John Guise (British Army officer)

Transcription

Ladies and Gentlemen the United Nations general assembly partition resolution of the 27th of November 1947 was the proximate portal of the Nakba. It was Britain, of course, that had dumped the Palestine problem in the United Nations to run away from the catastrophic consequences of the hubristic Jewish national home policy it had launched three decades earlier in 1917 via a human agent named Arthur James Balfour. The 1947 partition resolution got Britain out of it's self inflicted black hole because this resolution ostensibly created two states, a Jewish and an Arab state, to succeed the mandate in Palestine thus liquidating Britain's role there and hopefully it's moral responsibility to the policy's principal victim the Arab population of the country. It's interesting that neither George nor Gordon refer in their 2008 Knesset speeches, to the 1947 partition resolution which George's predecessor Harry Truman jammed down the wind pipes of the United Nation's member states and Gordon's predecessor Prime Minister Clement Attlee pretended not to endorse by abstaining from voting while seeing to it that Britain's Commonwealth parties did vote for it. The partition resolution is one of the major foundational myths of Israel on the grounds that it was equitable, practicable, and morally and legally viable ~and that~ and that the Jews had accepted it while the Palestinians and Arabs had rejected it but the Palestinian Arabs had rejected it precisely because it was not equitable or practicable or morally or legally viable. Aggression and offensive action were built into the very concept of the UN Partition and the mechanics of its resolution. Mandatory Palestine was divided into 16 districts 9 of these districts were allotted to the UN Jewish state. Only one of the nine had a Jewish majority with the Jewish population percentage in the other 8 ranging from 47% to 1%. In none of these did the Jews own a majority of the land with percentage ownership in the range from 39% to 1% the vast majority of the Jewish community in Palestine was concentrated in the three cities Haifa, Tel-Aviv, and Jerusalem. The Jewish population outside these three cities was very thin on the ground after seventy years of colonization Jewish land ownership in Palestine did not exceed 7% of the country. The area designated for the Jewish state by the United Nations was over 50% of the country so what the United Nations effectively said to the Yishuv, Yishuv the Jewish community in Palestine. It said go take possession of the forty plus percent of Palestine that you don't own from the people who do from the people who live in those areas and derive their livelihood from them yet Palestinian resistance to this invasion to this forcible incorporation of their land in the Jewish state was and is portrayed as aggression while the Yishuv's offensive to expand its territory ten-fold against the wishes of the native inhabitants is portrayed as guess what self defense. To this day it is still and invariably self defense when the military machine of the Yishuv's successor Israel is on the move Israel derives its legitimacy in part from the Zionist leadership's acceptance of the partition plan the acceptance is hardly surprising since partition was the official Zionist solution of the Palestinian problem at the same time the leadership of the Yishuv had no intention of sticking to the partition borders as is plain from the operational orders of Haganah's Plan Dalet the master plan for the military conquest of Palestine launched six weeks before the end of the mandate furthermore while the Zionist's leadership verbally accepted partition the second and third largest political parties in the Yishuv were all vociferously and adamantly against it demanding a Jewish state in the whole of Eretz Yisrael the passage of the UN Partition Plan launched what has been called the civil-war phase of the "First Palestine War" which lasted until the declaration of the Israeli state on 15th May of 1948. During that period the combined operations of Haganah and the so-called dissident groups the Irgun and Stern had already destroyed the fabric of Mandatory Palestinian society, launched the Palestinian exodus, conquered major Arab towns and scores of Arab villages and established Jewish control over the bulk of the territory allocated to the Jewish state and vast territories well beyond. The regular war with the Arab countries starting 15th of May 1948 would not have occurred had these events not preceded. The outcome of the war was already sealed in favor of Israel by the time it started the existential threat to the nascent Jewish state, supposedly posed by the Arab armies in 1948, occupies pride of place in Israeli and Zionist mythology but like the ostensibly equitable and morally viable partition resolution this threat is just that, a myth. At the 1897 Basel Congress which established the World Zionist Organization only 2 of the 199 delegates were Palestinian born fifty years later on 14th of May 1948 only 1 of the 37 signatories of Israel's Declaration of Independence was Palestinian born in many ways this encapsulates the nature of the Zionist movement it was not a native phenomenon it was not of Palestinian provenance Zionism was