The Birth of the State of Israel
The United Nations voted in 1947 to partition land in the British mandate of Palestine into two states – one Jewish, one Arab.
The state of Israel was formed in 1948.
But Chris McGreal writes that neither the Palestinians nor the neighbouring Arab countries accepted the founding of modern Israel. Fighting between Jewish armed groups, which the British regarded as terrorist organisations, and Palestinians escalated until the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan and Syria invaded after Israel declared independence in May 1948.
McGreal continues that with Israel’s new army gaining ground, an armistice agreement in 1949 saw new de facto borders that gave the fledgling Jewish state considerably more territory than it was awarded under the UN partition plan.
Subsquently 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.
Sarah Helm writes, “When Israeli forces “cleansed” the nearby villages in 1948, the process started with the same psychological warfare we see today, warnings to flee, the dropping of leaflets, and threats of what might happen if they didn’t. Villages were generally shelled before ground troops went in; many civilians were killed, and there were massacres. The village was usually surrounded, with one exit left open for Palestinians to flee through. Survivors eventually went to the Gaza Strip, as it was deemed a safe area.”
Sarah Helm writes that, “I worked as a journalist in the region in the 1990s, and in recent years I have spent a great deal of time in Gaza and Israel, researching the history of Gaza’s 2.3 million refugees. Almost everyone in Gaza is a refugee from one of 200 Arab villages, then in southern Palestine, that were destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948 when the Jewish state came into being. What remains of some of these villages lies within 10 miles of the Gaza boundary. Some refugees can even see their land through the fence.”
https://www.972mag.com/photos-nakba-depopulated-villages/
In 1967 another war occurred. By the end of the war Israel had taken the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. According to Chris McGreal Israel launched what it said was a pre-emptive defensive war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. McGreal explains that the attack caught Arab governments by surprise and saw Israel achieve rapid victories including seizing the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. The six-day war was a spectacular military success for Israel. Its capture of all of Jerusalem and newly acquired control over the biblical lands called Judea and Samaria in Israel opened the way to the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which became central to the conflict.
In 1973 another war occurred. Syria and Egypt launched an attack on Israel. Israel successfully stood the two countries off.
Israeli Expansionism, Invasion and Settling
During the various wars and attempted invasions of Israel, the state of Israel has annexed land belonging to the invading states, and have settled Israeli families in those regions.
In fact the birth of Israel was accompanied with the ethnic cleansing of their lands. In 1948 Zionist forces expelled Palestinians.
McGreal explains that following an armistice agreement in 1949 saw new de facto borders that gave the fledgling Jewish state considerably more territory than it was awarded under the UN partition plan. Subsquently 700,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled – about 85% of the Arab population of the territory captured by Israel – and were never allowed to return.
They have also forcibly removed Palestinian families from their homes, and then destroyed the homes, and then built new homes, which they have moved Jewish Israeli settlers into. Recently (2023) this was acknowledge by the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich who, according to Yuval Noah Harari warned Arab citizens of Israel that “you are here by mistake because Ben-Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister] didn’t finish the job in ’48 and didn’t kick you out” (ref).
Israeli Jewish people, not all of them, have consistently sought to encroach on and intimidate Muslims in the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, which is a calculated attempt to undermine the dignity of Muslims, for whom the Al-Aqsa Mosque is supposed to be the third most important holy site, and the most holy site in Jerusalem and Palestine. In fact, it should be noted, that in the days leading up to Hamas attack on Israeli civilians and state in October, the Israeli Defence Force, escorted Jewish Israelis into the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Israeli Racism
The destruction of Arab Palestinian housing and the eviction of Arab Palestinians from certain annexed lands, and the settlement of Jewish Israeli settlers in their place is a racist policy. It is a policy designed to take from one race of people Arab Palestinians to give to another race, Jewish Israelis.
McGreal explains that, historically, the Arabs who were allowed to remain in Israel, after the 1949 armistice, were subject to official discrimination. They were placed under military rule for nearly two decades, which deprived them of many basic civil rights. Much of their land was expropriated and Arab Israeli communities were deliberately kept poor and underfunded.
Declarations of Israel as a Racial Supremacist State, a Racist State and Ethnic Cleansing
Israel was established in 1949 to be a home for Jewish people, by Jewish people, in lands, which hitherto had been populated in large part, by Arabs, and had been controlled by various colonising powers for hundreds of years.
The establishment of Israel was shortly followed by the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousand of Arab Palestinians from the lands of Israel, and the destruction of Palestinian villages. In other words, the establishment of Israel was built on a campaign of ethnic cleansing. It is a campaign that has continued ever since.
