Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem,Sr
Introduction
“There is no denying that the Zionist colonization of Palestine which began in the early 1880s and continues to this day, represents one of the most remarkable colonizing ventures of all time”.
Dr Walid Khalidi – All That Remains
“I want to explore both the mechanism of the 1948 ethnic cleansing [of Palestine] and the cognitive system that allowed the world to forget…I want to make the case for the paradigm of ethnic cleansing and use it to replace the paradigm of war as the basis for the scholarly research of, and the public debate about, 1948”.
Professor Ilan Pappe – The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America’s crusade as Israel’s. On 16 August [2007], the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military “aid package” for Israel, the world’s fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel does. No other country has such a record of lawlessness; not any of the world’s tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history”.
John Pilger, August 2007
“In 1948 eighty-five percent of Palestinians in the part of Palestine that became Israel were displaced, 675 towns and villages were depopulated while their lands and properties were confiscated. Palestinians refer to this experience as their Nakba”.
Dr Salman Abu-Sitta – The Return Journey
“If I were to sum up the [1897] Basle Conference in one word – it would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State…If I were to say this to-day [3 September, 1897], I would be be met with universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will see it.”
Theodor Herzel, Founder of Zionism [from his own diaries]
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The principal aim of 1948 Lest We Forget, through its website, established in May 2006, is to expose the lies which have, for far too long, been presented as the true scenario of how Israel came to be in 1948.
There is nothing mysterious about what is often referred to as ‘the Palestine Problem’ or ‘The Palestine Question’. What Palestinians refer to as their Nakba was not enacted in some obscure era of history but rather in the 20th Century, within our life time and under the noses of western democarcies – who condoned it.
Until recently, detailed information about ‘the Palestine Problem’ had been hidden from academic researches mainly in the zionist archives of the Israeli state.
Apart from the declaration in 1897 by the Zionists at Basel to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the real decisions which helped bring about the realisation of that declaration and, consequently, the Palestinian tragedy were in fact taken in two Western capitals: London and Washington. These decisions were backed by a sophisticated machine of propaganda and manipulation the aim of which was to realise the Zionist vision of ‘a Jewish home in Palestine’. All the crises that have beset the Middle East, from the early days of the 20th century until the present bloody wars raging throughout this region, flow directly and indirectly from that Basel decision of 1897. About this, there is no doubt.
As the process of turning that ‘vision’ into reality continued, Western acquiescence to, and accommodation of that ‘vision’ also continued. Its manifestation lies at the heart of what might be termed as the Bible Syndrome. Its epicentre is the great dialogue between Christianity and Judaism. This epicentre is vast, powerful and is proving to be the final doomsday chapter of what is left of Palestine.
No conflict in the world has ever been so well documented and recorded as the Palestine tragedy.
There is a mass of detailed maps, photographs, populations counts, up-to-date reports, facts on the ground and official documents which show that the basis for the most trumpeted peace process today calling for an independent and viable Palestinian state sitting side by side Israel has long disappeared.
The so-called two-state solution is now nothing but an empty phrase. It is a ‘delusion’.
There is a huge gap between what is being said and what is being heard; between what is being done on the ground and what is officially reported or admitted. The continued military occupation of historic Palestine, and the manner in which it is manifested through the construction of tunnels, bridges, settlements, exclusion zones and bypass roads for Jews only, all supported by the 4th largest militay machine on the planet, continues unabated in defiance of International Law. The construction of the illegal prison wall around Gaza and the West Bank continues to rob Palestinians of their land and of their farms. The establishment of new illegal Jewish colonies and the enlargement of existing illegal ones are a daily activity funded in large part by he American taxpayer. No one makes a formal complaint and when they do, no one listens.
For these reasons, we aim to show that the problems did not start with the establishment of the Israeli state in May 1948 (for that is the event that caused the Palestinian Nakba), but with the decisions taken by the Zionist leadership in Basel in 1897: to create an exclusive home and a nation for the Jews in Palestine within 50 years.
That dream had been realised in 51 years! The Zionists plotted to take over the nation of one people and offer it to the people of many nations.
It is worth noting that at the time of the Basel Conference of 1897, 95% of the population of Palestine were Palestinian Arabs and 99% of its land was Arab owned. This fact was excluded from the thinking of the Zionist leadership and was memorably reflected in Golda Meir’s famous statement: “There was no such thing as a Palestinian people…it was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist”.
Israel did not even exist before May 1948. That so-called State has neither recognised boundaries nor a national constitution. For its people, that dream of a democratic state has been slowly turning into a nightmare.
Historical Background
The first clear use of the term Palestine was in the 5th century BC refering to the region between Phoenicia and Egypt. Herodotus, the Greek historian (484-485BC) wrote of a ‘district of Syria, called Palaistinê’. Aristotle, a century later, refered to the same region as Palestine in his ‘Meteorology’.
Palestine, for 1900 years (between 3000-1100 B.C.) was the land of the Canaanites. Throughout this period, the Egyptians occupied it until 1200 BC when the Philistines took it over. They were followed by the Israelites (1000-923BC: 77 years), the Phoenicians (923-700BC), the Assyrians (700-612BC), the Babylonians (until 539BC), the Persians (until 332BC), the Macedonians (until 63BC), the Romans (until 636AD), the Arabs (636-1200: 564 years), the Crusaders (1099-1291), the Ayubiyyin (1187-1253), The Memluks (1253-1516) followed by the Ottoman rulers (400 years) until 1917 (the year of the Balfour Declaration). The British Mandate took over in 1919 and took effect in 1922.
This chronology clearly shows that the Jewish Kingdom was only one of many which settled in the land of Palestine. The country became predominantly an Arab (and Islamic) country towards the end of the 7th Century. In 1516, it became a province of the Ottoman Empire with a rich mix of Arab (Muslim and Christian) and Jewish cultures; these people believed themselves to belong to a land called Palestine.
According to Illene Beatty, a well-known archaeologist, “the extended kingdoms of David and Solomon, on which the Zionists base their demands, endured for only about 73 years…then it fell apart…Even if we allow independence to the entire life of the ancient Jewish kingdoms, from David’s conquest of Canaan in 1000 B.C. to the wiping out of Judah in 586 B.C., we arrive at [only] a 414-year Jewish rule”.
When colonial states and empires eventually disappear, sovereignty becomes the natural aim of the indigenous people of the land. Where colonialism refused to let go, national wars of liberation took hold until independence was achieved. In places where the population, through brute force, was annihilated or ethnically cleansed by the occupying communities, the latter became the new nation states (as did happen in the Americas and elsewhere).
In the Middle East, after WW1, the victorious Allies divided the region into mandated states between the French and the British. These mandated states, under the guidance of the League of Nations, eventually evolved into nation states as their Mandate periods came to an end.
Except, of course, that was not to be the fate of Palestine.
The external perception of why this happened to Palestine differs greatly from the internal perception of the Palestinians themselves.
The Zionist Project
“Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word…it would be this: ‘At Basel, I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today [1897] I would be answered by universal laughter. If not in 5 years, then certainly in 50. Everyone will know it’ “. Theodor Herzl Diaries 1897.
Israel was established in May 1948. Herzl missed his goal by only 1 year.
“The aim of Zionism is the erection for the Jewish people of a publicly recognised, legally secured home in Palestine. Not a Jewish State”. President of the 10th Zionist Congress, Basle 1911 – nearly 14 years after Herzl’s declaration.
The problem with the vision of these Zionist leaders is that it comes too late in a world which has moved forward: a world of individual rights, international law and of nations, (as the Ottoman Empire was coming to an end), yearning for self determination. Exclusivity and special previliges belonged to another era.
So, let us be clear: the so-called state of Israel is a concept formed in recent history and in doubtful circumstances. World Zionism aimed at a state where world Jews would be huddled together irrespective of where those Jews were born or to which nation or state they belonged. European anti-semitism between the two world wars, gave Zionism the raison d’etre to push for the realisation of that concept of a state for the Jews. Early Zionist thoughts did not include Palestine as the first choice. This laid bare to the lie of modern Zionists that Palestine is the natural biblical home for the Jews.
