NAKBA CONTINUES AS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS FLEE GAZA

Back in October, Anti-Racist Action, together with almost 100 Wayne State students, confronted racist Israel supporter Daniel Pipes when he visited our university. We let Pipes know he wasn’t welcome on our campus, and it is a lesson he won’t soon forget.

One reason we opposed Pipes was his support for cutting off basic necessities to the Gaza Strip. He has expressed support for such proposals at least twice, once over six years ago and again in September 2007. In the past week, Israel has implemented just such a policy. Electronic Intifada summarized these measures and their implications in an article today: “That means no movement in or out of the Gaza Strip for people, or any kind of shipments in of vital food, fuel supplies and medicines. It is more than a miserable existence: it is a slow death.”

While Pipes and Israel assert that these measures have been taken as punishment for rocket attacks on Israel, their true purpose was revealed today, as 350,000 Gazans fled into Egypt following the bombing of the separation wall in southern Gaza. The purpose of this collective punishment is to make the Gaza Strip unlivable, to bring about the “slow death” of Gazans or force them off the land. WITH THE RECENT LOSS OF ALMOST 25% OF THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE GAZA STRIP, THE ZIONIST DREAM OF A JEWISH STATE IN ALL HISTORIC PALESTINE HAS COME CLOSER TO REALITY.

Today must be remembered as yet another Nakba in the series of Nakbas that constitute the story of the indigenous people of Palestine since the arrival at the turn of the 20^th century of Zionists bent on establishing their state.

These newest refugees of Israeli terrorism must be allowed to return to Gaza, as all Palestinian refugees of this conflict must be allowed to return to Palestine. The Jewish nature of Israel must be opposed, and apartheid must be destroyed so that peace may finally come to the region.

Free at Last, Free at Last

The following article continues our series documenting the harassment and intimidation faced by Palestine solidarity activists in the U.S. Michel Shehadeh highlights many of the key lessons for those of us involved in similar struggles, including the importance of building grassroots support networks and the meaning that comes from shared experiences of struggle where we create our own values and reject those of our racist and capitalist society. While once again a documentation of the lengths to which Zionists will go to destroy the lives of our people, at the same time it is a story of courage. Shehadeh fought against enormous odds, and all the tricks and connivances of the most powerful government in the world, and emerged unbowed and free. An interview with Shehadeh about his 20 year struggle for freedom is available here.

Twenty years of government harassment comes to an end

For the last 20 years, the U.S. government has accused me of being a terrorist. Along with six other Palestinians and a Kenyan, we were dubbed the "Los Angeles Eight" by the media. Our case even made it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Oct. 30, 2007 — 20 grueling years after the early morning raid in which armed federal agents barged into my apartment, brutally arrested me before my 3-year-old son's eyes, incarcerated me in maximum security cells in San Pedro State Prison for 23 days without bond, and attempted to deport me — the government dropped all charges fabricated against me. The charges involved accusations of aiding a member group of the Palestine Liberation Organization that the government alleged aided terrorism.

But Los Angeles immigration Judge Bruce J. Einhorn had ordered an end to the deportation proceedings against us last January because the government failed to comply with his order to disclose evidence that supported our innocence. He called their behavior "an embarrassment to the rule of law."

Why did the U.S. government spend 20 years trying to ban us from this country? Because we tried to educate Americans about the situation facing millions of Palestinians living in apartheid-like conditions under Israeli military occupation. Because we organized fundraisers to provide Palestinians with humanitarian support. And because we attended demonstrations to urge a shift in U.S. policy away from unconditional financial and diplomatic support of Israel.

The government robbed us and our families of the best and most productive years of our lives. For more than 20 years, they vilified us in public without recourse. We'll never be able to entirely erase the negative words and images they manufactured about us. Our case is a stark example, and is different only in degree, from what routinely befalls those who call for equal rights for Palestinians and who press for a fair Middle East U.S. policy consistent with international law. In February of this year, two others who advocated equal rights for Palestinians — Mohammed Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar — were found not guilty of terrorism charges based in part on evidence provided by Israel and obtained through the use of torture.

President Carter, university professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt and Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu face charges of anti-Semitism and shoddy scholarship meant to intimidate, discredit and silence them.

And it may be surprising, but I don't hold a grudge. Throughout this 20-year plus ordeal, we never lost faith that we would win against this political and legal oppression. Not only because of our innocence, but because of the tremendous, unfaltering support that we enjoyed all these years across religious, ethnic and civic communities, and a legal team that did not waver once in its commitment to justice. This incredible support has taught us more about America than we could have learned in two lifetimes; the support of such people who are a living example and a role model for immigrants — to positively engage with the issues facing the country on a daily basis. Struggling to make the place a bit better than when we arrived is what made America home to us. We made that choice, and we're the better for it.

