US Imperialsm for Beginners

The State of Israel—The First 25 Years

• Zionists Choose Palestine
• The Balfour Declaration
• Divide and Rule
• US Involvement
• US-Israel Mutual Assistance
• Relations with other Western Powers
• Israeli Aggression and Annexation
• Attacks on Syria and Lebanon
• Clearing the Pollution of Arab Inhabitation
• William Rogers Exacerbates US Lawlessness
• Zionist Millionaires
• Help for Israeli Militarization

Zionists Choose Palestine

To establish a Jewish state, territory was needed, but where? It worried the Zionists from the start, but they did not think only of Palestine. L Pinsker, a Zionist ideologist, wrote:

We do not have to settle at the very place where our statehood was crushed and wiped out… We want nothing but a tract of land that would be our property… We shall carry there the Holy of Holies rescued during the fall of our ancient homland—the concept of God and the Bible, for it was they, and not Jordan or Jerusalem, that made our mother country a holy land.

At the 6th Zionist Congress, in 1903, Theodor Herzl said the British government had offered Uganda as a Jewish state to be called New Palestine. British imperialism then aimed to use Jewish settlers for the colonial development of east Africa. Chaim Weizmann notes in his memoirs Jewish business circles approved of the plan, showing they did not care then that a new “mew national home for the Jews” would have no connexion with the “ancient homeland”. A Jewish national home could have been just as well established in Argentina, or Kenya, or on the Sinai—wherever imperialists wanted. But the rabbis were keen on Palestine, and, at the 7th Zionist Congress, in 1905, Palestine was chosen as the site of the Zionist Jewish state.

Since 1517 AD, Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire. Rulers of Jewish communities there had long solicited the Sultan for the land of Palestine, offering to pay a part of Turkey’s national debts, to help finance the building of a modern Turkish fleet, and to support the Sultan in international affairs. They failed. Giving up on the Sultan, they decided to suck up to the imperialist powers with an active colonial policy in the Middle East. Since then the Zionists offered their services to every colonial power, hoping to be rewarded with possession of Palestine. Not one of these imperialist powers failed to use Zionism in its colonial interests.

Before the First World War Zionist leaders relied mainly on Berlin where they were supported and financed by the banking house of Oskar Wassermann. The aggressiveness with which German imperialists were trying to get into the Middle East encouraged them more. Zionists revised their policy during the war as the prospects of a German victory dimmed with every year, pinning their hopes on Britain. Although in 1916, Berlin secured Turkey’s consent to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine under a German protectorate, it failed to sway the Zionists whose political sympathies by then were with the Entente.

The Balfour Declaration

On 2 November, 1917, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, announced in a letter to Rothschild, the banker, that His Majesty’s government regarded with favour plans for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, and was prepared to take every measure to facilitate the attainment of that goal.

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Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.

Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's government, the following declaration of sympathy. with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by the Cabinet:

His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status erjoyed by Jews in any other country.

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Your sincerely
Arthur James Balfour

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Jews were in a minority at that time in Palestine, vastly outnumbered by Arab Christians and Moslems.

Anticipating victory and an opportunity to seize Palestine, British imperialists were preparing to use Zionists for their colonialist aims. Soon after “the Jewish national home” was established in the Promised Land with the help of British imperialists and Rothschild’s money the Zionists began working to turn it into an independent Jewish state. To attain that goal they were ready to remain at the service of British imperialists, to become their outpost in the Middle East. Max Nordau, a Zionist leader in the 1920s, told the British:

We know what you expect of us. You want us to guard the Suez Canal, your route to India through the Middle East. All right, we are ready to fulfil that difficult mission. But you’ve got to help us to become a force capable of carrying out our duty to you.

Nahum Goldman, sometime president of the World Zionist Organization, repeatedly stressed:

The Zionists are ready to grant Great Britain the exclusive right to set up military bases in Palestine, including naval and air bases, on condition that Great Britain gives her consent to the establishment of a Jewish state on 65 percent of Palestinian territory.

A similar proposal was also made to the United States, if it would support and defend the Jewish state.

Divide and Rule

However, London did not intend to go too far in its “friendship” with the Zionists. When the war ended and Britain received the League of Nations mandate for Palestine, ministers began financially and politically sponsoring the emigration of Jews to the Promised Land, with the aim of using the principle of “divide and rule” on which British colonial management was based—that is, using systematic provocation of religious, intertribal and racial discord to maintain colonial domination. The British imperialist government was least of all motivated by their commitments to the Jews.

To apply their tested method in Palestine, the British had to take as many Jews as possible there and set them against the native Arab population, causing enmity between them. They gave every encouragement to Jewish settlers to buy land from ruined Arab landlords, whereupon lease holding peasants were driven off their plots. They gave opportunities to the settlers in trade, money lending and small scale industries. Thus the Jewish settlers had the money to set up enterprises and employ the impoverished Arabs, creating class antagonism between the exploters and the exploited, but they were interpreted and became national antagonisms between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous Arab poor deliberately created by the British. Thus British policy provoked acute enmity between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine, which grew into armed conflict.

British colonialists were quite satisfied to let Arab-Jewish enmity help them to suppress both the Jews and the Arabs. They were all the more interested in preserving such a state of affairs, since the stepped-up expansion of US capital in the Middle East and the growing influence of the pro American group among the Zionists worried the British seriously and made them anxious lest a sovereign Jewish state should become US oriented. The anxiety that the British felt turned out to be was well founded.

As the Anglo-American imperialist struggle for world supremacy grew more and more intense, the US monopolies were becoming increasingly interested in the rich Middle East which was also strategically important. Meanwhile, the Zionist leaders continued in vain to persuade Britain to let them establish a Jewish state on the territory of mandated Palestine. Their weightiest argument in favour of such a plan was their willingness to turn this state into a bulwark of the imperialists’ antisoviet policy. Ben-Gurion even proposed an agreement under which Britain would give her consent to the establishment of a Jewish state on a part of Palestinian territory, and the leaders of the new state would guarantee to make it a base of operations against Russia.

The British, however, were in no hurry to make concessions. They considered that a rapid growth of the Jewish population in Palestine would complicate continuance of their policy of balancing on the edge of an Arab-Jewish conflict, impede their resistance to the establishment of a Jewish state, and give the Americans an excuse for interfering in Palestinian affairs. Therefore, the British government began gradually to limit Jewish emigration to Palestine. Finally, in 1939 it decided, contrary to its previous commitments and in opposition to the Zionists’ efforts, to stop the resettlement of Jews in the Promised Land.

US Involvement

Back in 1919, US President Wilson had sent an unofficial mission to Palestine. On returning to Washington the mission recommended that the US government work towards the establishment in the Middle East of a state that would incorporate Palestine and the Lebanon, and that would be called United Syria. It was expected that the new state would be under American, and not British, control.

A member of the mission, William Yale, who represented the interests of Standard Oil, advanced a different plan. It envisaged the separation of Palestine from Syria and the establishment of an independent “national home” there for the Jews. He maintained that a Jewish state would inevitably be drawn under the control of US Jews who would bring into its life American ideals and American civilization, and that a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine would become a US outpost in the Middle East.

The Second World War weakened considerably Britain’s positions in the Middle East. This enabled the United States, as early as April 1941, to institute the American Palestine Committee which included 68 Senators and over 200 members of the House of Hepresentatives. The Committee openly called for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine. In March 1944, President Roosevelt declared that the American government had always disagreed with the British policy of obstructing the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Two months later the US Senate and the House of Hepresentatives drafted a joint resolution concerning America’s readiness to cooperate in the adoption of pertinent measures to ensure the unrestricted emigration of Jews to Palestine and to establish there a “free and democratic Jewish state”.

During the 1944 Presidential election campaign the Zionists’ demands upheld by big Jewish capitalists found their way into the campaign policy programmes of both the Republican and the Democratic parties. These demands, which concerned mostly the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state, fully accorded with the interests of US monopoly capital and, therefore, enjoyed the support of the White House.

In August 1945, President Truman requested the British government to let 100,000 Jewish emigrants into Palestine without delay. It was becoming impossible for Britain to dominate Palestine by the old methods in the face of US policy. The British government had to maintain US lease-lend to rebuild wartime damage and so had to yield to US pressure. As a consequence, in April 1947, it referred the Palestinian problem to the United Nations. In doing so, London hoped that the UN would not find a solution acceptable to both the Arabs and the Jews, and that as a result Britain would be able to consolidate her positions with regard to Palestine.

Israel Founded

On 29 November, 1947, the UN General Assembly decided, by a two thirds majority vote, that thc British mandate in Palestine should be terminated and that two independent states—Arab and Jewish—should be established on Palestinian territory.

• The Arab state, with a population of 735,000, including 10,000 Jews, was to get an area of 11,100 sq km, or 42 percent of Palestine’s territory.
• The Jewish state, with a population of 905,000, including 407,000 Arabs, was to get an area of 14,100 sq km, or 56 percent of Palestinian territory.