undoubtedly a nationalist movement but what kind nationalist movement it was not a movement of liberation or self-determination against a foreign imperial or colonial power like most Afro-Asian movements it was not a settler rebellion against the metropolitan parent like the American Revolution it was not an intifada against a brutal and asphyxiating military occupation it was not a sucession from a multinational state or Empire as the movements against the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires it was not an assertion of an indigenous communal or minoritarian identity against neighbors as in the case of the Kurds and the Basques and others it was not a Risorgimento at the ~regional~, aimed at the regional unification of a fragmented nation the movement had rich secular utopian and socialist "Fountainheads" but it also had powerful ethno-national impulses nurtured by centuries of discrimination, persecution, intimidation, insults, expulsions in Christian Europe, and an imperative desire to escape from an ubiquitous and humiliating minority status simultaneously the movement was en-formed by powerful religious spiritual even mystical currents the result was an admixture of these with other secular and national ingredients that defies easy analysis the slogan of the religious Zionist right the Mizrachi party during the Mandate was "Eretz Yisrael for the people of Yisrael according to the Torah of Yisrael" but messianic subtexts were by no means the monopoly of the religious parties the secular right under Menachem Begin called for the restoration of the whole "Land of Israel" to the God covenanted, God covenanted owners. Chaim Weizmann the secular atheistic scientist declared before a British Royal Commission that our charter is a divine promise while the socialist non-observing Ben-Gurion announced that the Bible is our mandate Ben-Gurion's socialist labor party is traditionally seen as the founder of the state less well-known is the fact that the ruling Zionist coalition from 1935 to the end of the mandate and well beyond was what is known in Israel as the historical coalition whose principal partners were the labor Mapai party and the religious Mizrachi party without the Mizrachi parties active participation it is doubtful that Israel would have been founded what particularly distinguishes the Zionist movement across this secular religious spectrum are first the nostalgia for a specific country Palestine by Jews in their intercontinental diaspora and second the Zionists dogged determination to return to it and to re-tie an ancient historical umbilical cord. Even in the pre-Balfour and pre-World War One state of political and military powerlessness Zionism exhibited a sense, a sense of exclusive entitlement and moral superiority which did not reflect only current European attitudes to non-European peoples but also seemed rooted in the conviction of a primordial and preemptive birthright pur-blind to the indigenous Palestinians of the land. Analogies to the Zionist venture abound, particularly those of the early settlers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand but while the parallels are clear they seem to pertain more to the mechanics of dispossession and colonization then to the motivational impulses of these settlers in which the atavistic irredentist Zionist dimension is lacking. The English settlers did see America as the promised land but they did not believe that they had originated from the prairies. After decades of reflection on the subject the closest analogy I can think of given the lack of congruence with other national movements is the Iberian Reconquista of the 13th to the 16th centuries under Castile and Aragón with its alchemy of religious and national motivation its compulsion to redeem territory considered long-lost its insatiable land hunger its since of prior ownership of this territory and its pitiless indifference to the fate of the inhabitants seen as usurpers and strangers and obstacles to its forward march. The watershed in the fortunes of the Zionist Movement was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 which Gordon Brown saw fit not to mention in the Knesset. The Balfour Declaration changed Zionism overnight from a fantasy to a possibility by providing it with the endorsement of the paramount imperial power of the day with the Balfour Declaration Zionism took giant strides towards what Mister Brown called the achievement of 1948 the hauteur towards the Palestinians of Mister Brown's predecessor at White Hall is best exemplified by the following words of Balfour himself written in 1919 Zionism be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import then the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land unquote in the same memorandum Balfour went on whatever defference should be paid to the views of those who live there i.e. in Palestine, the powers in their selection of a mandatory do not propose as I understand the matter to consult with them. The achievement of 1948 lauded by Mister Brown has, as we can see from these words, a pretty long British pedigree by riding piggyback on Imperial Mandatory Britain Zionism launched its Reconquista against the Palestinians by proxy with British bayonets coercion was integral to Britain's