Israel's indigenous invaders

Israel justifies the immanent relocation of thousands of Palestinian Bedouin by characterizing them as invaders.

Bedouins 'Invader' Camp

On June 24th the "Prawer Plan for the Arrangement of Bedouin-Palestinian Settlement in the Negev" passed its first reading in the Israeli parliament. If implemented, the Plan will constitute "the largest single act of forced displacement of Arab citizens of Israel since the 1950s", expelling an estimated forty thousand Palestinian Bedouin from their current dwellings.

The Plan’s ultimate objective is to Judaize the Israeli Negev. In order to do this, however, seventy thousand (out of 200,000) Bedouin who currently live in villages classified as ‘unrecognised’ by the Israeli government must be moved.The government already forbids them from connecting to the electricity grid or the water and sewage systems.

Construction regulations are also harshly enforced, and in 2011 alone about a thousand Bedouin homes and animal pens - usually referred to by the government as mere "structures" - were demolished. There are no paved roads, and signposts from main roads to the villages are removed by government authorities. The villages are not shown on maps, since as a matter of official geography, the places inhabited by these second-class citizens of Israel do not exist.

This transformation of the indigenous into an invader or a "Palestinian settler"... is key to understanding not only the Prawer Plan, but also the very logic of the State of Israel

The government has, for years, argued that because these people live in small villages scattered across a relatively large area, it cannot provide them with basic services and therefore its objective has been to concentrate them in a few townships.

Consequently, in 2009 Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed his planning policy chief, Ehud Prawer, to liberate the "Jewish land". Prawer’s main task was to relocate these seventy thousand Bedouin who have refused to sign over their property rights to the State and have continued living in their "unrecognised villages".

The logic informing the plan is actually best expressed inThere is a Solution, a 2010 report published by a settler NGO called Regavim (The National Land Protection Trust), which has been working in conjunction with several government agencies. The report maintains that the Negev’s Bedouin inhabitants "rob" the Jewish people "of the Land of Israel…ever so quietly, without the roar of battle and clamour of war."

"On this battlefield", the organisation continues, cement mixers have replaced tanks, ploughs replace cannons and innocent-looking civilians replace uniformed soldiers.... Acre after acre, house after house, buying, squatting, illegally cultivating the soil that is not theirs, sometimes with guile, other times with violence, with huge sums of money and firmly backed by anti-Zionist organisations in Israel and abroad - Israel is losing its hold on the Jewish people’s lands.

Regavim further maintainsthat Israel has until now "offered the Bedouins ‘carrots’ - but never a ‘stick’", claiming that through their "criminal activity" these Beduin are colonizing the land and thus threatening to "put an end to the Jewish future of the Southern region".

Citing Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s famous declaration that "The Negev is the test of the nation in Israel", Regavim offers a four stage solution to counter this threat, which includes curbing "illegal Bedouin construction", preparing the population for removal, evacuatingall the "illegal populations", and then transferring them to legal settlements.

Finally, the government must prepare for "the day after" and not allow "matters to return to their original state"."Original state" refers to the existing situation, which in Regavim’s view is characterised by the invasion of Jewish space by Palestinian "illegal populations". According to this narrative, space is, by definition, Jewish and therefore non-Jewish presence is a form of contamination - and the stake of Ben-Gurion’s test.

This is precisely the reasoning behind Prawer’s stick and the way the Palestinian Bedouin have been depicted and treated in the public sphere for years. Responding to a petition submitted to the High Court of Justice against the evacuation of Bedouin villages near the southern town of Arad, the town’sdeputy mayor told journaliststhat the claims of the "insolent invaders" are "disingenuous".

Bedouins accuse Israel of planning new town

Numerous articles have used the term invader when describing Bedouin activity in southern Israel, while a popularnews website notesthat the Bedouin have begun invading the country’s central region. Even in aHa’aretz opinion piece, which supported the High Court of Justice’s rulingagainst the government practice of spraying poison on "illegal Bedouin agricultural fields", the author refers to the Bedouin population using the term invader.