Two internationally administrated enclaves, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, were to be set up on the remaining two percent of the territory.

People all over the world hoped that Israel would take the road of peace and cooperation with its neighbours. Believing that this would be so and willing to respect the right of nations to self-determination, the Soviet Union also recognized the state of Israel. Zionist leaders, however, took a different road. They exploited the intense desire for independence that many Jews felt after the war, particularly immigrants from capitalist countries, to further their own political aims. They saw in the establishment of a Jewish state an opportunity to implement their far reaching expansionist plans. And so they set about turning the country into an openly militarist state pursuing a policy of annexation with the aim of creating “Greater Israel”. The Zionists made extensive use of the fact that the then reactionary Arab rulers, subservient to the imperialists, prevented the Arab people of Palestine from exercising their right to self-determination and establishing their own state on Palestinian territory in accordance with the UN decision.

To ensure their complete domination over the two prospective states, Britain and the United States provoked, in December 1947, an Arab-Jewish armed clash which grew, in early 1948, into a serious military conflict. This gave the Anglo-American imperialists the desired occasion to show “concern” and to intervene.

On 13 May, 1948, Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, was received by President Truman and secured his consent to the immediate proclamation of a Jewish state. The Zionists were prompt. The next day was the last of the British Mandate, and that same day, the Israelis proclaimed their independence, and announced the state of Israel. Before leaving the United States, Chaim Weizmann, now President of the newly born state, again visited Truman and secured more specific promises of economic and political aid which Israel would require in the first critical months. The US President guaranteed to Israel large deliveries of arms and loans for military purposes.

The outcome of the first Israeli-Arab war, which lasted up to the summer of 1949, was that Israel seized 6,600 sq km of the area meant for the Arab state in Palestine, including a part of Jerusalem (the New City). The other part of Jerusalem (the Old City) was occupied by Jordanian troops.

Thus, the decision of the UN General Assembly was never carried out.

Israel’s territory proved almost 50 percent larger than envisaged, totalling 20,700 sq km, the Arab state in Palestine was not established, and the international enclaves, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, were never formed.

During the hostilities and Zionist terror, over 900,000 people—more than 70 percent of Palestine’s Arab population—were forced to flee from their native land and become refugees. In subsequent years, Israel persistently refused to comply with the UN resolution concerning the return of the refugees to their homelands. This gave rise to the problem of Palestinian refugees and further aggravated the tense situation. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion was asked how he would deal with the Palestinians. They would be no trouble because…

…the old will die and the new generations will forget.

It was not so easy. The Palestinians did not forget. Constant oppression is a good way of reminding people of injustice. And where were the Arabs scared from their ancestral farms to go? They filled up huge refugee camps like the Jabalia camp in Gaza which housed 35,000 displaced Arabs in about half a square mile after the Arab-Israeli war, but today has 200,000 refugees in it! The refugees had no water other than that shipped in by the UN, and had to queue to use unsanitary communal toilets. A succession of wars and uprisings followed in the years since then—the Sinai War of 1956, the Six Day War of 1967, the Yom Kippur war ending in 1974, the intifada of 1987, and a further intifada in 2006.

US-Israel Mutual Assistance

From the very outset Israel’s foreign policy was directed by Washington. The United States used Israel as a sword held over the Arab world, as a weapon for struggle against the establishment of progressive regimes in some Arab countries. Since Israel was the US strategic springboard in the Middle East, the United States was lavish in its aid and support to its Zionist prot&eaute;gé. The Tel Aviv government reciprocated by flinging wide open the door to US monopolies and military establishment.

On 13 June, 1950, the United States and Israel signed an agreement under which the US Air Force was permitted to use Israeli territory. The first loans that Israel received from the United States were used to build up the Haifa harbour, to expand the Lydda air base, and to construct strategic railways. In December 1951, May 1952 and November 1953 the two countries signed agreements on US economic aid to Israel which, in return, assumed the obligation to defend together with the United States the region of the world of which Israel is a part, and to participate in measures aimed at maintaining international security. These and a number of accompanying agreements determined the diplomatic, political, economic and military cooperation between the United States and Israel by which either side tried to profit as much as it could.

Zionist leaders cynically admit that Israel is a US outpost. The leader of the Zionist Liberal Party of Israel, S Abramov, the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reports was outspoken on this score, saying:

Israel is fighting not only to defend itself but also to defend the vital interests of the West… Israeli soldiers at the Suez Canal spare the United States the need to send its own troops to that region.

It would be wrong to think that Zionism has become the cat’s-paw of US imperialism and that the Zionists have placed their entire policy and the state of Israel at its service. They uphold US interests only as long as American imperialism supports them.

Six million Jews live in the United States, a similar number to the Jewish population of Israel. Almost half of American Jews live in New York, constituting a large proportion of its population. Neither Democratic nor Republican party can afford to ignore Jewish voters, about 75 percent of whom reside in the large cities of six states which under the two-stage electoral system of the United States provide 178 electoral votes.

Relations with other Western Powers

Although Britain recognized the state of Israel only in March 1950, it had valued Israel as a partner earlier in the struggle against the national liberation movement of the peoples of the Middle East. The Anglo-Israeli rapprochement which began in connexion with the nationalization of the Suez Canal Company by Egypt soon grew into a close alliance. France had similar motives in her sympathies towards Israel, as well as Israel’s support of French anti-Arab policy in the United Nations.

Relations between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany date from 10 September, 1952, when Israel and Federal Germany signed an agreement on reparations to Israel. Nahum Goldman, President of the World Zionist Organization, played an important role in establishing negotiations with Federal Germany, and was the man through whom the German Chancellor, Dr Adenauer, transmitted to Tel Aviv his proposal to start negotiations. After the Nazi era, Federal Germany needed respectability in the eyes of the world.

From the value of the life of a victim of Nazi genocide multiplied by the number of Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis, the Zionist rulers of Israel, who had arrogated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of all Jews, agreed that the government of Federal Germany would deliver to Israel $822 million worth of commodities and extend various services over a period of 12 years. It was also agreed that Israel reserved for its citizens of Jewish nationality the right to claim individual restitution from Federal Germany. By 1965 these restitutions totalled $1,000,000,000.

Thus Federal Germany strove to achieve her moral rehabilitation, and with it to gain access to NATO membership. As for Israel, the mercenary considerations of its leaders prevailed over the moral ones. As the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, rightly noted, Zionist leaders in favour of restitutions had forgotten that German industry had made soap from their fathers' fat. The agreement on reparations and restitutions opened prospects of closer cooperation between Israel’s rulers and neo-Nazi, revanchist circles in West Germany which were then rather influential. In Federal Germany, Israel got a diplomatic supporter and a source of finance and supplies.

Israeli Aggression and Annexation

By establishing close ties with the United States and friendly relations with other imperialist countries, the Zionists could begin implementing new plans for annexation. In the summer of 1954, Moshe Dayan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army, visited the United States to discuss US military aid to Israel. In August 1954, Abba Eban, Israel’s Ambassador in the United States and then Foreign Minister, began talks with the State Department about Israel’s military obligations to the United States, and US guarantees of Israel’s security. These talks lasted eighteen months.

Relying on those guarantees, Zionist fanatics decided, in early 1955, to escalate Israeli-Arab border clashes to large scale military operations. In the spring of 1956, speaking at the Knesset Ben Gurion declared that war against the Arab states was inevitable. Israel had been prepared, with the help of the United States and other imperialist powers, for a war of aggression, and in the autumn of 1956 the Zionist rulers took advantage of the joint Anglo-French action against Egypt to attack that country.

Joint Anglo-Franco-Israeli aggression against Egypt began on 29 October, 1956 following nationalization of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian government. The aggression was marked by exceptional cruelty towards the peaceful Egyptian population. The United Nations and the world progressive forces resolutely condemned the aggression. Under the pressure of world public opinion and owing to the firm stand on that question taken by the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, the Zionist invaders were forced to obey the UN Security Council resolution and on 7 March, 1957 withdrew their troops from the Gaza strip.

Encouraged by the imperialist powers and actively supporting their aggressive policies in the Middle East, Israel was responsible for the mounting tension in that part of the world. In the autumn of that year, Israel was ready to take part in the armed intervention the United States had planned against Syria with the use of Turkish and Israeli armed forces. And Israel had a hand in the Anglo-American armed intervention against the Lebanon and Jordan in the summer of 1958.

While perpetrating acts of aggression and planning new annexation of Arab territory, Zionist organizations in Israel and elsewhere conducted a broad propaganda campaign to justify their actions. Addressing Israeli servicemen in October 1958, the member of the Knesset, Menachem Begin, leader of the fascistic Herut party of the most reactionary Zionist circles, said:

You are Israelites, and you should have no pangs about killing your enemy. You should have no sympathy for them until we have destroyed the so-called Arab culture. On its ruins we shall build our own civilization.