assumption of the Palestine Mandate without consulting Palestinian wishes the intrusiveness of Britain's rule in palestine because of its Jewish national home policy was more devastating than that of any of the other colonialist regimes along the the Mediterranean littoral, including Mussolini's Libya and France's Algérie Française even though initially very thin on the ground in rural areas the Zionists established early on a brilliant method for controlling the countryside in any future showdown with the Palestinian peasantry this was the kibbutz system based on Prussian models for the control of the Polish peasantry in East Prussia the kibbutz network centrally directed and financed occupied strong points in strategically selected sites across Palestine kibbutzs proliferated via the steady influx of pioneers "Halutzim", who had been specially trained in Europe before immigrating to Palestine the mandate was essentially a condominium between the British Administration and the World Zionist Organization whose headquarters was in London throughout the mandate can you imagine a Nehru, a Kenyatta, a Saad Zaghloul operating against Britain from a headquarters in London. The Yishuv in Palestine was an extension an emanation and literally the creation of the World Zionist Organization and its financial institutions overseas. Membership in the World Zionist Organization remained overwhelmingly diaspora based of a total membership of ~two million~, 2.16 million, 2.16 million at the time of the 1946 World Zionist Conference on the eve of the creation of the Jewish state only 300,000 members were from Palestine. American members at 956,000 were more than three times the Palestinian members the greater part of the Yishuv's income was never self-generated it always came from overseas largely from the American Jewish community as of 1917. There was a tri-lateral relationship of power in Palestine between the British occupier, the Palestinians, and the Yishuv. The fundamental story of the mandate in the years up to 1948 is the relentless growth of the Jewish national home under British aegis and the resultant cumulative shift in the balance of power between the Palestinians and the Yishuv in favor of the Yishuv the greater the sense of power of the Yishuv the greater the consolidation of its Reconquista mood and mold as early as 1920 Ben-Gurion and his labor colleagues had decided on the need for a secret underground army the Haganah on the realistic assumption that to convert a country whose vast majority was Arab into a Jewish national home required direct military force that the British government might not always be willing to provide. The word Haganah in Hebrew means of course self-defense. Shabtai Teveth the leading authority on Ben-Gurion believes that thanks to the British protected Jewish mass immigration from Europe Ben-Gurion by 1936 felt that the Yishuv was so strong that it could discontinue, discontinue all political dialogue with the Palestinians. Ben-Eliezer the brilliant Israeli sociologist has described in great detail the growth of militarism at the Yishuv grassroots level from the mid nineteen-thirties onwards. Arab anxiety and fear of the growing Jewish national home attested to by successive British royal commissions of inquiry finally erupted in the Palestinian rebellion of 1936--1939 the brutal crushing of the rebbellion by the British Army the killing and hanging and collective punishment the dismantling of Palestinian political organizations the arrests and exile of Palestinian leaders and the systematic disarmament of the Palestinian villagers massively and irreversibly shifted the balance of power in favor of the Yishuv by 1939 Britain had created a Jewish auxiliary colonial army twenty thousand-strong which it armed, trained, and officered. Tthis force was given the innocuous name of the "Jewish Settlement Police" but in fact it was a British territorial army modeled on the British Territorial Army in this country this new official, official Jewish army when added to the underground Haganah the unofficial army of 30,000 made the Yishuv with its population of less than half a million one of the most militarized ~states~ societies in the world. In 1937 a royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended for the first time the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state like the true mother of the child facing Solomon the Palestinians where outraged by the notion of their vivisection equally outrageous was the Commission's recommendation of the compulsory transfer of the Palestinians from the proposed Jewish state to make room for Jewish immigrants from abroad in revulsion at these recommendations the Palestinian rebellion against Britain reached its zenith in 1938-39 but Peel's compulsory transfer proposal was music to the ears of the Zionist leadership wetting its appetite and fueling its coercieve disposition in fact the concept of transfer a euphemism for expulsion of the Palestinians had been buzzing in Zionist's bonnets long before the peel Commission as has been documented by Nur Masalha there is evidence that both transfer and partition had been discussed by the Royal Commission with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann before the publication of the ~peel~, Lord Peel's report the concept of transfer continued to occupy a prominent niche in the ~stratii~ strategic thinking of the Yishuv's military and political elite as it does to this day with many Israelis. In the 1948 fighting the idea of transfer as shown in the work of Ilan Pappé unquestionably en-formed the implementation of plan Dalyet once the United Nations Partition resolution of November 1947 provided the tendentious alibi of self-defense a hallmark of British policy in Palestine had been the suspension of democracy this was not merely the usual feature of colonial policies everywhere but was absolutely integral to the very formation and development of the Jewish national home this is because to dismiss the desires and prejudices of the Arabs is to dismiss the desires and prejudices of the vast majority of the country thus the country that is tirelessly hailed in western capitals today as the sole democracy in the Middle East came into existence in Palestine only through the burial of democracy pending the building up of an artificial majority through forcible mass Jewish immigration from overseas. In 1935 the mother of parliaments in London overwhelmingly voted against a legislative assembly in palestine that provided the merest semblance of representative government out of concern that it might prejudice the growth of the Jewish national home having brutally crushed the resurgent Palestineian rebellion against partition and compulsory transfer Britain began reassessment of its entire Palestine policy with the war clouds of "World War 2" gathering the adverse effects of pro-Zionism on Britain's relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds where increasingly felt accordingly in 1939 Britain called for a conference in London to be attended by representatives of the Arab countries as well as by Palestinian and Zionist leaders a policy paper issued by the conference the "White Paper of 1939" put a cap on Jewish mass immigration and on the alienation of Palestinian lands into Zionist hands it also left the door open to a unitary i.e. non-partitioned Palestine. This was Britain's belated attempt at even-handedness but even-handedness then as now is not Zionism's favorite brand of tea the white paper was the beginning of the parting of the ways between London and the Yishuv. A distinctive feature of Zionism as a national movement is its dependence on imperial sponsors and the facility with which it could shed one sponsor for another soon after the white paper Ben-Gurion met the British Colonial Secretary, Malcolm MacDonald in the heated exchanges that ensued McDonald asked Ben-Gurion how long he thought Britain could afford to protect the Yishuv with British bayonets? Ben-Gurion answered that the Yishuv no longer needed British bayonets when McDonald suggested that an Iraqi army could invade from the east Ben-Gurion replied the sea is easier to cross then the desert. What Ben-Gurion had in mind was of course the Jewish communities overseas particularly in the United States and sure enough the Yishuv's shift to the United States as patron was presently formalized in the 1942 Biltmore program. The Biltmore program is so called because it was declared at the Biltmore hotel in New York at a general meeting ~organized by Ben-Gurion~ at Ben-Gurion's request of all leading American Jewish leaders. The program demanded in effect unrestricted post-war Jewish mass immigration into Palestine under the sole control of the World Zionist Organization and the declaration of the whole of Palestine as a Jewish Commonwealth, a code word for state. This was open political war against Britain and all out war against the Palestinians the Biltmore program was the strategic master stroke of a genius on Ben-Gurion's part it committed the American Jewish establishment and its resources to a collision course with Britain and the Palestinians while at the same time harnessing this establishment's aversion, aversion to post-war Jewish mass immigration to the United States itself for fear of ~arouse~, arousing the latent anti-semitism of gentile America. The Biltmore Conference took place in May 1942 ~before~ before the horrific details of the "Holocaust" emerged in November of that year once these details did emerge they were seized upon by Ben-Gurion's domestic foes in Palestine the revisionist right and particularly its extensions the Irgun and Stern terrorist groups to escalate against Britain so as to embarrass and outbid the Yishuv labor rights lead by Ben-Gurion. By 1944 the Irgun had acquired a new leader Menachem Begin a Pole from Brest-Litovsk. Begin had been commander in Warsaw of the revisionist paramilitary organization Betar. Fleeing his command at the approach of the German army he was arrested and presently released by the Russians. Begin set foot in Palestine for the first time in 1942 he assumed command of the Irgun in Palestine to start operations against the British at the request of American Jewish representatives this he did in February 1944 while British troops were battling Nazi panzer divisions across North Africa and Italy and preparing for the Normandy invasion. Jewish terrorist operations against the British continued in intensifying spirals without let up until the very end of the mandate in May 1948 