This transformation of the indigenous into an invader or a "Palestinian settler" - to borrow thephrase recently used by Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon- is key to understanding not only the Prawer Plan, but also the very logic of the State of Israel. In a context in which Palestinianshave been systematically alienated and elided from history and geography, the constitution of the Palestinian native as an illegal subject or foreign invader serves as the condition of possibility for "Judiazing" the land. More

 

Treatment of Palestinians is apartheid by any other name

Were it not for the razor wire, giant concrete blocks, steel gates, watchtower and standard-issue surly teenage soldier, it would be impossible to tell at what point the barren uplands of Israel’s eastern Negev give way to the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank.

Jonathan Cook - Award Winning Journalist

The military checkpoint of Shani vaguely marks the formal demarcation between Israel and occupied Palestinian territory, but in practical terms the distinction is meaningless. On either side of the Green Line, Israel is in charge.

In recent weeks it has been intensifying a campaign to evict Palestinian farming communities summarily from their ancestral lands to replace them with Jewish newcomers.

Israeli human rights lawyers, tired of the international community’s formulaic criticisms, say it is time to be more forthright. They call these “ethnic cleansing” zones – intended to drive off Palestinians irrespective of the provisions of international law and whether or not the Palestinians in question hold Israeli citizenship.

In the occupied South Hebron Hills, a dozen traditional communities – long ago denied by Israel the right to enjoy modern amenities such as electricity and running water – are struggling to remain in the cave-homes that sheltered them for centuries.

Israel has reclassified much of their land as a military firing range and demands that they leave for their own safety. An appeal to the Israeli courts, the latest instalment in a 14-year saga to avoid eviction, is due in the next few days.

Israel’s concern for the villagers’ welfare might sound more convincing were it not encouraging Jews to live close by in illegal settlements.

Palestinians in other parts of the occupied territories coveted by Israel – such as villages next to Jerusalem and those in the fertile Jordan Valley, the territorial backbone of any future Palestinian state – are being squeezed too. Firing ranges, closed military zones and national parks are the pretexts for Israel to appropriate the farmland these rural communities need to survive.

As a result, Palestinian life is withering in the nearly two-thirds of the West Bank Israel was temporarily entrusted with – the so-called Area C – under the Oslo Accords. Endlessly harassed Palestinians have sought sanctuary in West Bank cities under Palestinian Authority control. Today the remnants in Area C, a population of about 100,000, are outnumbered three to one by Jewish settlers.

A discomfited European Union, normally mealy-mouthed on Israel’s occupation, has started to describe this as “forced transfer”. The term may sound ominous and reproving, but human rights groups say that, from a legal perspective, the terminology obscures rather than illuminates what is taking place.

“Forced transfer”, observes Suhad Bishara, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre for Israel’s minority of 1.5 million Palestinian citizens, usually describes uncoordinated and unofficial incidents of population displacement, often as an outcome of war.

Bishara and others argue that Israel is carrying out a systematic and intentional policy to drive Palestinians off their land to replace them with Jewish communities. This, they say, should be identified as “ethnic cleansing”, a term first given legal and moral weight in the Balkans conflict in the early 1990s.

As evidence, the lawyers point to recent developments inside Israel. The treatment of tens of thousands of Bedouin in the Negev, all of them Israeli citizens, is virtually identical to that of Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills.

The Bedouin too have faced a prolonged campaign to push them off their ancestral lands and into a series of “townships”, forcibly urbanising them in the country’s most deprived communities. In the disconcerting language of Israeli bureaucracy, the Bedouin need to be “concentrated”.

Israel has increased the pressure – as in the West Bank – by denying these Bedouin all public services, and demolishing any concrete homes they build. As with Palestinians under occupation, the Bedouin have found their communities reclassified as firing ranges, military zones or national forests.

The village of al-Araqib, near Beersheva, for example, has been demolished more than 50 times in recent years as Israel plants on its land – with a suitably sinister irony – the Ambassadors’ Forest, commemorating the help provided to Israel by the international community’s diplomatic corps.

 

How Israeli apartheid is coming unstuck

One incident of racism, though small in relation to the decades of massive, institutionalised discrimination exercised by Israel against its Palestinian Arab citizens, has triggered an uncharacteristic bout of Israeli soul-searching.