Following fascistic traditions he declared:

We shall have no opportunity for development until we have settled our territorial problems from positions of strength. We shall make the Arabs obey us completely.

Addressing students, one of the chief Zionist ideologues and former Prime Minister of Israel, Ben-Gurion, said:

The map of Israel is not the map of our homeland. We have a different map which you pupils and students of Jewish schools must put into life. The Israeli nation must expand its territory to include the area from the Euphrates to the Nile.

That this is not just a casual remark but a statement of government policy is shown by the inscription on the stone wall over the entrance to the Knesset, which read:

Jews, your homeland stretches from the Nile to the Euphrates.

The Zionist fanatics thus presented the people of Israel with the clear goal of territorial expansion. The methods of attaining this goal were spelled out by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Zionist leader, long before the state of Israel was established:

Palestine must belong to the Jews. The use of appropriate methods for establishing a national Jewish state will be a necessary and ever present element of our policy. The Arabs already know what we must do to them and what we demand of them. We must create a situation of accomplished facts, and explain to the Arabs that they must leave our territory and get out to the desert.

The poisonous seeds of Zionist propaganda soon sprouted. They were one of the main causes of the Middle East “six day war”, Israel’s military action in 1967. The “six day war” had ended, but Israeli tanks, leaving a wake of destruction and death, had broken through to the Suez Canal, stood along the entire western bank of the Jordan and held the Golan Heights. The Zionists were faced with a new task—to retain the spoils of victory. Tel Aviv intended to compel the Arab states, victims of aggression, to agree to peace negotiations which, it hoped, would perpetuate the results of the aggression and leave Israel with its new territory, expanded at the expense of its neighbours. However, despite military setbacks, the Arab peoples did not capitulate and did not agree to negotiations while Israel held a part of their territory.

The imperialist plot against the people of the Middle East had failed. Yes, the aggressor’s troops were stationed on Arab soil, but they had failed either to overthrow the governments of Egypt and Syria, or to break the will of the Arab peoples to resist aggression.

Having attained success on the battlefield, the Zionists continued to rely on the force of arms for exerting political pressure. They began bombing and shelling the positions of Arab troops along the cease-fire line and on the border with the Lebanon, and making barbarous air raids deep into Syria, Egypt and Jordan. The brutal assault by the Israeli air force on the Jordanian village of Kufr Asad, the victims of which included old men, women and children, was but one instance of the Zionist policy of “pressuring” the intransigent Arabs. One after another such criminal air raids were made against towns and villages in the Arab countries, especially Egypt which the Zionist fanatics regarded as the chief obstacle to the implementation of their plans. In early February 1970, General Bar-Lev, the Israeli Chief of General Staff, boasted that, since the end of the “six day war”, the Israeli air force had carried out nearly 3,000 air raids over Egyptian territory.

In an attempt to provoke another war, Israel sent its bombers deeper and deeper into Arab countries and raided inhabited localities near Cairo, Damascus and Amman. There was even a commando raid carried out by Israeli paratroopers against the transformer substation in Nag Hammadi, south of Cairo. The raid was repeated in April 1969.

By late 1969, Israeli bombing and shelling were responsible for 1,200 casualties. In their speeches Zionist leaders began referring to a “permanent war”. Carried away by a burst of warlike frenzy Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, declared to the angry, indignant world that the air raids would continue until the “above stated aims were attained”. The aims of the Israeli fanatics consisted in provoking Arab retaliation to get an excuse for starting another war, but there were Israelis who continued to oppose the Zionists.

January 1970 saw more Israeli aggression, Zionist strategists stepping up the bombing of Arab territories, in contravention of the UN Security Council resolutions. On 6 February, Israeli pilots flew over thirty combat missions, raiding Tel el Kebir, the Red Sea ports of Hurghada and Safaga, and some densely populated areas. The Zionist fanatics counted on a psychological effect. They wanted to produce panic among the population, to demoralize it and force it to capitulate. It has remained their main purpose, but the Arabs are showing they are not that easily panicked.

On 12 February the world was shocked to learn about a brutal raid over a non-military enterprise, a metal-working plant, in Abu Zaabal, a suburb of Cairo. At a moment when work shifts were changing, Israeli pilots bombed and strafed the plant, killing over 80 people and wounding nearly one hundred. The air raid, absolutely senseless from the military viewpoint, was part of Israel’s psychological warfare.

In two and a half years after the “six day war”, besides the mass air raids, there were about 4,000 armed clashes on the cease-fire line between Israel and Egypt, over 3,000—on Israel’s border with Jordan, and over 300—on its border with Syria.

Attacks on Syria and Lebanon

On 8 September, 1972, numbers of Israeli Skyhawks and Phantoms raided the settlements of Palestinian refugees in Syria and the Lebanon. Flying at low level, Israeli pilots strafed women and children who rushed about panic-stricken. The air raid was repeated the next day. Ten areas in Syria and the Lebanon and one Jordanian village were bombed. In just two days there were over 400 casualties among peaceful civilians. A week later, on 16 September, Israeli mechanized and armoured units supported by aircraft invaded the Lebanon in the south. For about 36 hours the Israeli troops rampaged through captured towns and villages, and only after the arrival of a large number of Lebanese forces were they forced to retreat. Over 40 Arabs were killed and 100 wounded and 130 houses were destroyed during that raid.

Tel Aviv explained this barbarous raid as retaliation for actions by Arab extremists of the Black September terrorist organization. However, Zionist rulers did not even try to justify their next assault, on Sunday, 15 October, 1972. That day over 20 Israeli bombers attacked with bombs and rockets the suburbs of Saida, in the Lebanon, and the neighbouring villages. Simultaneously, an air strike was delivered against the city of Masyaf and its environs. In an interview with an American news agency, the Israeli command said that the raids should be regarded as an indication of Israeli’s readiness to attack whenever and wherever it wanted to.

Another demonstration of this readiness came on 30 October, 1972, when a new raid was made against several Syrian villages. The Israeli aircraft dropped many large delayed-action bombs, which made rescue operations exceedingly hazardous. According to France Press, about one hundred people were killed during the air raid. Many peasant houses and farm structures were destroyed, and many head of cattle were killed.

Before dawn on 21 February, 1973, following many instances of border violation and intrusion into the air space of Syria and the Lebanon, the Israeli aggressor landed airborne troops on Lebanese territory and attacked Palestinian refugee camps 180 km from the cease-fire line. Also on that day, Israeli fighter planes shot down a Libyan air-liner near the Suez Canal. The passengers, of whom there were over one hundred, and the crew were kiIled.

On 10 April, 1973, an Israeli terrorist group infiltrated into Beirut. They blew up several buildings and killed three of the leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and two Lebanese army officers. The terrorists kiIled or wounded 40 people. These armed clashes did not result in casualties only on the Arab side. Israeli troops also suffered considerable losses both in manpower and materiel. But this did not bother Zionist leaders too much. Recruitment among the Jewish population in the diaspora, and the sympathetic attitude of the imperialist powers ensured Israel replenishment both in manpower and weapons.

Vast sums were spent for the building of a powerful defence system along the eastern bank of the Suez Canal. The system was named the “Bar-Lev Line” after the Chief of the Israeli General Staff who directed the building of the defences. The necessary funds for all this were provided by Zionist organizations and governments of imperialist countries.

While evading a peaceful settlement with the Arab countries and preserving a “neither war, nor peace” situation in the Middle East, the Zionist rulers of Israel insist on continuing their annexationist policy “for the sake of security”. They assert that Egypt refuses to recognize Israel’s sovereignty and to let it use international waterways. In early 1971, in reply to an inquiry by Gunnar Jarring, special representative of the UN Secretary General, the Egyptian government stated that Egypt was ready to guarantee Israel’s sovereignty, provided both sides keep to the frontiers which existed prior to the Israeli aggression of June 1967, and that Egypt guarantee freedom of international shipping along the Gulf of Tiran.

Furthermore, upon the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the eastern bank of the Suez Canal, Egypt guaranteed to keep the canal open for the next six months to all ships, including Israeli ones. The Egyptian government did not object to the stationing of international control organizations at Sharm el Sheikh.

The United Arab Republic announced its acceptance of the proposal put forward by the UN special representative, Dr Gunnar Jarring, and readiness to conclude a peace agreement with Israel once the Israeli troops had withdrawn from the occupied Arab territories. The UAR has also proposed steps to resume navigation along the Suez Canal in the near future. The attitude of the Arab side provided a real basis for settling the crisis in the Middle East. The Israeli Government’s rejection of all these proposals, and Tel Aviv’s openly brazen claims to Arab lands showed who was blocking the way to peace in the Middle East, and who was to blame for the dangerous hotbed of war being maintained in that area.

