Israeli Terror

Then, in the months of May and June, 1954, Israel decided to activate the group decisively. Instructions were received at the headquarters calling for sabotage in public buildings, cinemas, post offices, and railroad stations.

The main target was to be British institutions such as libraries, cultural centers, houses owned by British citizens, and the British legation in Egypt. The aim? To bring Britain to the conclusion that it was still too early to pull out of Egypt and that all the guarantees offered by the Egyptian Government in exchange for the evacuation of the bases were ineffective in the light of the continuing wave of terrorism.

A Nation On Trial

95, 96 ---- Jewish State Immunized From Legitimate Censure

It should be clear that, in the context of the Nazi genocide, there can be no question of Jewish guilt or innocence. That is what makes Goldhagen’s overarching framework — convincing to many readers. Yet by proposing a transhistorical explanation for the Nazi holocaust, Goldhagen effectively detaches the most extreme manifestation of anti-Semitism from its historical context. Anti-semitism becomes a chronic mental aberration “divorced from actual Jews” and it follows that at all times and for no reason, Gentiles harbor homicidal anti-Jewish animus, while Jews always enjoy a priori moral impunity. that ahistorical conception is of evident utility to those who maintain that all critiques of Zionism are simply disguised forms of anti-Semitism. The Jewish state is accordingly immunized from legitimate censure of its policies: all criticism is and must be motivated by fanatical anti-Semitism. Intent as gentiles always are on murdering Jews, Jews have every right to protect themselves however they see fit; whatever expedient Jews might resort to, even aggression and torture, constitutes legitimate self-defense. Thus Goldhagen confines on Jews a double exoneration: total blamelessness and total license.

Israel’s Sacred Terrorism

Publisher: Association of Arab-American University Graduates Inc. Press ISBN No. 0-937694-70-3

ix, x ---- Foreword by Noam Chomsky

Yet only rarely will an analysis of crucial historical events reach a wide audience unless it conforms to certain doctrines of the faith. ...

Occasional departures from orthodoxy are of little moment as long as they are confined to narrow circles that can be ignored, or dismissed as “irresponsible” or “naive” or “failing to comprehend the complexities of history,” or otherwise identified with familiar code-words as beyond the pale. ...

Again with rare exceptions, one must adopt certain doctrines of faith to enter the arena of debate, at least before any substantial segment of the public.

The basic doctrine is that Israel has been a hapless victim — of terrorism, of military attack, of implacable and irrational hatred. It is not that uncommon for well-informed American political analysts to write that Israel has been attacked four times by its neighbors, including even 1956. Israel is sometimes chided for its response to terrorist attack, a reaction that is deemed wrong though understandable. The belief that Israel may have had a substantial role in initiating and perpetuating violence and conflict is expressed only far from the mainstream. ...

To maintain such doctrines as these, or the analysis of alleged facts that conform to them, it is necessary scrupulously to avoid crucial documentation. ...

Moshe Sharrett’s diary, to which Livia Rokach’s monograph is devoted, is undoubtedly a major documentary source. It remains outside of “official history” — that version of history that reaches more than a tiny audience of people unsatisfied by conventional doctrine. It is only reasonable to predict that this will remain true in the United States as long as the “special relationship” persists. If, on the other hand, Israel had been, say, an ally of the Soviet Union, then Sharrett’s revelations would quickly become common knowledge, just as no one would speak of the Egyptian attack on Israel in 1956.

— Noam Chomsky

xix ---- Comparing Israeli Bombing of Beirut to Guernica, Coventry and Dresden

The more the world tries to understand the situation in the Middle East, the more the Zionist organizations in the United States, acting in concert with Israel, try to fog it up. Israel’s wars against the Arabs in 1967 and 1982 obliterated its David image and confirmed it as the Goliath of the Middle East. No longer was it possible for the Israeli government to escape public scrutiny, despite all the immunity which it enjoys in the American public arena, as its forces, in the name of “security” for Israeli civilians, carried out the most ruthless aerial bombardment since Vietnam. The U.S. ambassador in Lebanon, whose government used its Security Council veto to protest Israel’s war gains in 1982, described their saturation bombing: “there is no pinpoint accuracy against targets in open spaces.” The Canadian ambassador said Israel’s bombing “would make Berlin of 1944 look like a tea party. . . it is truly a scene from Dante’s Inferno” NBC’s John Chancellor said: “I kept thinking of the bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. . . we are now dealing with an imperial Israel.” Indeed, in their pure murderousness, given the frequent use of phosphorous and cluster bombs, the Israeli bombings of Beirut, an advanced form of state terrorism, far outstripped the attacks on Guernica, Coventry and Dresden.

Pinning the anti-Semitic label on critics has become the standard and easiest tactic to pre-empt rational discussion of public policy regarding Israel and to intimidate would-be critics.

4 ---- Author's Introduction

The creation of a siege mentality in Israel’s society was necessary to complement the prefabricated myth of the Arab threat. The two elements were intended to feed each other. Although Israeli society faced a serious risk of social and cultural disintegration under the impact of a mass immigration of Asian and North African Jews into the pre-state’s ideologically homogeneous community, the purpose of the siege mentality was not so much that of attaining a defensive cohesiveness in Israel’s Jewish society. It was calculated principally to “eliminate the moral brakes” required for a society to fully support a policy which constituted a complete reversal of the collective ethical code on which its formal education was based and from which it was supposed to derive its vital strength. Of course, this ethical code had not been respected in the past either. Aggression and terror had been exercised by the Zionists before and during the 1947-48 war. The following testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Dueima in 1948 is only the most recently disclosed of a long chain of evidence:

Killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into the houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up . . . Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered the “good guys” . . . became base murderers, and this is not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better (quoted in Davar, 9 June 1979)

9 ---- About the Diary

The Personal Diary which Moshe Sharett wrote from October 1953 to November 1956 covers the last years of his political activity as Israel’s first foreign minister, including the two years in which he replaced Ben Gurion as the prime minister. It then extends over the first fifteen months of the tormented inactivity following his political demise. ...

The Diary, a 2,000 page document in eight volumes, contains the daily notes and aide-memoires in which Sharett recorded current events: personal, family and party happenings, as well as national and international meetings of prime importance, conversations with his wife or other members of the family alongside administrative questions regarding his ministry and comments on cabinet meetings.

— Excerpts From The Diary —

13 ---- October 15, 1953

According to the first news from the other side, thirty houses have been demolished in one village. This reprisal is unprecedented in its dimensions and in the offensive power used. I walked up and down in my room, helpless and utterly depressed by my feeling of impotence ... I was simply horrified by the description in Radio Ramallah’s broadcast of the destruction of the Arab village. Tens of homes have been razed to the soil and tens of people killed. I can imagine the storm that will break out tomorrow in the Arab and Western capitals.

13 ---- October 16, 1953

I must underline that when I opposed the action I didn’t even remotely suspect such a bloodbath. I thought that I was opposing one of those actions which have become a routine in the past. Had I even remotely suspected that such a massacre was to be held, I would have raised real hell.

13 ---- October 16, 1953

Now the army wants to know how we [the foreign ministry] are going to explain the issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials, Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border village, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation.

14 ---- October 18, 1953

[In the cabinet meeting] I condemned the Kibya affair that exposed us in front of the whole world as a gang of blood-suckers, capable of mass massacres regardless, it seems, of whether their actions may lead to war. I warned that this stain will stick to us and will not be washed away for many years to come ... It was decided that a communiqué on Kibya will be published and Ben Gurion [back from his vacation for the occasion] was to write it. I insisted on including an expression of regret. Ben Gurion insisted on excluding any responsibility of the army: the civilian citizens of the border areas, enraged by the constant murders, have taken justice into their hands. After all [he said] the border settlements are full of arms and the settlers are ex-soldiers ... I said that no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars. But I couldn’t seriously demand that the communiqué explicitly affirm the army’s responsibility because this would have made it impossible to condemn the act and we would have ended up approving this monstrous bloodbath.

15, 16 ---- January 31, 1954

Moshe Dayan brought out one plan after the other for “direct action.” The first — what should be done to force open the blockade in the straits of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians will bomb it we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or [we should] conquer Ras-e-Naqueb or open our way from the south to the Gaza Strip up to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked him, Do you realize this would mean war with Egypt? He said, of course.

18, 19 ---- December 22, 1954

It must be clear to you that we had no justification whatsoever to seize the plane [a Syrian civilian plane, hijacked by Israeli war planes shortly after takeoff, and forced to land at Lydda airport, on December 12, 1954], and that once forced down we should have immediately released it and not held the passengers under interrogation for 48 hours. I have no reason to doubt the truth of the factual affirmation of the U.S. State department that our action was without precedent in the history of international practice.

What shocks and worries me is the narrow-mindedness and the short-sightedness of our military leaders. They seem to presume that the State of Israel may — or even must — behave in the realm of international relations according to the law of the jungle.

19 ---- January 3, 1955

A young boy has been sacrificed for nothing ... Now they will say that his blood is on my hands. If I hadn’t ordered the release of the Syrian plane [ we would have had our hostages and] the Syrians could have been forced to free the five. The boy ... would have been alive ... our soldiers have not been kidnapped in Israeli territory by Syrian invaders as the army spokesman announced ... They penetrated into Syria and not accidentally but in order to take care of a wiretapping installation, connected to a Syrian telephone line ... the young men were sent without any experienced person, they were not instructed what to do in case of failure and the result was that in the first interrogation they broke down and told the whole truth. ... I have no doubt that the press and the Knesset will cry about torture. On the other hand, it is possible that the boy committed suicide because he broke down during the interrogation and only later he understood what a disaster he has brought upon his comrades and what he did to the state. Possibly his comrades tormented him afterwards. Anyway, his conscience probably cause him to take this terrible step.