Source: Y-net

Superland, a large amusement park near Tel Aviv, refused to accept a booking from an Arab school on its preferred date in late May. When a staff member called back impersonating a Jew, Superland approved the booking immediately.

As the story went viral on social media, the park’s managers hurriedly offered an excuse: they provided separate days for Jewish and Arab children to keep them apart and prevent friction.

Government ministers led an outpouring of revulsion. Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, called the incident a “symptom of a sick democracy”. Defence minister Moshe Yaalon was “ashamed”. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded that the “racist” policy be halted immediately.

Such sensitivity appears to be a reaction to an explosion of popular racism over the past few months against the one in five Israelis who belong to the country’s Palesinian Arab minority. Some Israeli Jews have started to find the endless parade of bigotry disturbing.

Israeli TV recently revealed, for example, that a group of children with cancer who had been offered a free day at a swimming pool were refused entry once managers discovered that they were Bedouin.

According to another TV investigation, Israel’s banks have a secret policy of rejecting Arab customers who try to transfer their accounts to a branch in a Jewish community, even though this violates banking regulations.

The settlers, whose violence was once restricted to setting fire to the crops of Palestinians or rampaging through their villages in the West Bank, are now as likely to attack Arab communities inside Israel. Torched mosques, offensive graffiti on churches and cars set ablaze in so-called “price-tag” attacks have become commonplace.

Similarly, reports of vicious attacks on Arab citizens are rapidly becoming a news staple. Recent incidents have included the near-fatal beating of a street cleaner, and a bus driver who held his gun to an Arab passenger’s head, threatening to pull the trigger unless the man showed his ID.

Also going viral were troubling mobile-phone photos of a young Arab woman surrounded by a mob of respectable-looking commuters and shoppers while she waited for a train. As they hit her and pulled off her hijab, station guards looked on impassively.

However welcome official denunciations of these events are, the government’s professed outrage does not wash.

While Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating Superland for its racism, they were busy backing a grossly discriminatory piece of legislation the Haaretz newspaper called “one of the most dangerous” measures ever to come before the parliament.

The bill will give Israelis who have served in the army a whole raft of extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and the provision of public and private services. The catch is that almost all of the country’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens are excluded from military service. In practice, the benefits will be reserved for Jews only.

Superland’s offence pales to insignificance when compared to that, or to the decades of state-planned and officially sanctoned discrimination against the country’s Palestinian minority.

An editorial in Haaretz this month observed that Israel was really “two separate states, one Arab and one Jewish. … This is the gap between the Jewish state of Israel, which is a developed Western nation, and the Arab state of Israel, which is no more than a Third World country.”

Segregation is enforced in all the main spheres of life: land allocation and housing, citizenship rights, education, and employment.

None of this is accidental. It was intended this way to guarantee Israel’s future as a Jewish state. Legal groups have identified 57 laws that overtly discriminate between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, with a dozen more heading towards the statute books.

Less visible but just as damaging is the covert discrimination Palestinian citizens face every day when dealing with state institutions, whose administrative practices find their rationale in the entrenchment of Jewish privilege.

This week a report indentified precisely this kind of institutional racism when it found that students from the country’s Palestinian minority were confronted by a series of 14 obstacles not faced by their Jewish compatriots that contributed to denying them places in higher education.

The wave of popular prejudice and racist violence is no accident either. Paradoxically, it has been unleashed by the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of rightwing politicians like Netanyahu, whose constant fearmongering casts Palestinian citizens as disloyal, a fifth column and a demographic threat to the state’s Jewishness.

So why if the state is so committed to subjugating and excluding Palestinian citizens, and Netanyahu and his ministers so determined to increase the weight of discriminatory legislation, are they decrying the racism of Superland?

To make sense of this, one has to understand how desperately Israel has sought to distinguish itself from apartheid South Africa.

Israel cultivates, as South Africa once did, what scholars term “grand apartheid”. This is segregation, largely covert and often often justified by security or cultural differences, to ensure that control of resources remains exclusively in the hands of the privileged community.