Clearing the Pollution of Arab Inhabitation

At first, to make more room around the Wailing Wall, bulldozers cleared away the Arab dwellings that stood near it. But they did not stop there. Whole blocks of Arab houses were pulled down and replaced with so-called Israeli units, according to the Ministry of Housing Construction, to house 65,000 more Jews in the eastern part of Jerusalem. This was in line with the general policy of ousting Arabs from the city. Their expulsion was accompanied by barbarous destruction of historical monuments and other objects of Arab culture. Zionists, who proclaimed Jerusalem Israel’s capital back in January 1950, planned to bring the Jewish population of the city up to 900,000. Then the whole world, and not only the Arabs, will be faced with an accomplished fact—the turning of that city into the religious, administrative and political centre of the Zionist state.

Housing for Jews and agricultural settlements are being built on land from which Arabs have been driven off. As captured land is developed, some of the fortified settlements are being transformed into agricultural enterprises. Young workers would carry a carbine or a submachine gun with them to the field, emphasizing the “accomplished fact” of their intention to stay on the land.

Until the end of 1970, the Israeli government did not recommend that businessmen engage in capital construction at Sharm el Sheikh, but then it encouraged them in every way to do so. As a result, hotels, tourist camps, cafes and restaurants, car repair shops and filling stations multiplied rapidly. The invaders were also active on the Gaza strip. In just two months, July and August, in 1972, they pulled down 7,729 dwellings there, and drove 16,000 people from their homes. Several schools in the area were turned into army barracks.

In constantly encouraging Tel Aviv in its policy of aggression, the US protectors of Zionism relied on the more adventurous elements among Israel’s ruling circles. When, in December 1969, a new Cabinet was formed in Israel, three generals became its members. This was an unprecedented thing, and it had been brought off with Washington’s assistance. The three generals were Yigal Allon, former commander of Israel’s striking forces, Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defence, and Ezer Weizmann, the founder of the Israeli air force. Together with two militant nationalists, Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, they formed an extreme Right group in the government, on which Prime Minister, Golda Meir, relied for support. It is noteworthy that as soon as the names of the new Cabinet members became known many political commentators abroad dubbed it a “War Cabinet”.

William Rogers Exacerbates US Lawlessness

When the Cabinet was being formed, Israeli Zionists took their instructions from the speech of William Rogers, US Secretary of State, at a conference of educators in Washington. At a time when candidates for ministerial posts and the government’s future policies were dicussed in Tel Aviv, Rogers declared that before it became possible to begin solving the problem of Israeli troop withdrawal from occupied territories, the Arab countries had to convince Israel that they desired a lasting peace in the Middle East. According to the State Secretary’s logic, the victim of aggression had to convince the aggressor of his peaceableness. This was unprecedented in world diplomacy and international law practice. Moreover, Rogers declared that Jerusalem must become a unified city, which conflicted with the UN General Assembly resolution on restoring the city’s prewar status. Equally revealing was his avoidance of the question of the occupied regions of Syria and Jordan, and the Palestinian refugees problem.

In Tel Aviv, Rogers’ speech was taken as a direct incitement to anti-Arab actions and consequently as instructions on how to select candidates to ministerial posts. The ability to follow Washington’s recommendations, especially with regard to the composition of the Israeli government, proved to be dependent on the size of US aid to Tel Aviv. Such influential Zionist leaders in the United States as Senator Jacob Javits and Max Fisher, special consultant to the White House, were systematically pressing the US government for new deliveries of Phantom and Skyhawk aircraft, tanks, missiles and electronic equipment to Israel. Active indeed were Zionist lobbyists in Congress where they conduct a carefully planned political campaign of persuading the government to unequivocally support Israel. Nothing changes.

Zionist Millionaires

The Israeli authorities demonstratively held Zionist conferences in Jerusalem. Some of these were the international conferences of Jewish millionaires, which demonstrated the support given the Israeli fanatics’ expansionist policy by the Zionist financial magnates of the world.

The international ties of Zionist financiers enable them to coordinate financial aid extended to the Israeli military by US millionaires and their opposite numbers in other countries. The participants in the three “conferences of millionaires” held in Israel after the “six day war” included:

• the British and French Rothschilds
• Charles Clore, the chairman or a director of 14 companies and banks in England
• Zigmund Warburg, a prominent London banker
• Isaak Wolfson, owner of large department stores in England
• Israel Calbin, the chairman or a director of 116 banks and companies in Brazil.

When it came to meeting Zionism’s needs, they all quickly and easily came to terms. The first of these conferences met in August 1967. It was attended by 60 Zionist capitalists, including 38 delegates from the United States. They approved Israel’s acts of aggression, and expressed readiness to advance the required sums immediately.

The second and more representative conference was convened in April 1968. It was attended by 500 important businessmen and 300 economic advisors. A discussion of the aggressor’s needs took place. At Wolfson’s suggestion, it was decided to set up a big Israeli insurance company. The conference also settled the problem of financing the construction of an oil pipeline from Elath, a port in the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea, to the port of Ashod on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The West German firms Thyssen and Mannesmann undertook to supply the steel for the pipeline.

A third conference of Zionist financial tycoons met in June 1969. Its delegates included 300 bankers, industrialists and businessmen. The conference was keynoted by openly expansionist plans. Besides the next allocation for armament, the delegates discussed capital investment in occupied Arab territories, particularly in the Gaza strip and in western Jordan. For “security reasons” the details of the new Israeli plans, which required large sums, were kept secret and not discussed at the conference. However, the Israeli Minister of Finance assured the delegates that their capital investments were absolutely safe, no matter what turn events in the Middle East might take.

Besides foreign investments, loans and credits, donations by Zionists play an important part in Israel’s economy. In less than a quarter of a century they turned Israel from a sparsely populated, economically backward country into a developed, industrial state. Without all this financial and economic assistance the Zionist offspring would have long gone bankrupt unable to cope with the material difficulties generated by its adventuristic policy and the continual wars it wages. In 1970 alone, Israel received, in various forms of payment and various currencies, almost 500,000,000 dollars, which nearly halved its balance of payments deficit.

The Zionists have a wide network of organizations which levy “taxes on the Diaspora”. The chief of them is the Jewish Agency with its centre in Jerusalem. The banking operations in transferring the money collected are in the charge of Keren Ha Yesod (Palestine Foundation Fund), an organization which is subordinate to the Jewish Agency and which has branches in 34 countries.

About 80 percent of its monetary gifts and credits Israel receives from the United States with its Jewish population of six million. In no other Jewish community do Zionists collect money on such a scale and with such proficiency as in the United States. The United Jewish Appeal, the US branch of Keren Ha Yesod, had its offices on the 29th floor of the Sperry Rand Building. It employed a large staff of paid and voluntary fund raisers. The UJA offices maintain direct teletype contact with nearly 300 Jewish communities in the United States. Golda Meir’s visit to the United States as long ago as 1973 netted Israel a free grant of $50,000,000. Now it is billions.

Zionist organizations in other capitalist countries are just as ready to fleece Jews. They are active in France. Once Rothschild, the French millionaire, appealed to the half-a-million French Jews to donate 10 percent of their incomes to Israel.

In Britain, the English branch of the Rothschild banking dynasty and other Zionist capitalists aid Israel with large sums. Possessing vast funds, Zionist organizations in Britain are able to press for donations through advertisements published not only in their own press but also in newspapers belonging to English capitalists.

By extensive fund-raising, steady streams of money flowed into Tel Aviv from over 50 of the main countries of the world. The total sum of donations which Zionists collected from the diaspora in the first 22 years from the establishment of Israel was over four billion dollars. Zionist leaders joked they had bred a fund raising cross between a cow and a giraffe—it feeds abroad but gives its yield in Israel.

Proceeding from the maxim that money does not smell, Zionists are not averse to collecting from known gangsters, owners of gambling houses and other dens of iniquity. In early 1971, the Israeli press jubilantly reported that Meir Lansky, a 69 year old gang leader, had become a citizen of Israel.

Lansky’s application for citizenship was prompted not only by his desire to avail himself of the advantages which the state conceived by Theodor Herzl offers to a rich man. It was also due to the fact that Lansky’s activities had attracted the attention of the American public to such an extent that even the eminently bribable US police could not easily overlook them. Fearing exposure and scandal, the aged gangster decided to take refuge in Israel, since he had repeatedly rendered invaluable services to the Zionists and shared his unsavory profits with them.

Lansky’s calculations were accurate. Both Israeli and American Zionist leaders, at whose requests he and his men had terrorized those who opposed the racialist ideology of Zionism and national discord in the United States, could not ignore the fact that the inveterate criminal possessed compromising documents and receipts signed by Zionist fund raisers to whom he contributed regularly. Thus, Zionists were bound to hold the gates to the Holy Land wide open for Lansky and his capital.

