State Terror at Unlawful Birth of Israel
In 1946 the British were still in political control of Palestine, formerly ruled by the Ottomons, under an arrangement created in the wake of World War I and approved by the League of Nations in 1923.
The Zionist movement, led primarily by Jews from Eastern Europe, was determined to drive the British out and terrorism of all sorts—assassinations, kidnappings, bombings, extortion, etc.—was at the very core of the effort.
The problem with the British was that they were carrying out their commitment under the Balfour Declaration far too conscientiously. As a means of gaining support from world Jewry, especially in the United States and Russia, against their enemies in World War I, which included the Ottomon Empire, the Balfour Declaration endorsed the idea of a Jewish home (not the Zionist objective of a ‘homeland’ or ‘state’) in Palestine (still at that time under Ottomon control), ‘it being clearly understood that nothing [would be] done which [would] prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine (still at that time under Ottomon control).
The Zionists wanted massive Jewish immigration from Europe and total political control of Palestine, with the apparent eventual goal of supplanting the entire non-Jewish population from the area. Such policies would certainly have been—and have been—prejudicial in the extreme toward the rights of the locals, and the British refused to institute them, incurring the murderous wrath of the terrorist Stern Gang, which counted future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (born Icchak Jeziernicky) among its leaders and its brother in terror, Irgun, one of whose leaders was future Prime Minister Menachem Begin (born Mieczysław Biegun). Why British government officials, and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in particular, would have been targeted for killing by the Zionist terrorists can be well appreciated by reference to Bevin’s Wikipedia page.
Although the attempted assassinations in Britain were unsuccessful, the terror campaign against the British worked. The British gave up their mandate and turned the whole question of Palestine’s future over to the United Nations to decide. Under heavy pressure from the United States, the majority of the UN General Assembly voted to partition Palestine into Jewish and non-Jewish sectors. This final arrangement, according to Bevin, was “…so manifestly unjust to the Arabs that it is difficult to see how we could reconcile it with our conscience.”
Legal rights?
This is a comment on http://www.israelandstuff.com/israels-rights-spelled-clearly where it is claimed that Israel (a) has a legal right to exist, and (b) has a right to hugely enlarged national boundaries.
I here argue that Israel’s righto exist is based on force and de facto occupation, achieved though tactics of terror.
This is being composed on Easter Sunday.
continue reading…
continue reading…