My two American-born sons learned though this experience the meaning of establishing a strong grassroots connection and of getting involved with their community. The words justice, freedom, equality and civil liberties are not words they learned in school that will become empty clichés as they grow older. They are concepts that have real meaning to them, that affect their family and community. They know these rights must be vigilantly protected, especially when the issues they advocate are not popular, or at times of war and conflict, when the first causalities are our basic freedoms — free speech, the right to dissent and to disagree with the government — the very basis of democracy.

From the beginning, we said that our case was a political one and that the government made us victims of a political witch-hunt. We persevered all these years and defeated the attempt to uproot us from our communities, break our families apart, and deport us, because we were innocent. Free at last, we are finally exonerated and it tastes sweet. We will savor the sweetness. And we will use it to fuel our determination to defend the same issues that our supporters defended through us: justice, civil liberties, freedom and immigrant rights. We believe that this is the America for which we continually aspire, the America that is just, here at home and in faraway places — with policies based on fairness, equality, and a shared humanity.

Michel Shehadeh is a research associate in the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. Reprinted from arabamericannews.com

Planning the Terror that Created Israel

2008 is the 60^th anniversary (if such a sweet-sounding term can reasonably applied in the circumstances) of the explusion of 800,000 Palestinians from historic Palestine by Zionist militias. This massive effort followed the passage of UN resolution 181, and aimed at achieving a vast Jewish majority in the areas that would become Israel. With such a majority, the so-called democratic character of Israel was thought to be secured.

Thankfully, brave anti-Zionist Israelis exist, alongside all the courageous anti-Zionists of all stripes. One invaluable asset to our ranks is Ilan Pappe, and his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, is a weapon in the struggle for Palestine.

As the anniversary of Nakba approaches, an important review of this book has recently been published by the International Socialist Review. You can find it below and at this link. Ilan Pappe’s book is available online or, of course, at your local, Palestine-friendly bookstore.

Planning the terror that created Israel

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Ilan Pappé
OneWorld Publications, 2006 (paper 2007)
320 pages • $15 (paper)

Review by MOSTAFA OMAR

ISRAELI HISTORIAN Ilan Pappe, whose parents fled persecution in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, minces no words in telling the real story of Zionism’s crimes against the Palestinians:

It is the horrific story of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a crime against humanity that Israel has wanted to deny and cause the world to forget. Retrieving it from oblivion is incumbent upon us; it is the very first step we must take if we ever want reconciliation to take a chance, and peace to take root, in the torn land of Palestine and Israel.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappé explains and documents that the true goal of the founders of Zionism had always been to create a majority Jewish state, emptied as much as possible of the native Palestinian population. He meticulously (and painfully) reconstructs the story of how Zionist leaders, over many decades, carefully laid the groundwork for this expulsion and how they intiated their plan in 1948 when the British finally decided to leave.

The same Western governments that have been quick to denounce ethnic cleansing in Darfur or Bosnia and Kosovo, writes Pappé, have failed to recognize that the same awful crime also happened to the Palestinians sixty years ago and continues today.

Myth and reality

Israel’s official version of the story of 1948 claims that Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to expel their Palestinian Arab neighbors; that Zionist leaders were willing to accept UN resolution 181 of November 1947, which called for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, but that it was the Palestinians who rejected that plan; and that the Palestinians became refugees when they “voluntarily” fled their homes to make room for the Arab armies that invaded Palestine in May 1948 to carry out what they called a “second Holocaust” against Jews.

Palestinian historians such as Walid Khalidi and Salim Tamari have repeatedly documented the crimes Israel committed in 1948 and afterwards, using historic records as well as the testimonies of Palestinian refugees. For his own research, Pappé decided to debunk the Israeli myths by relying almost exclusively on declassified Israeli military archives and the memoirs of Israel’s “founding fathers.”

These sources leave no doubt that, in the decades before 1948, the leaders of Zionism concocted a premeditated plan to expel the native Palestinian population. Pappé details how these Israeli “heroes” executed the plan in the period from December 1947 to March 1949 through the use of massacres, rapes, demolition of villages, and forced expulsion of the native population. In doing so, he manages to vindicate and corroborate the story that the Palestinians have been trying to get out to the Western world for the past sixty years.