30 ---- May 31, 1954

Finally I have discovered the secret official version on the Tel Aviv action — two Arabs that we have sent attacked the Mukhtar who was supposedly said to have been involved in a theft, and killed his wife: in another incident a unit of ours crossed the border “by mistake”; in a third incident three of our soldiers were patrolling deep inside Jordanian territory, ran into the National Guard which opened fire (who will check?), returned fire and killed four.

30 ---- May 13, 1954

Hundreds of workers in Sodom know the truth and laugh at [the denial of the murder broadcast by] the Israeli radio and the Israeli government. This situation endangers the life and the enterprise in Sodom. ... Is the army allowed to act in that way according to its own whims and endanger such a vital enterprise?

31 ---- March 5, 1955

The army informed Tkoa ... [responsible for Armistice Commission affairs in the Foreign Ministry] that last night a “private” revenge action was carried out following the killing of the young man and woman. Oded Wegmeister and Shoshana Hartsion, who went on a trip on their own around Ein Gedi [in Jordanian territory]. According to the army version a group of young men, including the girl’s brother Meir Hartsion ... crossed the border, attacked a group of Beduin, and killed five of them. The army says it supposedly knew that such an initiative was being prepared and intended to prevent it, but according to its information the action was scheduled for tonight and the assumption was that there is time for preventive action, but the boys advanced the action and this is the reason that what happened — happened. Today, the Jordanians issued a completely different version: twenty Israeli soldiers committed the murders — they attacked six Beduin, killed five and left one alive and told him that this is an act of revenge for the couple ... so that he will tell others about it. The army spokesman tonight announced ... that no army unit was involved in the operation.

This may be taken as a decisive proof that we have decided to pass on to a general bloody offensive on all fronts: yesterday Gaza, today something on the Jordanian border, tomorrow the Syrian DMZ, and so on. In the Cabinet meeting tomorrow, I will demand that the killers be put on trial as criminals.

32 ---- March 8, 1955

[While Purim festivities are being celebrated in the streets of Tel Aviv] The radio is broadcasting cheerful music ... some of which expresses much talent, spiritual grace and longing for original beauty. I meditated on the substance and destiny of this People who is capable of subtle delicacy, of such deep love for people and of such honest aspiration for beauty and nobility, and at the same time cultivates among its best youth youngsters capable of calculated, cold-blooded murder, by knifing the bodies of young defenseless Beduin. Which of these two biblical souls will win over the other in this People?

32 ---- March 10, 1955

Finally the four boys have been consigned to the police but now they refuse to talk. ... I phoned Ben Gurion. ... “It’s their legitimate right,” he said. ... [He added} that their confession to the army cannot serve for their incrimination by a civilian court. From a juridical viewpoint this may be so, but from a public point of view this is a scandal.

33 ---- March 28, 1955

The British ambassador, Nichols, expressed ... his surprise at the release of the four. According to him, Jordanians arrested the murderer of the couple in Ajur. ... What a contrast between their step and the shameful procedure adopted by us! ... Kesseh [the Secretary general of Mapei] learned from his son [a senior army officer] that the operation had been carried out with the full knowledge of the army, on all levels, including the Chief of Staff and in it were involved senior officers.

33 ---- January 11, 1961

The phenomenon that has prevailed among us for years and years is that of insensitivity to acts of wrong ... to moral corruption. ... For us, an act of wrong is in itself nothing serious: we wake up to it only if the threat of a crisis or a grave result — the loss of a position, the loss of power or influence — is involved. We don’t have a moral approach to moral problems but a pragmatic approach to moral problems. ... Once, Israeli soldiers murdered a number of Arabs for reasons of blind revenge ... and no conclusion was drawn from that, no one was demoted, no one was removed from office. Then there was Kafr Qasim ... those responsible have not drawn any conclusions. This, however, does not mean that public opinion, the army, the police, have drawn no conclusion, their conclusion was that Arab blood can be freely shed. And then came the amnesty for those of Kafr Qasim, and some conclusions could be drawn again, and I could go on like this.

37 ---- January 14, 1955

Isser [Harel, head of the Shin Bet] told me hair-raising stories about a conversation which Givli initiated with him proposing to abduct Egyptians not only from the Gaza Strip but also in Cypress and Europe. He also proposed a crazy plan to blow up the Egyptian Embassy in Amman in case of death sentences in the Cairo trial.

39 ---- March 1, 1955

I am shocked. The number [of Egyptian victims (39 dead and 30 wounded, including a seven-year-old boy.) changes not only the dimensions of the operation but its very substance; it turns it into an event liable to cause grave political and military complications and dangers. ... The army spokesman, on instructions from the Minister of defense, delivered a false version to the press: a unit of ours, after having been attacked supposedly inside our territory, returned the fire and engaged a battle which later developed as it did. Who will believe us?

41 ---- May 26, 1955

We do not need (Dayan said) a security pact with the U.S.: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action which we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn’t carry out if we were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph ... they make it possible for us to maintain a high level of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we would have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost. We have to cry out that the Negev is in danger, so that young men will go there. ...

The conclusions from Dayan’s words are clear: The State has no international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is nonexistent. ... It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Towards this end it may, no — it must — invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge. ... And above all — let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space. (Such a slip of the tongue: Ben Gurion himself said it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.)

44 ---- March 27, 1955

The defense minister’s proposal is that Israel declare invalid the armistice agreement with Egypt, and thus resume its “right” to renew the (1948-49) war. ... I have condemned the twisted logic in Ben Gurion’s reliance on the violation of the armistice agreement by Egypt, in order to justify the declaration on our part that this agreement does not exist any more and thus we are allowed to resume the war. ... Let us assume that there are 200,000 Arabs [in the Gaza Strip]. Let us assume that half of them will run or will be made to run to the Hebron Hills. Obviously they will run away without anything and shortly after they will establish for themselves some stable environment, they will become again a riotous and homeless mob. It is easy to imagine the outrage and hate and bitterness and the desire for revenge that will animate them. ... And we shall still have 100,000 of them in the Strip, and it is easy to imagine what means we shall resort to in order to repress them and what waves of hatred we shall create again and what kind of headlines we shall receive in the international press. The first round would be: Israel aggressively invades the Gaza Strip. The second: Israel causes again the terrified flight of masses of Arab refugees.

44 ---- March 29, 1955

What we succeeded in achieving ... in 1948, cannot be repeated whenever we desire it. Today we must accept our existing frontiers and try to relax the tensions with our neighbors to prepare the ground for peace and strengthen our relations with the Powers. ... Finally I proved that the occupation of the Gaza Strip will not resolve any security problem, as the refugees ... will continue to constitute the same trouble, and even more so, as their hate will be rekindled ... by the atrocities that we shall cause them to suffer during the occupation.

What Price Israel?

30 ---- Report Unacceptable to Zionists

But a Palestine which guarded “the rights and interests of Moslems, Jews and Christians alike,” was never acceptable to Zionists. To the leaders of political Zionism, nationalist politics were immeasurably more important than humanitarian concerns. For indeed, Zionism has never been refugeeism and refugeeism never Zionism.

40 ---- Jewish Terrorist Gangs Spring Up in Palestine

The Holy Land soon became an armed camp. The Arab Higher Committee was buying arms for its adherents. On the Jewish side, there was not only the Haganah (the more restrained and semi-official army of the Jewish Agency) but also the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the terrorist group which, since 1943, had been bombing Government buildings and installations.

The most vicious of the illegal bands was the Stern Gang which had broken away from the Irgun. Throughout World War II, its members engaged in a series of outrages, climaxed by the assassination of the British Minister of State for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo in November, 1944.

41, 42 ---- King David Hotel Blown Up: American Jews React

The tactics of the British in Palestine were compared with those used for a long time against Ireland’s fighters for freedom. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and the mob hanging of two British sergeants brought this hussah from Hollywood’s Ben Hecht: “Every time you let go with your guns at the British betrayers of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.”

52 ---- Accomplishments of the Terrorists

Judah Magnes’ commentary on the accomplishments of these terrorists will never be forgotten: “We had always thought that Zionism would diminish anti-Semitism in the world. We are witness to the opposite.” And indeed, in England, where there had never been even social discrimination against British Jewry, prejudices flared. Anti-Jewish outbreaks rose with the succession of British casualties in Palestine. The police were forced to guard British synagogues. three British police were killed by a bomb in London.

102, 103 ---- Pick a Sweet-Sounding Name and They Will Come

The success of any extremist movement in this country can, at least in part, be traced to the weakness of “prominent” Americans to join promiscuously any organization smart enough to pick a sweet-sounding name. the Reception Committee for Mr. Menachem Begin was just such an organization. ...

The invitations, calling upon the recipient to add his name to the list of distinguished Americans welcoming Menachem Begin to the United States said:

As Commander-in-Chief of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, he led one of the most glorious and successful resistance movements in history. A little defenseless community, a people who, in the course of almost two thousand years of dispersion, had lost the art of military defense, was transformed under the miracle of his leadership into a fighting and heroic nation. It was through the Hebrew Underground under his command that the hitherto pariah people of the world, the Jews, won back their dignity and self-respect and the respect of the civilized world. It was because of the valiant fight waged by the Irgun that the whole structure of the British regime in Palestine collapsed, making possible the proclamation of Hebrew sovereignty and the establishment of the State of Israel.

103, 104 ---- Begin’s Visa Application Rejection Overruled

The two-page letter neglected to mention that Mr. Begin had publicly claimed credit for such deeds as the blowing up of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, placing a time bomb in the British Colonial Office in London, the garroting and hanging of the two British sergeants at Nathanya, and the massacre of Arab women and children at Deir Yassin. ...

Begin’s record was well known in the State Department. Consequently, his visa application was rejected by two intelligent and competent officials — the Director of the Office of Near Eastern, South Asian, and African Affairs, and the Chief of the Visa Division. But from Key West, where President Truman was vacationing after his election victory, came a presidential order to grant the visa.

