Pursuing Truth about Israel/Palestine

I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, and the following is an explanation of why.

More than three decades ago when I made my commitment to this war effort -- in the full knowledge that it would make me persona non grata in the eyes of the mainstream media in which I had served with some distinction -- I believed that the single most amazing thing about the conflict was Zionism's success in selling its propaganda lies, lies which were told not only to justify anything and everything the Zionist (not Jewish) State of Israel did and does, but also to establish and fix the boundaries of what could and could not be discussed in public discourse about Israel's policies and actions.

I mean what could and could not be discussed by non-Jews, Europeans and Americans especially, if they didn't want to be terrorized by smears and false charges of anti-Semitism, which could result in them losing their positions and jobs.

What could be called the Mother and Father of Zionism's propaganda lies is the assertion that all the Jews of the world are descended from the ancient Hebrews and therefore have a common ethnic origin and national heritage. In other words, according to Zionism's assertion, Palestine is by definition the ancestral homeland of all the Jews of the world; and this, it is further asserted by Zionism, means that Israel has the right to sovereignty over all the land it occupies today and Jews from anywhere have the right to settle on it.

As Israeli historian Shlomo Sand  explains  in his book  The Invention of the Jewish People,  that is simply not true. And as I noted in my book  Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews  (which was published before Sand's work), almost all the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism's call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews.

They, like almost all Jews, were the descendants of peoples from many homelands (mainly in Eastern and Western Europe) who converted to Judaism centuries after the brief rule of the ancient Hebrews ended and who, after their conversion, had only their religion and its rituals in common.

By the time Zionism declared itself into existence around 1897, there were more Palestinian Arabs, who had descended from the ancient Hebrews, than Palestinian Jews who could count the ancient Hebrews as direct ancestors. That is because many descendants of the ancient Hebrews had converted to Islam and Christianity over the centuries. Thus, Zionism's claim that the Jews of the world have a right to the land now occupied by Greater Israel does not bear honest examination.

Declared Independence

One of the most influential of Zionism's follow-up propaganda lies asserted that Israel was given its birth certificate and thus its legitimacy by the United Nations Partition Resolution of Nov. 29, 1947. As I document in detail in my book and have indicated over the years in more than a few articles and presentations of public platforms of all kinds, that is propaganda nonsense.

In the first place the UN, without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine, did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own. Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote (rigged by Zionist pressure amounting to blackmail on the leaders and governments of some member states), the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either.

But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal -- meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council. But the General Assembly's partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid), and the question of what to do about Palestine after the occupying British had been driven out by Zionist terrorism was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favored and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what to do next that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence -- actually in defiance of the will of the organized international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that Israel had no right to exist. It came into existence because David Ben-Gurion had done everything necessary to guarantee that his Jewish forces would be more than sufficient in numbers and well enough armed to roll back and defeat any Arab military response to Israel's unilateral declaration of independence, and that Zionist might would prevail over Palestinian right.

Thereafter, Zionism was successful in convincing the Western world that poor little Israel lived in constant danger of annihilation, the "driving into the sea" of its Jews. The truth is that Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab military force. Despite some stupid, face-saving Arab rhetoric to the contrary, which played into Zionism's hands, the Arab regimes never, ever, had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine.

When elements of the armies of the frontline Arab states went to war with Israel in 1948, their objective was not to destroy the "Jewish state" but to hold the land that had been assigned to the Palestinian Arab state by the vitiated partition plan, and they failed miserably, as Ben-Gurion was confident they would.

Also true is that Jordan, whose king had been in secret dialogue with Zionism's in-Palestine leaders, would not have been a serious party to the Arab war effort if Ben-Gurion had not tried to grab Jerusalem; if, in other words, he had been content for the Holy City not to be part of either the Jewish or Arab state of the vitiated partition plan. Israel always was the aggressor and oppressor, not and never the victim.