Pappé has belonged to the school of historical revisionists pioneered by the Israeli historian Benny Morris in the late 1980s with The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949. In that book, Morris also researched declassified Israeli military archives and found that the Zionist leadership and militias committed certain crimes during the war of 1948 that led to Palestinian expulsion and flight. Morris maintained that these crimes were not the result of any advance plan of expulsion, but rather the result of the dynamics of the conflict—much the same as other bad things that happen in all wars.

The “transfer” plan

Looking at the same documents Morris used, however, Pappé concluded that Morris selectively used data and ignored many events that point starkly to a conscious plan of expulsion. He goes on to argue that the founders of Zionism—from Theodore Herzl to David Ben-Gurion—had always planned to expel the native Palestinian population as a prerequisite for creating an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

For example, in 1937 Ben-Gurion told the Jewish Agency Executive, the organization charged with procuring land for Jewish settlements in Palestine, “I am for compulsory transfer; I don’t see anything immoral in it.” Ten years later, Ben Gurion maintained his opposition to sharing Palestine with the Arabs by rejecting the UN partition plan because he believed it didn’t allocate at least the majority of Palestine to the Jewish state.

Pappé argues that the partition plan was, from the beginning, unfair to the Palestinians because they still made up two-thirds of the population in 1947, while the UN allocated only 42 percent of the land to them. Meanwhile, the UN allocated 56 percent of Palestine to foreign Jewish colonizers who only made up a third of the population. Despite this injustice to the native population, the founding father of Israel actually insisted on getting more and more land. In a speech delivered to his own Mapai Party on December 3, 1947, Ben-Gurion made his aims clear:

There are 40 percent non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state.… Only a state with 80 percent Jews is a viable state.

Zionist leaders believed that it was not possible to achieve a Jewish majority in the country simply through immigration, since most Jews fleeing Nazi Germany’s Holocaust wanted to head West, not to Palestine. Therefore, Pappé writes, they concluded that there was only one way to achieve this goal of a majority Jewish state on the majority of the land of historic Palestine—the ethnic cleansing of the natives.

Preparing for ethnic cleansing

Since the early 1930s, these founding fathers worked hard to prepare for a majority Jewish state with very few or no Arabs. First, they successfully strengthened Jewish economic, social, military, and political institutions that could become the basis of the new state. They also took advantage of British openness to Jewish immigration during the British colonial mandate period of 1917–48. In addition, they worked to weaken the Arab political leadership by fighting alongside British forces to crush most of the Palestinian political and military infrastructure during the Arab revolt of 1936–39. At the end of the Second World War, they launched a relentless campaign of terrorist attacks against British interests in Palestine to drive the British out.
They also authorized a committee of Jewish historians and Arabists (a term that refers to specialists in Arabic culture) to compile a detailed, secret map of every Arab town and village in Palestine. They recorded the location and topography of the villages, the degree of land fertility, and availability of water, the number of inhabitants and the names of all adult males, the number of guards and weapons, the names of individuals who took part in or sympathized with the 1936 revolt, and even recorded a description of the Mukhtar’s (mayor’s) living quarters.

Leaders such as Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Moshe Allon met for years on a biweekly basis in the “Red House” in Tel Aviv as a group called The Consultancy. They drew and revised a sophisticated plan to carry out the “transfer” of the Palestinians at an opportune time in order to secure a Jewish majority in Palestine. In the third updated version of that plan (compiled at the end of the 1930s and referred to as Plan C or gimel in Hebrew), these leaders agreed on the necessity of carrying out the following steps:

• Killing the Palestinian political leadership;
• Killing Palestinian inciters and financial supporters;
• Damaging Palestinian transportation;
• Damaging Palestinian water wells, mills, etc.;
• Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc.

Within a few months, the same “founding fathers” drew up the final version of the plan, now named Plan D, or dalet in Hebrew. These leaders ordered their militias and gangs to start implementing Plan D only hours after the UN issued resolution 181 in November 1947. The long nightmare for the Palestinians would only get worse. Zionist militias began to attack and expel villagers with or without provocation inside lands allocated to either the Jewish or Arab state.

Qisarya was the first village to be expelled in its entirety, on 15 February 1948. The expulsion took only a few hours and was carried out so systematically that the Jewish troops were able to evacuate and destroy another four villages on the same day, all under the watchful eyes of British troops stationed in police stations nearby.

The people of the village of Sa’sa were among the early victims. On the night of February 15, 1948, troops from Palmach (which had the largest Zionist militias) “took the main street of the village and systematically blew up one house after another while families were still sleeping inside.” Moshe Kalman, the Jewish officer in charge of the operation later recalled, rather poetically, “In the end, the sky prised open. We left behind 35 demolished houses (a third of the village) and 60–80 dead bodies (quite a few of them were children).”

