justify an expansionist program, or any other aggression against Syria.

On December 12, 1954, however, a Syrian civilian plane was hijacked by Israeli war planes shortly after its takeoff, and forced to land at Lydda airport. Passengers and crew were detained and interrogated for two days, until stormy international protests forced the Israelis to release them. Furious, Sharett wrote to Lavon on December 22:

It must be clear to you that we had no justification whatsoever to seize the plane, and that once forced down we should have immediately released it and not held the passengers under interrogation for 48 hours. I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State Department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice. ..... What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the shortsightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may or even must-behave in the realm of international relations according to the laws of the jungle. (22 December 1954, 607)

Sharett also protested to Lavon against the scandalous press campaign, which he suspected was inspired by the security establishment and which was aimed at convincing public opinion that the Syrian plane was stopped and forced down because it violated Israeli sovereignty and perhaps endangered its security. "As a result, the public does not understand why such a plane was released and naturally it concludes that we have here an unjustified concession on the part of the government" - (ibid.)

On December 11, the day before Israel set this world precedent for air piracy, five Israeli soldiers were captured inside Syrian territory while mounting wiretapping installations on the Syrian telephone network. A month later, on January 13, 1955, one of them committed suicide in prison. The official Israeli version is, once again, that the five had been abducted in Israeli territory, taken to Syria, and tortured. The result was a violent emotional upsurge in Israel, all the more so as this news arrived shortly after the condemnation in Cairo of members of an Israeli terrorist ring which had been described to public opinion as an anti-Jewish frame-up. The prime minister confided to his personal diary:

A young boy has been sacrificed for nothing.... Now they will say that his blood is on my hands. If I hadn't ordered the release of the Syrian plane [we would have had our hostages and] the Syrians could have been forced to free the five. The boy . . . would have been alive ... our soldiers have not been kidnapped in Israeli territory by Syrian invaders as the army spokesman announced .... They penetrated into Syria and not accidentally but in order to take care of a wiretapping installation, connected to a Syrian telephone line ... the young men were sent without any experienced person, they were not instructed what to do in case of failure and the result was that in the first interrogation they broke down and told the whole truth. . . . I have no doubt that the press and the Knesset will cry about torture. On the other hand, it is possible that the boy committed suicide because he broke down during the interrogation and only later he understood what a disaster he has brought upon his comrades and what he did to the state. Possibly his comrades tormented him afterwards. Anyway, his conscience probably caused him to take this terrible step. (3 January 1955, 649)

Isser [Harel, then Shin Bet chief] warned me of what may happen to me personally as a result of the suicide. A poisonous attack is being organized against me.... it is particularly necessary to take care of what is happening in the army and to prevent lawless riots. (14 January 1955, 653). It is clear that Dayan's intention ... is to get [Syrian] hostages in order to obtain the release of our prisoners in Damascus. He put it into his head that it is necessary to take hostages, and would not let go. (10 February 1955, 714)

Nineteen years later, Dayan, then minister of defense in Golda Meir's government, ordered his troops to move into a school, regardless of the danger to Israeli civilians including children, in Ma'alot, with the sole aim of preventing Palestinian guerrillas from obtaining, through the taking of hostages, the release of their Palestinian comrades jailed and tortured under the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. On that, as on other similar occasions, a virulent and poisonous Zionist campaign, widely echoed in the Western media, declared the Palestinian liberation movement's attempt to free prisoners by taking hostages as intolerable, barbaric, savage, murderous, and terrorist. When did these same media call Moshe Dayan a terrorist?

Israeli plots against Syria in the fifties were not only limited to expansionist and terrorist projects. On July 31, 1955, a senior foreign ministry aide, Gideon Raphael, reported to Sharett on a couple of "interesting meetings" he had held with Arab exiles in Europe. One of these was with ex-Syrian Premier Hosni Barazi:

Hosni wants to get back in power, and is ready to accept help from anyone: from Turkey, in exchange for Syria's future entrance into the Ankara-Baghdad pact; from the U. S., in exchange for Syria's future alliance with the West, with Israel, in exchange for a peace agreement. (31 July 1955, 1099)

Peace, however, was the last thing Israel was interested in. lsrael's support would require another price:

Meanwhile he says to us give-give: money for newspapers, money to buy off personalities, money to buy off political parties. Gideon [suggested to him that] . . . he himself is a big land owner, and why won't he get together a group of land owners, initiate a big plan of settling refugees.... Hosni listened, said it was a wonderful idea ... but only after he regains power, and until he regains power he needs a payment in advance. (31 July 1955, 1100)

A year later, a week before his final fall from the government, Sharett got a last report on Israel's subversive activities in Syria from his advisor on Arab affairs, "Josh" Palmon:

Our contacts with [Adib] Shishakly [the exiled Syrian dictator overthrown in 1954] have been strengthened. The guidelines for common action after his return to power (if he returns!) have been established. We have decided on guidelines to contact the U.S. in regard to this issue. (12 June 1956, 1430)

None of these "historical opportunities" regarding Syria actually materialized at that time, nor, however, did Israel ever abandon its plans to install a puppet regime in Damascus. But in Lebanon as well, the precise operational blueprints elaborated in 1954 waited two decades before being put into action.5

CHAPTER 5   Let Us Create A Maronite State in Lebanon

The February 27, 1954 meeting among Ben Gurion, Sharett, Lavon and Dayan has already been mentioned in connection with Israel's invasion plans of Egypt and Syria. In that same meeting a concrete proposal was outlined to disrupt Israel's most peaceful neighbor at that time, Lebanon. In this case, Israel's hegemonic ambitions did not even pretend to wear the phony fig leaf of security or defense.

Then he [Ben Gurion] passed on to another issue. This is the time, he said, to push Lebanon, that is, the Maronites in that country, to proclaim a Christian State. I said that this was nonsense. The Maronites are divided. The partisans of Christian separatism are weak and will dare do nothing. A Christian Lebanon would mean their giving up Tyre, Tripoli, the Beka'a. There is no force that could bring Lebanon back to its pre-World War I dimensions, and all the more so because in that case it would lose its economic raison-d'etre. Ben Gurion reacted furiously. He began to enumerate the historical justification for a restricted Christian Lebanon. If such a development were to take place, the Christian Powers would not dare oppose it. I claimed that there was no factor ready to create such a situation, and that if we were to push and encourage it on our own we would get ourselves into an adventure that will place shame on us. Here came a wave of insults regarding my lack of daring and my narrow-mindedness. We ought to send envoys and spend money. I said there was no money. The answer was that there is no such thing. The money must be found, if not in the Treasury then at the Jewish Agency! For such a project it is worthwhile throwing away one hundred thousand, half a million, a million dollars. When this happens a decisive change will take place in the Middle East, a new era will start. I got tired of struggling against a whirlwind. (27 February 1954, 377)

The next day Ben Gurion sent Sharett the following letter:

To Moshe Sharett The Prime Minister

Sdeh Boker February 27, 1954

Upon my withdrawal from the government I decided in my heart to desist from intervening and expressing my opinion on current political affairs so as not to make things difficult for the government in any way. And if you hadn't called on me, the three of you, yourself, Lavon and Dayan, I would not have, of my own accord, expressed an opinion on what is being done or what ought to be done. But as you called me, I deem it my duty to comply with your wishes, and especially with your own wish as Prime Minister. Therefore, I permit myself to go back to one issue which you did not approve of and discuss it again, and this is the issue of Lebanon.

.........It is clear that Lebanon is the weakest link in the Arab League. The other minorities in the Arab States are all Muslim, except for the Copts. But Egypt is the most compact and solid of the Arab States and the majority there consists of one solid block, of one race, religion and language, and the Christian minority does not seriously affect their political and national unity. Not so the Christians in Lebanon. They are a majority in the historical Lebanon and this majority has a tradition and a culture different from those of the other components of the League. Also within the wider borders (this was the worst mistake made by France when it extended the borders of Lebanon), the Muslims are not free to do as they wish, even if they are a majority there (and I don't know if they are, indeed, a majority) for fear of the Christians, The creation of a Christian State is therefore a natural act; it has historical roots and it will find support in wide circles in the Christian world, both Catholic and Protestant. In normal times this would be almost impossible. First and foremost because of the lack of initiative and courage of the Christians. But at times of confusion, or revolution or civil war, things take on another aspect, and even the weak declares himself to be a hero. Perhaps (there is never any certainty in politics) now is the time to bring about the creation of a Christian State in our neighborhood. Without our initiative and our vigorous aid this will not be done. It seems to me that this is the central duty - for at least one of the central duties, of our foreign policy. This means that time, energy and means ought to be invested in it and that we must act in all possible ways to bring about a radical change in Lebanon. Sasson ... and our other Arabists must be mobilized. If money is necessary, no amount of dollars should be spared, although the money may be spent in vain. We must concentrate all our efforts on this issue ........ This is a historical opportunity. Missing it will be unpardonable. There is no challenge against the World Powers in this ........Everything should be done, in my opinion, rapidly and at full steam.

The goal will not be reached of course, without a restriction of Lebanon's borders. But if we can find men in Lebanon and exiles from it who will be ready to mobilize for the creation of a Maronite state, extended borders and a large Muslim population will be of no use to them and this will not constitute a disturbing factor.

I don't know if we have people in Lebanon-but there are various ways in which the proposed experiment can be carried out.

D.B.G. (27 February 1954, 2397-2398)

Sharett responded a few weeks later:

Mr. David Ben Gurion March 18, 1954 Sdeh Boker.

.... A permanent assumption of mine is that if sometimes there is some reason to interfere from the outside in the internal affairs of some country in order to support a political movement inside it aiming toward some target it is only when that movement shows some independent activity which there is a chance to enhance and maybe to bring to success by encouragement and help from the outside. There is no point in trying to create from the outside a movement that does not exist at all inside ... it is impossible to inject life into a dead body.

As far as I know, in Lebanon today exists no movement aiming at transforming the country into a Christian State governed by the Maronite community....

This is not surprising. The transformation of Lebanon into a Christian State as a result of an outside initiative is unfeasible today . . . I don't exclude the possibility of accomplishing this goal in the wake of a wave of shocks that will sweep the Middle East . . . will destroy the present constellations and will form others. But in the present Lebanon, with its present territorial and demographic dimensions and its international relations, no serious initiative of the kind is imaginable.

The Christians do not constitute the majority in Lebanon. Nor are they a unified block, politically speaking or community-wise. The Orthodox minority in Lebanon tends to identify with their brethren in Syria. They will not be ready to go to war for a Christian Lebanon, that is for a Lebanon smaller than it is today, and detached from the Arab League. On the contrary, they would probably not be opposed to a Lebanon united to Syria, as this would contribute to strengthening their own community and the Orthodox community throughout the region .... In fact, there are more Orthodox Christians in Syria than in Lebanon, and the Orthodox in Syria and Lebanon together are more numerous than the Maronites.

As to the Maronites, the great majority among them has for years now supported those pragmatic political leaders of their community who have long since abandoned the dream of a Christian Lebanon, and put all their cards on a Christian-Muslim coalition in that country. These leaders have developed the consciousness that there is no chance for an isolated Maronite Lebanon and that the historical perspective of their community means a partnership with the Muslims in power, and in a membership of Lebanon in the League, hoping and believing that these factors can guarantee that the Lebanese Muslims will abandon their longings for a unification of Lebanon with Syria and will enhance the development among them of a feeling for Lebanese independence.

Therefore, the great majority of the Maronite community is liable to see in any attempt at raising the flag of territorial shrinking and Maronite power a dangerous attempt at subverting the status of their community, its security and even its very existence. Such an initiative would seem disastrous to them because it could tear apart the pattern of Christian-Muslim collaboration in the present Lebanon which was created through great efforts and sacrifices for an entire generation; because it would mean throwing the Lebanese Muslims into the Syrian embrace, and finally, because it would fatally bring about the historical disaster of an annexation of Lebanon to Syria and the annihilation of the former's personality through its dilution in a big Muslim state.

You may object that these arguments are irrelevant as the Plan is based on tearing away from Lebanon the Muslim provinces of Tyre, the Beka'a and Tripoli. But who can predict that these provinces will actually give up their ties to Lebanon and their political and economic connection to Beirut? Who can assure that the Arab League will be ready to give up the status that Lebanon's affiliation confers to it .......? Who will vouch that the bloody war that will inevitably explode as a result of such an attempt will be limited to Lebanon and not drag Syria into the battlefield immediately' Who can be sure that the Western Powers will look on as observers and will not intervene in the experiment before a Christian Lebanon will have been realized'? Who can guarantee that the Maronite leadership itself will not become aware of all the above considerations and will therefore back out of such a dangerous adventure'?

.... There are also decisive economic arguments against it. We are not discussing the issue in 1920/21 . . . but 30 years later. Mount Lebanon has meanwhile integrated into one organic unit with the coastal plane of Tyre and Sidon, the Valley of Baalbeck and the city of Tripoli. They are commercially and economically interdependent and inseparable. Mount Lebanon was not a self-sufficient unit even before World War 1. . . . The annexation of the three regions plus the city of Beirut to the Lebanese State has rendered possible the creation of a balanced economy. A return to the past would not just mean a surgical operation but also a disintegration leading to the end of Lebanon. . . .

