“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians.” Benny Morris, Israeli historian
This actually a play on Michael Shrimpton’s article, which is entitled “Israel hammers Hamas,” and which is completely devoid of historical facts and deep analysis about what has been doing on in the Middle East for the better part of sixty years.
Back in 2014, Shrimpton and I had a long discussion about similar issues, both at VT and via email messages. For the life of me, I simply cannot understand why Shrimpton continues to avoid scholarly studies that have been written on these issues and move on to perpetuate the Israeli narratives, which, as my dear friend Mark Dankof put it in our article The Closing of the Zionist Mind, is based on:
“an attempt to conceal what I believe the truth to be about the doctrine of Jewish racial supremacist ideology as the philosophical underpinning for land thievery, terrorism, and genocide in Palestine, along with the systematic concealment of the evidence of overwhelming Jewish financial and political support in the United States and Europe for fiat money and central banking; globalist trade treaties; Israel’s usurpation of American foreign policy; the overwhelmingly Jewish ownership position in the major media consortiums operating in the West; the amount of Jewish and pro-Israel PAC money routinely buying American Presidential elections and Congressional seats and committee assignments on Capitol Hill; and the provably disproportionate role played by Jewish interests in promoting the Cultural Marxism which has engulfed the United States and Western Europe in my lifetime, especially in the advancement of the LGBT agenda, the abortion industry, the pornography industry, and so forth.
“Ultimately, the Talmudic doctrine of Jewish racial supremacy is a frontal assault not simply on the rights of Palestinians and other Middle Eastern peoples, but in an American context should be properly seen as a frontal assault on the political and cultural autonomy of millions of Americans and on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights in the Constitution of the United States. The corroborative proof for this statement is perhaps best found in the draconian Global Anti-Semitism Review Act of 2004 signed into law by George W. Bush.”[1]
Hamas and other groups are simply a response to Israel’s terrorist activities which have been going on for decades. Don’t believe me? Well, take it from Avner Cohen, an Israeli scholar and philosopher who is well trained in Israel’s nuclear history and strategic policy. Cohen declared: “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”[2] Other Jewish scholars of various stripes have essentially said similar things.[3]
So how can any person with an ounce of common sense avoid the fact that Israel has been wiping out the precious Palestinians since the beginning of time? For example, Benny Morris, Israel’s foremost historian, unequivocally declared:
“A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.”
When Morris looked at archival documents, he even found that Israeli soldiers raped Palestinians. Morris admitted: “To my surprise, there were also many cases of rape. In the months of April-May 1948, units of the Haganah [the pre-state defense force that was the precursor of the IDF] were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves.”
Morris continued:
“On 14 or 15 May [1948], a 12-year-old girl was raped by two Haganah soldiers; there were also a number of attempted rapes. There was widespread institutional and private looting by Haganah and IZL [National Military Organization or Irgun] troops and Tel Aviv citizens who infiltrated the town, there was robbery on the roads by patrolling Jewish troops and there was widespread vandalisation of property. In general, the inhabitants complained, they were ‘being incessantly molested.’
“The looting was so bad that Chizik appealed directly to Ben-Gurion, who on 22 May ordered the IZL and the Haganah to obey Chizik’s instructions. A senior Kiryati officer, Zvi Aurbach, made a point of washing his hands of any responsibility for property in Jaffa. On 25 May, on official reported:
“‘During the whole day I walked about the streets…I saw soldiers, civilians, military police, battalion police, looting, robbing, while breaking through doors and walls…’”
Even the Daily Mail, of all places, reported that Israel, “a country born in bloodshed, has become the leader in assassinations.” Taking its cues from Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, the Daily Mail continues to say:
“Not only have Mossad’s secret agents killed more people than the agents of any other state since World War II, but the pace has rapidly increased, with some 800 operations in the past decade…
“One operation in 1968 was directly inspired by the film The Manchurian Candidate, with Mossad hiring a Swedish-born psychologist to brainwash a Palestinian prisoner into murdering Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
“The psychologist picked a suitable prisoner and spent three months hypnotising him with the simple message: ‘Arafat bad. He must be removed’. The prisoner, known only as Fatkhi, was trained to shoot at pictures of Arafat, hidden in a specially prepared room. On December 19, 1968, a Mossad team smuggled Fatkhi across the River Jordan, from where he was supposed to infiltrate Arafat’s headquarters.
“Then they waited. Five hours later, news came. Fatkhi had wasted no time. He had gone straight to a police station and accused Mossad of trying to brainwash him. The operation was an abject failure.”[4]
Jewish writers Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman try very hard not to say that the Mossad acts like terrorists, but there is an actual team from within the Mossad called Kiddon that practiced not only covert operations but the assassination of perceived enemies.[5] Most of the assassinations are approved by the prime minister. A classic example would be the strategic plan to assassinate the late Yasser Arafat.[6]
Shrimpton has to ignore all the historical background to say: “Well done the IDF! You always know when the Good Guys are winning.” Then he moves on to marshal an essentially diabolical, imperial, and racist statement: “The time for a ceasefire will come when all of Israel’s perfectly proper military objectives have been met.” So is Israel the only nation in the world whose “perfectly proper military objectives” should be met? Are they the only ones who ought to have a say in the Middle East? If Shrimpton cannot see that this is simply ridiculous, then we cannot help him.
Without a single evidence or back up (that’s typical of him), Shrimpton declares: “The conflict was started by Hamas, backed by Egypt and the half-crazed ayatollahs, if that is not a tautology with respect, in Iran.” Back a few years ago, I went to great pain reading much of Shrimpton’s book to see if he has any evidence for the extraordinary statements he relentlessly propounds, and it was a complete disappointment.
[1] For further studies on most of these issues, see John Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar & Straus, 2007); Paul R. Pillar, Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Ilan Pappé, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Culture (New York: New York: University Press, 2014); Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014); Andrew J. Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014); John M. Schuessler, Deceit on the Road to War: Presidents, Politics, and American Democracy (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015).
[2] Andrew Higgins, “How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2009.
[3] Sara Roy, Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018); Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe, Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010); Izzeldin Abuelaish and Marek Glezerman, I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010).
[4] “Poison toothpaste, prisoners hypnotised to kill: How Mossad, Israel’s secret service, has become the world leader in assassins with 800 operations in the last decade,” Daily Mail, July 28, 2018.
[5] Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars (New York: Levant Books, 2012), 6, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 284, chapter 18.
[6] Aaron J. Klein, Striking Back: The 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre and Israel’s Deadly Response (New York: Random, 2005), 109.