106, 107 ---- US Press Quizzes Menachem Begin on His Past Activities

Meanwhile, Mr. Begin was touring the United States, meeting with financial advisers and holding sensational press interviews. Questioned about the bombing of the King David Hotel, the Irgun leader laid the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the British Palestine Administrator, “who,” he declared, “had been warned of the bombing and had refused to evacuate the hotel.” (To Walter Deuel, of the Chicago Daily News, Begin confided that the British had all of thirty minutes in which to evacuate their headquarters). Mr. begin also belittled the charge that he had been a deserter from the Polish Army and a Soviet agent in Spain and China before going to Palestine. While in the United States, and later in his book, Begin ridiculed the accusation that 250 Arab inhabitants of Deir Yassin had been massacred. (This slaughter had brought forth, at the time, an apology from Premier Ben-Gurion to King Abdullah and a statement from the Jewish Agency that it deplored “the commission of such brutalities by Jews as utterly repugnant.”) He claimed that this “atrocity charge” was a combined Zionist-Arab propaganda story — quite a trick for warring nations. But throughout The Revolt, Begin boasts of the daring deeds he committed. he refers to “the military victory at Deir Yassin” and admits that the subsequent wild tales of Irgun butchering resulted in the “maddened, uncontrollable stampede of 635,000 Arabs. ... The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”

Every Spy a Prince

37, 38 ---- Iraqi Jews Convicted of Sabotage and Synagogue Bombing

The Iraqis arrested some one hundred Jews, one after another, and seized a huge cache of arms. Twenty Iraqi Jews were convicted in November 1951, and two were hanged. Tajar was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was deported nine years later, however, after Mossad agents established contact with the new Iraqi ruler, Colonel Abdel Karim Qassem, and secured Tajar’s freedom in exchange for information on plots by Iraqi dissidents against Qassem.

Among other crimes, the defendants were convicted of four acts of sabotage. One was a bombing that caused minor damage to the U.S. embassy’s public information center. The biggest and most surprising attack was a grenade explosion in the Masouda Shemtov Synagogue in Baghdad while hundreds of Jews were praying. Four congregants, including a twelve-year-old boy, were killed , and around twenty were injured.

The astounding accusation that an Israeli spy network had bombed a synagogue shocked Iraqi Jews. Rumors circulated among Iraqi immigrants to Israel, who suddenly suspected that their departures may have been hastened by Israeli agents waging terrorism. The Iraqis in Israel were already disgruntled, blaming the European-born leadership of the Jewish state for thrusting them into primitive tents and huts with little hope of decent housing or employment. The new Sephardic — “Oriental” — immigrants felt humiliated to be sprayed with insecticide and given no freedom of choice. The Ashkenazic, or European Jewish, politicians appeared too busy congratulating themselves on the good deed they had done by saving Iraqi Jewry to do anything concrete for them on the ground.

The Lobby: Jewish political power and american foreign policy

39, 40 ---- The Kibya Atrocity

American Jews had treated the attack as a “reprisal,” excessive, but understandable considering the Arab threats to the well-being of Jewish settlers along the Jordanian border. In his 1981 memoir, Kenen still portrays the attack as a justifiable response of Israeli civilians to a brutal murder, which remains the Israeli government’s official explanation for the Kibya raid. That Ben-Gurion got away with such an explanation, however, surprised even members of his own Cabinet, who were aware that a U.N. group visiting the scene had quickly discovered what the Israeli ministers had known from the start. Kibya was a massive military operation by the Israeli Army in a demilitarized zone and thus a clear violation of the 1949 U.N. armistice between Israel and its Arab enemies.

More than 250 soldiers had invaded the village firing heavy mortars and automatic weapons. The Israelis dynamited forty-one homes and one school; fifty-three civilians died. According to a report prepared by the U.N.’s armistice commission, the fighting lasted seven hours. It was also more than an isolated act of revenge. Memoirs and U.S. intelligence reports since declassified portray the raid as one of the earliest successes of a new commando unit specializing in nighttime fighting and demolition. At the time of the raid Moshe Dayan was acting chief of staff. The unit’s commander was a brash, aggressive major named Ariel Sharon.

43 ---- Israeli Spies and Saboteurs Arrested by Egyptians

In October, the Egyptians announced they had rounded up a ring of Israeli spies and saboteurs who had been involved in a series of bombings and arson attempts against Egyptian, British, and American targets, including the U.S. Information Agency offices in Cairo and Alexandria, which were damaged by fire bombs. The Egyptians charged that Israeli intelligence was behind it all with the aim to poison relations between the U.S. and Egypt, in line for some military aid from the Eisenhower administration. The Sharett government denied any involvement, and denounced the Egyptian claim as a fabrication.

The Egyptians held a public trial of the eleven suspects. With members of the international diplomatic corps and Western human rights organizations in attendance, eight of the defendants were convicted, and two of them — Egyptian Jews — were sentenced to death. (one had committed suicide in prison.) On January 31, the two convicts were hanged.

45 ----- Israeli Army Reservists Murder Bedouin Boys

On March 5 and 6, 1955 — while the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations was still meeting in the Shoreham Hotel in Washington — Sharett was scribbling in his diary about Israeli terrorism of “the worst type.” A group of army reservists avenged the murder of an Israeli couple, later confessing to army authorities that they had rounded up five Bedouin boys, interrogated them about the murders, and knifed each of them to death. Publicly, the Army had denied any involvement.

The Fateful Triangle: the united states, israel & the palestinians

12 ---- A Religious Duty to Destroy Non-Jewish Inhabitants

The settlers, he [a staff writer for Ha’aretz (essentially, the Israeli New York Times)] adds, are “Religious Jews who follow a higher law and do whatever their rabbis tell them. At least one of the Gush Emunim rabbis has written that it is a mitzvah [religious duty] to destroy Amalek [meaning, the non-Jewish inhabitants], including women and children. The Ha’aretz journalist adds that his journal has “a file of horror stories reported to us by soldiers returning from occupation duty in the West Bank. We can refer to them in general terms — we can rail against the occupation that destroys the moral fibre and self-respect of our youth — but we can’t print the details because military censorship covers actions by soldiers on active duty.

15, 16 ---- Charge of ‘Anti-Semitism’ or ‘Jewish Self-Hatred’ Device to Silence Critics

It might be noted that the resort to charges of “anti-Semitism” (or in the case of Jews, “Jewish self-hatred”) to silence critics of Israel has been quite a general and often effective device. Even Abba Eban, the highly-regarded Israeli diplomat of the Labor Party (considered a leading dove), is capable of writing that “One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism [generally understood as criticism of policies of the Israeli state] is not a distinction at all,” and that Jewish critics (I. F. Stone and I are specifically mentioned) have a “basic complex ... of guilt about Jewish survival.” Similarly Irving Howe, typically without argument, simply attributes Israel’s dangerous international isolation to “skillful manipulation of oil” and that “sour apothegm: In the warmest of hearts there’s a cold spot for the Jews” — so that it is quite unnecessary to consider the impact of the policies of the Labor government that he supported, for example, the brutality of the occupation, already fully apparent and sharply condemned in Israel when he wrote.

The Perlmutters deride those who voice “criticism of Israel while fantasizing countercharges of anti-Semitism,” but their comment is surely disingenuous. The tactic is standard. Christopher Sykes, in his excellent study of the pre-state period, traces the origins of this device (“a new phrase in Zionist propaganda”) to a “violent counterattack” by David Ben-Gurion against a British court that had implicated Zionist leaders in arms-trafficking in 1943: “henceforth to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic.” It is, however, primarily in the post-1967 period that the tactic has been honed to a high art, increasingly so, as the policies defended became less and less defensible.

20 ---- Israel Attempts to Blame Egypt For Terrorist Attacks

A third threat from which the region must be “defended” is the indigenous one: the threat of radical nationalism. It is in this context that the U.S.-Israel “special relationship” has matured. In the early 1950s, the U.S.-Israel relationship was decidedly uneasy, and it appeared for a time that Washington might cement closer relations with Egyptian President Nasser, who had some CIA support. These prospects appeared sufficiently worrisome so that Israel organized terrorist cells within Egypt to carry out attacks on U.S. installations (also on Egyptian public facilities) in an effort to drive a wedge between Egypt and the U.S., intending that these acts would be attributed to ultranationalist Egyptian fanatics.

31, 32 ---- Israel Granted Unique Immunity From Criticism in Media

The truth of the matter is that Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship, consistent with its unique role as a beneficiary of other forms of American support. We have already seen a number of examples and many more will appear below. Two examples noted earlier in this chapter offer a clear enough indication of this immunity: the Israeli terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities and other public places in Egypt (the Lavon affair), and the attack on the unmistakably identified U.S. Liberty with rockets, aircraft cannon, napalm, torpedoes and machine guns, clearly premeditated, leaving 34 crewmen dead and 75 wounded in “the Navy’s bloodiest ‘peacetime’ international incident of the 20th century.” In both cases, the general reaction of the press and scholarship has been silence or misrepresentation. Neither has entered history as a deplorable act of terrorism and violence, either at the time or in retrospect.

96, 97 ---- False Claims That Arab Leaders Ordered Flight of Palestinians

For many years it was claimed that the Palestinians fled in 1948 on the orders of Arab leaders. The basis for this claim was undermined by Erskine Childers in 1961, though one hears it still. In fact, it seems the Arab leadership tried to prevent the flight, which was encouraged by Israeli terror and psychological warfare, sometimes direct expulsion. Additional thousands of Arabs — citizens of Israel, in this case — were expelled from Israel’s Galilee region during the attack on Egypt in 1956, and hundreds of thousands more fled or were expelled from the conquered territories during and after the 1967 war. In a detailed investigation of the refugee flight, W. W. Harris estimates that of a pre-war population of about 1.4 million, approximately 430,000 left their homes from June to December 1967 (most of them in June), with considerable variation among regions (over 90% of the 100,000 people in the Golan Heights fled, but less than 20% of the 400,000 residents of the Gaza Strip, with other local variations). High population losses in some areas resulted from “a legacy of assorted fears,” for example, in the vicinity of Qibya, where Israeli forces commanded by Ariel Sharon had conducted a major massacre in 1953 (see pp. 383f.). Israeli hawks on occasion threaten a new expulsion if the Arabs do not mind their manners, as when Defense Minister Sharon warns that “the Palestinians should not forget 1948.” “The hint is clear,” Ammon Kapeliouk comments, citing Sharon’s statement.