I cannot imagine, even from this viewpoint alone, that any serious organization would collaborate with a plan that in my opinion would entail Lebanon's economic suicide.

When all this has been said, [I should add that] I would not have objected, and on the contrary I would have certainly been favorable to the idea, of actively aiding any manifestation of agitation in the Maronite community tending to strengthen its isolationist tendencies, even if there were no real chances of achieving the goals; I would have considered positive the very existence of such an agitation and the destabilization it could bring about, the trouble it would have caused the League, the diversion of attention from the Arab-Israeli complications that it would have caused, and the very kindling of a fire made up of impulses toward Christian independence. But what can I do when such an agitation is nonexistent? ... In the present condition, I am afraid that any attempt on our part would be considered as lightheartedness and superficiality or worse-as an adventurous speculation upon the well being and existence of others and a readiness to sacrifice their basic good for the benefit of a temporary tactical advantage for Israel.

Moreover, if this plan is not kept a secret but becomes known a danger which cannot be underestimated in the Middle Eastern circumstances-the damage which we shall suffer . . . would not be compensated even by an eventual success of the operation itself. . . .

M. S. (18 March 1954, 2398- 2400)

On April 24 a fleeting note in the Diary, informs us that "contacts with certain circles in Lebanon" had been discussed that day between the premier and some of his collaborators in the foreign ministry. The next time Lebanon is mentioned is on February 12, 1955: Neguib Sfeir, "an adventurer and a visionary" whom Sharett had known since 1920, had just paid a visit to the Israeli ambassador in Rome, Eliahu Sasson,........apparently on behalf of Lebanon's President Camille Chamoun. Lebanon would be ready to sign a separate peace if we accept the following three conditions: (a) guarantee Lebanon's borders; (b) come to Lebanon's aid if it is attacked by Syria; (c) buy Lebanon's agricultural surplus. Sasson ... suggested a meeting between himself and Chamoun during the latter's next visit to Rome. (12 February 1955, 723)

On May 16, during a joint meeting of senior officials of the defense and foreign affairs ministries, Ben Gurion again raised the demand that Israel do something about Lebanon. The moment was particularly propitious, he maintained, due to renewed tensions between Syria and Iraq, and internal trouble in Syria. Dayan immediately expressed his enthusiastic support:

According to him [Dayan] the only thing that's necessary is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right. If we were to accept the advice of the Chief of Staff we would do it tomorrow, without awaiting a signal from Baghdad.

... I did not want to bicker with Ben Gurion. . in front of his officers and limited myself to saying that this might mean ... war between Israel and Syria.. . . At the same time I agreed to set up a joint commission composed of officials of the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the army to deal with Lebanese affairs. . . . [According to Ben Gurion] this commission should relate to the Prime Minister. (16 May 1954, 966)

The Chief of Staff supports a plan to hire a [Lebanese] officer who will agree to serve as a puppet so that the Israeli army may appear as responding to his appeal "to liberate Lebanon from its Muslim oppressors." This will of course be a crazy adventure.... We must try to prevent dangerous complications. The commission- must be charged with research tasks and prudent actions directed at encouraging Maronite circles who reject Muslim pressures and agree to lean on us. (28 May 1954, 1024)

The "prudent actions" continued. On September 22, a mysterious incident occurred. A bus was attacked in Galilee, near Safad. Two persons were killed and ten wounded. Even before an investigation could establish where the aggressors came from (and there were, at that moment, three contradictory hypotheses), Dayan demanded a reprisal action against Lebanon. A Lebanese village suspected to be the attackers' base had already been chosen. Its population would be evacuated in the night, its houses blown up. Sharett objected to Israel's opening a new front along a border which had been totally peaceful since 1948. But this was exactly what Dayan sought: the destabilization of Lebanon and the search for a forerunner to Major Sa'd Haddad who declared a Maronite state in 1979. The fulfillment of his disruptive plans would have found an ideal point of departure in this terrorist action.

Sharett, however, vetoed an immediate action. At this point the Israeli plot against Lebanon was suspended for other reasons. On October 1, 1955, the U.S. government, through the CIA, gave Israel the "green light" to attack Egypt. The energies of Israel's security establishment became wholly absorbed by the preparations for the war which would take place exactly one year later. In the summer of 1956, in preparation for the Sinai-Suez operation, the close military and political alliance with France was clinched. It would last practically until the eve of the 1967 war, and would prevent Israel, especially following De Gaulle's rise to power in France in 1957, from implementing its plans for the dismemberment of a country Paris considered as belonging to the French sphere of influence. Israeli bombings of South Lebanon, specifically intended to destabilize that country, were to start in 1968 after the 1967 war, after Dayan's nomination as defense minister in Levi Eshkol's cabinet, and after lsrael's definite transition from the alliance with France to that with the United States.6 From that moment on, this unholy alliance was to use every possible means constantly to escalate terrorist violence and political subversion in Lebanon, according to lsrael's blueprints of the fifties. All this, it is hardly necessary to recall, was hatched when no Palestinian guerrillas were remotely in view.7If anything, the difficulties Israel encountered throughout all these years in consummating its long-standing ambition to divide Lebanon and separate it from the Arab world constitute one more proof of the external and alien nature of these plots in respect to the authentic aspirations of the Lebanese people regardless of their religious faith.

CHAPTER 6  Sacred Terrorism

On March 17, 1954, a bus traveling from Eilat to Beersheba was attacked in Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim crossroads. Ten passengers were killed and four survived. According to Israeli army trackers, all traces of the perpetrators disappeared at a distance of ten kilometers from the Jordanian border, inside Israeli territory, due to the rocky nature of the terrain. One of the survivors, a sergeant responsible for security arrangements on the trip, testified that the attackers were "Bedouin." Another survivor, a woman, said they were "five men wearing long robes." The army, according to Sharett, "then dispatched some of its Arab informers to the village of Tel Tsafi, [on the Jordanian side of the border] opposite Sodom." Upon their return, the informers reported that "a group of 8- 10 persons had been seen crossing the borders westward [that day]" by Tel Tsafi villagers. Quite apart from the fact that it was customary, since time immemorial, for the area's nomad population to cross back and forth at that point, there must have been something much too strange about this story of informers and villagers offering evidence. Colonel Hutcheson, the American chairman of the mixed Jordanian-Israeli Armistice Commission, did not take it seriously. Summing up the Commission's inquiry, Colonel Hutcheson in fact officially announced that "from the testimonies of the survivors it is not proved that all the murderers were Arabs." (23 March 1954, 41 1)

Moreover, in a confidential report dated March 24, and addressed to General Benike, Hutcheson explicitly attributed the attack on the bus to terrorists intent on heightening the tensions in the area as well as on creating trouble for the present government. Thereupon the Israelis left the Armistice Commission in protest, and launched a worldwide campaign against "Arab terrorism" and "bloodthirsty hatred" of Jews. From his retreat in Sdeh Boker, Ben Gurion demanded that Israel occupy Jordanian territory and threatened to leave the Mapai party leadership if Sharett's policy were once again to have the upper hand. Lavon, too, pressed for action. On April 4, the premier wrote to Ben Gurion:

"I heard that after Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim you thought that we should occupy Jordanian territory. In my opinion such a step would have dragged us into a war with a Jordan supported by Britain, while the U.S. would have condemned us in front of the whole world and treated us as an aggressor. For Israel this could have meant disaster and perhaps destruction." (4 April 1954, 453)

Sharett attempted to avert military action. He told officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that "we were all of the opinion that a retaliation for such a bloodshed will only weaken its horrible impression and will put us on the same level as the murderers on the other side. It would be better for us to use the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim incident as a lever for a political attack on the Powers so that they will exercise unprecedented pressure on Jordan." He also pointed out that a retaliation would weaken the effect of the massive propaganda campaign which, he noted in his diary, should counter "the attention given by the American press to the Jordanian version . . . according to which the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim massacre was committed by the Israelis." Not only in public but in his private notes, the prime minister declared his reluctance to believe this version.9

Deep down in his heart, however, Sharett too must have had his unconfessed doubts. He not only blocked the proposed military actions, but decided that Israel should refrain from complaining to the Security Council, i.e., from an international debate which he thought might be counterproductive. He felt he had acted wisely when Dayan, in the course of a conversation on April 23, let drop in passing that "he is not convinced that the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim massacre was the work of an organized military gang." He later learned from the British journalist Jon Kimche that Dayan had said about Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim that "UN reports are often more accurate than ours. . . .." He wrote: "From another source I heard this week that Dayan said to Israeli journalists that it was not proved that the Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim gang was Jordanian- it is possible that it was local."

Of course, it didn't occur to Sharett to open an internal investigation in order to find out the truth. On the contrary, he insisted on the removal of Colonel Hutcheson from his post as a condition for Israel's return to the Armistice Commission. The military, though, were reluctant to give in to his veto on a new attack on the West Bank. Taking for a pretext not Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim but a subsequent minor incident in the Jerusalem corridor area, on the night of March 28 the army launched a massive attack on the village of Nahlin, near Bethlehem. Dozens of civilians were killed and wounded, the houses demolished, the village - another Palestinian village - completely destroyed.

"I said [to Teddy Kollek (then senior aide in the Prime Minister's Office, today mayor of Jerusalem) ]: here we are, back at the point of departure-are we headed for war or do we want to prevent war? According to Teddy the army leadership is imbued with war appetites .... [They are] completely blind to economic problems and to the complexities of international relations." (31 March 1954, 426)

Arab capitals, too, were persuaded that the Israeli escalation of self-provoked incidents, terrorism and renewed retaliation meant that Israel was preparing the ground for war. They, therefore, stationed military reinforcements along the borders and took strong measures to prevent any infiltration into Israel. This in turn worried the Israelis. "The situation along the borders is better than it has been for a long time and actually it is quite satisfactory," Dayan told a journalist friend who reported it to Sharett on May 17. A new and more subtle strategy of covert aggression was thereupon introduced by the Israeli army. Its aim: to bypass both the Arab security arrangements and Sharett's reluctance to authorize attacks across the border. Small patrols slipped into the West Bank and Gaza with precise directives to engage isolated Egyptian or Jordanian military patrols, or to penetrate into villages for sabotage or murder actions. Invariably, each such action was falsely described later by an official announcement as having occurred in Israeli territory. Once attacked, the military spokesman would explain, the patrol proceeded to pursue the aggressors into enemy territory. Almost daily actions of this kind, carried out by Arik Sharon's special paratroops, caused a great number of casualties. Regularly, the prime minister was left to guess how things really went. Between April and June he noted in his diary that he learned by chance, for example, of the coldblooded murder of a young Palestinian boy who happened to find himself in the Israeli patrol's way near his village in the West Bank. With regard to another incident he wrote:

"Finally I have discovered the secret official version on the Tel Tsafi action -two Arabs that we have sent attacked the Mukhtar who was supposedly said to have been involved in a theft, and killed his wife: in another incident a unit of ours crossed the border "by mistake-," in a third incident three of our soldiers were patrolling deep inside Jordanian territory, ran into the National Guard which opened fire (who will check?), returned fire and killed four. (31 May 1954, 523)

Hundreds of workers in Sodom know the truth and laugh at [the denial of the murder broadcast by] the Israeli radio and the Israeli government.

This situation endangers the life and the enterprise in Sodom.... Is the army allowed to act in that way according to its own whims and endanger such a vital enterprise? "(13 May 1954, 514)

On June 27 an Israeli paratrooper unit crossed the border, "by mistake," according to the official communique, 13 kilometers deep into the West Bank, where it attacked and seriously damaged the Jordanian army base of Azun, east of Qalqilia. "Uncivilized, here they go lying again in front of everybody," was Sharett's ingenious comment about the army spokesman's announcement.

What Sharett feared most was Western reaction. A number of U.S. expressions of alarm presented during those weeks to the Israeli government were registered in the premier's diary.

Reports by U.S. embassies in Arab capitals, studied in Washington, have produced in the State Department the conviction that an Israeli plan of retaliations, to be realized according to a pre-fixed timetable, exists, and that the goal is that of a steady escalation of the tension in the area in order to bring about a war. 10 American diplomacy is also convinced that it is lsrael's intention to sabotage the U.S. negotiations with Egypt, and also those with Iraq and Turkey, aimed at the establishment of pro-Western alliances. (14 April 1955)

This analysis was correct. It was reconfirmed in the following weeks by Israel's rejection of border security proposals previously accepted by Egypt, including the creation of mixed Israel-Egypt-UN patrols, and the mining of certain border areas. Such arrangements, Dayan affirmed, "will tie our hands." It would be confirmed further in July, when an Israeli terrorist ring charged with sabotaging Western institutions in Cairo and Alexandria was broken up by the Egyptian authorities.