In 2018 the Israeli parliament passed a law, called The Nation-State Bill, which states that the the State of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. This Bill supported the racist fiction and ideal of the racist State of Israel, and in particular it being a Jewish state. In this way, given that there are many people living in Israel, who are not Jewish, the grand majority of who are Arab, the Bill by conflating the interests of the state with the interests of the Jewish people, elevated the interests and identity of the Jewish people and population, and made them superior to the interests of all the other racial groups within Israel, including the Arabs and anyone else. The Bill was therefore a statement and achievement and dream of racial supremacy, imposed by the Israeli state on the ethnically diverse population of Israel.
Upon presenting the reformed bill, Chairman Ohana stated: “This is the law of all laws. It is the most important law in the history of the State of Israel, which says that everyone has human rights, but national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people. That is the founding principle on which the state was established”. Minister Yariv Levin, a strong backer of the proposal, called it “Zionism’s flagship bill… it will bring order, clarify what is taken for granted, and put Israel back on the right path. A country that is different from all others in one way, that it is the nation-state of the Jewish people.” (taken from here)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2019, declared, “Israel is… the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them”.
JCB, Israel, Ethnic Cleansing
Criticising People Who Criticise the Racist Ethnic Cleansing of Arab/non-Jewish people within Israel
Justificatory arguments and fears
Naomi Klein, writing in the Guardian, 11th October 2023
Today, Naomi Klein, Canadian, Jewish, writing in the Guardian, called Israel’s actions, in response to the actions taken by Hamas in Israel, ‘a murderous levelling of Gaza’.
Klein mentioned what she referred to as militant Zionism. She that its core and governing belief is: ‘that the non-Jewish world hates Jews and always will’ and that ‘Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress’ and that ‘antisemitism is… a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.’
Britain and the United Nations, and the United States, all played a major role in getting us into this mess (not to say that it would have all been flowers and roses without them)
ONE LAND FOR TWO NATIONS, WHOSE FAULT?Have you ever wondered to whom we owe the eternal Arab-Israeli conflict? The issue is not so far from the one of the unit of Italy that concerns us closely.What were the English doing in Arab territories at the beginning of the twentieth century? Englishmen who during World War I went into conflict with the Ottoman Turks to avoid them taking over the Suez Canal. Englishmen who made contradictory commitments first with Arabs and then with Zionist Jews regarding the future political status of Arab territories belonging to the Ottoman Empire in case of victory, and Palestine in particular, initially promised to the Arabs in 1915 for the contribution received in the war against them Ottoman Turks. Then, in 1917, the United Kingdom, to reward Jews for their work of persuading the United States to intervene in the world conflict, granted Zionists the right to form a “national outbreak” for the Jewish people in Palestine. Right that was not to be understood as the permission to create a Jewish nation but as the international recognition of the Jewish community. The Zionists interpreted the British act as permission for the constitution of an autonomous and independent State, and they started attacking.In 1922, the Society of Nations granted Britain the mandate for the provisional administration of Palestine in the interest of the two ethnicities, and urged the creation of conditions for Jewish immigrants to obtain Palestinian citizenship. The Jewish Agency was born, a Zionist organization funded by foreign backers, which bought land and doubled the Jewish population in Palestine from 84,000 units in 1922 to 360,000 at the end of the decade. Some Palestinian movements were born, and since then history has been one of division, mutual intolerance and violence on both sides.At the end of World War II, the United Kingdom, between the two fires created, decided to return the Palestinian mandate obtained in 1922 in the hands of the UN baby, leaving Palestine in effect to both Arabs and Jews, and announced that it would finish the task in May from 1948. The solution to the difficult situation then came to the United Nations, which in November 1947 recommended the division of the territory contested between a Palestinian, a Jewish state and a third zone, which included Jerusalem, administered directly to the UN itself.On May 14, 1948, London lifted its curtains permanently on Palestine and the Jewish Agency for Palestine proclaimed independence of the “Jewish State in the Land of Israel,” becoming the provisional government of the State of Israel.The newly formed Arab League started a “liberation” war against Israel, whose armies would have militarily occupied territories that are still controversial.Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1967 opened the Israel-Strike conflict, which is just one chapter in bad history.Extremism, Hate, and Violence. All this is due to the interest of the British in strategic territories for their trade with the East, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) which the United Kingdom took over Egypt in 1882 to make it a British protectorate and proclaim its autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, then fought with the support of arabs in 1915. And we Neapolitans, today called southern Italy, know very well how much the start, in 1854, of the works for the Suez system influenced. From that moment on England has committed to “favor” the unity of a vassille Italy in the hands of the “friends” Piedmontese, with the elimination of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies of the “enemy” Ferdinando II, to use the southern part of our peninsula as a commercial and military outpost of his empire.It is the British historic claim to dictate the trajectories of the peoples for their own account. Who can understand, understands.________________________
References and Resources
Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity
https://sites.google.com/view/israel-elephant-in-the-room/home
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/13/why-israel-palestine-conflict-history