98 ---- Nahum Goldmann Critical of Use of Holocaust to Justify Atrocities and Murder

As for Nahum Goldmann, he became President of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968 but remained critical of Israel’s diplomacy, including its entry into the Cold War system on the side of the U.S. and its post-1967 rejectionism. He was also critical of the tactic of converting the holocaust into a device to justify atrocities and murder. At the beginning of the Jewish New Year, in October 1981, he wrote:

We will have to understand that Jewish suffering during the Holocaust no longer will serve as a protection, and we certainly must refrain from using the argument of the Holocaust to justify whatever we may do. To use the Holocaust as an excuse for the bombing of Lebanon, for instance, as Menachem Begin does, is a kind of “Hillul Hashem” [sacrilege], a banalization of the sacred tragedy of the Shoah [Holocaust], which must not be misused to justify politically doubtful and morally indefensible policies.

123 ---- ‘Religious’ Settlers in the West Bank

The religious settlers in the West Bank, operating freely with army support, take pride in creating a pogrom-like atmosphere among the Arabs, who must be trained not to “raise their heads,” this being the only way to treat Arabs, who “adore power” and will live in peace with the Jews only when “we show him that we are strong.” How? “We enter a village, shoot a bit at windows, warn the villagers and return to the settlement. We don’t kidnap people, but it can happen that we catch a boy who had been throwing stones, take him back with us, beat him a bit and give him over to the Army to finish the job.” The same West Bank settler also explains how official investigators act to protect Jews who shoot to hit and to kill (including firing at children). This particular interview ended because the settler — a friend of the journalist — “was in a hurry to get back home before the Sabbath.”

123, 124 ---- Settlers’ Justification: ‘It’s In The Book!’

The settlers are quite open about the measures they take towards Arabs and the justification for them, which they find in the religious law and the writings of the sages. In the journal of the religious West Bank settlers we find, for example, an article with the heading “Those among us who call for a humanistic attitude towards our [Arab] neighbors are reading the Halacha [religious law] selectively and are avoiding specific commandments.” The scholarly author cites passages from the Talmud explaining that God is sorry he created the Ishmaelites, and that the Gentiles are “a people like a donkey.” the law concerning “conquered” peoples is explicit, he argues, quoting Maimonides on how they must “serve” their Jewish conquerors and be “degraded and low” and “must not raise their heads in Israel but be conquered beneath their hand ... with complete submission.” Only then may the conquerors treat them in a “humane manner.” “There is no relation,” he claims, “between the law of Israel [Torat Yisrael] and the atheistic modern humanism,” citing again Maimonides, who holds, “that in a divinely-commanded war [milhemet mitzvah] one must destroy, kill and eliminate men, women and children” (the rabbinate has defined the Lebanon war as such a war). “The eternal principles do not change,” and “there is no place for any ‘humanistic’ considerations.”

124, 125 ---- Jewish Settlers Above the Law in Conflicts With Arabs

When Palestinians are beaten or detained by settlers, Arab policemen are afraid to intervene. “Palestinian lawyers say: the settlements are so formidable that the Arab police and courts never dare to serve a summons or make a search, leaving settlers beyond the law when it comes to conflicts with Arabs.” The general character of the occupation is indicated by an incident in an Arab village in March 1982. Four settlers claimed that a stone was thrown at their car in this village. They fired “into the air,” shooting one boy in the arm. Another boy was kidnapped, beaten, locked in the trunk of the car, taken to a Jewish settlement and locked in a room where he was beaten “on and off during most of the day,” then taken to the military government compound in Ramallah, where the boy was held while the settlers went on their way. A standard bit of black humor in the occupied territories is that Arabs should stop flying and begin walking on the ground so they won’t be shot so often when settlers fire into the air.

Children and teenagers are often the main victims, since they are generally the ones involved in protests and demonstrations. Danny Tsidkoni reports from Gaza that informants in an Arab village told him that several very young children threw stones at a car driven by armed settlers, who broke the leg of one boy and the hand of one girl in “retaliation.” A soldier reports that 30 12-13 year-old children were lined up facing a wall with their hands up for five hours in Hebron one very cold night, kicked if they moved. He justified the punishment because they are not “all innocent lambs as they look now, with their hands up and their eyes asking pity. ... They burn and they throw stones and participate in demonstrations, and they are not less harmful than their parents.” Afterwards, the children were taken to prison at an Army camp. Parents began to arrive to find out what had happened to their children, including one old man “with the dignity of a Christian saint.” He did not ask to see his son, but only wanted to know whether he was there and to bring him a coat. “The guard at the gate simply looked him up and down, and cursing him, ordered him to leave.” The old man stood all night waiting, in the freezing cold. In another case, a settler suspected of murdering an Arab boy “already had a criminal record for breaking the arm of an eleven-year-old boy who allegedly had thrown a stone at an Israeli vehicle.

The aged are also not spared. “For five days an elderly Arab woman has lain unconscious in a Jerusalem hospital after being brutally beaten in the small flat in which she lives with her husband in the Muslim quarter of the Old City.” She was attacked by religious Jews from a nearby Yeshiva [religious school] while her 85-year-old husband was praying in the Al Aqsa mosque. He heard that Jewish settlers had killed his wife, rushed home, but could not enter his apartment because, he said, “the Jews were on the roof of our building hurling bricks and bottles.” An Arab youth who tried to save the woman was also brutally beaten, and lies next door in the hospital. He “identifies his attackers as the Jewish zealots from the Yeshiva.” They “scarcely bothered to deny the attack.” When questioned about it, “an American zealot blandly talked of the need to cleanse the area of ‘terrorists.’ ”

126, 127 ---- Torture ‘Appears to Be Sanctioned’ As Policy

In the case of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, particular care has been taken to ensure that little is known here, though it has become more difficult over the years to meet this requirement. One interesting example was the unusually careful study conducted by the London Sunday Times Insight team which, after a lengthy investigation, found evidence of torture so widespread and systematic that “it appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy,” perhaps “to persuade Arabs in occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively.” The study was offered to the New York Times and Washington Post but rejected for publication and barely reported. A study by the Swiss League for the Rights of Man (June 1977), presenting similar material, received no notice here. The same is true of reports of torture by Israeli journalists. Various Israeli rebuttals were published though not, to my knowledge, the devastating Sunday Times response.

128 ---- 20% of the Arab Population ‘Has Passed Through Israeli Jails’

Quite apart from alleged torture under interrogation, the conditions of Arab political prisoners are horrifying, not a great surprise, perhaps, when we consider the scale of arrests in the occupied territories: some 200,000 security prisoners and detainees have passed through Israeli jails, almost 20% of the population, which has led to “horrendous overcrowding” and “appalling human suffering and corruption.”

129 ---- Defense Minister Sharon Urged Soldiers to Beat Arab Schoolchildren

According to the Jerusalem Post, “a military court has allegedly heard evidence that Defense Minister Ariel Sharon urged Israeli soldiers to beat Arab schoolchildren in the West Bank,” referring to the same trial of soldiers “accused of brutally mistreating Arab youths in Hebron last March,” a trial that “has attracted almost no publicity in Israel” — though it did shortly after. The source is a major in the reserves who told the court that the military governor had quoted Sharon to this effect. At the trial, soldiers reportedly told the court that they had beaten Arab high school students while the major stood by and watched, hitting them as hard as they could.

129, 130 --- Orders to Brutalize Prisoners Came From Chief of Staff

The trial of the soldiers did receive publicity later on, particularly when the defense established its claim that the orders to brutalize prisoners and impose collective punishments came directly from Chief of Staff Eitan. He was called to testify before the military court and confirmed that he had ordered such punishments as expulsion, harassment of inciters, the establishment of detention or exile camps “even without regular prison conditions” (which are grim enough), and a wide variety of collective punishments against towns where there had been resistance to the conquerors (primarily, stone throwing) and against families of pupils who “caused disturbances” (this device “works well with Arabs,” he testified). The Chief of Staff opposed calling leaders in for warnings. “We demean ourselves,” he said: “Instead of conversations, we should carry out arrests.” He also said that Jewish settlers must travel armed and feel free to open fire when attacked, say, by children throwing stones. The military court sentenced four soldiers to several months imprisonment, but ruled that Eitan’s orders were legal.

130, 131 ---- Holocaust ‘Commemoration’ Part of Collective Punishment Forced on Prisoners

Aharon Bachar writes of “the things that are being done in my name and in yours”: “we will never be able to escape the responsibility and to say that we did not know and we did not hear.” He describes a meeting between Labor Alignment leaders (including some of the most noted hawks, such as Golda Meir’s adviser, Israel Galili) and Menachem Begin, where they presented to Begin “detailed accounts of terrorist acts [against Arabs] in the conquered territories.” They described the “collective punishment in the town of Halhul,” in these words:

The men were taken from their houses beginning at midnight, in pajamas, in the cold. The notables and other men were concentrated in the square of the mosque and held there until morning. Meanwhile men of the Border Guards [noted for their cruelty] broke into houses, beating people with shouts and curses. During the many hours that hundreds of people were kept in the mosque square, they were ordered to urinate and excrete on one another and also to sing Hatikva [“The Hope,” the national anthem of Israel] and to call out “Long Live the State of Israel.” Several times people were beaten and ordered to crawl on the ground. Some were even ordered to lick the earth. At the same time four trucks were commandeered and at daybreak, the inhabitants were loaded on the trucks, about a hundred in each truck, and taken like sheep to the Administration headquarters in Hebron. On Holocaust Day, the 27 of Nissan [the date in the Jewish calendar], the people who were arrested were ordered to write numbers on their hands with their own hands, in memory of the Jews in the extermination camps.