Declassified Israeli military archives confirm that the Zionist militias carried out at least thirty-seven large-scale massacres in that period. Some of the worst massacres and rape cases took place in villages such as Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, where one survivor, Fahim Zaydan, described what Jewish troops did:

They took us one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him—carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her, they shot her too.

The news about the fate of the villagers in Deir Yassin spread like wildfire across Palestine, with Jewish troops cruising through other villages promising the villagers the same fate if they didn’t leave. And though more recent accurate accounts of the number of those killed in Deir Yassin suggest a figure of 170 men, women, and children, Zionist propaganda broadcast over loudspeakers in the weeks that followed the massacre claimed that they actually killed over 300, in order to elevate the panic among Arabs.

On October 28, 1948, Palmach troops committed another massacre in the village of Dawaymah, described by Pappé as more brutal than the massacre in Deir Yassin. In just a few hours, all houses were blown up and 455 people were executed, including 170 women and children. The remaining 6,000 inhabitants—who included 4,000 refugees expelled earlier that year from other villages—were forcibly expelled. According to Israeli archives, “The Jewish troops who took part in the massacre also reported horrific scenes: babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death.”

In all those villages that were attacked, the map compiled earlier by the Arabists proved to be extremely useful. It gave the Jewish troops complete understanding of the best way to attack those villages. And with the help of paid informants, it allowed them to pick out and immediately execute all potential resisters.

By the end of the war, Zionist troops had destroyed more than 420 Palestinian villages and turned their inhabitants into refugees. The same ill fate that befell the Palestinian countryside also befell the Arab population in cities—both Arab or mixed. The campaign against the Palestinian cities was also as relentless and brutal as that against the villages.

On the first day of Passover, April 21, 1948, Jewish troops began Operation Scissors (later renamed Operation Cleansing the Leaven or Bi’ur Hametz in Hebrew) to cleanse the mixed sea-port city of Haifa in the north of its fifty thousand Arab inhabitants. The troops attacked by rolling barrel bombs from the hills onto Arab streets and using heavy artillery while loudspeakers threatened the Palestinians to leave or else. Thousands of Palestinians fled to the port, attempting to get on boats to leave, but even there, Jewish troops continued to shoot, leading to more panic with parents trampling their own children. Many drowned when overloaded fishing boats capsized. This all happened under the nose of the British forces who were still stationed in the city and didn’t fulfill an earlier promise to protect the city’s Palestinian inhabitants.

Another example of what Pappé calls the urbicide, (killing of cities) of Arab Palestine is the attacks on the two cities of Acre and Baysan. On May 6, 1948, Jewish troops laid siege with intensive bombardment. Loudspeakers shouted everywhere: “Surrender or commit suicide. We will destroy to the last man.”

According to British doctors in the city’s Lebanese Red Cross hospital, the troops also caused an outbreak of typhoid and dysentery among Arabs and even British soldiers by poisoning the water supply with germs. These germs were developed by the Biological Warfare Science Corps program, set up by Ben-Gurion himself in the 1940s and ironically known by its acronym HEMED, which means “sweetness” in Hebrew.
Exhausted, starved, and fearing more death and destruction, the Palestinian inhabitants of Acre and Baysan finally surrendered in a matter of days only to be loaded by Jewish soldiers at gunpoint onto trucks that drove them to their future refugee camps. By the end of the war most major Palestinian cities had become totally or almost totally empty of their Arab inhabitants.

By the spring of 1949, Israel had conquered up to 80 percent of historic Palestine. It expelled 800,000 Palestinians, or 75 percent of the native Arab population, from their homeland, turning them into refugees and preventing them from coming back at the end of the war. The founding fathers had finally succeeded in securing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority. Some 660,000 Jews imposed military rule on 150,000 Arabs who dug in and didn’t flee. The rest of the Palestinians were dispersed as refugees in the remaining 20 percent of their own country or in neighboring Arab states—made to live as refugees for the following sixty years. Today, they number over six million.

Setting the record straight

Pappé makes a couple of critical points. First, he explains that the Arab resistance to the Zionist efforts of ethnic cleansing was actually quite weak. While Ben-Gurion, in public speeches, delivered fiery public warnings against a “second Holocaust,” he expressed utter confidence in private meetings that the nascent state of Israel would crush all Arab armies and resisters.

This confidence was based on his knowledge that Jewish troops outnumbered and out-gunned all the Arab armies combined. In addition, the Soviet Union allowed Czechoslovakia to supply the Jewish side with new tanks and air power while Britain formed an embargo on arms sales to the Arabs.