Further Help for Israeli Militarization

However great the services done for Israel by international Zionist organizations or the collected donations, they would have not been sufficient in themselves to enable Israel to carry on its adventuristic policy of aggression and plunder fo so many years. It was made possible by the imperialist countries which brought Israel into the world and have supported it ever since.

Already by 1973, according to US press sources, Israel had a regular army of 80,000 consisting of 20 brigades and equipped with 1,200 tanks, 300 self-propelled guns (105mm and 155mm calibre), 1,500 armoured cars and personnel carriers, and other equipment. The Israeli air force numbered 500 combat planes, including Mirage, Phantom and Skyhawk aircraft. During that year the force was expanded with burgeoning deliveries from the United States.

The draft age for men in Israel was from 18 to 29 years. There were also unmarried women aged 18 to 26, serving in the guard units, headquarters and logistical units of the Israeli army. Women’s detachments were guarding the government and the diplomatic corps. The Israeli armed forces personnel included 3,500 mercenary soldiers from 12 countries—mostly from the United States, Britain, Canada, South Africa and Australia—who have not become naturalized, and 10,000 Jews with dual citizenship—Israeli and of the country whence they came.

Golda Meir reported after her visit to Washington in the spring of 1973 that the United States showed a better understanding of Israel’s position than ever before. Evidence of this were the new credits and loans to Israel to the tune of $515,000,000, $300,000,000 of which was earmarked for the purchase of 48 Phantom aircraft, dozens of motor boats, a number of Skyhawks, laser beam guided bombs, and other modern fighting equipment. Tel Aviv allocates $100,000,000 for “housing construction”, which means for the “development” of occupied Arab territories. By this means, US tax dollars are converted into profits for US arms manufacturers

Although in connexion with the “six day war” Bonn announced its strict neutrality, Federal Germany never stopped aiding the aggressor. The Israeli Ambassador in Bonn, Asher Ben-Nathan, and State Secretary Lar of the West German Ministry for Foreign Affairs signed a contract on the granting of a 160,000,000 mark credit to Israel to cover a period of 25 years. In addition, the Deutsche Bank, a large West German bank, shared in the banking credit extended to Tel Aviv by an international banking consortium of seven countries to the amount of 15,000,000 marks.

Together with Israel, Federal Germany was conducting research on the use of atomic energy for military purposes. Over 70 West German physicists were involved in this work which was conducted by the Weizmann Institute and financed, among others, by the Fritz Thyssen and Volkswagen foundations.

The first official visit of an Israeli government delegation to Bonn took place in February 1970. The delegation was headed by Foreign Minister Eban. The talks which the delegation had with the West German President, the Chancellor, and the Foreign Minister were strictly confidential.

Besides Federal Germany, Eban visited Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg where he met with representatives of local Zionist organizations and urged them to intensify the raising of funds for Israel. In Brussels, he had a talk with representatives of the European Economic Community during which he discussed cooperation between Israel and the Common Market countries. Zionist organizations in these countries acted as mediators in negotiating an agreement between the European Economic Community and Israel, in which the latter is vitally interested.

The conflict in the Middle East in October 1973 giving rise to tension in international situation was caused by Israel’s seizure of Arab territory and her stubborn unwillingness to fulfil the Security Council resolution of 22 November, 1967 and withdraw her troops from the occupied Arab lands. Military actions took place on Egyptian and Syrian land, and nobody can question the right of the Arab peoples to fight for the liberation of this land. While defending this right the Arab peoples are for normalization of the situation in the Middle East which would create the conditions for extending the detente to this area.

---

• I Abuelaish, I Shall Not Hate, 2011
• R Brodsky, The Truth about Zionism, 1974
• S Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009

So this is Heroic, Is it? Fascist, More Like!

How can we agree to all this mayhem and still have a clear conscience?

Don't our leaders brag we live in Christian countries? Since when did the Jesus Christ of the gospels approve of killing and injuring people, in these cases people none of us even know. Fascists could hardly be worse. So, whose trying to stop it?

Bin Laden Assassination—the Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories about the death of Osama bin Laden have been fueled by the US military’s rapid disposal of the body at sea, and the US announcement it would not release any images of bin Laden’s dead body. When the Americans killed Mullah Dadullah, Taliban’s chief military commander, they publicly showed the footage. Canadian deputy Leader of the Opposition and MP, Thomas Mulcair, stated in an interview with CBC Television:

I don’t think from what I’ve heard that those pictures [of bin Laden’s body] exist.

Fox News has challenged the DNA evidence confirming Bin Laden’s death. Andrew Napolitano of Freedom Watch said Bin Laden’s death could not be verified. To be 99.9 percent certain of the identity by DNA, as was claimed, the test had to have been compared against the DNA of a mother and father, or several natural brothers or sisters. DNA was available only from half brothers and half sisters, which makes that degree of certainty impossible, unless a busload of them had been tested.

Radio host, Alex Jones, among many others, thinks Bin Laden has been dead for years, and his body had been kept frozen on ice to be used as a propaganda tool at a future politically expedient time. In 2002, he claimed that an anonymous White House source had told him that bin Laden “is frozen, literally frozen and that he would be rolled out in the future at some date”. Former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, said in 2003, “Yes we have been told by intelligence that they’ve got him, Bush may roll him out but because they exposed that at the election they didn’t do it”.

Stephen Lendman, citing former Pakistani president, Benazir Bhutto, said that Bin Laden died of natural causes in mid December 2001. Obama’s announcement was an excuse to involve the United States in wars with Pakistan. Maybe that is why the Pakistanis are particularly skeptical of the alleged raid and assassination.

Abbottabad residents said the announcement of Osama’s death was a US conspiracy against Pakistan. Some residents doubted not only that Bin Laden was dead, but also that he ever lived among them. A local lawyer agreed with Thomas Mulcair:

They’re just making it up. Nobody has seen the body.

Pakistani officials said no firefight had ever taken place:

Not a single bullet was fired from the compound at the US forces and their choppers.

Bin Laden was captured alive, and executed outside the compound in front of his 12-year old daughter. Then his body was taken away by helicopter. An article in the Urdu newspaper Ausaf quoted military sources as saying:

Arabic news network Al-Arabiya claimed senior Pakistani security officials said Osama Bin Laden was captured alive in his Pakistani hideout and then shot by US special forces. His 12 year old saw her father executed and his body dragged to a helicopter.

Another Pakistani official rejected US accounts of the bloody firefight, saying:

Bin Laden has been killed somewhere else. But since the US intends to extend the Afghan war into Pakistan, and accuse Pakistan, and obtain a permit for its military’s entry into the country, it has devised the [Seal operation] scenario.

Hamid Gul former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) said Bin laden had died many years ago and that the official death story given out by the American media was a hoax. He thinks the American government knew about Bin Laden’s death years ago:

They were keeping this story on the ice and they were looking for an appropriate moment, and it couldn’t be a better moment because President Obama had to fight off his first salvo in his next year’s election as he runs for president.

Contrary to that, others think Bin Laden was actually working with the US during the entire war on terror. Bin Laden was the main source of US help in the war on terror. He had been a US agent in Afghanistan when the Taliban were fighting the Soviets. A source was quoted as saying:

The West has been very pleased with Bin Laden’s operations in recent years. Now the West was forced to kill him in order to prevent a possible leak of information he had, information more precious than gold.

Pakistanis offer a unifying theory for the apparently discordant theories being bandied about. Bin Laden truly did die in 2001, but the US found a body double for them to pretend he was still alive, and to make the Bin Laden videos for “Al Qaida” to release after his death. US agencies and the Pakistan intelligence worked together to keep the double safe, eventually in the compound minutes away from the Pakistani military academy, a very safe place, and a place where videos could be made without fear of detection. Unbeknown to the poor dupe who was now Bin Laden, when the time was ripe, he was to be assassinated as Bin Laden! That is what happened on 2 May, but the release of photos meant the body might be recognized as not being Bin Laden. Diversionary fakes had to be released first, so that when the “real ones” come out, they too will be doubted!

Smug Gloating over the Murderous efficiency of the USA Bodes Ill

In the US, the killing of Osama Bin Laden seemed to have been everything that President Obama could have wished for with his battle for a second term on the immediate horizon. Raucous celebrations hit the US streets and Obama’s approval rating shot up by 9 per cent. A more reflective mood seems to be taking hold in the US at the cold blooded military execution of an unarmed and untried man.

Few people would want to defend Bin Laden, but anyone concerned with the application of proper democratic and civilized principles, especially in a violent cultural competition with those constantly accused of the opposite, his extrajudicial killing without trial by marines dropped illegally into a foreign country without permission are now starting to brood about the consequences of the operation. Slamming through anyone’s home shooting unarmed residents including women and children cannot advance the cause of law and justice. Even supposing the house had been under surveillance for some time, the marines could not have been sure whom they might have killed.

The initial infantile bogeyman propaganda soon began being revised into its opposite. Bin Laden did not use his wife as a human shield. She rushed spontaneously at a US gunman who shot her in the leg. The armed resistance of Bin Laden was false, he was unarmed and defenceless, as were everyone in the main building. The resistance came from a guard outside in the compound.