Israeli border terrorism in its various forms was to continue unperturbed during the next two years, up to the very eve of the Sinai-Suez war, and, of course, beyond. Sharett noted an episode "of the worst type" in March 1955, immediately after the Gaza operation.

"The army informed Tkoa ... [responsible for Armistice Commission affairs in the Foreign Ministry] that last night a "private" revenge action was carried out following the killing of the young man and woman, Oded Wegmeister and Shoshana Hartsion, who went on a trip on their own around Ein Gedi [in Jordanian territory]. According to the army version a group of young men, including the girl's brother, Meir Hartsion ... crossed the border, attacked a group of Bedouin, and killed five of them. The army says it supposedly knew that such an initiative was being prepared and intended to prevent it, but according to its information the action was scheduled for tonight and the assumption was that there is time for preventive action, but the boys advanced the action and this is the reason that what happened-happened. Today,the Jordanians issued a completely different version: twenty Israeli soldiers committed the murders they attacked six Bedouin, killed five and left one alive and told him that this is an act of revenge for the couple ... so that he will tell others about it. The army spokesman tonight announced . . . that no army unit was involved in the operation....

This may be taken as a decisive proof that we have decided to pass on to a general bloody offensive on all fronts: yesterday Gaza, today something on the Jordanian border, tomorrow the Syrian DMZ, and so on. In the Cabinet meeting tomorrow, I will demand that the killers be put on trial as criminals. (5 March 1955, 816)

Ben Gurion [back in the government as Minister of Defense in the wake of the Lavon Affair] reported to the cabinet . . . how our four youngsters captured the Bedouin boys one by one, how they took them to the wadi, how they knifed them to death one after the other, and how they interrogated each one of them, before killing him, on the identity of the murderers of the boy and the girl and how they could not understand the answers to their questions, since they do not speak Arabic. The group was headed by Meir Hartsion from kibbutz Fin Harod.... They gave themselves up to the army and fully admitted what they have done.

Both Ben Gurion and I saw an advantage in trying them in a military court .... educationally it is desirable that the lengthy imprisonment to which they will be condemned will be given by a military court, since the army will not have any respect for a punishment coming from a civilian court.... In the evening the Minister of Justice and the General Prosecutor informed me that there is no legal way to turn them over to a military court. . . I contacted Ben Gurion and arranged that he will give instructions to the army to turn them over to the police. . . . By the way, Hartsion . . . and his three friends are paratrooper reservists. (6 March 1955, 817)

[While Purim festivities are being celebrated in the streets of Tel Aviv] The radio is broadcasting cheerful music . . . some of which expresses much talent, spiritual grace and longing for original beauty. I meditated on the substance and destiny of this People who is capable of subtle delicacy, of such deep love for people and of such honest aspiration for beauty and nobility, and at the same time cultivates among its best youth youngsters capable of calculated, coldblooded murder, by knifing the bodies of young defenseless Bedouin. Which of these two biblical souls will win over the other in this People? " (8 March 1955, 823)

"Finally the four have been consigned to the police but now they refuse to talk. . . . I phoned Ben Gurion. . . . ,It's their legitimate right," he said .... [He added] that their confession to the army cannot serve for their incrimination by a civilian court. From a juridical viewpoint this may be so, but from a public point of view this is a scandal. (10 March 1955, 828)

The police chief approached the Chief of Staff and asked if the army is willing to aid the police interrogation .... The Chief of Staff said that he will ask the Minister of Defense and then answered in his name that he does not agree to have an interrogation in the army ... it is clear that the army is covering up for the guys.

Isser [Har'el] senses that almost no one in the country condemns the youngsters who murdered the Bedouin. Public opinion is definitely on their side.

When I arrived in Tel Aviv an officer ... came to tell me that the whole revenge operation was organized with the active help of Arik Sharon, the commander of the paratroopers battalion." He had the four furnished with arms, food, equipment, had them driven with the unit's car part of the way and ordered that their retreat be secured by his patrols. The officer did not rule out that Dayan, too, knew of the operation in advance. Moreover, the four now refuse to talk upon an explicit order from Arik [Sharon], perhaps approved by Dayan. A campaign is being organized against me because I revealed their identity (to the press). Arik is shouting that I have exposed the men to revenge in the case that they will fall prisoners while fighting in the army at any future time. (11 March 1955, 834)

The four are ready to confess on the condition that they will be guaranteed an amnesty. (13 March 1955, 840)

In the thirties we restrained the emotions of revenge and we educated the public to consider revenge as an absolutely negative impulse. Now, on the contrary, we justify the system of reprisal out of pragmatic considerations .. . . we have eliminated the mental and moral brakes on this instinct and made it possible. . . to uphold revenge as a moral value. This notion is held by large parts of the public in general, the masses of youth in particular, but it has crystallized and reached the value of a sacred principle in [Sharon's] battalion which becomes the revenge instrument of the State." (31 March 1955, 840)

The British ambassador, Nichols, expressed . . . his surprise at the release of the four. According to him, Jordanians arrested the murderer of the couple in Ajur. ... What a contrast between their step and the shameful procedure adopted by us! ... Kesseh [the Secretary General of Mapai] learned from his son [a senior army officer] that the operation had been carried out with the full knowledge of the army, on all levels, including the Chief of Staff and in it were involved senior officers. (28 March 1955, 870)

At a meeting of Mapai's secretariat on January 11, 1961, six years later, Sharett returned to this haunting episode.

The phenomenon that has prevailed among us for years and years is that of insensitivity to acts of wrong ... to moral corruption.... For us, an act of wrong is in itself nothing serious, we wake up to it only if the threat of a crisis or a grave result the loss of a position, the loss of power or influence is involved. We don't have a moral approach to moral problems but a pragmatic approach to moral problems. . . . Once, Israeli soldiers murdered a number of Arabs for reasons of blind revenge ... and no conclusion was drawn from that, no one was demoted, no one was removed from office. Then there was Kafr Qasim* . . . those responsible have not drawn any conclusions. This, however, does not mean that public opinion, the army, the police, have drawn no conclusion, their conclusion was that Arab blood can be freely shed. And then came the amnesty for those of Kafr Qasim, and some conclusions could be drawn again, and I could go on like this. (11 January 1961, 769)

All this must bring about revulsion in the sense of justice and honesty in public opinion; it must make the State appear in the eyes of the world as a savage state that does not recognize the principles of justice as they have been established and accepted by contemporary society.

*See Appendix 2.

CHAPTER 7 The Lavon Affair: Terrorism to Coerce the West

ONE: Start immediate action to prevent or postpone Anglo-Egyptian Agreement. Objectives are: one, cultural and information centers; two, economic institutions; three, cars of British representatives and other Britons; four, whichever target whose sabotage could bring about a worsening of diplomatic relations. TWO. Inform us on possibilities of action in Canal Zone. THREE. Listen to us every day at 7 o'clock on wavelength G.

This coded cable was sent to the Israeli spy ring which had been planted in Egypt many months before it was activated in July 1954. The ring originally was to serve as a fifth column during the next war. The cable was preceded by oral instructions given by Colonel Benjamin Givii, head of Israel's military intelligence, to an officer headed for Cairo to join the ring. These instructions were:

[Our goal is] to break the West's confidence in the existing [Egyptian] regime .... The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt. The choice of the precise objectives to be sabotaged will be left to the men on the spot, who should evaluate the possible consequences of each action ... in terms of creating commotion and public disorders.13

These orders were carried out between July 2 and July 27, 1954, by the network which was composed of about ten Egyptian Jews under the command of Israeli agents. Negotiations were at their height between Cairo and London for the evacuation of the Canal Zone, and between Cairo and Washington for arms supplies and other aid in connection with a possible U.S.-Egyptian alliance. British and American cultural and informational centers, British-owned cinemas, but also Egyptian public buildings (such as post offices) were bombed in Cairo and Alexandria. Suspicion was shifted to the Muslim Brothers, opponents of Nasser's regime. The Israeli ring was finally discovered and broken up on July 27, when one of its members was caught after a bomb exploded in his pocket in Alexandria.

On that same date Sharett, who knew nothing about the ring, was informed of the facts, and he began to collect evidence on the responsibilities of defense ministry and army officials. He did nothing beyond this, however, until October 5, when Cairo officially announced the imminent trial of the arrested saboteurs. Sharett then fully supported the campaign launched by Israel to present the case as an anti-Jewish frame-up by the Egyptian regime. On December 13, two days after the trial opened in Cairo, the prime minister denounced in the Knesset "the plot ... and the show trial . . . against a group of Jews . . . victims of false accusations."* His party's paper, Davar, went as far as to accuse the Egyptian government of "a Nazi-inspired policy." Horror stories of confessions extracted from the accused under torture circulated in the Israeli and international media. Sharett knew all this to be untrue. "In reality," he wrote in his diary on January 2, 1955, "except for the first two days of their arrest, when there was some beating, the treatment of our men was absolutely decent and humane." But publicly, he kept silent did not himself join the massive anti-Nasser chorus. Even the members of the cabinet, the president of the state, not to speak of the press, were not officially informed until some time in February, when rumors exploded on each street corner in Israel. Then the true story came out, that the government propaganda had been false from beginning to end, that the terrorist ring was indeed planted in Egypt by the Israelis and the only frame-up in question was the one invented against Egypt by the Sharett administration.

*See Appendix 4.

By the time the trial was over-two of the accused were condemned to death and executed, eight were condemned to long terms of imprisonment, while the three Israeli commanders of the operation succeeded in fleeing from Egypt and the fourth committed suicide other important facts became known to the prime minister. The technical question of who actually gave the order to activate the ring on a certain date was not to be cleared up until six years later, when a fourth or fifth inquiry commission finally and definitely exonerated Lavon from that responsibility, and established that Dayan, Peres, Givli and other, minor, "security" aides had forged documents and falsified testimonies in order to bring about the incrimination of the minister of defense. In 1954-55, Sharett anticipated the findings of that commission, figuring that the entire leadership of the security establishment was guilty of the affair. For him, the question of who gave the order was secondary to the necessity of pronouncing a judgment on the ideology and politics of lsrael's terrorism. Therefore, while he had no doubts about the guilt of the Dayan-Peres-Givli clique, to him Lavon's political responsibility was also inescapable.

[People] ask me if I am convinced that "he gave the order?' . . . but let us assume that Givli has acted without instructions ... doesn't the moral responsibility lie all the same on Lavon, who has constantly preached for acts of madness and taught the army leadership the diabolic lesson of how to set the Middle East on fire, how to cause friction, cause bloody confrontations, sabotage targets and property of the Powers [and perform] acts of despair and suicide" (10, January 1955, 639)

At this point, Sharett could have changed the history of the Middle East. Had he spoken frankly and directly to public opinion, which was deeply troubled by the events in Egypt the arrests, the trial, the executions, the contradicting rumors, the climate of intrigue surrounding the "Affair," tearing up the mask of secrecy, denouncing those who were responsible, exposing his true convictions in regard to Israel's terroristic ideologies and orientations, proposing an alternative, he could have created for himself the conditions in which to use the formal powers that he possessed to make a radical housecleaning in the security establishment. The impact of such an act would have probably been considerable not only in Israel itself but also in the Arab world, especially in Egypt. The downfall of Lavon on one hand and of the Ben Gurionist gang, headed by Dayan and Peres, on the other hand might have blocked Ben Gurion's return to power, and in the longer range, the Sinai-Suez war. Events since then would have taken a different course. (14)

As it was, though, the prime minister had neither the courage nor the temperament required for such an action. Moreover, he always feared that his "moderate" convictions would expose him to accusations of defeatism by the activists of aggressive Zionism. Thus, he took cover behind a variety of pretexts aimed at justifying his passivity even to himself, while in his heart he knew that his objective compliance with the rules of the game imposed by his enemies would boomerang, in the end, against his own career. An open admission of the facts, he tormentedly argued, could be damaging to the people on trial in Cairo; or it could damage lsrael's image in the world; or it could bring about a split in the Mapai party, to whose leadership Lavon and Ben Gurion as well as he belonged, causing it to lose its majority in the next elections. Inevitably, he ended up entangled in the plots woven around him by the opposing factions in the government, the army and the party. By mid-February, he had no other choice but to acquiesce to the unspoken ultimatum of Ben Gurion's men and appeal to the Old Man to reenter the cabinet as minister of defense in Lavon's place.

By January 1955, Sharett was well aware that the "Affair" was being used by Lavon and his friends on one hand, the Ben Gurionists on the other, and such extremist pro-militarist factions as Ahdut Ha'avoda 15-to bring into the open the conflict between the "activist" line and the prime minister's "moderate" politics. He was informed also that Dayan was attempting to organize a coup d'etat and that Ben Gurion had given it his support. Other persons who had been approached (mainly from among Mapai's younger militants) had rejected the idea of a change of leadership through violence. 16 Dayan wanted to avoid at any cost being exposed by the investigation committee nominated by Sharett as one of those actually responsible for the "Affair." Lavon, on the other hand, threatened to commit suicide if the commission declared him guilty of having given the order.