Zionism emerged as a national movement in Eastern Europe in the 1880’s. Its founder, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), a Hungarian Jew, dreamt of establishing a Jewish State in the land of Palestine, a dream which was to be realised through colonisation and land acquisition. According to Zionist archives, the leadership of early Zionism believed that the native population of Palestine, as a result of this colonisation, would simply “fold their tents and slip away”or, if they resisted, they would be “spirited across the borders”.
For the Zionists, it all started in Livorno, Italy with the birth of Moses Haim Montefiore in 1784, and who, by the age of 40, had amassed a huge fortune through trading in the City of London where he was knighted in 1837.
Sir Moses travelled to Palestine a total of six times. The first in 1827 at the age of 43 and the last in 1874 at the mature age of 90. He made acquaintance with the Pasha of Egypt in the hope that the Pasha would allow him to purchase lands in Palestine to establish the first Jewish colonies near Safad.
As early as the mid 1850s, the single aim of all Zionist planners and so-called philanthropists like Montefiore, was to slowly acquire as much land in Palesine for the sole benefit of the Jewish community and the newly arrived Jewish immigrants. Naturally, this can only be at the expense of the eventual displacement of Palestine’s indigenous people.
In 1854, Sir Moses succeeded in acquiring that piece of fertile farming land near Safad, for the benefit of some 54 Jewish families. In 1870, near the Palestinian port city of Yafa, world famous for its produce of Jaffa oranges, a group of Russian Jews founded an agricultural school called Mikveh Israel on 2500 Dunums. Russian Jewish students also formed many religious groups the most famous of which was Bilu in 1882. Other similar but more powerful groups were formed calling themselves ‘Hoverei Zion’ (Hebrew for ‘Lovers of Zion’). Their activities in Palestine were aimed at establishing new colonies such as Rishon-Le-Zion near Yafa, Zikhron Ya’acov south of Haifa and Rosh Pinnah in the Galilee.
During the late 1860’s, Palestine witnessed the influx of a new type of arrivals from Germany: The Knights Templars. Their number did not exceed 200-250, but they made a name for themselves by their excellent farms and their good manners of land management. Thier first colony was Sarona founded in 1871. Like the Zionists, they modelled their settlements on their German lots back home.
In 1878, a small number of Jews left the walls of Jerusalem, and settled in the fields of Umm Lebes near Tel-Aviv where they established the well-known settlement of Petah Tikva (‘The Mother of Settlements’).
Montefiore was also behind the establishment of the present-day – notoriously insulated and extremely religious – community of Mea Shearim (Hebrew for ‘Hundred Gates’) just outside the Damascus Gate, in Jerusalem. This is a community which started with a few dozen houses and a bakery. Now it boasts over 300 houses and its bakery is the second largest in Jerusalem.
It was through wealthy philanthropists like Montefiore that financial mechanisms were established to funnel foreign investments into Palestine for the sole purpose of establishing Zionist communities throughout the country. For example, Montefiore established the Amsterdam Fund which preceded its sister organisation The Montefiore Testimonial Fund helping to collect money from Jews around the world. Although the early settlers were an enthusiastic bunch, they were generally unfit for the task of building their communities. It is thanks to this massive influx of funds from major Jewish philanthropists, that these early colonies managed to survive and multiply.
The network of Jewish philanthropist did not only cover Palestine, but was also active in distant continents like Argentina and aimed at establishing Jewish agricultural colonies there. A main driver of such an enterprise was a German Jewish multi-millionaire by the name of Baron Moritz von Hirsch (1831-1896) from Munich. His idea of establishing a Jewish home in Argentina was viewed with suspicion by those who favoured colonisation in Palestine. Baron von Hirsch’s views were nevertheless debated at the first Zionist Congress of 1897, but ultimately rejected by the majority of the Zionist delegates.
Baron Moritz von Hirsch (1831-1896)
Other colonisation projects were considered by the Zionist leaderships in other parts of the world aimed at the creation of a Jewish Home.
For instance, Herzl had approached Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary at the time with the idea that the Zionist should be allowed to colonise Cyprus. This was refused. Herzl then proposed Al-Arish, an Egyptian territory. This was also rejected by the British on behalf of the Egyptians. Chamberlain’s sympathies for Zionist enterprises were eventually aroused, and he offered a British colony in East Africa called Uganda (present-day Kenya). Herzl was overjoyed. He presented this to his Zionist leadership suggesting that, in order to appease the leadership, this would merely be a stepping stone to the eventual colonisation of Palestine. But Herzl died, aged 44, on July 3 1904 without realising this dream.
At the 7th Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905, all other colonisation projects were dealt a mortal blow, with Palestine being the preferred bull’s eye. The rest is history.
Theodor Herzl had written back in June 1895: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border…and both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly…”
Israel Zangwill (see below) followed by saying that “if we wish to give a country to a people without a country, it is utter foolishness to allow it to be the country of two peoples…”.
But years before Herzl and Zangwill made their prophetic announcements, other Jewish intellectuals laid the grounds for them. in 1862, a German Jew by the intriguing name of Moses Hess, who was inspired by French civilization, wrote “…what we have to do today, for the re-establishment of Jewish national existence, is to keep alive the hope of our political rebirth…and the founding of Jewish colonies in the ancestral land”.
This concept of transfer and colonisation of the local population was held dear by almost every member of the Zionist leadership in Europe. At their first official Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, they called already for “the establishment of a publicly and legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people”.
20 years later, the Balfour Declaration threw them a lifeline.
To secure support for this project, Israel Zangwill (1864-1926), an Anglo-Jewish writer born in London, and a powerful leader of British Zionism, coined the phrase: “a land without a people for a people without land”. Little did he and all his colleagues in the Zionist leadership realise (or wished to forget) that there were almost 410,000 Palestinians (Muslims and Christians) living in Palestine around the early 1890’s.
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), who was born in Motal near Pinsk in Belarus, and who was to become Israel’s first president, once said: “…there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people…and there exists the Jewish people and it has no country. What is left is to fit the gem into the ring…”
The Zionist leadership did not actually mean that there were no people in Palestine. They meant that there were no people in Palestine worth considering as a people. The Zionists truly believed then, and still do now, that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people.
The reality began to dawn on these leaders that the only way to realise the Zionist dream in a land with no many indigenous people is to tarnsfer them out of the country.
Zionism’s idea of transfer was initially tested within a wider Arab framework where Zionist leaders would offer Arab leaders financial incentives, expertise and international influence in exchange for allowing transfers to take place and acquiescence in the expansion of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). In January 1919, for example, Chaim Weizmann and the Hashemite Emir Faisal (1883-1933) who was aspiring to the leadership of the Arab Nationalist Movement, concluded an agreement under British auspices whereby Faisal would support Jewish immigration into Palestine in return for economic support for the future kingdom Faisal was hoping to create.
As Palestinian resistance to the expansion of the Yishuv was growing, so was the Zionist determination to implement the doctrine of separation between the Jewish community and the Palestinian population in preparation for the eventual establishment of a Jewish state.
Enter David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), one of the Yishuv leaders who was born in Poland as David Gruen and arrived in Palestine in 1906 at the age of 20 and later became the first prime minister of Israel. He strongly advanced the idea of transfer and saw a clear link between the separation of the Palestinians and of the Jews and the plan for the eventual transfer of the Palestinians out of Palestine.
When the Palestinian Revolt took place between 1936 and 1939, the Zionists saw a chance for the strengthening of their underground forces and the expansion of their military infrastructure. It was becoming clear to the Yishuv that the solution to the Palestinian demographic problem can only be achieved through military force.
Ben-Gurion declared in 1936: “…What can drive the Arabs to a mutual understanding with us?…Facts, only after we manage to establish a great Jewish facts in the country will the precondition for discussion with the Arabs be met”.
Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), born in the Ukraine-USSR, was a member of the World Zionist Organisation. He later founded the Zionist-Revisionist movement, which was the central ideological component of the Likud (which became Ariel Sharon’s Kadima party). He always believed that the creation of a Jewish state meant imposing the will of Zionism on the Palestinian population. He stated:
“…colonisation can continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through…this is our policy towards the Arabs and to formulate it in any other way would be hypocrisy…The Jewish question can be solved either completely or it cannot be solved at all. We are in need of a territory where our people will constitute the overwhelming majority…and one must not be afraid of the word ‘segregation’ ”.
A secret document dated 18 April 1920 from the British General HQ in Cairo to the War Office in London, revealed that the riots of April 1920 in Jerusalem were incited by Jabotinsky and his clique of armed gangs who were well armed. Just before the arrival of the first British High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, an arch-Zionist and a Jew, in Palestine, Jabtinsky was arrested, tried and sentenced by the military court in Jerusalem to 15 years. But, Herbert Samuel later pardoned Jabotinsky against the advice of the War Office.
Jabotinsky believed that only ‘an iron wall of bayonets and Jewish armed garrisons’ would be able to secure Jewish sovereignty on both sides of the Jordan River. Like Weizmann and Ben-Gurion before him, he had only contempt for the indigenous Arabs. He once said: “we Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East. The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Yisrael”. This ideology found expression in two military terrorist organizations which became notorious for their massacres before and after the partition of Palestine in 1947:
The first was the Irgun formed in 1935 by Menachem Begin (1913-1992) a Polish Jew who became prime minister in 1977 (and about whom Albert Einstein in a letter to the NY Times said that he and his party were “closely akin in their organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”).
The second was the Stern Gang led by Itzhak Shamir (1915-2012) born Icchak Jaziernicki in Rozana, Poland. Stern was responsible for many terrorist acts including the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte. Shamir, of course, became Israel’s Prime Minister not once but twice: from 1983-84 and again from 1986-1992.
This Shamir described the Arabs as “beasts of the desert, not a legitimate people”. In a memorandum to UNSCOP in 1947, his Stern Gang called for the compulsory evacuation of the entire Palestinian population from Palestine, preferably in the direction of Iraq. As the sale of land by absentee landlords increased so did the bitterness of the Palestinian farmers who worked on them and who were now forced to leave by their new land owners. For this purpose, Chaim Weizmann established the Jewish Agency Executive to promote the idea of Palestinian transfer from newly acquired land. At the same time, Jewish immigration increased and the number of Jewish immigrants jumped from 30,000 in 1933 to 61,000 in 1935 (representing 29.5% of the total population).
“The aim of Zionism in the erection for the Jewish people of a publicly recognised, legally secured home in Palestine. Not a Jewish State”. President of the 10th Zionist Congress, Basle 1911.
“The aim of Zionism in the erection for the Jewish people of a publicly recognised, legally secured home in Palestine. Not a Jewish State”. President of the 10th Zionist Congress, Basle 1911.
The Concept of Transfer
With Palestinian riots erupting in 1936, Britain decided to dispatch a commission to investigate the causes for the riots and the clashes taking place between Jews and Arabs. The Royal Commission, known as the Royal (Peel) Commission arrived in Palestine in November of that year led by William W Peel, 1st Earl Peel (1867-1937). It interviewed Zionist and Arab leaders before it made its recommendations suggesting in a nut shell that “sooner or later, there should be a transfer of land and, as far as possible, an exchange of population”.
Lord Peel arriving in Mandate Palestine, November 1936
The Commission’s recommendations were seen as the first official indication of a plan to partition Palestine and to transfer its population, an idea credited to one of the Peel Commission members, Reginald Couplan, who was considered Zionism’s greatest friend on the Royal Commission. But contrary to general belief, the idea of partition did not occur in the Commission’s mind until after its members had left Palestine and after its 396-page Report had been written. For the first time in any government document, it was stated that the existing mandate for Palestine was unworkable and that the aspirations of Arabs and Jews were irreconcilable. Yet the Commision’s Report was enthusiastically received by a powerful group called The Milner Group (see next section) and was accepted as policy.
So the transfer concept was slowly tied to the idea of partitioning and became the central core of all Zionist lobbying efforts that followed.
Moshe Shertok (1894-1965), who, like Jabotinsky, was born in the Ukraine, (and later became the 2nd Prime Minister of Israel), was elected as the head of the political department of the Jewish Agency. He was crucial in formulating policies on the question of transfer. In a speech to the Zionist Actions Committee in April 1937, he stated:
“The proposed Jewish state would not be continuous. The frontier line would separate villages from their fields…the Arab reaction would be negative [to the partition idea] because they would loose everything and gain almost nothing…they would loose the richest part of Palestine…the orange plantations, the commercial and industrial centres…most of the coastal areas…and [they] would be driven out into the desert. As for now, we must not forget who would have to exchange the land? Those villagers who live more than others on irrigation, on orange and fruit plantations, in houses built near water wells and pumping stations, on livestock and property and easy access to markets. Where would they go? What would they receive in return? This would be such an uprooting, such a shock the likes of which had never occurred before and could drown the whole thing in rivers of blood”.
This revealing speech, could have been made today as it would reflect exactly what is happening to the Palestinian territories now. The fear amongst the Palestinian people was that the Peel Commission was taking one step towards turning the Balfour Declaration of a ‘Jewish National Home’ into a Jewish State.
Although Ben-Gurion admitted that he could forsee enormous difficulties “in uprooting by foreign force some 100,000 Arabs from the villages in Galilee which they have inhabited for hundreds of years”, he was, nevertheless, determined that “we must be prepared to carry out the transfer…we must expel Arabs and take their place, and if we have to use force…the we have force at our disposal…Our strength will exceed theirs [the Arabs] and we will be better organised and equipped because behind us still stands…the whole younger generation of Jews from Europe and America”.
This is from a terrorist who became the first Prime Minister of Israel.
Eliezer Kaplan (1891-1952), born in Minsk, Belurussia, was appointed head of the Finance and Administrative Department of the Jewish Executive (and later became the Finance Minister in Ben-Gurion government). He declared that “the question here is not one of expulsion, but of organised transfer from Jewish territories to another place”.
Other Zionist leaders were even worried that such a transfer to neighbouring countries would actually jeopardize future expansion of the Jewish state [into these neighbouring countries]!
One of the leaders of the Mapai Party, Yosef Baratz (1890-1968), born in the Ukraine but moved to Palestine against his parents’ wishes, was initially doubtful whether it would be possible to transfer 300,000 Palestinian Arabs. Yet, he confidently remembered that: “…dind’t we transfer Arabs from D’Aganiya [the first Zionist communal settlement in Palestine where he lived and married] , Kenert, Merhavya and Mishmar Haemek? I remember the nights on which Shmuel Dayan [Moshe Dayan’s father] and I were called to help Hashomer [a Zionist terrorist organization] carry out Arab evacuation. What was the sin in that?”.
Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) was born in a kibbutz to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. He later became Israel’s defense minister between 1953-1958. He spoke of the effect of the Zionist transfer policy on the Palestinian landscape [as quoted in Haaretz in April 1969]: Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages [in Palestine]. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not either. Nahlal [Dayan’s own settlement] arose in the place of Mahlool; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; Kefar Yehushu’a in the place of Tal Al-Shuman. There is not one single place in this country [Israel] that did not have a former Arab population”.
The records of the Protocol of the 20th Zionist Congress on 9 August 1937, show that the idea of transfer was heavily debated: “in Dr Weizman’s opinion, it would be possible to transfer 100,000 Palestinians in 20 years, i.e., 5,000 per year. He [Weizmann] told of a plan to set up a fund for a large [Arab] re-settlement. The Jews will contribute to this the amount of 1 million Palestinian pounds, and another 2 million pounds will be given…from the savings of the Mandatory treasury”.
Menachem Ussishkin (1863-1941), born in Imperial Russia and elected chairman of the powerful and influential Jewish National Fund, advocated the transfer of Palestinians not only to Transjordan, but to Iraq [the farther the better, he apparently thought]: “the Arab people in Palestine have immense areas of land at their disposal. Our people have nothing. We demand that our inheritance, Palestine, be returned to us”.