The report continues, detailing how prisoners are beaten, tortured and humiliated, how settlers are permitted into the prisons to take part in the beating of prisoners, how the settlers brutalize the local inhabitants with impunity, even in the case of a settler who killed an Arab, whose identity is known, but who is not arrested. All legitimate, presumably, by the standards of the New Republic, as quoted above. the same correspondent reports similar stories a few weeks earlier, presented to top government officials who did not even take the trouble to check the information, provided by an Israeli soldier.

132 ---- Writing ID Numbers on Arms of Prisoners ‘Common Practice’

Writing identification numbers on the arms of prisoners is a practice that many have naturally found particularly shocking. It is apparently common, and the circumstances just described are not unique. Peace Now military officers describing the daily “brutality and violence” of the IDF and the settlers in the territories, the “repression, humiliation, maltreatment and collective punishment,” report that soldiers regularly write the numbers of Arab IDs on the wrists of Arab prisoners, and one recalls a particularly “appalling incident” of this sort that he witnessed — again, on the Day of the Holocaust. Another describes an incident in which a group of fresh recruits were issued clubs and told: “Boys, off you go to assault the locals.” He describes the treatment of Arab prisoners, who are required to clean the soldiers’ rooms, mess halls and latrines. “At night, they are put into a small room and beaten up” so badly that “many of them cannot even stand up” — “youngsters, ... most of whom have not been tried, people who will be released due to lack of evidence.” Aharon Geva writes in Davar that “Some of us Israelis behave like the worst kind of anti-Semites, whose name cannot be mentioned here, like the very people who painted a picture of the Jew as a sub-human creature. ... In fact, what has been happening in the occupied territories for many years is all too familiar from Jewish history.

133 ---- And In the Golan Heights . . .

The press reported many more details, for example, the case of a three-year-old boy who was beaten with a club by a soldier after he threw an Israeli ID card to the floor; his mother was shot when she came to his aid. The national water company reduced water supplies. Jewish settlements (including kibbutzim) complained because they were deprived of their normal workforce of Golan Druze. A lead article in Ha’aretz observed that there was no protest in the Knesset apart from Rakah (Communist) and that editors did not protest the prohibition of entry of journalists. “In the general Israeli Jewish public the indifference is shocking. Only some few hundreds of meters away from the besieged Druze village, young Israelis enjoy the sun, take photos in the snow, eat and gossip. On one side, barbed wire and human beings in a cage, on the other, people skiing, going up and down in lifts. In the middle, the Israeli Army.

136, 137 ---- Arab Intellectuals Kept ‘On a Short Leash’

The three [West Bank] editors were confined to their West Bank villages three years ago, he [David Richardson] reports. No reason was given. None of them had ever been accused of any crime, and the security services refused to provide their lawyers with any charges. As editors, they are responsible for what appears in their journals, published in Jerusalem, but they are unable to see these journals, since distribution is forbidden in the West Bank areas where they are confined: “the Kingdom of the Absurd.” “If this were happening to Jewish journalists, we would be raising a cry to the heavens,” he observes, “but here we accept it all peacefully. What is so terrible? Is anyone being killed?” The technique of the occupation, in this case, is “to keep them on a short leash,” not to act brutally, but to make sure that they recognize always “that the whip is held over their heads.”

The treatment of the editors of the Jerusalem journal Al Fajr illustrates what Arab intellectuals may expect if they “raise their heads,” in the terminology of the West Bank settlers — if they try to act with a measure of intellectual independence. One was picked up by the police and kept in solitary confinement for 17 days. He was made to stand for 24 hours with a bag over his head and his arms bound, until he fainted. He was then charged with possessing two copies of a PLO journal. A second has been prevented for a year from visiting the occupied territories, where his family and friends live and where his professional responsibilities are focused. A third was kept in jail for a week for failure to change the license on a new car. A fourth was confined for two and a half years in Ramallah. The journal is subjected to heavy censorship, often not permitted to republish material from the Hebrew or more conformist Arabic press. It is even prevented from publishing factual information about such matters as the opening of a school that had been closed, or events in the occupied territories. Journalists from Al Fajr are continually taken for interrogation, degraded, threatened, arrested. “If things like this happened to your journalists,” one editor said to an Israeli reporter, “all the world would respond with great anger. You shout about the suppression of intellectuals in the USSR, but you close your eyes to what is happening to the intellectuals in the West Bank, right under your noses.”

141 ---- Child Labor

This only skims the surface. There is also, for example, the issue of child labor, of children aged six or seven trucked in by labor contractors at 4 A.M. to work on private or collective farms for “a meager subsistence wage,” though “often they are cheated on that.”

154 ---- Bible Tells How to Deal With Palestinians

In the mass-circulation journal Yediot Ahronot in 1974, Menahem Barash wrote with much admiration about the teachings of Rabbi Moshe Ben-Zion Ushpizai of Ramat-Gan, who used biblical texts and traditional commentary to explain how Israel should deal with the Palestinians, “a plague already written in the Bible.” “With a sharp scalpel and convincing logic” the Rabbi uses the writings of the “greatest sages” to elucidate the commandments, still binding today, as to how to “inherit the land” that was promised by God to Abraham. We must follow the doctrines of Joshua, he explains, referring to the genocidal texts that appear in the book of Joshua and elsewhere. “The biblical commandment is to conquer the land of Israel in its detailed borders, to take possession of it and to settle it.” It is “forbidden” to “abandon it to strangers” (Gentiles). “There is no place in this land for the people of Israel and for other nations alongside it. The practical meaning of [the commandment to] possess the land is the expulsion of the peoples who live in it” and who try to prevent the Jews of the world from “settling in our land.” It is “a holy war, commanded in the Bible,” and it must be fought against Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, or any other people in the world” who seek to block the divine commandment. There can be no compromises, no peace treaties, no negotiations with “the peoples who inhabit the land.” “You shall destroy them, you shall enter into no covenant with them, you shall not pity them, you shall not intermarry with them,” the divine law dictates. Whoever stands in our way must be annihilated, the rabbi continues with his “convincing logic,” citing numerous traditional authorities. All of this is reported quite seriously, and with much respect.

166, 167 ---- Tragedy of Deir Yassin Now A Celebration

Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the ability to efface atrocity concerns Deir Yassin, where 250 people were murdered by Begin’s Irgun and LEHI in April 1948. A year later, Ha’aretz reported the “settlement festival” for religious settlers who were founding Givat Shaul Beth (now part of Jerusalem) in “the former village of Deir Yassin.” Ha’aretz reports further: “President Chaim Weizmann sent his greetings in writing ... the chief rabbis and Minister Moshe Shapira took part in the ceremony ... the orchestra of a school for the blind played. ...” In 1980, the remaining ruins were bulldozed to prepare the ground for a settlement for Orthodox Jews. Streets were named after units of the Irgun, which perpetrated the massacre, and of Palmach, the kibbutz-based strike force of Haganah, which took part in the operation but not the massacre. These units were to be “immortalized on the site,” in the words of the Israeli press. More recently, most of the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed to prepare the ground for a highway to a new Jewish settlement.

Nahum Barnea writes that “at first Deir Yassin was forgotten. Now it is celebrated.” He describes a (to him, horrifying) tour to Deir Yassin organized by the Society for the Protection of Nature, perhaps, he suggests bitterly, because “nature was the only thing not destroyed there on April 9, 1948.” the tour (an annual event) was led by a former Irgunist, who whitewashed the operation before a largely passive audience. the actual site of the village is now a mental hospital, as is the Acre prison, site of another Irgun operation.

217 ---- Extermination of the Two-Legged Beasts

The first target was the Palestinian camp of Rashidiyeh south of Tyre, much of which, by the second day of the invasion, “had become a field of rubble.” There was ineffectual resistance, but as an officer of the UN peace-keeping force swept aside in the Israeli invasion later remarked: “It was like shooting sparrows with cannon.” The 9000 residents of the camp — which had been regularly bombed and shelled for years from land, sea and air — either fled, or were herded to the beach where they could watch the destruction of much of what remained by the Israeli forces. All teenage and adult males were blindfolded and bound, and taken to camps, where little has been heard about them since.

This is typical of what happened throughout southern Lebanon. The Palestinian camps were demolished, largely bulldozed to the ground if not destroyed by bombardment; and the population was dispersed or (in the case of the male population) imprisoned. Reporters were generally not allowed in the Palestinian camps, where the destruction was worst, to keep them from witnessing what had happened and was being done. There were occasional reports. David Shipler described how after the camps were captured the army proceeded to destroy what was left. An army officer, “when asked why bulldozers were knocking down houses in which women and children were living,” responded by saying: “they are all terrorists.” His statement accurately summarizes Israel’s strategy and the assumptions that underlie it, over many years.

There was little criticism here of Israel’s destruction of the “nests of terrorists,” or of the wholesale transfer of the male population to prison camps in Lebanon and Israel — or to their treatment, discussed below. Again, one imagines that if such treatment had been meted out to Jews after, say, a Syrian conquest of Northern Israel, the reaction would have been different, and few would have hesitated to recall the Nazi monsters. In fact, we need not merely imagine. When a PLO terrorist group took Israeli teenage members of a paramilitary (Gadna) group hostage at Ma’alot, that was rightly denounced as a vicious criminal act. Since then, it has become virtually the symbol of the inhuman barbarism of the “two-legged beasts.” But when Israeli troops cart of the Palestinian male population from 15 to 60 (along with many thousands of Lebanese) to concentration camps, treating them in a manner to which we return, that is ignored, and the few timid queries are almost drowned in the applause — to which we also return — for Israel’s display of humanitarian zeal and moral perfection, while aid is increased in honor of this achievement. It is a scene that should give Americans pause, and lead them to raise some questions about themselves.