At the same time, Israel long shied away from what some call South Africa’s model of “petty apartheid” – the overt, symbolic, but far less significant segregation of park benches, buses and toilets. More

 

Palestinian hospitalized after IDF handcuffs, abandons him at checkpoint

A Palestinian resident of East Jerusalem found himself dehydrated in a Hebron hospital after border policemen and soldiers handcuffed, blindfolded and abadoned him in a car on a hot day in May.

A checkpoint

About two weeks ago, A. was on his way from Hebron to Jerusalem. A is a resident of Abu Dis, and married to a resident of East Jerusalem; as such, he enjoys Israeli residency. But as he was about to find out, that didn’t help him all that much.

On his way home, A. passed through a checkpoint charmingly named “the humanitarian checkpoint,” where he ran into a surprise roadblock, manned by a mixed force of soldiers and border policemen. The soldiers asked A. to turn off his engine, leave the car, and hand them his papers. A. noted they spoke “poor Arabic.”

The soldiers first searched A. before searching his vehicle – they found nothing suspicious. But then the all-too-common occurrence turned surreal. A. says that two border policemen told him that he must speak Hebrew. A., who does not, denied it. The two began laughing, and then someone (A. was with his back to him, so he can’t say if it was a soldier or a policeman) held him from behind, handcuffed him, blindfolded him, put him in the vehicle and left him there.

The time of the year is May, and the days are hot. A., left blindfolded and handcuffed in the car, asked the person to speak with him in Arabic, saying he was in pain. There was no response, but A. remembers hearing them laughing. That’s the last thing he remembers from the incident.

A. woke up in a hospital in Hebron, after an IDF ambulance transfered him to a Red Crescent ambulance. A. reached the hospital in a state of total disorientation, likely as a result of dehydration and sunstroke. He was given a fluid infusion in the IDF ambulance.

A. is suspected of nothing. He was not detained. His vehicle was not confiscated but rather left near the checkpoint. A family member drove to the checkpoint and found the vehicle there. There, the family member asked the soldiers about the whereabouts of the vehicle’s owner. “The owner stopped the vehicle because he felt unwell,” they responded. A man handcuffs himself, blindfolds himself (what is that routine good for, except intimidating the detainee?) and climbs into a hot vehicle. Sounds reasonable.

A needless handcuffing is a kind of torture. A needless detainment is abuse of power. Think about how much noise would be made if an Israeli citizen were detained by soldiers or police officers, handcuffed without any reason or explanation, and placed in a hot vehicle where he loses consciousness. This happens to people who are Israeli residents, by armed Israeli men, without so much of a squeak. We’ve gotten used to that. More

 

Pretending away the Nakba only perpetuates the conflict

When the Czechs prefer to keep silent and repress their history, it’s a problem, but it is not an imminent danger to the country. When Israelis prefer to pretend there was no ethnic cleaning here, it’s a wholly different question: the conflict won’t end unless Israel admits to the injustice it caused.

A few weeks back I watched The Gatekeepers, a movie which interviews six of the chiefs of Shin Bet, from Avraham Shalom to Yuval Diskin. The movie is shocking and well worth your time. The most surprising character was Diskin, who obviously underwent a great change upon leaving the service: at the end of the movie he adamantly agrees with Yishayahu Leibowitch’s famous dictum that the occupation will turn Israel into a ”Shin Bet state.” And over the weekend we learned Diskin went through another metamorphosis: he recommended to the Turkel Committee that the Shin Bet start video-taping its interrogations, which the service has long resisted.

Diskin is merely the latest in a series of senior security officials who, as soon as they leave office, see the light and understand just how ruinous the office they headed was, and how they represented positions that were damaging to the country. The last great show in this genre was the bunch of senior commanders of the IDF’s Northern Command, who upon retirement were astonished to find out that the Security Zone in Lebanon was a huge mistake – often, after defending it in uniform as vital to security just a few weeks prior.

In that regard, the most interesting speaker is certainly Avraham Shalom, the oldest interviewee. Shalom thinks strategic errors were made, particularly by the politicians, but he himself regrets nothing. When asked about moral problems, he laughs. “Morality?” He asks, “Morality? Look for it first among the terrorists.” One assumes former chiefs, assuming they would even bother to be interviewed, would supply similar remarks. It’s very hard to see Issar Har’el, for instance, the closest thing we’ve got to J. Edgar Hoover, providing the camera with anything aside from a mocking, world-weary grin, saying in effect “you’ll never understand, so don’t even try.”