Dr Selig Soskinnother character, Dr Selig Soskin (1872-1959), Director of the Land Settlement Department of the Jewish National Fund, had extensive knowledge of land issues and means of transferring people form one place to another. He advocated the idea of total transfer of Palestinians as a condition for the establishment of a Jewish state. With the help of the Land Fund set up to purchase Arab land, he argued that the transfer must be carried out with the greatest speed possible: “The transfer of the Arabs by such numbers in a long period shall not have the desired effect of freeing the country from the heavy burden of a second class citizen and from cheap producers. Besides, the small numbers suggested by the Peel Commission will be made up by the natural increase in numbers through their economic development under Jewish rule”. He estimated that 40,000 Palestinian families or 250,000 Palestinian Arabs will have to be transferred from the proposed Jewish state. The cost of this transfer, he estimated, would be about £P200 per Arab family.
World Zionists Prepare the Ground
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) British Prime Minister from 1874-1880 once said: “The Lord deals with the nations as the nations deal with the Jews”.
On 31 October 1917, a British army contingent numbering 150,000 soldiers led by General Allenby attacked the Turkish garrison town of Beer Sheba (Beer Al-Sabe’) near the Gaza Strip and raized most of its buildings to the ground. This crucial victory laid the Palestine landscape beyond open to the invading British forces.
Within hours of that victory, Allenby shot a telegram to London informing the government of the great news. Months earlier, Chaim Weizman leader of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) and Arthur J Balfour (1848-1930), a Conservative politician appointed Foreign Secetary in December 1916, had been conducting secret negotiations the aim of which was the establishment in Palestine of ‘a national home for the Jews’.
This Declaration came about after extensive lobbying from the Zionist Organisation whose spokesman and tireless lobbyist Weizmann never missed an opportunity to prepare the grounds to secure this Declaration. For instance, in one letter he wrote to a friend in December 1914, he said:
“I saw Balfour on Saturday [mid December 1914] and the interview lasted one and a half hours. Balfour remembered everything we discussed 8 years ago [1906] and I gave him a brief summary of what has happened over these years…He listened for a long time and was very moved – I assure you, to tears – and he took me by the hand and said that I had illuminated for him the road followed by a great suffering nation [the Jewish nation], and expressed his opinion that the question of Palestine would remain insoluble…until there was a normal Jewish community in Palestine. He asked me whether I wanted anything practical at present. I said no, [but that] I would like to call on him again…when the roar of the guns had stopped [meaning, WW1]. He saw me out into the street, holding my hand in silence, and bidding me farewell said warmly:
‘Mind you come again to see me, I am deeply moved and interested, it is not a dream, it is a great cause and I understand it’“.
The Balfour Declaration then followed 3 years later.
Yet, it must be remebered that in June 1917, five months before Balfour issued his declaration, Jules Gambon, Secretary General at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued his own ‘declaration’ to a Zionist leader at the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) in London by the name of Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936). Skolow had had discussions with Gambon about the creation of a Jewish Home in Palestine. Gabom stated in his letter to Sokolow that “...it would be a work of justice and retribution for the Allied forces to help the renaissance of the Jewish nationality on the land from which the Jewish people was exiled so many centuries ago. The French government…cannot but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies. I am happy to give you herewith such assurance“.
On the 2nd of November 1917, Balfour pulled out a secret document which had been agreed with the WZO, and known ever since, as The Balfour Declaration and issued it in the form of a letter addressed to Lord L Walter Rothschild (1868-1937) a British banker and member of the wealthy Rothschild financial dynasty. What it represented was the most treacherous, the most ambiguous and the most deceitful document laying the seeds of the Palestine/Israel conflict which has engulfed the Middle East ever since.
This is what it said:
Arthur Balfour (1848-1930) Lionel Walter Rothschild (1868-1937)
The Balfour Declaration may be considered the most extraordinary document of any government. It should have been called the “Milner Declaration” after Sir Alfred Milner who drafted it (a fact not revealed until July 1937). Sir Alfred, headed one of the most notorius, secretive and powerful organisations to influence British Colonial policies: The Milner Group. He was also behind the drafts for the Mandates after WW1 and was the chairman (and sole British member) of the 5-member International Committee that approved these drafts.
Notwithstanding all this intrigue, what makes the Balfour Declaration so extraordinary is the fact that, in the words of Arthur Koestler (Jewish novelist 1905-1983), “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”. Even more extraordinary, we believe, is that this third/promised country (Palestine) was still part of a fourth (the Ottoman Empire).
Britain had no business offering the nation of one people to the people of many nations. And this even before the British set foot in Palestine.
In a curious comment, which smacks of typical colonial arrogance, Balfour said:
“…in Palestine, we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country. The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder impact than the desires of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit this ancient land”.
Millions of copies of this Declaration were distributed throughout eastern and central Europe to inform the Jewish communities of the great news. On the other hand, every effort was made not to mention it in any proclamation by the British authorities in Egypt. Allenby’s various declarations issued from Jerusalem towards the end of 1917 made no references to either the contents of the Declaration or to the ‘Jewish National Home’. During the whole of the two proceeding years, the Declaration was never published in Palestine, never alluded to and never referred to. Deception to the core.
When Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, was asked at the Paris Peace conference in 1919, what was meant by a Jewish national home in Palestine, he was quoted as saying that “…Palestine should be as Jewish as America is American or England is English”.
Henry Cattan(1906-1992) a renowned international jurist and writer, once observed that the Balfour Declaration was “legally void [because it did not obtain the consent of the indigenous people of Palestine], morally wicked [because Britain solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third] and politically mischievous [because it planted the seeds of conflict between Jews and Arabs who had lived together in peace and harmony for many generation]“.
But to give it an international seal of legitimacy, the Balfour Declaration draft text was submitted to President Woodrow Wilson of the United States who approved it prior to its publication. On the 14th February and 9th May 1918 respectively, France and Italy publicly endorsed it.
The Balfour Declaration had been in the background even before the advent of WW1. Britain and Fance (and to a lesser degree the Russians) prepared to divide the spoils of war and the Ottoman Empire should they defeat it, and two diplomats were in deep negotiations to finalise an agreement which became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. This was a secret agreement negotiated by two officials from Britain and France: Sir Mark Sykes (1879-1919) and Francois Georges-Picot (1870-1951). They effectively divided the Ottoman Empire into two sphere of influence (see map below) while Palestine and Jerusalem were to be governed by an international administration. Britain was allowed access to the Mediterranean via the ports of Haifa and Akka.
The war with the Turks ended in victory for the Allies 3 years later, on the 28th June 1919. Article 22 of the Covenant of The League of Nations signed at this time, prescribed that the wishes of the people formerly belonging to the Ottoman Empire be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory. It is worth mentioning that Article 22 ascribed a top Category A Mandate for Palestine as one of the “communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire [and which] have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised…until such time as they are able to stand alone”.
Colonial minds do enjoy, albeit to a miniscule degree, a sense of what may be fair for their colonial subjects. No lesser zionist sympathiser than Mark Sykes did volunteer in 1918 that if Arab nationality is to be recognised in the conquered Middle East, then surely some form of national administrative control can be allowed in Palestine. Another pro-zionist leader, Winston Churchill declared later in 1922 that the whole idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine stood in conflict with British policy of taking into account the wishes of the people in mandated territories resulting in representative institutions as soon as they are ready for self-government.
According to the surveys conducted at the time, it was not Britain that the Arabs had opted for to run the Palestine Mandate. They had opted for the United States to be their supervisory body. The Zionist leadership opted for the trusteeship of Great Britain over Palestine and when Turkish rule formally ended under the Treaty of Sevres on 10 August 1920, the Zionists ensured that the famous Balfour Declaration was embodied in it under Article 22. Yet, it is worth remembering that the British Mandate over Palestine was ratified in July 1922 by the League of Nations, but did not come into effect until September 1923. But it could not become operational until peace with Turkey was signed and sealed in August 1924. So legally speaking, Palestine from 1917 (when the Balfour Declaration was issued) until 1924 (when the peace Treaty was ratified with Turkey – a total of 7 years) was ‘occupied territory’. This means that Britain remained bound by the restrictions of the Hague Convention of 1907 outlining the laws of war and war crimes. Where are the legal brains today to stand by this?