226 ---- American Nurse: ‘Israel Dropped Bombs on Everything’

An American nurse working in Beirut, who was appalled by the “watered-down descriptions in American newspapers,” reported that Israel “dropped bombs on everything, including hospitals, orphanages and, in one case, a school bus carrying 35 young schoolgirls who were traveling on an open road”; she cared for the survivors. the U.S. Navy Lieut. Commander in charge of removing unexploded ordnance in Beirut reports that “we found five bombs in an orphanage with about 45 cluster bombs in the front yard. We were called there after five children were injured and four killed.” About 3-5% of the shells and bombs failed to go off and are considered highly dangerous, he said. This particular orphanage, then, must have been heavily bombed.

232, 233 ---- ‘Liberation’: Israeli Style

A lengthy account of the experiences of one prisoner in Israel and in Ansar appears in the German periodical Der Spiegel. This man, a Lebanese Shiite Muslim (the largest religious group in Lebanon) was taken prisoner on July 2, when his village was officially “liberated” by the IDF. At 4:30 A.M. the village was awakened by loudspeakers announcing that all inhabitants from ages 15 to 75 were to gather in the village center at 5 A.M. IDF troops with tanks and armored personnel carriers surrounded the village while, to the amazement of the villagers, a network of collaborators within the village, clearly established in advance, appeared with IDF uniforms and weapons, prepared for their task, which was to select the victims. Each person received a notice, “guilty” or “innocent”; this man was “guilty,” with a written statement describing his “crime” — in Hebrew, so he never did find out what it was. The guilty were blindfolded and taken to a camp in southern Lebanon. There they were interrogated while being beaten with heavy clubs. Teachers, businessmen, students and journalists received special treatment: more severe beatings. The interrogation-beating sessions lasted from 10 minutes to half a day, depending on the whims of the liberators. Prisoners slept on the ground, without blankets in the cold nights. many were ill. They were forced to pass before Lebanese informants, and if selected, were sent to Israel.

For no reason that he could discern, this man was one of those selected. Their first stop in Israel was Nahariya, where Israeli women entered their buses, screaming hysterically at the bound prisoners, hitting them and spitting at them while the guards stood by and laughed. They were then driven to an Israeli camp where they were greeted by soldiers who again beat them with clubs. They were given dinner — a piece of bread and a tomato. Then soldiers came with four large shepherd dogs on chains, who were set upon the prisoners, biting them, while those who tried to defend themselves were beaten by soldiers. “Particularly the young boys, aged 15 and 16, began to cry from fear,” leading to further beatings.

“Each day brought with it new torture.” Many were beaten with iron bars, on the genitals, on the hands, on the soles of the feet. One had four fingers broken. This man was hung by his feet “and they used me as a punching bag.” When prisoners begged for water they were given urine, provided by the liberators. One day they were taken to the sports stadium of a nearby village where the inhabitants came to throw bottles and other objects at them. Prisoners were forced to run like cattle, beaten with clubs. Once they were made to sit for a solid week, most of the time with hands on their heads. The worst times were Friday night and Saturday, when the guards celebrated the Sabbath by getting drunk, selecting some prisoners for special punishment “to the accompaniment of laughter, full of hate.”

After the war ended this man was taken back to Lebanon, to the Ansar concentration camp, where there were about 10,000 prisoners. There the terror continued. One day they saw many Lebanese women outside the camp. They waved to them and shouted. To stop the turmoil, the guards shot in the direction of the women, and the prisoners, angered, threw stones, and were fired on directly with 28 wounded, eight seriously. One night at 1 AM, he was told that he was free; 225 men were freed, all Lebanese. he was sent to Nabatiye, where an officer told him: “We wish you all the best. We had to mete out justice. It was a long time indeed, but justice triumphed anyway.” “I do not know what he meant,” this man adds, concluding his story.

235 ---- Israeli Sources Augment Horror Stories

More information about the prisons comes from Israeli sources. Dr. Haim Gordon, an IDF educational officer, describes his visit to what he calls the Ansar “concentration camp.” Prisoners are not permitted to leave their tents, but must lie on the ground. There are no showers, in the burning July sun. “The terrible stink ‘maddens’ the Israeli guards. One prisoner is an 83-year-old man who “collaborated” with the PLO, renting a field to Palestinians who allegedly used it for an ammunition dump. He is therefore “a terrorist,” and “we must frighten him so that in the future he will not collaborate,” Gordon was informed by a guard.

Ammon Dankner reports testimony by an Israeli soldier who served as a prison guard. He too describes the terrible smell, intolerable to the Israeli guards; and “the cries of pain of those under interrogation.” He describes the pleading women who kiss your hands and show you a picture, begging you to tell them whether you have seen their husband or child, whom they have not seen or heard from for three months. And the military police officer who shoots into a crowd of prisoners (see p. 233), the blood streaming from the wounds of those who are hit, the roadblocks where you must stop and send back a woman about to give birth or an old man in terrible pain, trying to reach a hospital. And finally, the suicide of an Israeli soldier, who, it seems, could bear no more.

236 ---- Haddad Soldiers “Worse Than Border Guards,’

Even worse than the behavior of the Border Guards (with the knowledge of their officers, who did nothing) was that of the Haddad forces who had free access to this IDF base. They beat prisoners brutally, again, with the knowledge of IDF officers. In one case a young woman, “completely bound ... and crying from pain wherever they touched her,” was repeatedly raped by Haddad soldiers who also attempted to force her to copulate with a dog. Then “they returned her to imprisonment.” “Naturally there was no investigation” of what had happened within this IDF military base; the responsible IDF officers “explained to me that this is how they behave in Lebanon. ...”

236 ---- Brutal treatment of Prisoners ‘An Old [Menachem] Begin Specialty

It might be noted, incidentally, that brutal treatment of helpless prisoners is an old Begin specialty. After the Deir Yassin massacre, survivors were paraded through the streets of Jerusalem by Irgun soldiers proud of their achievement. Colonel Meir Pail, who was communications officer for the Haganah in Deir Yassin and an eye-witness, describes how Begin’s heroes loaded 25 survivors into a truck and drove them through Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem, then taking them to a quarry where they were murdered, while others were driven off to be expelled beyond Israeli lines. And after Begin’s troops had finished with their “orgy” of looting and destruction in Jaffa in April 1948, they also paraded blindfolded prisoners through the streets of Tel Aviv, “to the disgust of a large section of the public.” Many of those driven from Jaffa in 1948 found their way to the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, where their families were subjected to the gentle ministrations of Israel’s local adjuncts in September 1982.

238 ---- Veteran Saw Nothing Comparable in WWII to Destruction of Palestinian Camp

Yirmiah explained that as soon as he entered Lebanon he realized that the purpose of the military operation was not “to kill terrorists — few terrorists were killed — but to destroy the [Palestinian] camps.” After three months, virtually nothing had been done for the tens of thousands of people whose camps (actually, towns) were destroyed, and Israel refused to take any responsibility for them. Even in his service in the European theater during World War II, Yirmiah said, he saw nothing comparable to the destruction of the Ain-el-Hilweh camp. He also described his visit to one of the concentration camps for Palestinian men and boys. He saw prisoners with their hands tied beaten by soldiers, one struck repeatedly in the face with the heel of a shoe, others beaten with clubs all over their bodies — on orders, they claimed. Appeals to higher officers went unanswered.

240 ---- You Are A Nation of Monkeys! You Want A State? Build It On The Moon

Some of Yirmiah’s most terrible stories concern the prisoners. Lebanese and Palestinians were taken over and over again for “identification” before hooded informers, many from the underworld — “so that they should know what awaits a terrorist, and will be careful in the future,” the official explanation ran. He tells story after story of prisoners savagely and endlessly beaten in captivity, of torture and humiliation of prisoners, and of the many who died from beatings and thirst in Israeli prisons or concentration camps in Lebanon. On the bus trip to an Israeli prison, one 55-year-old man, a diabetic with heart disease, felt ill and asked for air; he was thrown out of the bus by a soldier, fell and died. His son heard his cries and tried to help him, but he was stopped with “severe beatings.” The son was still in Ansar, as of January 1983. The long and repeated interrogations were accompanied by constant beatings, or attacks by dogs on leashes, or the use of air rifles with bullets that cause intense pain but do not kill: “this gets all the secrets out of those under interrogation,” Yirmiah was told by an IDF officer who exhibited this useful device. New loads of clubs had to be brought into the camps to replace those broken during interrogation. The torturers were “experts in their work,” the prisoners report, and knew how to make the blows most painful, including blows to the genitals, until the prisoners confessed that they were “terrorists” — although when the Red Cross was finally permitted entry to Ansar in August, things improved somewhat. Prisoners were placed in “the hole,” a tin box too small to permit them to sit or lie down, with gravel and pieces of iron on the floor; there they would be kept for hours until they fainted and were covered with wounds on the soles of their feet. Prisoners were forced to sit with their heads between their legs, beaten if they moved, while guards shouted at them: “You are a nation of monkeys, you are terrorists, and we will break your heads: You want a state? Build it on the moon.” The stories closely resemble those told by other released prisoners, specifically, the death from beatings and harsh treatment of “at least seven prisoners” who were buried in the Muslim cemetery near Sidon.

241 ---- A Touch of ‘Humor’

On one occasion, on August 4, the IDF attempted a ground attack, but withdrew after 19 Israeli soldiers were killed. The IDF then returned to safer tactics, keeping to bombing and shelling from land and sea, against which there was no defense, in accordance with familiar military doctrine. The population of the beleaguered city was deprived of food, water, medicines, electricity, fuel, as Israel tightened the noose. Since the city was defenseless, the IDF was able to display its light-hearted abandon, as on July 26, when bombing began precisely at 2:42 and 3:38 PM, “a touch of humor with a slight hint,” the Labor press reported cheerily, noting that the timing, referring to UN Resolutions 242 and 338, “was not accidental.”

257, 258 ---- ‘Holocaust Survivor’ Protests Lebanon War

Letters appeared in the press from the generation of Holocaust survivors expressing fear and concern over what they felt was happening. One, Dr. Shlomo Shmelzman, was forbidden by the directors of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Center to conduct a hunger strike there — his son was serving with the paratroopers in Lebanon. He wrote a letter to the press announcing his hunger strike in protest against the Lebanon war.