before 1944 Jewish terrorism had been particularly directed and exclusively directed at Palestinian civilians particularly in the period 1937--1939 it was during that period that Jewish terrorism introduced for the first time in the Middle East the diabolical tactic of placing in bus stops, vegetable markets, and cafes, delayed action electrically detonated mines hidden in kerosine containers, milk cans, and fruit baskets. From 1944 onwards these terrorist tactics with more sophisticated and more shocking variations and effects were deployed against the British army by both the Irgun and Stern there is no time to go in detail into the sequence of events leading to Britain's shameless abandonment of her "Ship of State" in palestine but the central figure in these events was Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion was without doubt the most capable leader operating in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s he had his priorities right he did not follow the Irgun and Stern in their attacks against the British because he intuited that the real enemy was not Britain but the Palestinians and the Arabs with the American Jewish Committee committed to the Biltmore program Britain had become as far as Ben-Gurion was concerned superfluous, a broken reed, an obstacle. Meanwhile the Yishuv had gained immensely in military strength since 1939 some 25,000 Jews from Palestine had acquired military training in the British Army in North Africa, thus in 1945 at the end of "World War 2" the time had come for the establishment of the Jewish state with maximum possible borders Britain had to be removed but not by the direct military action of the Haganah itself Ben-Gurion's grand strategy to remove Britain involved the following #1 first mobilizing the American Jewish community to put sustained pressure on Washington, to put sustained pressure on London #2 two, massive illegal Jewish immigration from Europe with American Jewish funding to undermine the white paper restrictions, flood the coast-guard facilities of the British Mandatory Administration, wear down the war exhausted Royal Navy #3 third, a world wide propaganda campaign to denounce Britain for piteously preventing Jewish DPs from reaching the shores of Palestine depicted as the only place in this wide world able to absorb them #4 fourth. formulating a partition plan based on the Biltmore program to win the support of the new unelected American president Harry Truman who had moved into the White House after Roosevelt's death and who was facing presidential elections in November 1948 and finally looking the other way while the Irgun and Stern groups escalated their vicious terrorist campaign against Britain to nudge it further towards the exit. The strategy succeeded brilliantly Britain was ignominiously driven out of Palestine by its own adopted child and protege the terrorist innovations used against the British Army and government to achieve this end included; the postal bomb, the booby-trapped vehicle, the booby-trapped suitcase, and the letter bomb. According to the "Times of London", letter bombs all intercepted by Scotland Yard were sent to London in 1947 to Sir Stafford Cripps Minister of the Board of Trade, Mister John Stretchy Minister of Food, Mister Ernest Bevin Foreign Secretary, Mister Antony Eden former foreign secretary and Mister Arthur Greenwood Minister without portfolio still other Jewish terrorist innovations were taking British officers hostage in Palestine and whipping them a first in the entire history of the British Army kidnapping British NCOs and hanging them and bobby trapping the hanging bodies another first the masterminds behind these operations were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir later Prime Ministers of Israel mentors and role models for the Tzipis and the Bibis and the Liebermans congratulated in the Knesset by George W. Bush and Gordon Brown the British Army in Palestine in the last years of the mandate was one hundred thousand strong one WW2 veteran for every three adults in the Yishuv this army could have smashed the Irgun and Stern overnight but its hands were tied by George Bush's predecessor at the White House, between 1945 and the partition resolution 1947 the ratio of Britains to Jewish terrorists killed was 4-to-1 170 Britains to 44 Jewish terrorists an unheard of ratio in the annals of colonial warfare as we know only too well from recent events. Ladies and Gentleman the "Green Light" for the Reconquista came with the partition resolution on the 29th of November 1947. What followed could not be called military operations by one army against another there was no Palestinian Army and on the Jewish side there was not so much an army as a nation on the march Ala Aragón and Castile, bent on redeeming what it saw as its ancestral lands from Palestinian strangers and squatters according to the operational orders of Haganah's plan Dalet and Jehovah's design according to Bush and Brown. Ladies and Gentleman the irony, the grandmother of ironies is that Ben-Gurion spent 1916 researching the history of Palestine in of all places the New York Public Library one of the conclusions of his research was that the Palestinian peasantry were the true descendants of the ancient Hebrews, thank you very much.