Teddy [Kollek] painted a horrifying picture of the relations at the top of the security establishment. The Minister of Defense is completely isolated none of his collaborators speaks to him. During the inquiry, these collaborators [e.g., Peres, Dayan and a number of senior Ministry officials and army officers] plotted to blacken his name and trap him. They captured the man who came from abroad, [the commander of the unit in Egypt Avraham Zeidenberg, also known as "Paul Frank," "Flad," or "the third man"] who escaped from Egypt........ instructed him in detail how to answer, including how to lie to the investigators, and coordinated the testimonies so as to close the trap on Lavon. Teddy is convinced that Lavon must go immediately. Givli, too, must be dismissed, but Dayan, however, should not be touched for the time being, (9 ,January 1954, 637)

I would never have imagined that we could reach such a horrible state of poisoned relations, the unleashing of the basest instincts of hate and revenge and mutual deceit at the top of our most glorious Ministry [of Defense].

I walk around as a lunatic, horror-stricken and lost, completely helpless . .. . what should I do? What should I do? (10 January 1954, 639)

Isser [Harel, head of the Shin Bet, stung at the time because the "Affair" had been conducted by the military intelligence, without coordination with his organization] told me hair-raising stories about a conversation which Givli initiated with him proposing to abduct Egyptians not only from the Gaza Strip but also in Cyprus and Europe. He also proposed a crazy plan to blow up the Egyptian Embassy in Amman in case of death sentences in the Cairo trial. (14 January 1955, 654)

To Aharon Barkatt, then secretary general of Mapai, Sharett painted the following picture of Israel's security establishment:

Dayan was ready to hijack planes and kidnap [Arab] officers from trains, but he was shocked by Lavon's suggestion about the Gaza Strip. Maklef [who preceded Dayan as Chief of Staff] demanded a free hand to murder Shishakly but he was shaken when Lavon gave him a crazy order concerning the Syrian DMZ. (25 January 1955, 682)

He [Lavon] inspired and cultivated the negative adventuristic trend in the army and preached the doctrine that not the Arab countries but the Western Powers are the enemy, and the only way to deter them from their plots is through direct actions that will terrorize them. (26 January 1955, 685)

Peres shares the same ideology: he wants to frighten the West into supporting Israel's aims.

CHAPTER 8 Nasser: Coexistence with Israel is Possible.

Ben Gurion's Reply: Operation Gazat

Commenting on Israel's terrorist actions in Egypt, a U.S. embassy official in Cairo concluded on February 8, 1955 that "Sharett does not have control of the matters if such mad actions can be carried out."17

The State Department, the prime minister noted, feared subsequent Israeli provocations to sabotage U.S. relations with the Arab world following the signing of the Ankara-Baghdad pact. The American administration therefore attempted to move simultaneously in two directions in order to save what may be saved in the given situation: it placed pressure on Nasser to negotiate some kind of agreement with the Sharett government, and it offered the Zionist state a security pact. The Israeli premier noted that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. of the CIA was working on the creation of contacts between Israel and Egypt, and that he, Sharett, would nominate Yigael Yadin as his representative. (21 January 1955, 675)

[I met with] Roger Baldwin, the envoy of the U.S. League of Human Rights who visited Cairo.... Nasser talked to him about Israel, saying that he is not among those who want to throw Israel into the Mediterranean. He believes in coexistence with Israel and knows that negotiations will open some day.(25 January 1955, 680)

Cable from Eban. .. the U. S. is ready to sign an agreement with us whereby we shall make a commitment not to extend our borders by force, it will commit itself to come to our aid if we were attacked. (28 January 1955, 69 1)

Teddy [Kollek] brought a message from Isser's [head of the Security Services] men in Washington. The partners (the CIA) renew their suggestion for a meeting with Nasser, who does not regard the initiative of the meeting canceled because of the outcome of the trial .... He is as willing to meet us as before and the initiative is now up to Israel. (10 February 1955, 716)

[In regard to Washington's proposals for a U.S.-Israel security pact] I cabled Eban that we are willing to accept a clause which obliges us not to extend our borders by force, but we should in no way commit ourselves to desist from any hostile acts because this would mean closing the door on any possibility to carry out reprisal actions. (14 February 1955, 726)

This last phrase indicates that the news of the American proposals, and of possible negotiations between Sharett and Nasser had spread rapidly in the security establishment. The pressures on Sharett were stepped up. On February 17, Ben Gurion accepted the premier's invitation to return to the government as minister of defense. Quoting his landlady, Sharett noted on that day in his diary "that is the end of peace and quiet." Ten days later, in fact

Ben Gurion arrived.......with.......the Chief of Staff, who was carrying rolled up maps. I understood at once what would be the subject of the conversation.... The Chief of Staff's proposal was to hit an Egyptian army base at the entrance to the city of Gaza.... [He] estimated that the enemy losses would be about ten ... and that we have to be prepared for a few victims on our side. Ben Gurion insisted that the intention is not to kill but only to destroy buildings. if the Egyptians run away under the shock of the attack, there may be no bloodshed at all.

I approved the plan. The act of infiltration near Rehovot-30km from the border of the Gaza Strip-shocked the public and a lack of reaction is unacceptable.... In my heart I was sorry that the reprisal would be attributed [by the public] to Ben Gurion. After all, I did authorize a reprisal action ... when Ben Gurion was away from the government, and it was purely by chance that the operation did not take place. I would have approved this one, too, regardless of Ben Gurion being the Minister of Defense. (27 February 1955, 799-800)

I am shocked. The number [of Egyptian victims (39 dead and 30 wounded, including a 7-year-old boy,)] changes not only the dimensions of the operation but its very substance; it turns it into an event liable to cause grave political and military complications and dangers.... The army spokesman, on instructions from the Minister of Defense, delivered a false version to the press: a unit of ours, after having been attacked supposedly inside our territory, returned the fire and engaged a battle which later developed as it did. Who will believe us? ( I March 1955, 804)

It was the same old story: hit and run and try to fool the world-

The embassies should be instructed to condemn Egypt and not to be on the defensive.... Now there will be a general impression that while we cry out over our isolation and the dangers to our security, we initiate aggression and reveal ourselves as being bloodthirsty and aspiring to perpetrate mass massacres . . . it is possible that this outburst will be interpreted as the result of the army and the nation's outrage against the Powers' policy of ignoring the security of their state and will prevent the continuation of that policy to the bitter end. We, at least, have to make sure that this will be the common impression. . . . I dictated a briefing for the embassies .... It is desirable that the press should express the following: (a) Our public opinion had been agitated by the penetration of an Egyptian gang into a densely populated area and its attack on public transportation; (b) It seems that the clash developed into a serious battle as the exchange of fire was going on; (c) Egypt always claims that it is in a state of war with Israel which it demonstrates by acts such as blockade and murders and if there is a state of war, these are the results; (d) This event cannot be detached from the general background of the feeling of isolation which prevails in Israel in view of the West's alliances with the Arab states , . .. the most recent example of which is the Iraq-Turkey Pact whose anti-Israeli goals are particularly evident.

The last argument (d) needs very cautious handling in the sense that it should not be attributed to us and should be confided only to the most loyal [commentators] who must be warned not to appear inspired by our sources.

When I wrote these things [the instructions to the embassies] I still didn't know how crushing is the evidence-that was already published, refuting our official version. The huge amounts of arms and explosives, the tactics of the attack, the blocking and mining of the roads ... the precise coordination of the attack. Who would be foolish enough to believe that such a complicated operation could "develop" from a casual and sudden attack on an Israeli army unit by an Egyptian unit? . . .

I am tormented by thoughts as to whether this is not my greatest failure as Prime Minister. Who knows what will be the political and security consequence" (1 March 1955, 804-805)

One of the immediate and inevitable consequences was the following:

Yesterday . . . there was a conversation between [Salahl Gohar [the chief Egyptian representative to the mixed armistice commission] and [Joseph] Tkoa, The Egyptian representative informed [Tkoa] immediately that right after the previous meeting [which took place immediately following the Gaza attack] ... Nasser told him ... that he had had a personal contact with lsrael's Prime Minister and that there were good chances that things would develop in a positive way, but then came the attack on Gaza, and naturally now ... it's off.

Lawson [U.S. Ambassador] thinks that the reason for the warning and the threats [from Arab countries] is fear which has seized the Arab World due to Ben Gurion's comeback. The Gaza attack is interpreted as signaling a decision on our part to attack on all fronts. The Americans, too, are afraid that it will lead to a new conflagration in the Middle East which will blow up all their plans. Therefore, they wish to obtain from us a definite commitment that similar actions will not be repeated. (12 March 1955, 837)

But it was precisely to prevent a similar commitment that Ben Gurion rejoined the government, and he had no intention of changing his mind. On the contrary, on March 25, less than a month after the attack on Gaza, he proposed to the cabinet that Israel proceed to occupy the Gaza Strip, this time for good. The discussion lasted five whole days and ended with the ministers divided between the opponents of the proposal, headed by Sharett, and Ben Gurion's supporters. With five votes in favor, nine against it, and two abstentions, the plan was rejected, or perhaps simply postponed. The security pact offered by the U.S., however, had to be rejected, because-as Dayan explained in April 1955-"it would put handcuffs on our military freedom of action." He went into a detailed explanation on May 26, during a meeting with Israel's ambassadors in Washington (Abba Eban), Paris (Ya'acov Tsur) and London (Eliahu Eilat). The conversation was reported to Sharett later by Ya'acob Herzog and Gideon Raphael:

We do not need (Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there....

The conclusions from Dayan's words are clear: This State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is nonexistent.... It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no-it must-invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge.. . . And above all -let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space. (Such a slip of the tongue: Ben Gurion himself said that it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.) (26 May 1955, 1021)

On August 14, a U.S. Quaker leader, Elmer Jackson, on a visit to Jerusalem after a meeting in Cairo with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Fawzi, told Sharett that Nasser was still interested in normalizing relations with Israel. On October 7, the Egyptian president himself said to New York Times special envoy Kenneth Love: "No Arab says today that we should destroy Israel."18 But Israel had already made its decisions. 19

CHAPTER 9 Disperse the Palestinian Refugees ....

One important reason for the insistence with which Israel pursued its retaliation policy was the desire of the Zionist ruling establishment to exert permanent pressure on the Arab states to remove the Palestinian refugees of the 1949 war from the proximity of the armistice lines, and to disperse them through the Arab world. This was not due, in the early fifties, to military considerations: as we have seen, and as Dayan's above quotation clearly demonstrates, the Israeli government was more interested in the heightening of border tensions than in their elimination. Furthermore, its lack of concern for the security of the Jewish border population was as cynical as its own promotion of a sensation of danger among the settlers through provocation and false propaganda. Moreover, in those years no organized Palestinian resistance movement existed. It was all too obvious that the low level of guerrilla-type activities permitted by the Arab regimes was intended more to reduce the tensions created inside their countries by the presence of the refugees, and to keep the issue on the agenda in the international arena, than to prepare for a war of liberation in Palestine.20 But the presence of the Palestinian refugees along the armistice lines in Gaza and the West Bank was not only a constant reminder of the illegitimacy of lsrael's territorial conquests in 1948-49 and of its violation of UN resolutions calling for repatriation, it was also a living, physical landmark along borders which Israel had no intention of accepting as definite limits to its territorial expansion. In other words, as long as masses of Palestinians were still concentrated on Palestinian soil, the Israeli rulers argued, there was both the risk of international pressure in support of their claim to return to their homes, and little likelihood for international permission for Israel to cancel the geopolitical concept of' Palestine entirely, substituting it with that of "Eretz-lsrael."

It must be underlined at this point that Sharett's position on the Palestinian question did not differ, except regarding the use of military methods to disperse them, from that of the "activists." He had totally rejected Count Bernadotte's repeated pleas in 1948 for a return of tile refugees to their homes (Folke Bernadotte To Jerusalem, London, 1951). A year later, he ridiculed the position of the General Zionist Party in favor of a Palestinian independent state in the West Bank and against an agreement with King Abdullah on the division of the West Bank between Israel and Jordan (Divrei, Haknesset, Jerusalem, 1949). In his Diary, there are numerous references to negotiations attempted by his senior aides at the foreign ministry with Arab representatives or exiles aimed at resettling the Palestinians in countries such as Libya, Syria or Iraq. (Among others, Mustafa Abdul Mun'im, Deputy Secretary General of the Arab League is quoted by Sharett on May 23, 1954, as having affirmed that "the refugees should be settled in the neighboring countries, or, if capital is available, in Sinai.") On June 30, 1954, Sharett met with two representatives of a Union of Palestinian Refugees, Aziz Shehadeh from Jaffa and Mahmud Yahia from Tantura, in regard to the payment of compensation. Finally, on May 28, 1955, Sharett's ideas on the question of the Palestinian refugees were unequivocally expressed in his instructions to lsrael's ambassadors in connection with the Security Pact offered to Israel by the U.S., which the foreign minister suspected might include some conditions: "There may be an attempt to reach peace by pressuring us to make concessions on the question of territory and the refugees. I warned [the ambassadors] against any thought of the possibility of returning a few tens of thousands of refugees, even at the price of peace." And this was the "liberal" Zionist leader who claimed to be an expert on Arab affairs because he had lived for two years, during his adolescence, in an Arab village in the West Bank; because he knew Arabic-, because he had lived in Syria during his military service in the Turkish army. On the whole, his attitude toward the Palestinians is well illustrated by a note in his Diary on November 15, 1953. It refers to a report made that day to the cabinet meeting by Colonel Yitzhak Shani, then chief military governor of the Arab minority in Israel. (As is obvious, those whom Sharett calls infiltrators were forcefully expelled Palestinian Arabs trying to return to their home villages or to reestablish contacts with their families who remained under Israeli rule.)

