A Potted Recent History of Israel

1946: Irgun Zvai Leumi (The National Military Organisation) bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and injuring others. (Gordon, 2023).

1948, May 14^th: Israel was declared a state but by who?

• Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon weren’t happy about this and invaded.
• Israel fought back. The war was called The Arab-Israeli War of 1948.
• The war ended with Egypt being given control of the Gaza Strip.
• The same year Israeli settlers ethnically cleansed Israel of Palestinians. Israeli forces bullied 800,000 Palestinians out of Israel. Actions included:
  • Murdering Palestinians and a massacre.
    • IZL and Lehi, paramilitary groups, contributed to the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, killing 107 Palestinians (Gordon, 2023).
  • Driving Palestinians out of their homes and out of Israel.
  • Destroying the buildings of Palestinian villages.
  • Terrorising Palestinian communities.
    • One of their techniques was to murder most of the Palestinians in a village, and let a few survivors free, so the survivors would tell Palestinians living in other village of the horrors they had witnessed.
  • Holding victory parages, which involved showing off the captives taken from the Palestinian villages, the majority of whose members they had murdered (Abramowitz et al, 1948).
  • Palestinians bullied out of Israel, ended up living in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank of the River Jordan and the Gaza Strip. The descendants of the Palestinians, who were bullied out of Israel, still live in these refugee camps today.
• And Lehi, the paramilitary organisation, assassinated Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator between Israel and Arab countries. (Gordon, 2023).
• IZL formed a political party, called The Freedom Party. A group of Jewish people, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, wrote a letter to the New York Times comparing the organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal of The Freedom Party to the Nazis and fascist parties. (Abramowitz et al, 1948). The Freedom Party would go on to be called Likud, the party that currently rules Israel.

1949, January, the then Israeli government offered Lehi an amnesty. (Gordon, 2023).

In 1967 another war happened.

• The war lasted six days.
• Israel’s military entered and took over:
  • Parts of Jordan: the West Bank and East Jerusalem and took it over.
  • Parts of Egypt: the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula.
  • Parts of Syria: the Golan Heights.
• Subsequently the Israeli government continued their campaign of ethnic cleansing in some of these areas, by bullying Palestinian people from their homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and allowing Israeli people to build new housing there.
• Israel took control of water supplies in these areas (Edwards and Cromwell, 2018).

1977: The Israeli electorate voted in a way, that enabled Menachem Begin to become Prime Minister. Begin, in 1948, was the leader of the ‘Freedom Party’, whose membership had been drawn from IZL, whose members had murdered Palestinians in Deir Yassin.

1979: The Israeli government honoured the paramilitary group, Lehi, which had murdered Palestinians in Deir Yasin by creating the ‘Lehi ribbon’. (Gordon, 2023).

1983: The Israeli electorate voted in a way, that enabled Yitzhak Shamir to become Prime Minister. Shamir was a former leader of Lehi, one of the paramilitary groups, which had murdered Palestinians in Deir Yasin. (Gordon, 2023).

References

Abramowitz, I. et al (1948) Letter to the New York Times: New Palestine Party: Visit of Menachem Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/einstein/1948/12/02.htm

Gordon, N. (2023) On Human Shields. London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/december/on-human-shields

Illan Pappe (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Oxford.

Avi Shlaim (2000) The Iron Wall: Israel and The Arab World. W.W. Norton & Company. New York, 2000, p31.

David Edwards and David Cromwell (2018) Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, Pluto Process. London.

 

	The establishment of the ‘Israeli’ state in Palestine, in 1938, was a very bad idea.
	A Potted Recent History of Israel.
	Israel – a scared, traumatised, racist, expansionist, racially supremacist, ethnic cleansing – state & movement.
	The elimination of the state of Israel.
	‘From the river to the sea Palestine will be free’ the desire for a Palestinian state and equality for Palestinian people.
	Comparing the policies and action of the Israeli government with the policies and action of Nazi Germany.
	An Islamophobic alliance of capitalists, fascists and colonialists (and scared little centrists) are behind Israel’s massacre of Gaza’s Palestinians.
	Hamas cannot be defeated at ‘any’ cost by Israel.
	Is Israel carrying out genocide in Palestine in 2023?

 

 

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