This execution has revived arguments about the illegality of the war on terror and has raised all the issues that made it such a controversial and unacceptable policy. Summary justice reflects the disregard for law that the US has shown in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya, at Guantanamo Bay, and continually with Iran, the Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere. It is the conduct of a state that has no regard for the rights of others where its own interests are concerned.

The point of justice is that the evidence for and against someone can be heard, and people are judged by their peers, not their enemies. The USA nominally subscribes to that form of justice. Bin Laden was a human being and deserved the same right to justice as anyone else, a trial, establishment of identity, a plea, presentation of the evidence for and against, examination of it, and a fair judgement. Failure to follow the rules of law, the due process of law, is ultimately a danger to everyone. It damages our claims to be a superior civilisation to that of our enemies and detractors, the terrorists. The Nazis were surely far worse criminals than any modern terrorist but were accorded the right to defend themselves at Nuremburg. Besides sending illegal hit squads to assassinate people abroad, the rulers of the USA feel free to start wars of imperial conquest, to set up concentration camps, to torture people, and to murder of foreigners, most of whom are innocent, in distant countries by robot aircraft armed with missiles.

Eight missiles from a US Predator drone led to the destruction of a vehicle carrying “foreign militants” in Datta Khel in north Waziristan, Pakistan, killing 15 people as it approached a roadside restaurant, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. The restaurant and a nearby house were hit and at least one civilian was among the dead. Barack Obama’s administration has favored the use of CIA unmanned drones because no American can be killed or injured while feeding the dogs of war in the US. Nor does the US government publicly acknowledge its responsibility for these attacks though it is the only force able to deploy them. The US Brookings Institute estimates that the drones kill 10 civilians for every alleged terrorist killed. The Conflict Monitoring Centre says at least 900 Pakistanis were killed by drones in 2010, “the vast majority” of whom being civilians.

Another US drone fired a missile at a car in Yemen’s Shabwa province killing two brothers suspected of being Al Qaida militants, the first in Yemen since 2002. The Defence Ministry confirmed the deaths. Shabwa provincial officials identified the two as Abdullah and Mosaad Mubarak. The Yemeni foreign minister had already said the government would no longer allow missile strikes by pilotless aircraft because of the high rate of civilians killed and injured by them.

These were within days of the death of Bin Laden. The USA is beginning to sound worryingly Nazi itself! Where is the barrier to stop some administration from acting with equal arbitrariness at home. All they need is some suitable atrocity to blame on whoever they want to attack. The Nazis burnt the Reichstag building as an excuse to set up martial law. How long can the rule of law last in the USA when it is so easily abrogated elsewhere? The fact that there seems to be pretty general approval for the violation of law in the USA, and the added fact that few have the nerve to contest it, does not bode well. The USA is rushing like lemmings to their own destruction while gloating smugly over their power to destroy others.

Reporting, the UK Morning Star

Civilians in War Zones and International Law

In a discussion on Civilians in War Zones, eminent Judge, Richard Goldstone, formerly of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, characterized the last century as “very bloody”. At the beginning of the 20th century, there was one civilian killed for every eight or nine soldiers. In World War II, the ratio became 1 to 1. Now, for every soldier killed, nine civilians die. The cause is the use of indiscriminate air power which pays propaganda value lip service to supposed minimization of collateral damage, a euphemism for civilian injuries, but also because of “deliberate attacks against civilians” to terrorize them.

Though we already have some excellent international court facilities, like The Hague in Holland, not all countries co-operate in making them effective, including the US, and so to deter this trend, Goldstone wants better international courts and more international co-operation to bring criminals to justice:

Our only hope is in an efficient, international system of justice&hellip [and] …an effective, coherent international system of law.

The widespread availability of pictorial evidence, from digital cameras, mobile phones and hand held movie cameras, easily transmitted from country to country by the internet offers new ways of bringing criminals to justice. He said:

There should be true equality. People’s human dignity and their right to that dignity needs to be recognized, [through] a concerted effort to implement international law.

Helen Stacy, a Stanford scholar in international and comparative law, pointed to the admirable role of the US in bringing about the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in pressing on with the Nuremberg Trials. Yet the US has fallen short of its once impressive standards in refusing to sign, for example, the Convention on the Rights of the Child. 194 nations have ratified this convention including all of the nations in the UN except Somalia and the US! Equally, the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has only not been signed by the US.

The US has, of course, liberal forms of expression, and so notionally it is possible for citizens to raise these issues and press for them, but It is pretty plain to outsiders, if not to many people within the US system, that the fault in the system is the press and broadcast media which are overwhelmingly owned by one small section of society with a view of the world that does not favor many of these conventions, for all the past reputation of the US. The media either fail to highlight important international issues, or make light of them. Professor James Campbell, who headed Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice, said:

Conversations like this are enormously important. The future of international humanitarian law is being determined.

International humanitarian law is “a constant struggle, an inescapably political struggle assailed by powerful enemies, and curiously mocked by a public that regards it as naïve, feckless, or who regard the idea of international law as an oxymoron”. Nevertheless, “the rapid expansion of international law is ongoing… Just as freedom is a constant struggle, so is international humanitarian law. It is being waged in our country, in dialogues like the one we’re having today”.

Ultimately, the skepticism about international law, will remain valid as long as the most powerful country in the deliberately stands in the way of effective implementation because it prefers to be its own law. That would be fine, if that country operated internationally by the legal and democratic principles which it is fond of citing. Instead it uses the double talk of John Foster Dulles—it always agrees in principle, while in practice putting every obstacle in the way.

NATO Civil and Military Co-ordination in Afghanistan Failing

Lillian Katarina Stene spent six months in war torn and war weary Aghanistan, serving as a major in the US military as a civil and military co-ordination (CIMIC) officer and now is submitting her research there as a PhD thesis. To connect local structures and military intentions, designated civil military coordination (CIMIC) units are set up within NATO. Their three core functions are to liaise, be a support to the civil environment and the military force. They contribute by assessment of villages and supporting basic infrastructure such as roads, water and bridges when needed.

Stene thinks President Hamid Karzai and NATO’s leadership are mistaken in relying on the withdrawal of foreign troops to bring peace. Though more “boots on the ground” are needed, she says:

We must differentiate better between military and civil tasks, and present ourselves more clearly. The military is the prolonged arm of politics, but soldiers are neither politicians nor aid workers. Nevertheless, the NATO strategy presupposes interference with civilian life. This gives rise to concern, and it is not an easy task to win the “hearts and minds” of local people

In short, a peaceful solution requires stability to be enforced with more troops, but the actions of the military and civilian aid in the war effort have to be better co-ordinated. One is inclined to think that none of us would be easily winnable by a foreign coalition whose soldiers kept shelling our villages and breaking into our homes boot first in the early hours of the morning making our lives intolerable, even if they claim to be protecting us form other gangsters. Indeed, the whole situation is reminiscent of the old gangsters’ protection rackets. You had to humor and cough up your hard earned dollars to both sides just to stay alive until one or the other won the territory war between them. Then you just paid your insurance premium, or taxation, to the winner.

That must be how Afghan people feel, not to mention the Iraqis, Vietnamese, and all the others who have gone before in the history of US imperialism. In history, people get rid of their own gangsters, even if they have to wait until the gangsters’ kids are fat and smug before they can do it. They can feel then that they have solved their own problems without any unasked for help from some other gang wanting to rob them instead.

Stene says that as long as war skirmishes are taking place within and among local inhabitants, a popular justification is TINA—there is no alternative. She admits that this is maybe the greatest challenge, a nuanced criticism of the NATO (ie US) strategy. Perhaps she has to humor her own employers, or former employers, from whom she hopes for a pension, but seems in no doubt when she says:

The war in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means. There are only political solutions to crises and conflicts. The Afghan people itself, through its leaders and representatives, must take the lead in finding a solution. Which is quite a challenge as the international community—meaning the UN, NATO’s coalition forces and numerous governmental and non governmental organisations—are all deeply involved in the development of the country.

Conflicting roles among military and civilian personnel is counterproductive to NATO’s strategy for peace in Afghanistan, for, as military forces continue to build infrastructure and cooperate closely with large civilian organizations, local people must find it increasingly hard to distinguish between the different agents’ roles and objectives. Isn’t it obvious that, when there are no military present to interfere with civilian assistance, then there is no problem of co-ordinating them, and the various agencies involved should be at least halved? In her opinion, too little effort is put into long term planning for reconstructing the country. Different national caveats and ingrained practices, attitudes, training and interpretations conducts different operational modes among the countries working under the NATO umbrella. Stene says:

Since there is no unified way of doing things in Afghanistan, NATO has a problem. While Americans like to act quickly, Germans and Scandinavians prefer to consider the long term effects of civil military coordination. The Americans are likely to dig a well on the spot, while Germans prefer to let the Afghans dig the well themselves.