It is also worth noting that the moderate minds within the British government who were set against the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, has nearly four and a half years (from the date the Balfour Declaration was issued to the ratification of the Mandate by the League of Nations) to harness all their political muscle to stop its implementation. But this was never to be.
The embodiment of this Zionist dream within the League’s Covenant sealed the fate of Palestine at this early stage of the Mandate. If there was any doubt in anyone’s mind about this linkage, it was dispelled by Article 4 of the Mandate which stated:
“An appropriate Jewish Agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and cooperating with the Administration of Palestine…as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine…The Zionist Organization shall be recognized as such agency…and shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to…assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home in Palestine”.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) twice British Prime Minister between 1940-45 and 1951-55, endorsed it officially in a letter he wrote in 1920 which said that “it has fallen to the British Government, as a result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life. The fiery energies of Dr Weizmann leader of the Zionist project, supported by the full authority of Lord Allenby, are all directed to achieving the success of this inspiring movement. Of course Palestine is far too small to accommodate more than a fraction of the Jewish race, but if there should be created in our lifetime by the Banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise 3 or 4 million Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire”.
In this atmosphere of promises and deceptions, the Mandate for Palestine was formally allotted to Great Britain at the Peace Conference of San Remo on 25 April 1920. The borders of Mandate Palestine were drawn at this conference.
Speaking of deceipts and decpetions, we urge the reader to examine Chapter 9 in George Antonius’ “The Arab Awakening” a seminal book on the history of the Arab world. Antonius (1891-1941) outlines for the first time all the correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon and Sherif Hussein. The conclusion reached is that the British government double-crossed the Palestinian leadership and renaged on its promises.
The Palestinian population grew suspicious of the intentions behind the Balfour Declaration and the ambiguity embedded within its text. They energetically lobbied the British authorities to stand by the promises made to them for eventual independence once the British Mandate had ended and were genuinely frustrated by the lack of committment to those promises. These frustrations came to the boil on the Muslim holiday of Nebi Musa in Jerusalem on 4 April 1920 and lasted for 4 bloody days. The British Military Command appointed a commission, known as the Palin Commission (after its head Major-General Sir Philip Palin) to investigate.
This disturbance was to be the first of many riots by the Palestinians and this Commission the first of many commissions by the British Mandate. The riots were suppressed and the commision reports were disregarded. The Zionists had a project of their own to take over historic Palestine and the seeds to facilitate that path for them were planted by no lesser a personality than Sir Herbert Samuel.
Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner in Palestine (served 1920-1925) was known to be an arch-Zionist and the one person who is credited with preparing the ground in Palestine for the implementation of the Balfour Declaration to enable the “Jewish Homeland” in Palestine to turn into the Jewish state in 1948. Being of the Jewish faith, many believed that Samuel’s appointment would give a signal as to his alignment with Zionist ideal and objectives. He himself stated at the time that…”it would be inadvisable for any Jew to be the first Governor”. Thanks to the persistent prodding by Chaim Weizmann, Samuel, his close friend, was encouraged to accept the post.
At that time many of the high establishment figures in British politics including the military administrators in Palestine and Egypt were against the Balfour Declaration and its vague wording. They knew that trouble will come if the parameters of the Mandate were not revised. In the short period leading to the transfer to civilian administration in 1920, Major General Sir Louis Bols, the military administrator at the time, in handing the reigns to Samuel, is known to have told him that he wanted him “to sign a receipt’, to which Samuel responded: “for what?” and Bols responded: “For Palestine”. According to Samuel’s memoirs, on the day of the transfer of administration in Jerusalem, Bols handed a well typed document with names and dates which Samuel signed. It said: “One Palestine Complete”.
Herbert Samuel (1870-1963)
The embodiment of the Balfour Declaration withing the League’s Covenant was seen by many as a turning point in Western-Arab relations. Not only did it contradict the meaning of Article 22 of the Mandate for Palestine, but it also negated promises made earlier to the Arabs for a national homeland in exchange for their help in defeating the Ottoman Empire. Here is what Item 10 of that Agreement stated:
“10. The British and French Governments, as the protectors of the Arab State, shall agree that they will not themselves acquire and will not consent to a third Power acquiring territorial possessions in the Arabian Peninsula, nor consent to a third Power installing a naval base on the east coast or in the Red Sea…”
All the promises made to the Arabs for independence and sovereignty once the war was over, have been broken. To add insult to injury, their land was cut up and Palestine was promised to the the Jews 18 months later via the Balfour Declaration.
Sir John Shaw, Britain’s former Chief Secretary of Palestine, who spent nearly 10 years of his life there, stated in a TV interview that the Mandate was “not only immoral but ill-advised”. When asked why, he replied: “…because it is not your business, or my business, or British business, or [for] anybody else to interfere in other people’s countries and tell them how to run it well. They must be left to their own salvation”.
Worth noting is the fact that the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 had contradicted all promises made in the form of letters exchanged between Sir Henry MacMahon, the Briitish High Commissioner in Egypt and the Sherif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali and dated 14 July 1915-30 January 1916. These became famously known as the MacMahon-Hussein Letters.
This would partly explain why the Sykes-Picot Agreement was never made public until a year later after the Russian Revolution of 1917 when Pravda exposed it in its first major scoop of the decade. Soon afterwards, the Balfour Declaration added another promise and another spanner in the works.
The British, as the Mandatory power in Palestine, therefore, were confronting the contradictions of three irreconcilable aims: promising the Sherif of Mecca a kingdom of his own, assisting Palestine to advance towards (and to achieve) independence under the Mandate Charter, and, finally, the commitment, under the Balfour Declaration, to a future Jewish Home in Palestine.
It is a fact that Sir Mark Sykes himself began to have misgivings about the practical and even the moral validity of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In a letter he wrote in October 1918 to Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects ofThe League of Nations and who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937, Sykes urged that, for the sake of world interests, Britain, should use its diplomatic power to “to foster and revive Arab civilisation and to promote Arab unity with a view to preparing them [The Arabs] for ultimate independence”.
Article 22 of The League of Nations Covenant stated that the right of “those colonies and territories which, as a consequence of the late war, have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves…there should be applied the principle that the well being and development of such people form a sacred trust of civilisation and that the securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this Covenant”.
Continued illegal Jewish immigration and the purchase of Palestinian land by the Jewish National Fund reached record levels in the 1930’s with Hitler in Germany, and Mussolini in Italy, advocating the expulsion of Jews from Europe. By the mid 1930’s the Jews in Palestine formed one third of the total population enjoying the blessing of the Balfour Declaration.
Arab resistance escalated from delegations and emmisaries, petitions and declarations to demonstrations and strikes. This culminated in the first Palestine Riots in 1929 forcing the British Government to issue The Passfield White Paper in November 1930 calling for a limitation on Jewish immigration into Palestine. But with Zionist pressure mounting to allow more Jews into Palestine, the registered figures show that such immigration reached ‘invasion’ proportion in just 4 years: from 9,553 Jews in 1932 to 30,327 (1933) to 42,359 (1934) to 61,854 (1935) totalling 144,093. In the same period, the equivalent number of Jewish immigration to the USA was only 14,118. The Palestinian Arabs now braced themselves up for a national revolt.
The Palestinian Arab Rebellion of 1936 lasted for 3 years and forced Britain to send yet again one of its time-honoured commissions to Palestine. Led this time by Lord Peel, it concluded that the two objectives of Article 2 of the Mandate (eventual independence for the indigenous population and the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine) could not be reconciled, The Peel Commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned. The Palestinians, of course, were horrified at this conclusion which granted the Jews 40% of Palestine when Jewish land ownership at the time did not exceed 5.5%; the cruellest provision of all was that there should be, if necessary, a “forcible transfer of Arabs” out of lands allotted to the Jewish state (see later sections).