Superficially, Shalom, born in 1928, and Diskin, born in 1956, are separated by just one generation. Actually, they come from different worlds. Diskin grew up in Givatayim, possibly Tel Aviv’s most secure suburb. Shalom was born in Vienna. It was not a safe place for Jews even then, and in 1938 came the Anschluss, the annexation by Nazi Germany, which the Viennese used as an excuse for an orgy of violence against resident Jews. Shalom was lucky: his family understood early on where things were going, and fled to Palestine in 1939. They arrived penniless – this was Adolf Eichmann’s specialty, how he made his name – but they survived.

Not everyone was that lucky. Uri Ben-Ari, who would one day create the IDF’s doctrines of tank warfare, saw as an eight-year-old child in Berlin (he was still called Heinz Benner) how a gang of SA gunmen severely beat his father, after which they urinated on him. On Kristallnacht, the father and son saw the synagogue where he had recently celebrated his bar mizvah being set on fire. Several days later, Benner was kicked out of his school in a humiliating public spectacle: “Heinz Benner! You are a member of the Jewish race which committed heinous crimes against mankind and against the German people! The school vomits you from its ranks and you are hereby expelled! Go through our gate and be gone from our sight forever. Forward march! Heil Hitler!” Ben-Ari emigrated to Palestine, alone, in March 1939. His father was left behind.

In that regard, Ben-Ari was more typical than Shalom. The Palmach generation is often described as composed of native-born, but a significant number of them were European refugees, not natives. For a generation, the symbol of the Palmach sabra was Dan Ben-Amotz. He was actually born in the Ukraine under the name Moise Tehilimzuger. Like Ben-Ari, he too came to Palestine alone; his family, too, was murdered. The number of Jews then residing in Palestine who lost their family in Europe was staggering. To the rest of their trouble – the relative poverty and primitiveness of Palestine, at least when compared to central Europe; the conflict with the Arabs; the significant suffering inflicted on teenaged refugees by teenage sabras and often even by the grown-ups, who couldn’t comprehend what was happening “over there” – must be added survivor’s guilt. The refugees who made it to Palestine prior to 1941 believed they were pioneers, and that their family and friends would join them after a while; many of them saved money diligently to aid in this immigration. At the end of 1945, most of them would realize they were either the last survivors of their family or very nearly so. The fact that they not merely survived, but lived in relative comfort, must also have been a burden.

Ben-Ari and Shalom joined the Palmach in 1946, the year the organization began preparing itself for the coming independence war, which would come within 18 months. This was the same period in which Eastern Europe convulsed in a series of terrifying national struggles which followed the border changes the Soviet Union forced on the region following its victory over Nazi Germany. These struggles – a more apt title would be “ethnic cleansing” – were bloody, and included the murder of possibly millions of people: Ukrainians, Poles, and many Germans. The Czechs murdered, in a savage outburst of hatred only occupied people who felt their chains slip away can understand, some 20,000 Germans in the days immediately following liberation. Most of the victims were women, children and the elderly. The Czech don’t talk much about it nowadays, nor are they fond of speaking of the expulsion of some 1.5 million Germans, or the pillaging of their property. During a tour in Prague two months ago, the tour guide described what happened there as ‘genocide.’ Most of his people prefer to look the other way. The Poles made it clear to Jews who thought they could return home, with the pogrom in Kielce and by hundreds and thousands of terror killings on the roads and on trains, that they, too, are an ethnic minority whose historical role is over. Without understanding these events, it’s impossible to understand some of Alterman’s most haunting, poisoned lines in “The Child Avram”: More

 

Newly declassified documents give insights into last days of British occupation of Palestine

The Foreign Office on Friday is releasing to The National Archives a stack of until now secret files from the British occupation authorities that ruled Palestine until 1948.

The Electronic Intifada was invited to a press preview of the files on Wednesday and had a chance to read many of the newly-released documents, mostly from the 1940s.