In the last three years [Shani reported] 20,000 infiltrators settled in Israel, in addition to 30,000 who returned immediately after the war.... Only because these 20,000 have not been given permanent documents has the brake been put on the flow of infiltration directed toward settlement. To abolish the military government would mean to open the border areas to undisturbed infiltration and to increasing penetration toward the interior of the country. Even as things are, around 19,000 Arabs in Galilee are in possession of permanent permits to move freely around but only to the West and the South and not toward the North and the East.... it is true that the troublesome problem of the evacuees must be liquidated through a permanent resettlement, but the evacuees firmly refuse to settle on land belonging to refugees who are on the other side of the border.... Even when stone houses are built for them, they refuse to settle in them if they are built on absentee land.... The Arabs who continue to live on their land enjoy advantages, since their production costs are much lower than those of the Jews. In addition they are exempt from spending money and engaging manpower for vigilance, as the infiltrators don't touch their property .... It may be assumed that after this lecture the "General Zionists" demand that the military government be abolished would finally be silenced. (15 November 1953, 150)

Throughout 1953-54 Sharett periodically referred in his diary to proposals made by Ben Gurion, Dayan, Lavon and others to present Egypt with an ultimatum: either it evacuates all the Palestinian refugees from Gaza and disperses them inside Egypt, or else. The description of the Cabinet discussion in the last week of March 1955 on Ben Gurion's demand for the occupation of Gaza, offers more details:

The Defense Minister's proposal is that Israel declare invalid the armistice agreement with Egypt, and thus resume its "right" to renew the (1948-49) war .... I have condemned the twisted logic in Ben Gurion's reliance on the violation of the armistice agreement by Egypt, in order to justify the declaration on our part that this agreement does not exist any move and thus we are allowed to resume the war.... Let us assume that there are 200,000 Arabs [in the Gaza Strip]. Let us assume that half of them will run or will be made to run to the Hebron Hills. Obviously they will run away without anything and shortly after they establish for themselves some stable environment, they will become again a riotous and homeless mob. It is easy to imagine the outrage and hate and bitterness and the desire for revenge that will animate them.... And we shall still have I 00,000 of them in the Strip, and it is easy to imagine what means we shall resort to in order to repress them and what waves of hatred we shall create again and what kind of headlines we shall receive in the international press. The first round would be: Israel aggressively invades the Gaza Strip. The second: Israel causes again the terrified flight of masses of Arab refugees. (27 March 1955, 865)

In yet another six-hour cabinet meeting Sharett continues his arguments:

What we succeeded in achieving in 1948, cannot be repeated whenever we desire it. Today we must accept our existing frontiers and try to relax the tensions with our neighbors to prepare the ground for peace and strengthen our relations with the Powers.... Finally I proved that the occupation of the Gaza Strip will not resolve any security problem, as the refugees will continue to constitute the same trouble, and even more so, as their hate will be rekindled by the atrocities that we shall cause them to suffer during the occupation. (29 March 1955, 873)

Ben Gurion's speech was full of anger against those who disagree with him and who are in his opinion incapable of seeing the fatal forecast and cannot understand that we can only be delivered by daring action, if it will be performed in time, before the opportunity is missed. . . . The problem of the refugees is indeed a pain in the neck, but nevertheless we shall chase them to Jordan. (ibid., 874-875)

CHAPTER 10 .... and Topple Nasser's Regime

At the same cabinet meeting Ben Gurion, according to Sharett's Diary,:

Tried to prove that Egypt aspires to dominate Africa, westwards to Morocco and southwards to South Africa where one day the blacks will get up and massacre the two million whites and then subject themselves to Egypt's moral authority.... Nasser, [he said] will probably not react to the occupation of the Gaza Strip because his regime is based solely on the army, and if he tries to fight back he will be defeated and his regime will collapse. The Arab States will probably not come to Nasser's aid anyway. Finally, the Western powers will not react ... militarily. England will not invade the Negev - "and if she will, we shall fight and throw her out in disgrace. . . ." Our force is in the accomplishment of facts -this is the only way for us to become a political factor which has to be taken into consideration. This is the right moment because the Arab world is divided and Egypt has not yet signed an agreement with the U.S. or England. (ibid.)

To prevent an alliance between the West and the Arab world, especially with the most important Arab country- Egypt-was (and was to remain) Israel's main goal. This had nothing to do with Israel's security. On the contrary, Ben Gurion's policy was directed at preventing guarantees from being imposed on the Zionist state by the U.S. . Such guarantees would necessarily imply the achievement of a minimum agreement between Israel and the Arab world (definition of the borders, a "face-saving" solution for the Palestinian refugees). The basic motivation was also clearly stated: the use of force was "the only way" for Israel to become a hegemonic power in the region, possibly in alliance with the West. Nasser had to be eliminated not because his regime constituted a danger for Israel, but because an alliance between the West and his prestigious leadership in the third world, and in the Middle East, would inevitably lead to a peace agreement which in turn would cause the Zionist state to be relativized as just one of the region's national societies.

That Nasser's regime did not constitute any danger to lsrael's existence was well known at the time to the Israelis. Sharett noted:

I expressed my doubts in regard to the [much publicized by Israel] growth of Egypt's military strength, seeing that this year all the energies of the [Egyptian] army have been absorbed in domestic conflicts and rivalries. . . . About 500 officers, among the best in the Egyptian forces, left the military services [after Nasser replaced Neguib] and passed to administrative and political activities. (30 March 1955)

But Israel's worldwide campaign had nothing whatever to do with the true facts:

Ben Gurion [in the cabinet meeting] declared that Nasser is the most dangerous enemy of Israel and is plotting to destroy her .... It is not clear where he gets this confidence that [enables him] to express [this] so definitely and decisively as if it were based on solid facts. (24 April 1955)

It was simply directed to mobilize international opinion against Egypt, and prepare a favorable ground for Israel's imminent military aggression. At the same time, however, Israeli officials were instructed to convince Western governments that the instability of Nasser's regime did not make it worthy of Western aid and support. As always when their end justified the means, lsrael's rulers were not at all concerned about the contradiction between their parallel campaigns. To prove Nasser's weakness they resorted to testimonies by Egyptians:

Gideon Raphael. .. reported on ... an interesting meeting with one of the major Egyptian capitalists, Aboud Pasha.... Aboud turned out to be a close friend of Nasser. It seems that he conserved and even strengthened his status under the new regime which is an enemy of capitalism.... According to Aboud, Nasser's position is unstable in his own ranks. He is constantly nervous and does not know whom to please first. The leadership of the group is divided and conflicts explode between the officers, each of whom leans on the support of a different corps -the air force, the navy, ground forces. The situation is very instable and it is difficult to know what will happen. (31 July 1955, 1 100)

As well as to new attempts at subversion:

I sat with Josh Palmon . . . to hear a report on the continuation of the negotiations with the leaders of the Sudanese Umma party.... One of them will visit Israel soon. Some more possibilities of developing commercial connections between us and them. It is necessary to detach Sudan from economic dependence upon Egypt, and from its sphere of influence.

We are maintaining contacts with Wafd [rightist, nationalist, anti-Nasser Party] exiles in London.(3 October 1955)

The Eisenhower administration seemed divided. State Department pro-Arab elements, according to Sharett, were still pressing for a Western-Arab alliance in the Middle East, and considered an agreement between Washington and Cairo essential to the security and stability of the region, in the words of Israel's foreign minister. But Israeli pressures were increasingly bearing fruit. After years of contacts and negotiations, Egyptian requests for defensive armaments resulted in no more than, as Mohammed Hassanein Heykal later disclosed, a personal present made to General Neguib in the form of a decorative pistol to wear at ceremonies, and this while Israel's military aggression was growing more brazen from day to day. No economic aid to speak of was reaching Egypt from the West. And John Foster Dulles' commitment to help Egypt in the construction of the Aswan Dam had faded into thin air. Cairo was humiliated, while Western verbal regrets after the devastating Israeli attack on Gaza did not seem to have affected in any way Israel's preparations for an all-out war. Ben Gurion made a public speech on August 8 in which he criticized Sharett's policy as being aimed only at pleasing the gentiles and pointed towards the destruction of the state. He announced that from now on the foreign minister's duty will be none else than to explain to the world the defense ministry's security policies. These factors contributed to extinguishing Cairo's last illusions. By the end of September 1955, Egypt signed an arms deal with Czechoslovakia intended to secure its survival and self-defense.

On October 1st

Teddy [Kollek] brought in a classified cable from Washington. Our "partner" named [in code] "Ben" [Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA] ... describes the terrible confusion prevailing in the State Department under the shock of the Nasser- Czech "i.e., Russian" deal. (Henry) Byroade and all the others who were in favor of U. S. support to Egypt lost their say completely. He adds: "We are surprised at your silence." When our man asked for the meaning of these words, and whether we are expected to go to war, the answer was: "if, when the Soviet arms arrive, you will hit Egypt no one will protest." (I October 1955, 1182)

In the cabinet meeting on October 3 at one stage Ben Gurion declared:

"if they really get Migs ... I will support their bombing! We can do it!" I understood that he read the cable from Washington. The wild seed has fallen on fertile ground. (3 October 1955)

Isser [Harel, Shin Bet chief] likewise concludes that the U.S. is hinting to us that as far as they are concerned, we have a free hand and God bless us if we act audaciously.... Now ... the U.S. is interested in toppling Nasser's regime, . . . but it does not dare at the moment to use the methods it adopted to topple the leftist government of Jacobo Arbeni in Guatemala [19541 and of Mossadegh in Iran [1953].... It prefers its work to be done by Israel.

Hence, Isser proposes seriously and pressingly ... that we carry out our plan for the occupation of the Gaza Strip now.... The situation is changed and there are other reasons which determine that it is "time to act." First the discovery of oil near the Strip ... its defense requires dominating the Strip-this alone is worih dealing with the troublesome question of the refugees. Second, Egypt's betrayal of the West. This fact eliminates the danger of an armed intervention of the Powers against us. (ibid., 1 186)

Precisely one year later Dayan's troops occupied the Gaza Strip, Sinai, and the Straits of Tiran and were arrayed along the shore of the Suez Canal to watch the spectacular French and British aerial bombardments of Ismailia and Suez, accompanied by the rapid landing of troops in the Canal Zone. Six months before, as a result of a personal decision of Ben Gurion, Sharett had been eliminated from the government. The premiership had been resumed by the Old Man in November 1955, one month after the U.S. "green light" for an Israeli invasion of Egypt. A vicious whisper campaign had been mounted, to present the foreign minister as incapable of obtaining for Israel the arms necessary for its defense. The atmosphere surrounding Sharett's departure is significant:

......[Around] the table [in the Cabinet meeting] they all sat in silence. None of my colleagues raised his head to look at me. No one got up to shake my hand, despite everything. It was as if all their merital capacities were paralyzed, as if the freedom of movement was banned from their bodies, the freedom of expression was taken away from their hearts and the freedom of independent action from their consciences. They sat heavy and staring in their silence. Thus I crossed the whole length of the meeting room, and left. ( 18 June 1956)

In the next months the U.S. authorized France to divert to Israel Mirage planes which were already earmarked for NATO. At the moment of the Suez offensive the U.S. feigned surprise, and even indignation. But it made a clear distinction between England and France, the beaten rivals in the inter-imperialist struggle for influence in the Middle East, and Israel. The immediate retreat of Britain and France from Egypt was requested by President Eisenhower within a matter of hours. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza and Sinai was pushed through only four months later and then only thanks to heavy Soviet pressure which threatened to submerge the West in unforeseen complications to world peace. Israel, with the CIA authorization in its pocket, was granted the mitigating circumstances of "security needs" in world opinion's judgment on that criminal war. The precedent had thus been set, and could only mean that the retreat from Gaza and Sinai was to be purely tactical, as the 1967 war later proved.

