Democratic Palestine : 24 (ص 24)
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- Democratic Palestine : 24 (ص 24)
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39 Years of Infamy
The Creation of the Zionist State
May 15th marks 39 years since the Zionist movement created its
racist state by occupying the major part of Palestine. This illegal act
was accomplished by brute force, like all of Zionism’s major ad-.
The article below relates how the Zionists militarized
vances.
Palestine, dispossessing the Palestinian people and turning their land
into a base for further aggression and expansion, in line with im-
perialist interests.
The first Arab-Zionist war, the war
of 1948, was not the result of inherent
tension between Arabs and_ Jews.
Rather it was minutely planned by the
Zionist leaders to provide a cover for
their occupation of Palestine and ex-
pulsion of the native inhabitants -
crimes deemed necessary to accomplish
their goal of an exclusively Jewish
State, to serve as imperialism’s
foremost ally in the region.
The Zionists’ war preparations relied
to a great extent on their alliance with
the colonial powers, specifically Bri-
tain, dating back to the participation of
a Zionist brigade in the British expedi-
tion against Turkey in World War I.
Having offered Jews as cannon fodder
to the British war efforts, the Zionists
secured the Balfour Declaration of
November 2, 1917, which promised
British support to «the establishment in
Palestine of a National Home for the
Jewish people,» despite the fact that
92% of Palestine’s population were
non-Jewish Arabs. On _ this _ back-
ground, the Zionist delegation to the
1919 Paris Peace Conference circulated
a plan for the Zionist state with borders
extending from Sidon (Lebanon) in the
north, eastwards to include parts of
Syria (roughly covering the Golan
Heights) and what is now Jordan, all of
Palestine and a part of Egypt’s Sinai.
The document defined these boundaries
as essential for the state’s economic
viability, especially water resources.
Special reference was made to the need
for the fertile plains east of the Jordan
River. ! This plan foretold the 1948 and
1967 wars and occupations, as well as
the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
The Hagana, the embryo of the
Israeli army, was formed in 1920, and
began intensive training with the British
colonial forces in Palestine in the 1930s,
24
to beat down the 1936-39 Palestinian
revolt. At this time, the British formed
three counterinsurgency units, the
Night Squads, composed of Zionist
settlers, and commanded by Captain
Orde Wingate whom David Ben-
Gurion paid tribute to as follows:
«Wingate’s work was not in vain. The
Hagana’s best officers were trained in
the Special Night Squads, and
Wingate’s doctrines were taken over by
the Israeli Defence Forces...» Moshe
Dayan, who was personally trained by
Wingate, said: «In some sense every
leader of the Israeli army even today is
a disciple of Wingate. He gave us our
technique, he was the inspiration of our
tactics, he was our dynamic.»
The Palmach, the Hagana’s strike
force, was formed in 1941, to defend
Zionist settlements in Palestine, as:
32,000 Zionist settlers volunteered to
serve with British units in World War
II. The Jewish Agency worked to
channel these volunteers into units that
would get training useful to Zionism in
the future. (This was, of course, in
marked contrast to the Zionist move-
ment’s failure to participate in the
anti-fascist resistance movement in
Europe.)
Added to the arms and training ac-
quired from the British, there was
underground Zionist training in
Palestine and abroad, the formation of
the Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang) terror
groups alongside the Hagana, and large
arms and manpower shipments to the
Zionists in Palestine. «Already in 1945,
the composition of the Jewish im-
migrants into Palestine - legal and il-
legal - was changing: people of military
age, many of whom had already had
military training and/or experience in
Europe, predominated.» > Irgun and
Hagana men beat up and harassed
Jewish youth in the displaced persons
camps in Europe, who didn’t want to
go to Palestine and fight for Zionism.
Just as the composition of the im-
migrants belie Zionist claims of
creating ‘Israel’ to «save» the Jews
from the holocaust, so other facts
refute their claims of self-reliance in
creating this state: In 1948-9, the
Zionist movement tried to recruit
thousands of US servicemen, including
officers, in the US and Europe, to
serve as instructors for their new
army. 4 Most of the Israeli pilots in the
1948 war were foreigners, especially
from the US. Mercenaries also par-
ticipated.
Thus, the stage was set for the
Zionists’ first expansionist, preventive
war, launched to prevent a Palestinian
State which would not have allied with
imperialism, as the Zionist state was
intended to from the beginning.
WAR ON CIVILIANS
With their pro-Zionist slant, most
bourgeois historians date the 1948 war
to May 15th, when the Arab armies
entered Palestine. In reality this war
grew out of the Zionist militias’ terror
attacks on the Palestinian civilian
population, which started well before,
and escalated dramatically in the spring
of 1948. On November 29, 1947, the
UN had adopted the Partition Plan,
whereby 56% of Palestine was
allocated to a ‘Jewish state’ and 43%
for an Arab state, while Jerusalem was
to be a UN—administered international
zone; at this time Jews were less than
one-third of the population and owned
about 6% of Palestine’s land. Palesti-
nians staged strikes and demonstrations
in protest of this injustice, while the
Zionists celebrated. The nature of their
celebrations is clear from what Ben-
Gurion wrote: «Arabs started fleeing
from the cities almost as soon as
disturbances began in the early days of
December (1947)...»>
To rule out any rethinking of the
resolution and to expand their already
unjustly large territory, the Hagana,
Irgun and Lehi went into action. In the
areas designated for the ‘Jewish state’,
Palestinian citizens were expelled from
Tiberius, Haifa, Safad, Beisan and
hundreds of villages. The Zionist forces
attacked and occupied the villages of
Qazaza, Salameh, Saris, Qastal and
Biyar ‘Adas, and the towns of Jaffa
and Acre - all in the area reserved for
the Arab state. In the six months before - هو جزء من
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