The Peel Commission (November 1937)
Arab revolt and resistance to this policy was more than equated by fierce British repression against the Palestinians. More than 5,000 were killed and over 15,000 wounded out of a population of 1 million (the equivalent at the time of 200,000 British and 1 million Americans killed and 600,000 British and 3 million Americans wounded). The number of detainees was over 5,600 in 1939 alone. All of this was accompanied by the terrorisation and murder of Arab villagers by special British-trained Jewish squads and underground terrorists.
The Zionist leadership in the persons of Weizmann and Ben-Gurion, were of course jubilant at the Peel recommendations, for this was the first time that the “Jewish National Home” was being officially and publicly equated with a “Jewish State”. It was also being pronounced by a great power, Britain, which was itself the Mandatory.
Ben-Gurion, although grateful for the Peel recommendations, stated soon afterwards that “The Jewish state now being proposed to us is not the Zionist aim. But this will be a decisive step in bringing about the great Zionist aim. In the shortest time possible, it will build the real Jewish strength that will carry us to our historic objectives”.
The Palestine Arab Revolt evoked the sympathy and support of Mahatma Gandhi who wrote in 1938: “Surely, it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their National Home”.
As the clouds of WWII were gathering and as the threat of international crisis was looming, the British Government called for a Round Table Conference attended by Arabs, Palestinians and Zionist representatives. Malcolm Macdonald, the new Colonial Secretary was the driving force behind it. The inconclusive conference issued its White Paper on May 17, 1939 which indicated a sudden change of heart from the British Government about the recommendations of the previous Peel Commission. Perhaps this is because the British government began to realise that Palestine could never become the solution for the Jewish problem and that the development of a National Home for the Jews in Palestine can be achieved only as a result of the wholesale eviction of the existing indigenous population. The White Paper of 1939 stated the following:
1. “The proposal of partition recommended by the Royal Commission, namely the establishment of self-supporting independent Arab and Jewish states within Palestine, has been found to be impracticable.
2. His Majesty’s Government now declares unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state.
3. The object of His Majesty’s Government is the establishment within 10 years (i.e., by the end of its Mandate) of an independent Palestine State…in which Arabs and Jews share in government in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each community are safeguarded”. The Zionists rejected the White Paper outright and, with the increasing influence of David Ben-Gurion on Zionist strategic thinking, began to shift their base of political lobbying and influence from London to Washington leading up to 1947. The events taking shape during this period sounded the death knell for Palestine. The Zionist link between Palestine and the Holocaust was forged.
The Population Transfer Committee: November 1937
On the heel of the Peel Committee recommendations, the Jewish Agency created the Population Transfer Committee with an impressive list of executive members, one of whom was Dr Kurt Mendelson from Holland considered to be ‘the expert on the question of population transfer’. He would divide the Palestinian Arabs into 3 categories to be cleared in the first stage of the Transfer Plan:
1. Tenant farmers.
2. Landless villagers working as agricultural labourers.
3. Farmers who owned less than 3 dunums per capita.
To resettle these people, the Transfer Committee calculated that 1.15 million dunums would have to be purchased in Transjordan and that it would take nearly 10 years to complete the transfer.
Ben-Gurion opted instead for a total evacuation of Arabs from the proposed Jewish state. He said that he looked at the Jewish part only as a provisional solution “on the basis that after we build a strong force following the establishment of the state, we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel”.
One executive member of the Jewish Agency concurred: “…we will not achieve this by preaching sermons on the mount, but by machine-guns which we will need”. Some Committee members even opposed the idea of partition itself and argued for a single state for the Jewish people: “We cannot begin the Jewish state with a population of which Arabs constitute almost half of the population…Such a state cannot survive even for half an hour”.
Fearing moral backlash from world opinion against forced expulsion of the Palestinian population, the debate considered ways of how to contain such a possible backlash. But this did not deter one Committee member to volunteer: “If you ask me whether it is moral to remove 60,000 families from their place of residence…I will say to you that it is moral. I am ready to come and defend the moral side of it before the Almighty and the League of Nations”.
Ben-Gurion closed the debate: “I support compulsory transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it.
Surprisingly, the British Government decided that all this transfer talk would not wash. It sent a new commission to Palestine in April 1938, called the Woodhead Commission chaired by Sir John Woodhead. It was to examine the recommendations of the Peel Commission for the partition of Palestine.
It issued The White Paper 1939, also known as the MacDonald White Paper, which was in essence an internal policy paper in which Britain unilaterally abandoned the Mandate’s goals of establishing a ‘Jewish homeland in Palestine’ in favour of an independent bi-national state governed jointly by Palestinian Arabs and Jews. However, this Paper was later rejected by the League of Nations to whom the Mandatory Authorities had to answer and which had to approve every change to British policy in the Mandate.
Meanwhile and behind the scenes, a New York-based Jewish Multi-millionaire by the name of Edward A Norman (1900-1955) was devoting much of his fortune to supporting the Yishuv (the Jewish population in Palestine). He established what later became the American-Israel Cultural Fund which supported all cultural institutions of the Yishuv in Palestine and later in Israel. Part of his plan evolved around the transfer of Palestinian Arabs to Iraq. Norman estimated that the cost of settling one family would be in the region of $300. He hoped that the Palestinian families would be ‘bought out’ and be induced to leave, starting with those in the coastal plain where land is suitable for agriculture. Later in February 1937, he was to revise his figure to $1,800 per Palestinian family of 6 persons. This cost would be partly covered by money earned from the sale of Palestinian land to immigrant Jews.
Norman presented his scheme to British Colonial Office officials when he visited London in early 1938. He was relying on the fact that Britain would rather have the support of a future majority Jewish population in Palestine than an Arab one aspiring to an independent nation. He wrote articles in the London Times in the spring and summer of 1938 promoting Palestinian transfer to Iraq. He discussed these ideas with Weizmann and Ben-Gurion. Weizmann and Norman even lobbied the American Government to accept the idea of transfer to Iraq as a necessary means for producing foodstuff by Palestinian labourers to help war efforts by the allies in the various theatres of war at the time.
This scheme, mercifully, came to nothing as Britain’s Labour Party came to power.
For the next few years and for the duration of WW2, the Zionist leadership began to shift their priorities and looked away from Britain for alternative sponsors: the United States of America.
Although the idea of transfer was not in the foreground of all Zionist discussions, it was believed that as a result of WW2, shifts in populations in Europe and in Palestine would eventually take place. Weizmann, the energetic Zionist that he was, intended to discuss his plan for a Jewish state in Palestine with American President Roosevelt. He would propose that the Palestinians would be evacuated from the proposed state to allow room for 3-4 million Jewish immigrants from Europe.
In New York, on May 6, 1942, a small group of Zionist leaders (including Weizmann, Ben-Gurion and Nahum Goldman, chairman of the Jewish Agency) together with 6000 American Jews gathered at the Biltmore Hotel in New York to formulate their official demand for a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Their declaration, known as the Biltmore Programme, reiterated the following aims:
1. The fulfilment of the original purpose of the Balfour Declaration
2. The total rejection of the White Paper of 1939
3. That Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.
It is worth noting here that what Ben-Gurion meant by ‘Jewish Commonwealth’ was neither ‘a national home in Palestine’ (Balfour Declaration), nor ‘a Jewish state in Palestine’ (the Peel Partition Plan), but the undisputed control by the Zionists of immigration of Jews into Palestine and the extent of land acquisition in the country. (At this time, it is worth remembering, Jewish land ownership stood only at 5.9% of the total area, and the Jewish community at only 31.2% of the total population. This Biltmore Programme wielded President Wilson’s name for the benefit of the American people, and confirmed Washington as the new centre of gravity for decision making on Palestine.