As a so-called moderate Zionist, Moshe Sharett's lifelong assumption had been that lsrael's survival would be impossible without the support of the West, but that Western so-called morality as well as Western objective interests in the Middle East would never allow the West to support a Jewish state which "behaves according to the laws of the jungle" and raises terrorism to the level of a sacred principle. To prominent Mapai leader David Hacohen, who declared himself convinced that the Israelis should behave in the Middle East as if they were crazy in order to terrorize the Arabs and blackmail the West, he replied: If we shall behave like madmen, we shall be treated as such-interned in a lunatic asylum and isolated from the world. But his adversaries proved him wrong, thereby dealing a crushing blow to his personality as well as to the very hypothesis of moderate Zionism. What they proved was that his supposedly rational assumption was not only fallacious but also unrealistic. In the final analysis the West, and in particular the U.S., let itself be frightened, or blackmailed, into supporting Israel's megalomanic ambitions, because an objective relationship of complicity already existed and because once pushed into the open this complicity proved capable of serving the cause of Western power politics in the region.21 Just as Zionism, based on the de-Palestinization and the Judaisation of Palestine, was intrinsically racist and immoral, thus the West, in reality, had no use for a Jewish state in the Middle East which did not behave according to the laws of the jungle, and whose terrorism could not be relied on as a major instrument for the oppression of the peoples of the region. There was a fatal but coherent logic in this newly acquired equation, which would determine the course of future events:

I go on repeating to myself:nowadays admit that you are the loser! They showed much more daring and dynamism ... they played with fire, and they won. Admit that the balance sheet of the Sinai war is positive. Moral evaluations apart, Israel's political importance in the world has grown enormously.... You remain alone. Only your son Coby is with you. The public, even your own public, does not share your position. On the contrary. . the public now turns even against its "masters" and its bitterness against the retreat [from Sinai and Gaza] is developing into a tendency to change the political balance in this country in favor of Begin. (4 April 1957)

APPENDIX 1  Operation Kibya

Ben Gurion's version of operation Kibya, broadcasted on Israeli Radio on 19 October 1953, as recorded by Davar, 20 October 1953.

( ... )The [Jewish] border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps, have, for years, been the target of(. . .)murderous attacks and had shown a great restraint. Rightfully, they have demanded that their government protect their lives and the Israeli government gave them weapons and trained them to protect themselves.

But the armed forces from Transjordan did not stop their criminal acts, until [the people in] some of the border settlements lost their patience and after the murder of a mother and her two children in Yahud, they attacked, last week, the village of Kibya across the border, that was one of the main centers of the murderers' gangs. Every one of us regrets and suffers when blood is shed anywhere and nobody regrets more than the Israeli government the fact that innocent people were killed in the retaliation act in Kibya. But all the responsibility rests with the government of Transjordan that for many years tolerated and thus encouraged attacks of murder and robbery by armed powers in its country against the citizens of Israel.

The government of Israel strongly rejects the ridiculous and fantastic version, as if 600 soldiers participated [in the action] against Kibya. We had conducted a thorough check and found out that not even the smallest army unit was missing from its base on the night of the attack on Kibya.

APPENDIX 2   "And Then There Was Kafr Qasim..."

On the eve of the 1956 Sinai War, Israeli Brigadier Shadmi, the commander of a battalion on the Israeli-Jordanian border, ordered a night curfew imposed on the "minority" (Arab) villages under his command. These villages were inside the Israeli borders; thus, their inhabitants were Israeli citizens. According to the court records (Judgments of the District Court, The Military Prosecutor vs. Major Melinki, et. al.), Shadmi told the commander of a Frontier Guard unit, Major Melinki, that the curfew must be "extremely strict" and that "it would not be enough to arrest those who broke it they must be shot." He added: "A dead man (or according to other evidence 'a few men') is better than the complications of detention."

The court recordings continue:

He (Melinki) informed the assembled officers that the war had begun, that their units were now under the command of the Israeli Defense Army, and that their task was to impose the curfew in the minority villages from 1700 to 0600, after informing the Mukhtars to this effect at 1630. With regard to the observation of the curfew, Melinki emphasized that it was forbidden to harm inhabitants who stayed in their homes, but that anyone found outside his home (or, according to other witnesses, anyone leaving his home, or anyone breaking the curfew) should be shot dead. He added that there were to be no arrests, and that if a number of people were killed in the night (according to other witnesses: it was desirable that a number of people should be killed as) this would facilitate the imposition of the curfew during succeeding nights.

......... While he was outlining this series of orders, Major Melinki allowed the officers to ask him questions. Lieutenant Franknanthal asked him "What do we do with the dead?" (or, according to other witnesses "with the wounded?") Melinki replied: "Take no notice of them" (or, according to other evidence: "They must not be removed," or, according to a third witness: "There will not be any wounded.") Arieh Menches, a section leader, then asked "What about women and children?" to which Melinki replied "No sentimentality" (according to another witness: "They are to be treated like anyone else-, the curfew covers them too.") Menches then asked a second question: "What about people returning from their work?" Here Alexandroni tried to intervene, but Melinki silenced him, and answered: "They are to be treated like anyone else" (according to another witness, he added: "it will be just too bad for them, as the Commander said.")

In the minutes of the meeting which were taken down and signed by Melinki a short time after he signed the series of orders, the following appears:

....As from today, at 1700 hours, curfew shall be imposed in the minority villages until 0600 hours, and all who disobey this order will be shot dead.

After this psychological preparation, and the instructions given to the policemen-soldiers to "shoot to kill all who broke the curfew," the unit went out to the village of Kafr Qasim to start its work:

The first to be shot at the western entrance to the village were four quarrymen returning on bicycles from the places where they worked near Petah Tiqva and Ras al-Ain. A short time after the curfew began these four workmen came round the bend in the road pushing their bicycles. When they had gone some ten to fifteen meters along the road towards the school, they were shot from behind at close range, from the left. Two of the four (Ahmad Mahmud Freij and Ali Othman Taha, both 30 years old) were killed outright. The third (Muhammad Mahmud Freij, brother of Ahmad Freij) was wounded in the thigh and the forearm, while the fourth, Abdullah Samir Badir, escaped by throwing himself to the ground. The bicycle of the wounded man, Ahmad, fell on him and covered his body, and he managed to lie motionless throughout the bloody incidents that took place around him. Eventually he crawled into an olive grove and lay under an olive tree until morning. Abdullah was shot at again when he rolled from the road to the sidewalk, whereupon he sighed and pretended to he dead. After the two subsequent massacres, which took place beside him, he hid himself among a flock of sheep, whose shepherd had been killed, and escaped into the village with the flock. . . .

A short time after this killing a shepherd and his twelve year old son came back from the pasture with their flock. They approached the bend along the road from the Jewish colony of Masha. The flock went along the road as far as the village school, the shepherd throwing stones at sheep that had strayed to turn them back on to the Masha road. Two or three soldiers, standing by the bend, opened fire at close range on the shepherd and his son and killed them. Their names were Othman Abdullah Issa, aged 30, and his son Fathi Othman Abdullah Issa, aged twelve.

Note: The translation of the court proceedings appeared in The Arabs in Israel by Sabri Jiyris (Monthly Review, 1976). Jiyris sums up: "In the first hour of the curfew, between 5 and 6 PM, the men of the Israeli Frontier Guard killed forty-seven Arab citizens in Kafr Qasim."

APPENDIX 3  "Soon the Singing Will Turn Into A Death Moan"

The following is excerpted from Meir Har-Tzion's Diary, published by Levin-Epstein, Ltd., Tel Aviv, 1969. It describes an Israeli raid in Gaza during the early 1950s.

The wide, dry riverbed glitters in the moonlight. We advance, carefully, along the mountain slope. Several houses can be seen. Bushes and shrubbery sway in the breeze, casting their shadows on the ground. In the distance we can see three lights and hear the sounds of Arab music coming out of the homes immersed in darkness. We split up into three groups of four men each. Two groups make their way to the immense refugee camp to the south of our position. The other group marches towards the lonely house in the flat area north of Wadi Gaza. We march forward, trampling over green fields, wading through water canals as the moon bathes us in its scintillating light. Soon, however, the silence will be shattered by bullets, explosions, and the screams of those who are now sleeping peacefully. We advance quickly and enter one of the houses "Mann Haatha?" (Arabic for "Who's there?")

We leap towards the voices. Fearing and trembling, two Arabs are standing up against the wall of the building. They try to escape. I open fire. An ear piercing scream fills the air. One man falls to the ground, while his friend continues to run. Now we must act we have no time to lose. We make our way from house to house as the Arabs scramble about in confusion. Machine guns rattle, their noise mixed with a terrible howling. We reach the main thoroughfare of the camp. The mob of fleeing Arabs grows larger. The other group attacks from the opposite direction. The thunder of hand grenades echoes in the distance. We receive an order to retreat. The attack has come to an end.

On the following morning, the headlines will read: "The refugee camp of Al-Burj near Gaza was attacked. The camp has been serving as a base for infiltrators into Israeli territory. 'Twenty people were killed and another twenty were wounded."

.. . . A telephone line blocks our way. We cut it and continue. A narrow path leads along the slope of a hill. The column marches forward in silence. Stop! A few rocks roll down the hill. I catch sight of a man surveying the silence. I cock my rifle. Gibly crawls over to me, "Har, for God's sake, a knife!!" His clenched teeth glitter in the dark and his whole body is tight, his mind alert, "For God's sake," . . . I put my tommy down and unsheath my machete. We crawl towards the lone figure as he begins to sing a trilled Arab tune. Soon the singing will turn into a death moan. I am shaking, every muscle in my body is tense. This is my first experience with this type of weapon. Will I be able to do it?

We draw closer. There he stands, only a few meters in front of us. We leap. Gibly grabs him and I plunge the knife deep into his back. The blood pours over his striped cotton shirt. With not a second to lose, I react instinctively and stab him again. The body groans, struggles and then becomes quiet and still.

From an interview with Meir Har-Tzion, Ha'aretz weekly supplement, 9 November 1965:

"Pangs of conscience? No. Why should I have any?" The man's blue eyes open wide in amazement. "It's easy to kill a man with a rifle. You press the trigger and that's that. But a knife, why, that's something else-that's a real fight. Even if you are successful, you come close to death. The enemy's blade is as close as the air. It's a fantastic feeling. You realize you're a man."

APPENDIX 4  The Lavon Affair

Moshe Sharett's public version of "The Lavon Affair" in his statement to lsrael's Parliament (Divrei Ha-Knesset, the 514th meeting, 13 December 1954):

Honorable Chairman, members of the Knesset. The trial that started two days ago in Egypt against 13 Jews is disturbing everybody and brings about an emotional turmoil and deep bitterness in the country [Israel] and in the whole Jewish world. Indeed, it must cause concern and anxiety in the hearts of all justice-seeking people around the universe. The Committee for Foreign Affairs and Security has alreadv dealt and will further deal with this serious issue. But at this stage I feel obliged to make a short announcement. In my speech in the Knesset on November 15 1 said "The uncontrolled behavior of' Egypt . . . does not indicate . . . that its leadership . . . is seeking moderate approaches and peace. How far Egypt is from this spirit [of moderation and peace] can be learned from the plot woven in Alexandria, the show-trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who became victims of false accusations of espionage, and who, it seems, are being threatened and tortured in order to extract from them confessions in imaginary crimes." This gloomy assumption was verified and was revealed to be a cruel and shocking fact, by the declaration of the accused Victorin Ninyo in the military court in Cairo that was published this morning. [According to this declaration] she was tortured during the interrogation which preceded the trial and by that torture they extracted from her false confessions to crimes which did not happen. The government of Israel strongly protests this practice, which revives in the Middle East the methods used by the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. The government of Israel strongly rejects the false accusations of the general Egyptian prosecution, which relegates to the Israeli authorities horrible deeds and diabolic conspiracies against the security and the international relations of Egypt. From this stand we have protested many times in the past persecution and false accusations of Jews in various countries. We see in the innocent Jews accused by the Egyptian authorities of such severe crimes, victims of vicious hostility to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. If their crime is being Zionist and devoted to Israel, millions of Jews around the world share this crime. We do not think that the rulers of Egypt should be interested in being responsible for shedding Jewish blood. We call upon all those who believe in peace, stability and human relations among nations to prevent fatal injustice.

APPENDIX 5  Israeli Newspaper Reveals Government's Attempt to Stop Publication of Israel's Sacred Terrorism

Following are major excerpts from an article by Israeli Member of the Knesset Uri Avneri, published in Hoalam Hazeh, September 23, 1980, entitled "Sharett's Diary for the Arabs." The booklet uses quotations from Sharett's diary to illuminate eight affairs which took place during the fifties. Livia Rokach did clean work. All her quotations are real. She did not ever take them out of context, nor did she quote them in a way that contradicts the intention of the diary writer. To any person who is familiar with Israeli propaganda, such quotations may have a stunning effect . . . Through the use of selective excerpts from Sharett's diary, her historical research deals in detail with the following affairs:

1.Retaliation activities Quotations from Sharett show that these activities were never carried out in revenge or retaliation, as the were presented to be, but that they were the product of the premeditated policies of David Ben Gurion and Moshe Dayan. These policies aimed at heating the borders, as a preparation for war, and as a pretext to vacate and disperse Palestinian refugees who lived in camps close to the borders. Quotations from Sharett's book also reveal that President Yitzhak Ben Zvi hoped for an Egyptian attack to justify lsrael's occupation of half of Sinai. Sharett reveals, furthermore, that the incidents on the Syrian border were also a result of an Israeli initiative. Sharett details at length the reasons behind the blood-bath committed by the 101 unit, under the command of Arik Sharon, in the village of Kibya, where fifty-six innocent Arab villagers were killed. He also recites how the government decided to publish a false communique, in which this event was portrayed as a partisan action carried out by civilian "settlers."