Pappé shows that the majority of the Palestinians, especially villagers, never fully comprehended the gravity of the Zionist threat in 1948. They had no idea that the Zionist project meant not to exploit them but to expel them. Indeed, in the early months of 1948, many were going on with their lives, even planning future harvests.

Second, Pappé demonstrated that Benny Morris was wrong to claim that the expulsion started after the Arab armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948. He uses the same archives that Morris looked at to show massacres and expulsions beginning and spreading as early as December 1947.

The price: The future

Like all Israelis who dare to tell the true story of what happened, Pappé was ostracized. He received death threats and was forced out of his job as a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Haifa last summer. Citing an atmosphere of hate and bigotry, he decided to accept a job at Exeter University in England.

There, he continues to argue that Israel must admit its historic crime in order to begin the process of reconciliation. He also argues that the state of Israel is racist to the core and must be democratized and purged of hate. The first step towards democratization is eliminating the Jewish character of the state, allowing all Palestinian refugees to return, and establishing total equality between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.

He is full of hope that this future is possible through the Palestinian struggle for national liberation. Pappé likens the resistance to Palestine’s olive trees, a national symbol of pride. Israelis keep trying to destroy them by planting pine trees over them, but the olive trees keep growing back.

BOLE SO NIHAL! SAT SRI AKAL!

Today, Sikhs around the world gather at their local Gurdwara to celebrate Guru Gobind Singh Ji's Janam Din. Guru Gobind Singh is perhaps the most well-known of the 10 Sikh Gurus, possibly because his life was filled with incredible struggles and trials and for ultimately institutionalising Sikhism through creation of the Khalsa.

Guru Gobind Singh became the 10^th Guru when he was nine years old upon receiving the head of his father, the 9^th Guru, in a box. His father, Guru Tegh Bahadur, had been beheaded by the Emperor in India at the time for refusing to convert from Sikhism. The period in which the Guru lived was one of conflict between local landowners endlessly trying to oppress the people in their undying quests for power and the Emperor at the time trying to suppress all those who politically and religiously differed from him in his own attempts to maintain power. The Guru followed his father's example as well as the example of the eight Gurus before them, refusing to capitulate to those in power and fighting to maintain freedom for not only Sikhs but other oppressed people as well. After all, Guru Tegh Bahadur had been beheaded not only for refusing to convert himself but for refusing to convince others to convert as well.

Guru Gobind Singh Ji is perhaps most well-known for creating the Khalsa within Sikhism. The Khalsa is the collective of baptised Sikhs. Ultimately the Khalsa is the brother/sisterhood of Saint-Soldiers of Sikhs. The idea behind it is simple; one must not only be involved in spiritual affairs but also in temporal affairs. The soldier has two swords as symbolised in the Khanda, the symbol of Sikhs- one to fight the oppressors of people and the second with which to defend the innocent. This is reiterated in the uniform of the Khalsa given to Sikhs by the 10 ^th Guru. The 5 K's, which make up the uniform, include the kesh (uncut hair), kept because all of God's creation is perfect so to cut it is a dishonour to God, the kanga (wooden comb), to maintain cleanliness of the kesh, kara (steel bracelet), a reminder that a Sikh is bound to God, kachhera (long undershorts), symbolising modesty and high moral character, and the kirpan (strapped sword), worn to not only remind one of her duty as a Khalsa but also worn as symbol to defend one's faith and to defend those who cannot defend themselves.

No one embodied the idea of a Saint-Soldier more than Guru Gobind Singh Ji. He lost not only his father, but his mother and his four sons, the two elder were killed in battle, and the two younger were bricked alive (all of whom died for refusing to convert from Sikhism). Despite these tragedies which would have crushed the spirit of any man, the Guru continued to be a beacon of hope and light for all people. He himself fought in many battles mostly in defense of people increasingly subject to religious persecution from the rulers of India at the time as well as to defend his own religious freedom and that of his followers. The Guru found no reason to be tied to any Empire or local ruler; rather he believed that people should be allowed to live their own lives as they see fit. This obviously led to clashes between him and the Emperor at the time as well as with local landlords who cherished the feudal system, under which they lived and prospered. Ultimately he was assassinated for refusing to bow down to those in power, for recognizing no power but that of God. He was the last of the living Gurus for the Sikh people passing on his succession to the eternal Guru, the Guru Granth Sahib which is the holy scriptures of the Sikh people.

Gobind Singh Ji was an amazing man and his birthday is a time to not only celebrate and remember his legacy as something of the past but to honour it by embodying these ideals within our own lives in the present and future. BOLE SO NIHAL! SAT SRI AKAL!