In my childhood I have suffered fear, hunger and humiliation when I passed from the Warsaw ghetto, through labor camps, to Buchenwald. Today, as a citizen of Israel, I cannot accept the systematic destruction of cities, towns, and refugee camps. I cannot accept the technocratic cruelty of the bombing, destroying and killing of human beings. I hear too many familiar sounds today, sounds which are being amplified by the war. I hear “dirty Arabs” and I remember “dirty Jews.” I hear about “closed areas” and I remember ghettos and camps. I hear “two-legged beasts” and I remember “Untermenschen.” I hear about tightening the siege, clearing the area, pounding the city into submission and I remember suffering, destruction, death, blood and murder ... Too many things in Israel remind me of too many other things from my childhood.

364 ---- Unholy Alliances

The Phalangists appear to have been drawn largely from the Damouri Brigade, which had been operating behind Israeli lines since June. These units consisted of “some of the more extreme elements in the Christian militia,” “with a well-documented record of atrocities against Palestinian civilians,” coming from villages that had suffered brutal PLO retaliation for Phalangist massacres in 1976. the Haddad militia is “virtually integrated into the Israeli army and operates entirely under its command.”

The forces that Israel had mobilized were sent into the now defenseless camps for “mopping up” and “to clear out terrorist nests” (Sharon). For anyone with a minimal acquaintance with the circumstances, it was not hard to imagine what would happen, and by Thursday night it was clear that these expectations were being fulfilled, with ample evidence that a massacre was in progress. Throughout Thursday night, Israeli flares lighted the camps while the militias went about their work, methodically slaughtering the inhabitants. The massacre continued until Saturday, under the observation of the Israeli military a few hundred yards away. Bulldozers were used to scoop up bodies and cart them away or bury them under rubble. One “mass grave that has been specially bulldozed” was directly below an Israeli command center, with a view from an Israeli rooftop position “directly onto the grave and the camp beyond.”

375 ---- Charge of Anti-Semitism a Reflex Action

When the reports of the massacre reached the outside world, Israel denied any knowledge of what had happened. This pretense was quickly dropped in favor of outraged denial of any responsibility. The official reaction of the government was announced on September 19, and appeared in a full page advertisement in several American newspapers. the heading was “BLOOD LIBEL,” a reference to traditional anti-Semitic incitement. It is a reflex reaction to accuse critics of Israel of anti-Semitism, a device of proven effectiveness to deflect any rational discussion of the issues; see pp. 15-6.

382, 383 ---- The Qibya Attack: Deception Used to Hide Terrorist Antics of Ariel Sharon

Peres knows, for example, that this is not the first time that an Israeli government has been forced to resort to such deceit to cover up the terrorist violence of Ariel Sharon. The first well-known occasion was in October 1953, when Unit 101 commanded by Sharon attacked the Jordanian village of Qibya in alleged “reprisal” for the killing of a mother and two children in an Israeli village. Jordan had condemned the murders and offered its cooperation to track down the criminals; the murderers had no known or suspected connection with Qibya. UN military observers who reached the scene two hours after Sharon’s commandos had finished their work described what they found: “Bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them ... Witnesses were uniform in describing their experience as a night of horror, during which Israeli soldiers moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades.”

The Qibya attack evoked harsh condemnation with even the American Jewish and strongly pro-Israel press comparing it to the Nazi massacre at Lidice; in contrast, the massacre is lauded as a major achievement in the official Israeli history of the paratroopers, which states that “it washed away the stain” of earlier defeats that the IDF had sustained in “reprisal operations.” The public stance was different. Concerned over the international reaction, Ben-Gurion, speaking in the name of the Government of Israel, rejected “the ridiculous and fantastic” claim that Israeli military units were involved in the raid; it was, he claimed, a spontaneous retaliation by “border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps,” who attacked the village of Qibya “that was one of the main centers of the murderers’ gangs,” the kind of reprisal that Israel had “feared.” Foreign Minister Sharrett was opposed to the deception, feeling that “no one in the world will believe such a story and we shall only expose ourselves as liars.”

Book Title: The Zionist Connection - what price peace?

129, 130 ---- Housing Policy in Israel

Apparently the Israeli Ministry of Housing has a special unit called “Department for the Housing of Minorities.” While the Housing Ministry is engaged in building flats for Jews only inside Jerusalem, its minorities department is doing the reverse: it “thins out” Muslims and transfers them out of Jerusalem and further, according to [Dr. Israel] Shahak:

The racist state of Israel has no human housing policy, as it exists in varying manners in the U.S.S.R., in the U.S.A., and in Britain. The State of Israel does not pretend to care about housing for a human being because he is a human being, for a poor family, or one that has many children, because decent housing is a human need. No! The State of Israel because of its Zionist aims, such as the “Judaization of the Galilee,” is carrying out two contradictory sets of policies at the same time: One of maximum care for Jews and the other of discrimination against and oppression of the “non-Jews.”

132, 133 ---- ‘Brown Jews’ Object of Discrimination

As far back as July 1951, Iraqi Jews had been holding mass demonstrations in Tel Aviv against racial discrimination. These were reported in the Alliance Review, the organ of the American Friends of the Alliance Israelite and Université, but nowhere else. Other unpleasant outbursts followed, to the point where Prime Minister Ben-Gurion felt compelled to assail “Israeli anti-Semitism” publicly. Many of the B’nei Israel sect — the brown Jews from Bombay, Rangoon and Calcutta — found themselves the object of discrimination. At one point Israel’s rabbinate even banned marriages between Indian-born Jews of this sect and Jews of other communities. When this stigma was finally removed, these particular Jews were still required to prove the purity of their forebears before marrying out of their community.

163, 164 ---- Israeli Soldiers on Rampage

Although the Arabic language is given to gross hyperboles, the following account of a Christian Arab living in occupied Jerusalem still must make the reader pause:

Early in June, 1967, the people of the West Bank of Jordan, including Jerusalem, suddenly found themselves under Israeli occupation, and the same tragedy of 1948 has been repeated. Their nationality and personality as a nation has again been the subject of doubt.

Terror reigned when the Israeli army entered Jerusalem. Looting on a large scale commenced, and ninety percent of the shops were broken into. Both military and civilian Israelis ransacked houses and emptied them of all valuables. Residents of Jerusalem did not realize at the beginning what was happening, many of them, who for the first time now seeing Israeli soldiers, mistook them for Iraqis coming to the rescue. Due to this mistake many civilians were killed in welcoming such soldiers.

For the next five days, the curfew was relaxed only two hours a day. When it was lifted, the first impression one gained when leaving his house was the vast destruction of houses and commercial centers and the number of bodies of both military and civilian Arabs that were in the streets. People were running about inquiring as to their relatives. Everyone appears to have missed somebody. In some houses the number of missing came up to ten. Hundreds of young innocent men were carried by force in trucks and detained without any offense. Their fate is still doubtful.

Arab Jerusalem was not prepared for war for the simple reason that it was thought as a holy city, the town would be spared the catastrophes of battle. Not a single sandbag was prepared and no shelters built. The civilian population was not trained for civil defense.

During the five days of fighting in Jerusalem the population could understand that it was war, but worse was coming after the fighting had stopped. Every officer and soldier acted on his own initiative and took the law into his own hand. The following are some examples of what took place.

Israeli soldiers entered the house of the Sandouka family whose head was a sick man in bed for two years. Without warning they shot dead four of his family, injured two grandchildren aged eight and twelve and a cousin who happened to have been taking shelter with them. The tragedy was completed when the head of [the] family was shot and killed and dumped over the bodies of his family.

The Hindiyeh family lost two sons aged twenty and twenty-four. When the younger brother was shot and killed at the doorstep of his house, his elder brother tried to pull him in, but he was in no better luck, and another shot penetrated his stomach. The second son could have been saved if medical attention was available. The mother tried first aid but without success and he died of hemorrhage. His mother had no water even to wash up the blood of her sons.

Two girls of [the] Khashram family, aged nineteen and twenty, were victims of Israeli cruelty. the first was hit by a shrapnel. The other sister decided to take her to the nearest first aid center and carried a white flag to show that they are innocent civilians. Immediately when they proceeded from the house, they were met by an Israeli tank which shot both sisters dead on the spot.

168 ---- Israelis Worse Than Germans

A Christian Science Monitor editorial quoted what Michael Adams had written in the Guardian Weekly, stated: “I had my ups and downs during four years of war in Germany, but the Germans never treated me as harshly as the Israelis are treating the Arabs of the Gaza Strip, the majority of whom are women and children.”

169, 170 ----- Israelis Spray Arab Crops With Defoliant to ‘Teach a Lesson to These Villagers’

Then, according to Le Nouvel Observateur and the Christian Science Monitor, the Israelis took this drastic action:

On April 18, an Israeli Piper plane overflew Akraba spraying a chemical defoliant over the villagers’ wheat fields. In one night all the wheat sown the previous December (200 hectares or 494 acres) had changed its color: the green turned brown, burnt by chemical products. . . . The Israelis do not deny these facts. They admit having sprayed the fields with chemicals, but only “to teach a lesson to these villagers” who were stubbornly continuing to work lands to which the army had forbidden them access. . . . One can’t help wondering why, in the midst of these arid hills, cultivated fields were chosen as training grounds (for the Israeli military). The answer is no mystery: the idea is to prepare for the arrival of the Israeli settlers. In any case, Akraba is not the only village of the occupied West bank where pressure is exerted on the villagers to sell their lands.

178, 179 ----- Palestinian Arabs Tortured During Interrogation

Where Shahak and Langer failed to win any meaningful media coverage on the gross maltreatment and torture of Palestinians, the London Sunday Times succeeded in its June 19, 1977, four-page spread based on the exhaustive study of its prestigious “Insight” team of Paul Eddy and Peter Gilman. Working inside the West Bank, they interviewed forty-four Palestinian Arabs who had been arrested by Israeli security forces and who stated they were tortured during interrogation to extract confessions of crimes. In twenty-two of these cases the Arabs questioned agreed to be named even though they still live under the Israeli occupation. The others asked to remain anonymous.