2.The plan for the occupation of Southern Syria Sharett reveals that Ben Gurion, Dayan and Pinhas Lavon requested in February 1954 to exploit the toppling of the Syrian dictator, Adib Shishakly, by occupying southern Syria and annexing it to Israel. They also requested to buy a Syrian officer who would acquire power in Damascus and establish a pro-Israel puppet government. These things seem more actual today in light of the deteriorating position of Hafez al-Assad and Israeli declarations in this regard.

3.The intention to partition Lebanon Sharett reveals that already in February 1954 Ben Gurion proposed a large Israeli operation to dismember the Lebanese state and to establish a Maronite-Christian state in one of its parts. Extended discussions were held as a result. Ben Gurion explicated the plan at length in a letter to Sharett, and Sharett answered in a long letter in which he opposed the plan vehemently, Ben Gurion was ready to invest large sums in bribing Christian leaders in Lebanon. Sharett also revealed that the chief of staff supported the plan of buying a Lebanese army officer who would be used as a puppet, and who would make it seem that the intervention of the Israeli army would be in response to his call for the liberation of Lebanon from Muslim subjugation. In the eyes of today's reader this plan seems an accurate blueprint for what took place in Lebanon after that- the civil war, the establishment of the Maronite enclave of Major Sa'd Haddad and labeling it "free Lebanon."

4.The Har-Tzion Affair Sharett recites how Meir Har-Tzion of the 101 Unit murdered with his own hands five innocent Bedouin youth in revenge for the killing of his sister who crossed the Jordanian border during one of her hikes. Sharett recites, further, how Arik Sharon and Moshe Dayan covered over this abhorrent act, and how Ben Gurion foiled his decision to bring Har-Tzion and his friends to justice.

5.The Lavon Affair Sharett describes at length the nasty business in Egypt. Livia Rokach appended to the book in which Sharett reveals the truth about the affair his own lies-filled speech in the Knesset in which he claimed that the accusations against those indicted in the Cairo trials were motivated by blood libel and antisemitism. The Israeli reader who read the excerpts from Sharett's diary which were serialized in Maariv, or even the eight volumes of the diary themselves cannot be shocked by these revelations, in spite of their severity. However, the impact of such a publication abroad is bound to be sharper. Indeed, the lack of legal intervention by the Israeli Foreign Office prevented a wide spread dissemination of the booklet. The Arab-American organization that published the booklet does not have the means required to disseminate it widely, especially when faced with the conspiracy of silence imposed by the pro-Israel American media ....

NOTES

1. In his Diary Sharett reports consultations with the Israeli ambassador to Brazil, David Shealtiel, concerning the settlement in that country, of half a million Palestinian refugees - one hundred thousand "in the first stage." Sharett expresses enthusiasm for the project.

2. Negotiations on the implementation of a UN-approved plan for the division of Jordan River water among Israel, Syria and Jordan were conducted at the time by President Eisenhower's special envoy Erric Johnston, Israel, however, was rapidly nearing the completion of its own deviation project. No agreement was ever concluded.

3. In September 1979, following the publication of Sharett's Diary, an Israeli citizen on a radio debate asked Arik Sharon about the massacre, in which sixty nine civilians were killed. Sharon, who personally commanded the Kibya action, and who was a loyal member of Mapai in the 1950s, according to Sharett, is today the minister in the Begin government responsible for the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza. A report on this radio discussion in the Histadrut Labor Party newspaper Davar, of 14 September 1979, gives the following comments:

The responsibility for the killing of 69 civilians in Kibya, according to Sharon, falls on the victims themselves. At that time the Arab population was used to the Army's reaching just the edge of the village, dynamiting just one house , and leaving. Therefore, the people stayed in their houses. Thus, any attempt to claim that in Kibya there was a cold-blooded action to murder women and children should be described as a completely unfounded accusation.

Sharon decided personally to give an energetic character to that action. He instructed that 600 kilograms of explosives be taken along. Forty -five houses in the village were marked to be blown up, among which was the school. The task force did not know that people were hiding in the cellars and the upper floors. The houses were blown up after a superficial examination of the ground floor alone. This is why the number of victims was so high.

Kibya was, according to all evidence, a tragic error. A more cautious commander may, have avoided it. Had Arik Sharon changed for the better since, he would have now said that he was sorry. He did not.

Davar editorialist Nahum Barnea ostensibly attacks Sharon, but in fact he obviously tends to excuse the murderous operation. Kibya was no "tragic error" but a deliberate crime, as the context of Sharon's story proves. Before going into action, Sharett's soldiers, moreover. were given a dramatic description of a previous incident in Yahud (an Arab village repopulated with Israeli Jews) in which a woman was killed. Yahud served as a pretext for the Kibya attack, although it was known that Kibya had no other relation to the earlier episode. Clearly, the intention was to incite the soldiers emotionally to exterminate the greatest possible number of civilians and have no qualms about the killing of women and children. Significantly, upon his return from Kibya, Sharon reported the number of victims to have been ten to twelve: "We counted only the military dead, the soldiers of the Jordanian Region's garrison," he said in the above broadcast.

4. At that time Israel was literally flooding the world with propaganda in which it catastrophically pictured itself as threatened in its daily existence by growing Arab power. It is also significant that the above disclosures were made confidentially to American Zionist leaders, who thus became involved in Israel's two-faced strategy. The use of the term "Western Eretz Israel" is particularly illuminating. It implies that, in contrast with their official statements at that time, the concept of' an "Eastern Eretz Israel" (i.e., Jordan) has never been eliminated from the political vocabulary of the Israeli leadership.

5. See Ha'aretz of' 29 June 1979, commenting on a recent wave of terrorist actions in Syria attributed to the Muslim Brothers: "If Syria assumes its Sunni character again, as it was prior to the rise of the Ba'ath and the Alawites to power, new and varied opportunities may open up to Israel, Lebanon and the whole Middle Fast. In view of such a possibility, Israel must keep vigilant and alert: It must not an opportunity which might be unrepeatable". A quarter of a century later, The same formula is being used. In general, a close refilling of the Israeli press through 1979 suggests that Israel is again deploying efforts in various directions to bring about the fall[ of Assad's regime, and to install a Damascus regime which would go along with Israeli policies. "Israel is aiming at installing a Sadat in Damascus," one Israeli political figure told us in September 1979.

6. This is not to say, obviously, that no alliance between Israel and the US existed prior to 1967. Through the fifties collaboration was particularly close between Israel's special services and the CIA. It is certainly not accidental that following the Israeli leadership's outlining of plans to disrupt Lebanon, the U.S. according to CIA director William Colby in testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees in July, 1976- "supplied arms in the fifties to Christians in Lebanon in the framework of the use of religious and ethnic minorities in the fight against communism". However, starting in the summer of 1956, and going well into the sixties, Israel was dependent on France for arms supplies and could not have acted openly against France's wishes. The end of France's colonial war against Algeria and De Gaulle's growing impatience with Israel's arrogance led to the termination of the French-Israeli special relationship in 1967, and to its substitution by the exclusive U.S.-Israel one.

7. Israel's systematic genocide in Lebanon for over a decade, which has recently reached a degree of cynical brutality unequaled in contemporary history outside of U.S. action in Indochina, bears no justification in any case. In the light of the documentation we have presented, Israel's pretense of acting in self defense and in defense of Lebanon's Christians against PLO terror becomes even more ridiculous as well as outrageous. This pretense is all too often supported by Western media and governments. Undoubtedly, lsrael's permanent representative to the UN, Yehuda Blum, counts cynically on the ignorance of the general public when he says: "Lebanon's fundamental problems date back many years. The situation in the South should be considered only a byproduct and a symptom of those problems" (The Nation,15 September 1979). This is how, he describes Israel's direct massacre of civilian populations and the other daily attacks, devastation and torture, carried out with U.S.-made arms and under Israeli protection by Israel's isolationist Maronite puppets commanded by Major Sa'd Haddad.

8. Sharett hinted that the report was clandestinely intercepted by the Israelis. He also aired the possibility that Hutcheson intended to refer to elements from the Irgun, acting against his government and then rejected this hypothesis. In this connection it is interesting to recall that in a debate in the Knesset (Divrei Haknesset Hashnya, p. 654) on January 25, 1955, a Herut spokesman, Arie Altmann, attacked the government for its "weaknesses" and added: "If the government will not comply with its duties in the security field, don't be surprised if one day you will be confronted with the surprising phenomena of private initiatives, and not one initiative, but a very complex and ramified one..... ". In his Mistraim Ve'Haa Fedayeen (see note 20) Ehud Ya'ari mentions the existence at that time of a terrorist group operating in border areas under the name of "Tadmor Group" of which, he says, "no details are yet available." These disclosures suggest that a close cooperation existed at that time, on an operative-clandestine level, between the pre-state terrorist Zionist organizations the Irgun and the Stern gang, which were officially dissolved in 1948 but in fact continued to act militarily and regular army or "security" units such as the paratroopers corps and Sharon's Unit 101. The latter, Ya'ari recalls, "operated its own unpublicized 'infiltrations' into the Gaza Strip........accomplishing actions such as the attack on the refugee camp at Al Burj, near Gaza, on August 31, 1953." Further research on this subject might reveal that the extent of the acts of aggressive provocations by Israeli forces across the armistice lines were much vaster than has ever been known publicly. However, the most important aspect of these relations lies in their political significance, which offers a completely new key to the interpretation of the history of the Zionist state. In fact, they constitute a decisive refutation of the accepted thesis according to which a distinct division, marked by ideological, political and pragmatic antagonisms, existed at least up to 1965 between labor Zionism and the so-called "irrational Zionism" of Revisionist origin.

9. Israel launched a particularly virulent campaign about Ma'aleh Ha'akrabim, and renewed the campaign at the time of, and as a justification of, the 1956 attack on Egypt.

10. The euphemistic use of the term "retaliation" in the context of actions to be realized according to a pre-fixed plan corresponds to Dayan's description of' the "reprisal" policy. Reminiscent of notorious euphemisms from the Vietnam war ("pacification", "neutralization", "Vietnamization"), the term has been used until recently to describe lsrael's massacres in Lebanon.

11. Today Sharon is minister of agriculture in Begin's government, and responsible for the colonization of the West Bank and Gaza. He was commander of the notorious "Unit 101," which engaged in actions against civilian populations across the armistice lines. In a recent radio debate (see note 3 above), Sharon was asked about this episode. "As to Meir Hartsion," Sharon said, "I want to say: it is unfortunate that there are no more men like him, with his loyalty, his love for the country, and his contribution to raise the combat level of the Israeli army. It is shameful that a man who fought, and fought for you too, you call him a murderer". Davar, 14 September 1979)

12. It must be noted that the term "terrorism" was not in vogue at that time. Sharett, in fact, uses the word "revenge" and "blind revenge." It is clear that he was groping for a word that would correspond exactly to today's use of"terrorism."

13. Both texts are reproduced from the Acts of the Olshan-Dori lnquiry Commission of the "Affair," annexed to the Diary, pages 659, 664, respectively.

14. In a letter to Ben Gurion dated March 6, 1961 Sharett confirmed: "Why did I refuse then to approve the firing of Peres? Because his removal at that period would have been interpreted as an admission that the leadership of lsrael's security establishment was responsible for the savage actions in Cairo" (p. 789). In general, very little is known outside Israel about the "Affair" and its complicated ramifications and implications which have profoundly corroded and influenced Israel's political life for years. It is therefore understandable that even an excellent reporter such as David Hirst could be misled to think that Lavon shared Sharett's moderate line ( The Gun and the Olive Branch, London: Futura Publications, 1976). In fact Lavon was an ardent "activist" who missed no occasion to preach the use of violence and this was why Ben Gurion, when leaving for Sdeh Boker, left him in charge of "his" defense ministry. Later, however, Ben Gurion began to suspect that through his activist zeal, Lavon also sought to supplant him at the head of the security establishment. Thus, a complicated rivalry involving these two members of Mapai's leadership as well, as for their own reasons and ambitions, Ben Gurion's younger heirs, especially Peres and Dayan, became interwoven in the intrigues to which the "Affair" had given rise.

15. Ahdut Ha'avoda, whose best known leaders were Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, united with Mapai to form the Labor Party in the sixties.