It is the difference of attitude of the arrogant young imperialism with the long in the tooth old one. The young imperialists, the Americans think these inferior races ought to submit to their betters, and when they don’t, then a bullet will encourage them to do so, while the European powers, who have had the same attitude in the past, and have even fought crippling wars among themselves to share out portions of the world pudding, are now more circumspect, if not more humanitarian. While Afghan civilians are being killed in dawn raids and by drone or warplane attacks, it is hard for any rational being not to appreciate why their skepticism over US intentions continues to grow.

So, the military alliance’s “comprehensive approach” is counterproductive to both civilian and military parties operating in Afghanistan, since this strategy enables role conflicts among them. From her access to the inner workings of the NATO forces, Stene believes NATO is too top heavy. When grey zones between military and civilian participants appear, it is harder for locals to separate the two groups, and to establish who does what. Aid workers, whose safety depends on being trusted by the local communities, may be seen as representatives of the occupation force, and thus become more vulnerable.

A case in point is the dramatic increase in the killing of aid workers over the last years. When some of these organizations profess to be impartial, while simultaneously running development projects paid for by Afghan authorities and the international community, they are not considered neutral by local inhabitants. Such organizations suffer more frequent attacks, and their security situation is deteriorating. Stene says:

Building trust takes time. In order to succeed in Afghanistan, we have to spend time in the country and perform our tasks in accordance with the Afghans’ terms.

Spending more time seems to be her justification for more boots on the ground for longer, but the rest of her case might be better served by a withdrawal and an emphasis on civilian aid, as long as it is not allowed to be skimmed off by the US crooks set up as the country’s “proper” representatives to milk the country dry. That perhaps is why she sees the need for a continued NATO military presence:

Civil military coordination is about working behind the scenes, and handing over tasks to the Afghans:

• It is vital to separate between strictly humanitarian organizations, whose task it is to supply basic utilities such as water, food and medicines to everyone in need—regardless of who they are—and international or independent organizations which are building schools and infrastructure and cultivate land in compliance with the international community’s or the Afghan government’s development plans.
• It is vital to gain insight into people’s real needs, and to involve local projects and contractors. Building schools may not always be the answer to everything.

If local structures are not sufficiently developed, I’m afraid we are building a house of cards which will fall down after we have left.

Help the Heroes Day?

In the UK we are coming to the end of “Help the Heroes Day”, a day of fundraising for the charity, Help the Heroes, recently started by an army officer to provide for war wounded soldiers. It has had vast media coverage in its short life and has raised an enviable amount of money, money at least that the Royal British Legion (poppy day) might envy, since it was set up for the same purpose.

Well, no one would disagree with helping seriously hurt people, would they? but, beside the British Legion, the UK has, or had, a comprehensive National Health Service (the NHS) for which we all pay a National Insurance Stamp while we are working which entitles, or entitled, us to free health care, a basic pension in our old age so that we are not destitute or forced to beg, and benefits when we are sick or unemployed, for the same reasons. Soldiers, of course, were entitled to all of this together with any special care the government or military were willing to provide for the wounded, together with what the RBL provided on top.

The issue I have is that all the publicity that the new charity has received is more than simple advertising for a good cause, it is tantamount to a military and militarization campaign across the country.

Take the word “heroes”. Is it proper to call these soldiers “heroes”? A hero these days is considered simply to be someone who is courageous, and I don't doubt that soldiers involved in active service are courageous. But with this definition so too are many others, and among them are people who the public would not agree were heroes. The 9/11 attack involved people willingly driving aeroplanes into high buildings with death a sure consequence. These people were courageous, and so must have been heroes. Were they?

Then again, when we fight a war we fight an enemy who are also facing us as their enemy, and they too are facing death, just as our soldiers are. They too are courageous, so must be heroes, mustn't they?

Indeed, in the middle of the twentieth century we lost many myriads of heroes facing the Axis powers, Germany, Japan and Italy, and 55 million people in total lost their lives on both sides, soldiers and civilians. Were they all heroes?

Surely, a hero is not just brave, a hero is also noble, so we can count out the 9/11 bombers, and soldiers who are fighting for any cause that is itself not noble, like the fascist soldiers of Germany and Italy, and the soldiers of imperial Japan. They were all invading foreign countries and killing innocent civilians in those countries to make them submit to the conqueror. We are not like that. We do not send troops into foreign countries to make other people submit to us, do we?

By now, I hope you have got my point. Soldiers who are forcing themselves into the homes of innocent people in a foreign country can hardly be regarded as doing anything noble, they are not being heroes. They are acting like Nazis. We are not fighting them because their governments, with the support of their people, have invaded our country. The government of Afghanistan is in place because the US has put it there. The leader of the Iraqis was in place because the US had put him there. We are killing innocent farmers and their wives and children while fully aware that most of them would prefer it if we just went away.

The whole point of the current militarization campaign is to condition us to permanent warfare, just as the people of the US have been conditioned, and just as George Orwell prophesied. We are not helping heroes, and if we want to help heroes, we would do much better to force our governments not to make young men into heroes, dubious as the title is, by killing innocents abroad. Young men would be better served by an anti-war movement, not one that gives help too late to young people with shattered bodies all for a political myth.

All we have to do to see the injustice of it is to imagine that a foreign army was raiding our houses at dawn, killing or detaining our fathers and sons, and killing or raping our mothers and sisters, and all on some pretext given them by a few extremists. That is what we fought the Nazis and the Japanese to stop. But we are now doing it ourselves, and calling our bullying troops, when they suffer in retaliation, “heroes”.

Are we to suppose that we would not fight back if we were invaded and misused by some foreign bullies? Have Americans so completely forgotten that they set up their own state by fighting off the invading soldiers of the British that they are now repeatedly determined to bully other people into submission?

And what of 9/11 itself? Is that a sufficient pretext for killing tens of thousands of foreign people who had no part in the original monstrous plot? Indeed, if we had already shown our own lack of basic justice for others by supporting oppression of poor Arabs, are we supposed to stand by and expect them not to want to retaliate against the mean spirited unfairness of our own previous actions.

You can keep whipping your dog to keep it cowed, but when it gets the courage to bite you, whose fault is it? If we treat these poor foreign farmers like dogs then we can expect to get bitten, and there is nothing noble or heroic about beating innocent animals or humans that have done us no harm, and who could not kill and maim our dubious “heroes” if they were not there to be harmed.

We still need to oppose foreign wars, and not be beguiled by bogus sentimentality disguising military propaganda. Help our heroes by stopping foreign wars and bringing them home before they are wrecked.

Church’s Koran Burning will Endanger US Troops

Afghans demonstrate against US Koran burning

Reuters, the BBC, Voice of America and thousands of other media sources reveal that the commander of the 150,000 strong US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, says an obscure American church’s plan to burn Korans on September 11 could put the lives of US troops in Afghanistan in danger, and damage the overall war effort in that country. The US embassy in Kabul issued a statement condemning the plans. It said it was deeply concerned about the deliberate attempts to offend members of religious or ethnic groups, and condemned the plan as an “act of disrespect” toward Islam. General Petraeus said in a statement to US media:

It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort. It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world, we are engaged with the Islamic community.

The planned burning of the Moslem holy book could be used to stoke sentiment against the US, not only in Afghanistan, but across the Moslem world. The White House and Nato have also expressed concern over the plan. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said:

Any type of activity like that that puts our troops in harm’s way would be a concern to this administration.

The Nato chief, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, attacked the church’s plans, telling reporters that burning Korans violated the Nato alliance’s values. AFP quoted him as saying:

There is a risk that it may also have a negative impact on security for our troops.

Pastor Terry Jones, of the Gainsville, Florida, Dove World Outreach Center, a small evangelical church, plans to put copies of the holy book in a bonfire to mark this week’s anniversary of the 9/11, 2001 attacks. The church has a right to do so under the US constitution’s First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. Authorities in Gainesville are preparing special security measures to prevent trouble at the event by the church, which has about 30 members and calls itself a “New Testament, Charismatic, Non-Denominational Church”. The city’s mayor and police department repeated appeals to Jones call off the Koran burning. They warned that while his First Amendment constitutional rights guaranteed freedom of speech, assembly and religion, he would violate city ordinances if he went ahead without proper authorization. Gainesville Mayor Craig Lowe condemned what he called the church’s “offensive behavior”. Mayor Lowe said on his Facebook site:

The Dove World Outreach Center is a tiny, fringe group and an embarrassment to our community. They are opposed to the true character of Gainesville.

City officials ahave denied his request for a burn permit.

Mr Jones said he takes General Petraeus’ warning seriously. He said the church was praying on the matter but they had “firmly made up our minds”, adding:

How long do we back down?