Corroborating the Shahak and Langer charges, The Times found that torture was so “systematic that it cannot be dismissed as a handful of ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders” and “implicated all of Israel’s security sources.” the six principal conclusions reached were:

1) Israel’s security and intelligence services ill-treat Arabs in detention.

2) Some of the ill-treatment is merely primitive prolonged beatings, for example. But more refined techniques are often used, including electric shock torture and confinement in specially constructed cells. This sort of apparatus, allied to the degree of organization evident in its application, removes Israel’s practice from the lesser realms of brutality and places it firmly in the category of torture.

3) Torture takes place in at least six centers at the prisons of the four main occupied towns of Nablus, Ramallah, and Hebron on the West Bank, and Gaza in the south; at the detention center in Jerusalem known as the Russian compound; and at a special military intelligence center whose whereabouts are uncertain, but which testimony suggests is somewhere inside the vast military supply base at Sarafand, near Lod Airport on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road.

4) All of Israel’s security services are implicated: the Shin Beth, roughly Israel’s MI-5 and Special branch in one, which reports to the office of the Prime Minister, Military Intelligence, which reports to the Minister of Defense; the border police; and Latam, Israel’s “Department for Special Missions,” both of which report to the Police Minister.

5) Torture is organized methodically, It appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy.

6) Torture seems to be used for three purposes. The first is, of course, to extract information. The second motive, which seems at least as common, is to induce people to confess to “security” offenses of which they may, or may not, be guilty. The extracted confession is then used as the principal evidence in court: Israel makes something of the fact that it has few political prisoners in its jails, only those duly convicted according to the law. The third purpose is to persuade Arabs in the occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively.

364, 365 ---- Israelis Seek to Destroy U.S., Egyptian Relations With Violence

The situation [improving relations between the U.S. and Egypt] was viewed in high Israeli quarters as a grave threat to the continued flow of American dollars into Israel from public, if not private sources. A direct severance of relations between Egypt and the U.S. was deemed desirable. An Israeli espionage ring was sent to Egypt to bomb official U.S. offices and, if necessary, attack American personnel working there so as to destroy Egyptian-U.S. relations and eventually Arab-U.S. ties. the creation of simulated anti-British incidents was calculated to induce the British to maintain their Suez garrison. Several bomb incidents involving U.S. installations in Egypt followed.

Small bombs shaped like books and secreted in book covers were brought into the USIA libraries in both Alexandria and Cairo. Fishskin bags filled with acid were placed on top of nitroglycerin bombs; it took several hours for the acid to eat through the bag and ignite the bomb. The book bombs were placed in the shelves of the library just before closing hours. Several hours later a blast would occur, shattering glass and shelves and setting fire to books and furniture. Similar bombs were placed in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Theater and in other American-owned business buildings.

In December two young Jewish Egyptian boys carrying identical bombs were caught as they were about to enter U.S. installations. Upon their confession, a sabotage gang of six other Jews was rounded up. Five more were implicated in the plot. The conspirators, who received sentences ranging from fifteen years to life, were the objects in the U.S. of multifold sympathetic editorials and articles. Nothing appeared in print at the time to refute the image that this had been but another Nasser conspiracy to unite his country against Israel. The cry “anti-Semitism” widely reverberated.

369 ---- ‘How Israelis Started the Terror by Post’

It took the Sunday Times of December 24, 1972 in a lengthy article, “How Israelis Started the Terror by Post,” to place the responsibility for the spate of bombs. As noted by other European observers, it was out of character for the Black September not to have claimed “credit” for these incidents, as they had done instantaneously at the time of Munich and invariably on other occasions.

With the exception of the first London bomb, which just missed detection, the bomb in the Bronx post office, and one mailed from India, which injured jeweler Vivian Prins in London, all the other numerous letter bombs sent in Europe and the U.S. to Jews and Jewish organizations were somehow intercepted or proved to be duds. In contrast, almost all of the bombs addressed to Arabs and Palestinians worked successfully. The device for these bombs is very simple, and they have been generally termed to be uniformly deadly. In the words of the police in New York regarding the Hadassah letters: “They failed to detonate even though the trigger was lying directly against the blasting cap.” And the Palestinians proved on many occasions their ability to handle infinitely more sophisticated weapons than these.

372 ---- Israelis Down Libyan Jet

Five and a half months later, on February 21, 1973, a Libyan Boeing 727 with 113 civilians aboard was callously clawed out of the sky by Israeli fighter planes over Israeli-occupied Egyptian territory of the Sinai, about twelve miles from the Suez Canal. Some 102 passengers and 8 crewmen were killed immediately or later died, including 27 women and children. The plane had overflown Cairo, losing its way in a terrible sandstorm, when it was intercepted by Israeli fighters, whom the French pilot mistook for a friendly escort of Egyptian MIGs. The aircraft had already turned around and was headed toward Cairo, nine minutes away, when it was shot down.'

389 ---- Atrocity in Lebanon

During an Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon the previous November in which more than 100 civilians were killed, a man in his sixties, as told by an American newsman, “lost everyone he had in the world at Hazziyeh — his wife, six children his brother, his brother’s wife, his brother’s four children. Numbed by grief, he walked like a robot around a Palestinian Red Crescent hospital near Tyre. He knelt among the bodies of his family, crouched over the dirty mutilated face of his smallest son, kissed him and said, ‘Darling, go. It doesn’t matter, God is great.’ ”'

This man, if possible, was perhaps more fortunate than other defenseless parents in unarmed Lebanese villages and Palestinian refugee camps upon whom, as Thomas Kiernan describes in the prologue of The Arabs, American-made Phantoms showered phosphorous bombs made of wax and acid — wax which stuck to the skin while the acid ate it away:

A human figure materialized out of the gloom, an eerie, unintelligible chant issuing from what was once its lips. Stumbling, weaving, then falling to its knees and crawling, it crept towards us. It was a child — boy or girl I couldn’t tell — and its charred skin was literally melting, leaving a trail of viscuous fluid in its wake. Its face had no recognizable features. The top of its skull shone through the last layer of scorched membrane on its head. Not more than ten yards from us it fell on its side, its kneecaps exposing like the yolks of poached eggs. It twitched once or twice in the dust, gave a final wheeze, then went still in the puddle of molten flesh that formed around it in the dust. . . . Later it was run over by a car. No one would ever know what had happened to that child.

461 ---- Holocaust Kept Alive as Weapon Used by Zionists

The holocaust is the weapon that hovers behind the cover-up and supplies the principal prop to the cover-over. When all else fails, the six million killed during the Nazi holocaust remain the ultimate silencer. These six million are quite literally pulled from the ovens, propped up, and pushed forward to confront any who might raise the slightest question or smallest voice of dissent. Even the mere threat of this suffices to silence most people. But on many occasions, the six million are ritually brought out. Silence ensues. The line is maintained. Hitler had made reluctant Zionists out of many guilt-ridden Christians and assimilated Western Jews. As Hitler exploited the Jews, it is paradoxical that certain Jews should have exploited and up to this very moment are still very much intent upon exploiting Hitler for Zionist propaganda purposes. There has been an almost continuing conspiracy, fostered by an unholy alliance between the media and the Zionists, to keep us all in the era of 1940-45.

474 ---- Media Keeps Holocaust Alive ‘Whenever Jews Will It’

As the one weapon that will never let “them” forget how “we” suffered, the holocaust continues to be immemorialized whenever Jews will it, and their multifold actions, exacted as many pounds of flesh, are never questioned.

474 ---- Holocaust Resurrected Only to ‘Prick the World Conscience Anew’

The greater the need for Israel to defend itself against pressure to yield the occupied territories, the more the holocaust was pushed before the American public. Two days before Begin’s March talks with President Carter, the Times Op-Ed piece, “Ein Volk, Ein Reich,” illustrated with a swastika, described the takeover of a suburb of Vienna, the burning of the synagogue, and other Nazi criminal actions. At a time the Middle East was in flames over the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the recital of this forty-year outdated, newsless, and unrelated incident could have had no other purpose than to prick the world conscience anew.

574, 575 ---- The Israeli Attack on the American Ship, ‘Liberty’

UPI reported on September 18, 1977, that the American Palestine Committee had obtained CIA documents through the freedom of Information Act revealing that Israeli Defense minister Moshe Dayan had himself ordered the attack on the Liberty. One document, dated November 9, 1967, released by APC Chairman Norman Dacey, quoted unnamed agency informants:

Dayan personally ordered the attack on the ship. One of his generals adamantly opposed the action and said, “This is pure murder!” One of the admirals who was present also disapproved the action, and it was he who ordered it stopped.

The sole comment from the CIA was that the documents had been “unevaluated for accuracy.” CIA Director Stansfield Turner on national television questioned the validity of the documents and asserted his belief that the Israeli attack had been an honest mistake. But the accusation leveled against Dayan jibes with the theory advanced for the Israeli attack by a national Security Agency source. The Liberty, sent to intercept details of Israeli intelligence, had learned that Dayan had ordered his victorious troops on to Damascus and Cairo, and had so informed Washington. President Johnson then brought intense pressure on Israel to halt further troop movement and at the same time warned President Kosygin against what appeared to be Soviet airborne operations aimed at Israel from bases in Bulgaria. The Liberty constituted a grave menace to the plans of Minister Dayan.

What is patently clear under any theory is that had the Israelis been successful in sinking the Liberty, the atrocity would have been blamed on the Egyptians and produced a Pearl Harbor reaction in the U.S. When the first news of the Liberty attack reached the Sixth Fleet, so certain was American reaction that it was the Egyptians who had struck, that a squadron of jets was sent in a threatening sweep over Cairo as if in a preliminary to war. Dayan in 1967 was determined to succeed where he had failed in the 1954 Lavon Affair — to shatter U.S.-Egyptian and eventually U.S.-Arab relations.