16. The history of the attempts to organize coups d'etat in Israel is also little known outside its borders. In 1957 one such attempt was plotted by a group of officers who wished to prevent the retreat from Gaza and Sinai, which Ben Gurion had reluctantly accepted under heavy international pressure. In late May 1967, it was under the threat of a military coup that Premier Levi Fishkol co-opted opposition Knesset member Moshe Dayan into his government as minister of defense, thereby definitely acquiescing in the army's decision to go to war.

17. This comment was made by Lewis Jones, an embassy aide in Cairo, who Sharett says "is considered a personal friend of Nahum Goldman and Teddy Kollek ,and is well known to us for his fair attitude to Israel." Jones also expressed the opinion that Israeli protests against the Cairo sentences should not be taken too seriously: "Even if there will be a hanging [death sentence] it would not be a disaster [for the Israelis] ... since it will probably help [the Israelis] to collect more money in the US." 18 February 1955, p. 712)

18. (7 October 1955, p. 1197). See also Kenneth Love, Suez (McGraw-Hill, 1969). Sharett here told the story of how a previous news agency dispatch on the interview with Love, attributed to Nasser the phrase "we should destroy Israel." Sharett couldn't believe this to be true, and he professed to have been relieved when the correction of what was reported as a "telex transmission error" arrived, confirming his own view of Nasser's conciliatory policies.

19. A detailed comparison of the above realities with, among others, the account and analysis of the events of that period as provided by Naday Safran in his Israel-The Embattled Ally (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1978) would throw a significant light on the falsifications that continue to permeate a certain Zionist- inspired historiography to this day. According to Saf'ran, Nasser's attitude shifted in 1955 "from one of apparent moderation to one that seemed bent on ... leading the Arab States in an assault on lsrael" and the "apparent willingness of the Arab States to accept Jewish State" changed in the mid-fifties to a "commitment to eliminate that State," (See also note 20.)

20. See Abu Iyad, Palestinians Sans Patrie (Paris: n.p., 1979) and Ehud Ya'ari, Mitsraim Ve'Ha Fedayeen (Givat Haviva, 1975). The first, by one of the leading figures of Fatah, provides a direct account, from personal experience, of the Egyptian repression of the attempts by the Palestinian refugees in Gaza to organize resistance cells. The second consists of a collection of documents captured by the Israeli intelligence during the 1956 and 1967 wars in Gaza, Sinai and the West Bank, which demonstrate the efforts by the Egyptian and Jordanian governments to suppress any infiltration to Israel, control the borders, and repress the demands by the population for adequate defense measures to protect them against Israeli incursions, including the demand for a distribution of arms. The following constitute the main points in the evidence contained in Ya'ari's documents:

-At the end of 1953, the Egyptian administration of Gaza reported to the War Ministry in Cairo on arrests of infiltrators and actions to block their access routes to the border. At that same time police and army troops were employed in refugee camps attacked by Israel to disperse demonstrators asking for arms and protesting plans to settle Palestinian refugees in an area near Al Arish. A special civil guard force was created at the end of 1953 to control the Palestinian refugee camps. In 1954 this force was reinforced. In that year, the Egyptian representative in the Mixed Armistice Commission replied to a complaint by Israeli representative Arie Shalev in regard to infiltrations: "We are not sending them, and as far as we are concerned, you can kill them." "There is not one single Egyptian document [among those captured and examined] that speaks positively of infiltrations or sabotage actions. On the contrary, they all reflect an official policy of suppression and energetic directives to this effect," according to Ya'ari's conclusion. This has been confirmed also from other sources:

General E. L. M. Burns, who was the head of the UN Observers Corps in the Middle East, reported in his book Between Arab and Israeli (London: n.p., 1962) that Nasser told him in November 1954 that he wanted calm to reign in the Gaza Strip.

Keith Wheelock, in his Nasser's New Egypt (London: n.p., 1960) wrote that it was "clear that the Egyptian government wishes to avoid fighting along the border, if only because the great plan for internal development left very limited resources for a reinforcement of the Egyptian army."

Among the documents presented by Ya'ari there is also a memorandum of a meeting held at the office of the Egyptian governor of the Gaza Strip, Yussef Al Agrudi, on January 29, 1955, one month before the Israeli attack on Gaza, in which the following measures aimed at controlling the border were decided among the rest :

Prohibition of traffic from sunset to dawn in the area east of the Gaza-Rafah road, including the refugee camp of Jebelyiah.

An order to open fire on any infiltrator. All the mukhtars (village chief) were required to report persons missing from their villages or tribes. Warnings were to be issued through the media against infiltration. A detention camp was to be set up for persons suspected of infiltration against whom no sufficient evidence existed to bring them to trial.

Distribution of food rations to refugees who did not appear personally to receive the rations would be stopped.

According to Ya'ari, finally:

The Israeli army attack on Gaza on February 28, 1 955 was ... a decisive turning point in the relations between Israel and Egypt. Nasser as well as many Western diplomats and analysts have spoken of it as a turning point in Cairo's policies. Nasser himself explained on innumerable occasions that the attack was the moment of truth in which he understood there was no chance for the [conciliatory] line adopted by Egypt until then. He finally perceived the dimensions of the Israeli problem. and therefore appealed for Soviet armaments . . . .

The Gaza action occurred at a moment of relative tranquility following the enforcement of repressive measures decided on by the Egyptian administration in the Strip. Hence, the explanation for Ben Gurion's decision to order the attack ... is to be sought elsewhere.

The Israeli attack on Gaza unleashed huge demonstrations in the Strip and clashes between the local population and the Egyptian army. Due to further Israeli provocations the protests continued, and in May the Egyptian government was forced to consent to the activities of fedayeen units for sabotage actions in Israel. These units were, however, placed under the strict control of the Egyptian army so that their activity could again be limited several months later. "In any case," is Ya'ari's conclusion, "there is no doubt that the appearance of Fedayeen under direct Egyptian guidance was a phenomenon which emerged following-the Israeli attack on Gaza."

It is worth mentioning here that the documents presented by Ya'ari also include detailed information on two terrorist actions undertaken by Israeli intelligence in July 1956. In both cases senior Egyptian officers were killed by explosive packages, disguised as books. In the first case, the victim was Lt. General Mustafa Hafez, the commander of Egyptian intelligence in the Gaza Strip. Hafez emerges from the documents as a man who opposed infiltrations into Israel as well as the inclusion of Palestinians in the Civil Guard. In fact in a forged version of the circumstances of his assassination, Israel tried to attribute the murder to a settling of accounts on behalf of outraged refugees, having obviously reason to believe that this version would be accepted as credible. The other victim was the Egyptian military attache in Amman, according to Ya'ari, Hafez's collaborator in the recruitment of Fedayeen and their infiltration into Israel from Jordanian territory. Ya'ari states that on the basis of the documents in his possession, the contradiction in the description of Hafez's role remains unsolved. The episodes, however, conform to Sharett's conviction in regard to the unrestrained use of terrorism by Israel's security establishment.

On the other hand, Sharett's Diary confirms beyond any doubt that lsrael's security establishment strongly opposed all border security arrangements proposed by Egypt, Jordan or the UN.

A UN-Egyptian proposal that mixed Egyptian-Israeli-UN patrols operate along the borders to prevent infiltration and mining came to Dayan's knowledge, Sharett noted. The chief of staff exploded with rage. "But I don't want the UN to prevent mining". Obviously, he considered the deterrent effect of the mixed patrols proposal on Israeli incursions into the Strip (see note 8) as more damaging to Israel's security than the occasional infiltrations from the Strip into Israel. In fact, Ben Gurion rejected the proposal] on the grounds that it "will tie our hands"

21. See Noam Chomsky in The Nation, 22-29 July,1978, pp. 83-88 for a review of five books on US.-Israeli relations, and his article "Civilized Terrorism" in Seven Days, July 1976, pp 22-23.

DAMASCUS, SYRIA (4:50 A.M)- Israeli Regime forces yet again opened fire upon peaceful demonstrators in Gaza yesterday, killing two and injuring more than 420.

The two killed, were 13 yr old Yasser Abu Naja and Mohammed Al-Hamayda (24 yrs old). Mohammed was two weeks engaged.

The thirteen year old child, Yasser Abu Naja, was executed by an Israeli Sniper who targeted him with an explosive bullet. The head wound inflicted upon the child, killed him instantly.

No, I did enter a large number of caveats. I did say the Palestine struggle is very tough now, because it’s salience has been drastically dramatically reduced because events in Yemen, Saudi, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, so the Palestinian struggle has lost its political and moral salience. Then, most of the significant states in the Arab world are either out of the picture because they have been decomposed, or they support Israel — the Saudis, the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan — they all support Israel. And the Palestinian Authority wants to see Gaza destroyed. So those factors were now working against nonviolent civil resistance.

But I said, if two conditions are met, it has a possibility. One is they have to adopt in a very strict way nonviolent civil resistance. I also said Hamas has to move to the side.

And to my shock they did it. They have no Hamas flags at the demonstrations. The organization is really democratic, they just have, they’re the most moderate force, by the way, in what’s called the High Commission, because they’re trying to strike very strictly to nonviolence.

So that condition was achieved. It’s not a Hamas phenomenon. It’s really a mess, nonsectarian, phenomenon. But I said there was one other factor and I was very optimistic. I said the solidarity movement is now dormant, however if you engage in mass nonviolent resistance I think the solidarity movement will come back to life. You might recall the joint Operation Protective Edge. There were tens of thousands of people demonstrating in London. It was a huge international outcry of outrage and indignation. And I was really bewildered that they did engage in the mass nonviolent civil resistance and the solidarity movement was missing in action.

JS: So, this week, Israel is not only celebrating the founding of the state of Israel, but also it’s the date of the creation of the Israeli Defense Forces, the combined defense forces, and I want to read a quote to you that I know you’re familiar with from a lecturer at the IDF National Defense College, Arnon Soffer. He said this in 2004: “When 2.5 million people lived in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today. With the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam, the pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war, so if we want to remain alive we will have to kill and kill and kill, all day, every day.”

NF: Now let’s just stop for a moment, go to my website. It’s going to be a little ways down, it’s going to be Netanyahu’s speech before the Jewish nation. Read what he says:

JS: “It’s easy to declare the people of Gaza must be exterminated, but it’s not an easy task to accomplish. Most of you will know what it’s like when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1,000. To have executed this ghastly charge and to have remained decent, it has earned us a glorious page in the annals of history. We have the moral right, we have the duty to our people to kill this people who would kill us. We have carried out this most difficult task out of love of our people and we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul or in our character.”

NF: Yeah. We’re killing this people who want to kill us. It’s a terrible task. We all shoot and cry, but that’s what we have to do.

JS: So, whose words did I just read there?

NF: If you substitute “Gaza” for “Jews,” that was Heinrich Himmler. It’s a very famous speech of his, where the Nazis, like some others who came later, they derived this kind of sick pleasure in pitying themselves.

JS: I understand but the notion that is put forth consistently by Israeli political figures, or I just mentioned this geographer who’s an instructor at the IF university that Israel has a right to kill these people because it’s in their defense, and that is sort of how it’s framed. And if you say anything about Gaza on social media you get hounded immediately by people saying, “Are you saying Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself?”

NF: That’s exactly what the U.N. report said. You have the right to defend the border from attack. You have no right to cage in a people in an unlivable space who are slowly being poisoned. You regain, you reclaim your right when you do three things:

One, you end the illegal blockade of Gaza. Two, you end the illegal occupation of alien territory. And three, you give the people in Gaza and the West Bank the right to self-determination and statehood. The denial of all of those three rights, not one fundamental right, not two fundamental rights, three fundamental rights, the denial of those rights means you lose any right to quote-unquote “defend yourself.” Until and unless you end those three consecutive, compounded, illegal situations.

There’s a fundamental principle of international law. I won’t give you the Latin, I’ll give you the English. You can’t get a right from a wrong. If you are inflicting on Gaza an illegal blockade, an illegal occupation, and you’re illegally denying them the right to self-determination, you don’t have a right to self-defense. You lost that right because you do not have the right if you are inflicting a wrong. If a rapist is raping a woman, and then a woman starts pummeling a rapist, the rapist doesn’t have the right to hit back in self-defense. You lost that right to self-defense the moment you start raping the victim. And it’s the same elementary principle there. You have only one right. It’s a right to pack up and leave and to stop tormenting and torturing those people. That’s your only right. Once you pack up and you leave and all the legalities are in place: No blockade, no occupation, the people are able to exercise the right to self-determination and statehood once the situation has become legal and legitimate, Israel has the right to self-defense.

I have said that from the moment I began being involved in this conflict more than 35 years ago. When all of these so-called radicals, when all of the radical posing and posturing, with all of their inane slogans about BDS and one-state, I have stayed very steadfast and firm and paid a very big price.

Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself but not until and unless it stops tormenting and torturing the people of Palestine, and, in particular, the people of Gaza. Until and unless, they have no right except to pack up and leave.