Jewish Land Ownership in Palestine
On the other side of the Atlantic, in December 1944, the British Labour Party issued its Conference Resolution supporting Zionist ideas for Palestinian transfer from Palestine. This resolution was drafted by Hugh Dalton, an ardent supporter of Zionist maximalist aims for the establishment of a Jewish state on both sides of Jordan River and the Sinai Peninsula.
In 1945, another transfer plan was formulated by a close friend of Jabotinsky. His name was Eliahu Ben-Hurin, editor of of Yishuv’s Hebrew paper Doar Hayom. His campaign reached as far as the American White House where, in 1943, he had convinced Herbert Hoover to lend his support for transfer of Palestinians to Iraq. Hoover’s support came in the form of a proposal published in the New York World-Telegram paper in 1945 where he called the transfer ideas as ‘a sane and practical solution’. As an engineer by profession, Hoover stated that he wished to achieve an ‘engineering solution’ to the Palestine conflict.
The full impact on the Palestinian people of the transfer policy can be confirmed by the following statistics:
Percentage of Palestinian population drop vs rise in Jewish land ownership
As the Palestinian Nakba was taking place in 1948, Harper’s Magazine published an article by Ben Horin entitled ‘From Palestine to Israel’. The Editor of the magazine noted that “Now, with thousands of Arab refugees facing a dismal future, the transfer idea appears to be a likely bet…in view of Mr Ben Horen’s earlier judgement and prophecies, we can bank on his words about present-day Israel: ‘It works’ “.
The Link: Palestine and the Holocaust
The main Zionist efforts and objective now concentrated on the abrogation of the White Paper. With the White Paper out of the way, and with world public sympathy aroused as a result of Nazi barbarism against the Jews in Europe, the Zionists could move to present this abrogation of the White Paper as the one available solution to move Europe’s Jews to Palestine. This was the main call at the Biltmore Conference in New York (see later) which stated: “The policy of the White Paper is cruel and indefensible in its denial of sanctuary to Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution”.
This statement is inexplicable in terms of logic and equity. The Allies were victorious in the war against Germany. Nazism had been crushed. Jewish survivors were moved into relief centres which were supervised and protected by Allied troops and Palestine Jewish Brigades. The plight of these Jewish survivors was a scar on the conscience of the Western world which possessed the resources and the ingenuity to provide them with a secure future. But to exploit the plight of the Jewish refugees for the political purpose of tearing the White Paper of 1939, itself the end result of two agonised decades of Palestinian struggle for national survival, is to throw into question the motive of the American endorsement.
Moved by the plight of Jewish Holocaust survivors, no less a person that the US President Harry S Truman was endorsing the Biltmore declaration. He asked the British Government in August 1945 to allow the immediate immigration of 100,000 Jews from Europe into Palestine while declaring to his constituents (as he ran for election in 1948) that the US would ‘alone’ bear the brunt of the 300,000 refugees moving into the US. This secured for him the support of the Zionist leadership in America and alienated the Arab world from the West. Truman told his assembled American diplomats from Arab countries: “I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism; I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs in my constituency”.
At war’s end, the international environment suffers from general fluidity and is therefore vulnerable to territorial surgery. World public opinion has been saturated by the Holocaust tragedy and its sympathy for Zionism peaked regardless of what it understood Zionism to be. The corollation between the Zionist doctrine and its aims in Palestine and the Holocaust tragedy itself became clear. The political solution for the Jewish problem had to be at the expense of the humanitarian one.
The staunchly pro-Zionist Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, established a joint Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, made up of 6 ‘non-official citizens’ of Britain and USA, to look into the Palestine question.
It set out for Europe and Palestine in 1946 an event which marked the beginning of a diplomatic struggle between the Palestinians and the Zionists for the sympathy and understanding of world public opinion through its new forum, the United Nations which was only 1 year old.
It is worth noting that the Committee of Inquiry first toured the Jewish concentration camps in Europe before travelling to Palestine, a critical success by the Zionist lobby to impact committee members with the Holocaust events. Many camp dwellers, initially not wishing to immigrate to Palestine, were influenced by Jewish organisations to adopt a pro-Zionist line when interviewed by Committee members and to request that they be moved to Palestine.
Consequently, when the Committee of Inquiry reached Palestine, it was warmly welcomed by the Jewish Agency but was boycotted by the Arab High Committee. The Committee of Inquiry was already leaning towards the view that the Jewish situation in Europe had to be linked with Jewish migration to Palestine. This link proved to be a vital factor in understanding the role played by the Holocaust in the creation of the state of Israel.
On 30 April 1946, the Committee concluded its work by recommending that 100,000 Jews from Europe be allowed admission into Palestine and the establishment of a bi-national state under a UN trusteeship with equal rights for both communities. These proposals were rejected by the British Government on the basis of Clause 76 of the UN Charter which protects the right to independence through majority rule for any nation desiring it.
In 1947, and despite mass illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine, the Palestinians still constituted 65% of the population of Palestine: that is, 1,350,000 Palestinians vs 650,000 Jews (of whom 253,700 were born in Palestine and the rest were alien immigrants).
With the Mandate coming to an end, fierce Zionist operations against the British in Palestine forced the British to submit the Palestine problem to the United Nation, which in February 1947, was only 2 years old with little experience in solving regional conflicts. With 5 permanent members and 6 non-permanent members, the UN General Assembly began its crucial deliberations which, as we shall see, sealed Palestine’s fate and squashed its hopes of becoming an independent nation.
UNSCOP: The United Nations Special Committee On Palestine
Following the British example, but not learning from it, the Security Council decided to establish the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to be made up of 11 members, none of them permanent members of the Council, and most of them having little knowledge of the Middle East, let alone of Palestine. The Committee members were: Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, The Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia.
The United Nations was born in October 1945 with 51 founding members for the sole purpose, after WW2, of maintaining international peace and preventing wars – something which its predecessor, the League of Nations, failed to do. Ironically, the UN’s inaugural meeting took place in London on 6 January 1946, the birthplace of the Balfour Declaration nearly 30 years earlier. At the time of issuing its Resolution 181 calling for the partitioning of Palestine in November 1947, this body was less than 2-years old and its membership no more than 57 (in 2015, the number reached 193).
Before UNSCOP reached the shores of Palestine on June 18 1947, the British, in a desperate attempt to ease Jewish immigration into Palestine, asked the US government to take up an initiative by Congressman William Stratton in April 1947 to allow a one-off immigration, from Europe to USA, of some 400,000 Jews. This was categorically rejected by the US Administration.
The Jewish Agency, through it Mossad arm, made sure that UNSCOP’s arrival in Palestine coincided with the arrival of the Jewish refugee ship The Exodus 1947 (dubbed ‘the ship that launched a nation’). The British decision to capture and return itto Germany reinforced the link, in the minds of UNSCOP Committee members, between the survival of European Jews and their eventual settlement in the land of Palestine.
UNSCOP visited Palestine from June 18 to July 3, 1947. They embarked, courtesy of the Jewish Agency’s hospitality, on a tour of several regions in Palestine. The Agency ensured a welcome reception and arranged, through two of its prominent members David Horowitz and Aybrey Eban, to tour that Jewish settlements where they ensured that members of those settlements visited, spoke the language of the Committee members. The Arabs boycotted UNSCOP because they knew that its aim was eventually to recommend the partitioning of their country. For a detailed reading on the events of this period, please refer to The International Diplomacy of Israel’s Founders (2015) by John Quigley.
UNSCOP members were so impressed by the Jewish Agency’s arguments, that they invited Horowitz and Eban to join them as they left Palestine heading to Germany, Austria and finally Geneva. During their last stretch of this trip, and under Zionist insistence, UNSCOP visited some of the Nazi concentration camps – a move which no doubt swayed many of UNSCOP members and lead to the conclusion that Palestine can be he only safe haven for Jews. As the Committee retired in Geneva to write its final report, the images of the concentration camps and the Holocaust could not have been far from their mind. That link was key to UNSCOP’s proposed recommendation for the partitioning of Palestine. This aspect of UNSCOP’s work – the visits to the camps – was not in its terms of reference when they set out on their mission.