And:

We must send a clear message to the radical element of Islam

Mr Jones’s Florida unknown church is reported to have 50 members. Its incendiary plans haven’t emerged out of nowhere. 53 per cent of Americans view Islam unfavourably, and only 42% favourably. American Moslems say they feel more isolated than at any time since the 2001 attacks. Its website labels Islam “violent and oppressive” and has prompted protests elsewhere. Hundreds of Afghans took to the streets in the capital, Kabul, to protest against the plan, chanting “Death to America” as they rallied outside a mosque, burning an effigy of Pastor Jones. Similar protests were earlier held outside the US embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Claims that US soldiers have desecrated the Koran in both Afghanistan and Iraq have caused bloodshed in the past, and this new controversy comes just when religious fanatics in the US are worked up over a proposal to build an Islamic cultural centre two blocks from Ground Zero, site of the 9/11 attacks, in New York. Lives were lost in Afghan riots in 2005 when Newsweek told that US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed a copy of the Koran down a toilet. The story was false and was retracted, after the damage was done. In 2008, protests in Afghanistan followed a US soldier deployed to Iraq shooting up a copy of the Koran.

Why the US has a Perpetual War Economy

During WWII, government decisions stopped all market fluctuations. A major power in the middle of a serious war, cannot allow markets to boom and bust. Economic effort was singularly aimed at victory. Besides victory, people just worried about what things would be like once the war was over. The Americans were not themselves suffering from bombing. They never have done. So, an extra year of war was not nearly as great a worry as the question of how the war economy could be switched to peacetime conditions.

Most economic experts thought the transition would involve a violent crisis. Americans were pessimistic. Post-war unemployment, counting women engaged in war work, of up to 20 million were commonly predicted, based on the heavy readjustment crisis after WWI. Things would be no different after WWII, they predicted.

Then there occurred the American economic miracle—the demobilization of ten million people without any upheavals. Transition to a peacetime economy was smooth. Unemployment rose to less than four million—half as much as before the war. The US had mild recessions in 1946, 1949, and 1954 but nothing like a real crisis. America's faith in heaven on earth revived, and the specter of 1929 faded.

Economic optimists quickly became confident, for three reasons:

1. the American economy was less speculative, as post war stock exchange transactions show, and speculation was strictly controlled compared with 1929, when reckless gamblers used unlimited credit to drive stock to precipitous heights—something that is again familiar
2. Keynesian principles were applied—a downward trend in the economy was helped by a dose of inflation, and conversely an unhealthy boom invited deflationary measures such as a gentle credit squeeze.
3. the main one, now obviously swept under the carpet, was rearmament—the perpetuation of the war economy. After WWII, the US continued to spend twenty times as much money on its armed forces and military aid abroad as before the war. In the early post war years, between 12% and 15% of the national income was directly or indirectly spent on war and war preparations, employing 10-12 million people on the Federal budget, near enough the same number as were unemployed pre war.

Post war, financial speculation gradually returned, and Keynesianism was abandoned under pressure from the right wing fad of monetarism, and eventually, Reagan and Thatcher abolished all the regulations that had kept banks and markets under control and stable.

As for the third, and most important factor, it never changed! Rather it has become increasingly important. In fiscal year 2010, total US defense spending accounted for 38–44% of estimated tax revenues. Over sixty years after the war, Americans still spend a large fortune on warfare and armaments supporting, with their tax dollars, the death of their own boys, 6000 miles away murdering mainly innocent Moslems, people simply trying to assert their own freedom in their own country. All of this mayhem to avoid giving benefits to those Americans they call idle—people who cannot find work—and profits to billionaires who could do with a lot less.

The US since the last war has maintained a war economy, supporting utterly wasteful and cynical military adventures all over the world. And the American people seem to be happy it should remain the case when the federal government could be creating useful jobs through civilian projects. Alternatively, why not just give the unemployed sufficient benefits to live on, so that by spending them they thereby employ others! Every tax dollar spent by the government at the grass roots of society is multiplied five times over, as it is successively spent.

A fabulously wealthy country spends over a third of its tax revenue supporting the military industrial complex, when it could transform derelict cities like Detroit, and the decaying suburbs of many other famous cities, taking millions of US citizens off drugs and tranquilizers by letting them live decently. Yet the childishly unselfcritical Yankees profess bafflement that the wicked world does not love them! Will enough Americans ever realize that they are being treated with contempt by the political caste in Washington, the gentlemen soldiers of the ruling megarich elite? They are too ready to believe the bullshit they are constantly fed.

The Palestinian Case in Brief

The Palestinians, who have lived in Palestine for 2000 years, are no closer to having their own state than they ever were. Israel’s desire to push forward with the peace process is not clear. It refuses to countenance either withdrawal from the occupied territories or the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under US pressure, did join his predecessors in endorsing Palestinian statehood, albeit grudgingly and with caveats. The idea is not popular with the right wing members of his coalition, and efforts to coax Israel into halting all settlement construction in the West Bank have not succeeded.

The illegal apartheid wall snakes through the West Bank. Illegal Israeli settlement colonies, still being expanded, on the West Bank are for Jews only, as are the specially constructed roads. Gaza is still being illegally blockaded. Palestinians in their homeland are confronted by a plethora of checkpoints and barriers that divide families and keep people from their homes, farms and workplaces. What red blooded Yankee would stand for it? Moreover, the international community’s failure to hold Israel to account for war crimes gives it virtual carte blanche to launch attacks with the best modern weaponry, supplied by Uncle Sam, on the virtually defenseless Arabs.

To cover up their criminal complicity, Israeli's and their western sponsor, the US, blame the victims, claiming that Hamas’s resistance to recognizing the current gains of their oppressors stands in the way of a just settlement. Avigdor Lieberman demands the execution as traitors of Arab members of the Knesset who have met Hamas, and the expulsion of Arab citizens who do not sign a loyalty oath to Israel “as a Jewish state”. Such ideas are plainly racist—a form of apartheid. Anti-Arab racism is woven into the fabric of Israeli society. Lieberman is an example.

Palestinians who were born on land inhabited by their forebears for centuries, were driven out by the Jewish terrorist groups that became the core of the Israeli Defense Force after Israel’s foundation, and have no right of return. But Lieberman was born in Chisinau in Moldova, a place totally foreign to Palestine and its Arab people. Yet his status as a Jew qualified him to emigrate to Israel with full civic rights and the ability to travel and to settle anywhere in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

At the root of this mess is the protective umbrella with which America unconditionally shields its Middle East ally. As long as the US has the power of veto within the UN Security Council, Israel can do what it pleases. At the same time, Britain cannot hold Israelis to account without risking its special relationship with Washington.

Britain, which has always prided itself on its legal system and respect for human rights, actually colludes with Israel to ensure its officials escape prosecution. The British Foreign Office engaged in diplomatic shenanigans so that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak could receive immunity from prosecution while on a private visit to London with his wife. British justice does not extend to Israeli war criminals being held to account for their atrocities.

Those who believed that President Obama would make a difference are disappointed. He now seems a man of fine words and little action, certainly in foreign affairs. Like his predecessors, he is perpetuating US double standards. He calls for a nuclear free Middle East and wags his finger at Iran for enriching uranium, then blesses Israel’s policy of “nuclear ambiguity”.

Britain, kow-towing to the US and Israel and in common with the rest of the European Union, refuses to talk to Hamas, even though it was properly elected in the Palestinian election, but it is ready and willing to engage with war criminals and racists. So much for the sanctity of democracy.

Meanwhile, the United Nations ignores Israel’s flouting of Security Council Resolutions, and chooses to bin its own investigations into Israel’s crimes. The carefully compiled report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict was shelved. Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lobbied diplomatic support to back Israel’s objection to the report accusing Israel of war crimes. The report wanted its conclusions referred to the International Criminal Court prosecutor in The Hague, if the warring parties failed to conduct credible investigations within six months. The court at the Hague is not popular with the US either. Too many US leaders would be up for trial as war criminals, they fear.

Where does this sorry state of affairs leave the Palestinian people? Absolutely nowhere. They are constantly failed by international bodies and the international legal system. Is it any wonder that they have resorted to desperate methods? Who would not take them in the unjust situation Palestinians are in? Promises made that their own state is on the horizon are always broken.

When, in frustration, they turn to violence, they are branded as terrorists. The Islamist movement Hamas is regarded by Israel and the West as a terrorist organization after carrying out dozens of suicide attacks, but the invasion by Israel of Gaza on 27 December 2008, left 1,400 Palestinians, nearly all civilians, and 13 Israelis, nearly all soldiers, dead.

Surely something is seriously wrong with our world when a people who have been wronged for over a half century are treated as the criminals. Wherever the Palestinians turn, they find every door shut. Whatever they do to obtain a fraction of their rights, they face insurmountable obstacles. Time and again, they pursue international justice only to discover that it does not exist… for them! Recognized legal channels lead them nowhere.

Compiled from various sources.