Although there were too many documents to even skim in one day, the files seem to give a fascinating insight into the final days of the British “Mandate” over Palestine.

One file (FCO 141/14284), a collection of weekly intelligence reports from the High Commissioner for Palestine to the Colonial Secretary in London, ends chillingly. The last document in the file is dated 10 April 1948 and contains an initial report on the Zionist massacre in Deir Yassin which had happened only the day before.

The Jews … seized part of the village of Deir Yassin. The latter operation is believed to have been a joint N.M.O. [National Military Organization, aka Irgun]- Stern Group enterprise undertaken with knowledge of the Haganah [Zionist militia]. Arab casualties are believed to have been heavy.

The report, marked “Top Secret,” does not elaborate on the more than 100 Palestinian villagers, including women and children, who were murdered that day.

Changing sides

While the files I’ve looked at so far appear to contain nothing totally new, they do give some interesting details.

Another file (FCO 141/14283) is a collection of telegrams and reports from 1948, but coming from British police, it is more military-focused than the politically-oriented reports of the High Commissioner. It contains an interesting episode.

A report dated 27 April 1948 by one R.C. Catling, Assistant Inspector General with the Criminal Investigation Department (plain-clothes detectives) shows that some British officers decided to take the Palestinian side.

The report details an attack by Palestinian fighters on a British Armored Personnel Carrier which was carrying mail from Jerusalem to Qalandia. It was ambushed “on the Ramallah road by approximately 50 armed Arabs.”

The Arabs appeared to be led by two Britishers, one of whom was recognised as an ex-B/Constable whose name is unknown and the other man is thought to be an ex-B/Constable Brown, who escaped from Acre after being sentenced to four years’ [sic] imprisonment. Both men were wearing khaki drill clothing and Arab headdresses.

The armed police drivers had their weapons and APC confiscated, but were apparently released unharmed.

The report is reminiscent of Peter Kosminsky’s 2011 TV serial The Promise in which a British soldier, despite being initially sympathetic to Zionism, becomes disillusioned with the British role in Palestine and deserts to join Palestinian fighters who unsuccessfully attempted to defend the country.

Although fictional, Kosminsky based his drama on real history, including original research and conversations with surviving British colonial soldiers.

Other stories

Several of the files (FCO 141/14256, 14270-73, 14288) concern Germans, Italians and Iranians interned as enemies during the Second World War, and sent from Palestine to prison camps in Australia.

Some of the Italians were said to be priests sympathetic to fascism. Many of the Germans were members of the Templar colony Sarona near Jaffa, which was expropriated and used as a British military base.

One Samuel Theodore Hoffman, born in Jerusalem 1893 was said to be “an extremely dangerous Nazi” who was “active in the dissemination of Nazi propaganda in Palestine.”

Another file (FCO 141/14285) contained correspondence from worried British subjects seeking to flee the country after the UN decision to partition Palestine.

Other newly-released files, which I did not have the time to review, are said to contain details of Hijaz railway assets to be handed over to “the Transjordan government” (modern-day Jordan).

Background

The documents are part of a wider collection from former British colonial administrations around the world designated the “Migrated Archives.” During the process of decolonization, British occupation authorities wanted to ensure that any evidence of their wrongdoing was covered up. More

 

The Palestinians: The Forgotten People

It is impossible to understand the present Palestinian/Israeli conflict without understanding the past, in particular, the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, who are not Semitic people, but indigenous to Eastern Europe.

In 1900, there were no Ashkenazi Jews living in Palestine; essentially none, that is, but a few, small mostly temporary Russian Jewish settlers, not totally unusual for various cults in the Holy Land at that time. Theodore Herzl, frequently designated ‘The Father of Modern Zionism' stated in 1897:

“[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Deir Yassin ------------->

Thus the concept of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

By the 1930' 'transfer' of the Arabs was the unanimous opinion of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of ‘transferring the Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year's end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab cities or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of the banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. The massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, only one of many, but possibly the most famous, occurred on April 9, 1948. Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and it was the next day, May 15, that the first regular soldier of an Arab army set foot in Palestine. By then, about half of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees had been generated. More