It is crucial to note that, as records show, the Jewish Agency, worked feverishly to ensure that Jews from the camps who wanted to immigrate were not accepted by the countries to which they desired to go. The Agency wanted them to head for Palesine.
It took UNSCOP exactly two and a half months to complete its Report. It met in the conference room on the first floor of the Palais des Nations in Geneva where they signed the official Report on the last hour of the last day of August 1947, just minutes before its term of office expired.
Please click on this link for UNSCOP Report in full:
It is in this emotional atmosphere that UNSCOP was discussing the fate of the Palestinians. The Arab Higher Committee was convinced that the independence of Palestine was not UNSCOP’s main priority. Interestingly, we now know that the Jewish Agency provided UNSCOP, in May 1947, with a map of Palestine which showed a future Jewish state in over 80% of Palestine. This is even less than the total land that today’s peace negotiators are willing to offer Israel under a two-state solution.
Jewish Agency Proposal – August 1946 (copyright George Kirk)
UNSCOP’s Report included a Majority Proposal for a Plan of Partition with Economic Union and a Minority Proposal for a Plan for a Federal State of Palestine.
The general recommendation of UNSCOP stated: “In the appraisal of the Palestine question, it be accepted as incontrovertible that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution of the Jewish problem in general.”
Before dealing with the Majority Report which was eventually submitted to the General Assembly for a vote, it would be essential to provide a summary of the UNSCOP Committee’s Minority Report which, broadly speaking, can be considered today to be the brainchild of the One State solution.
UNSCOP’s Sub-Committee 2 which produced the Minority Report was chaired by Sir Mohammed Zafrulla Khan (Pakistan) who also acted as Rapporteur of the Sub-Committee 2. Its aim was to concentrate broadly on 3 main issues:
(1) The legal questions connected with or arising from the Palestine problem
(2) The problem of Jewish refugees and displaced persons and its connection with the Palestinian question
(3) The termination of the Mandate over Palestine and constitutional proposals for the establishment of a unitary and independent state.
An Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question was established by the General Assembly shortly after the issuance of the UNSCOP report. It released the report of its findings on November 11, 1947. It observed that with an end to the Mandate and with British withdrawal, “there is no further obstacle to the conversion of Palestine into an independent state”, which was the objective of the Mandate in the first place. It found that “the General Assembly is not competent to recommend, still less to enforce, any solution other than the recognition of the independence of Palestine, and that the settlement of the future government of Palestine is a matter solely for the people of Palestine.”
It concluded that “no further discussion of the Palestine problem seems to be necessary or appropriate, and this item should be struck off the agenda of the General Assembly”, but that if there was a dispute on that point, “it would be essential to obtain the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on this issue…and that the partition plan was “contrary to the principles of the Charter, and the United Nations have no power to give effect to it.”
Consequently, three resolutions were presented by the Sub-Committee to UNSCOP’s Ad-Hoc committee which were:
1) A draft resolution referring certain legal questions to the I.C.J. [the International Court of Justice];
2) Draft resolution on Jewish refugees and displaced persons, and
3) Draft resolution on the constitution and future government of the State of Palestine.
Through heated debates and numerous voting sessions, these recommendations were rejected by the Ad-Hoc Committee who voted 25 to 13 with 17 abstensions, to recommend partition. Four days later, the General Assembly approved a final resolution infamously known as GA Res 181 by a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions [1 member state was absent from the proceedings].
Thanks to UNSCOP, more committees and more sub-committees, the fate of Palestine was formally sealed. The tragic consequences are felt to this day.
The Road to Partition
UNSCOP’s report included a partition plan which divided Palestine into two independent states: a Jewish one to include Eastern Galilee, the coastal strip along the Mediterranean (excluding Jaffa and the coastal strip down to Gaza) and the Negev. The Arab State (note that it was not called Palestinian State) included Upper and Western Galilee, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The City of Jerusalem and its environs were to be an international enclave, Corpus Separatum, with autonomous rights for both communities.
The Palestinians were allocated 38% of Mandatory Palestine when they made up 65% of the total population of 1,846,000. The Jewish state was to include 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Palestinians.
Mandatory Palestine was made up of 16 districts, 9 of which were to be allocated to the Jewish state. None of them had either a Jewish majority or land owned by a Jewish majority.This demographic imbalance was to be solved by settling the displaced Jews from Europe in the Jewish part of partitioned Palestine.
The two states were required to eventually conclude a 10-year treaty of economic union as a condition for their promised independence.
Whilst the Jewish Agency decided to exert all its diplomatic energy to assure the acceptance of the partition of Palestine, the Arabs expressed a total rejection. UNSCOP made its recommendation to the Ad Hoc Committee for consideration. As the General Assembly vote was approahing, Britain, the Mandatory power with responsibility over Palestine, decided in a deceitful way, to take a neutral position to abstain from voting.
UN Resolution 181 was set in motion amid shameful lobbying and arm twisting by both the Zionist leadership and the United States of America.
It is important to remember here that Palestinian Arabs numbered at this time 1,203,000 (65% of the total population) and Jews numbered 608,000 (33%) and this number was mainly the result of illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine from Europe.
Equally, Palestinian Arabs owned more land in every single district in the country than Jews. Even in Jaffa were Jews had the highest ownership of land (39%), Palestinians owned 47% of Jaffa district. In the whole country, Palestinians owned 85% of the land and Jews only 7%.
Despite these galring statistics, thousands of miles away in Central Manhattan, NYC, USA, the air was thick with intrigue and conspiratory planning. Members of the UN General Assemply committed a political crime whose consequences still haunt us today.
Resolution 181: The Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947
On the 23rd day of September 1947, the General Assembly assigned the question of partitioning of Palestine to its Ad Hoc Committee. Another sub-committee was to study the proposal of establishing a unitary State in Palestine in which the Democratic Constitution would guarantee the human rights and fundamental freedom of all its citizens without distinction as to race, language or religion. The two reports were submitted and after prolonged discussions, there was great pressure from the United States and Soviet Delegations to adopt the Resolution to Partition Palestine.
It was on 25 November 1947 that the world became acquainted for the first time with the final draft of the partition resolution: Resolution 181. The General Assembly refused a resolution to submit the Palestine question to the International Court of Justice to determine whether the UN had any jurisdiction to recommend the partition of Palestine or any other country.
For a draft resolution to become an official one, UN procedures required a two-third majority of its ad hoc committee. As two votes were lacking for such a majority, the draft was handed to the General Assembly. Both Zionist and Arab delegations were now in a race against time. Other delegates who had originally favoured the partition proposals, but now seemed to be wavering, were pressured and guided by the White House to ensure that a favourable outcome is secured. Concerted and remarkable lobbying by the Zionist lobby ensured at the last moment that those 8 wavering and doubtful votes, were swung into the partition lobby. The strength of the Jewish/Zionist lobby in Washington should not have come as a surprise to the world community.
Zionist politicians did not waste time in recruiting and lobbying wavering delegates. At the same time, intensive efforts were made by the Zionist leadership around the world to gain crucial votes: the French altered their position from abstaning to supporting the resolution; Liberia, as a result of economic promises, offered support; the direct lobbying of President Truman and pro-Zionist senators and congressmen secured the votes of 12 out of 20 Latin American countries.
President Truman, in his memoirs, stated the following: “The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders—actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats—disturbed and annoyed me”.
Not to be forgotten, the President of the General Assembly for that session was Oswaldo Aranha who is known to have lobbied as fiercely as the Zionists to sway the vote for acceptance. He even postponed the voting session for 3 days to ensure passage.
On Saturday morning, 29 November 1947, against the will of the Palestinian people, the General Assembly in New York voted for the partition of Palestine and accepted Resolution 181. The vote was 33 in support of the Resolution, 13 members opposed it and 10 members abstained including Britain. One small country, Siam, was absent.
When the time to vote arrived, the British Government, perhaps under the weight of its guilt for abusing the trust which the League of Nations had bestowed upon it to protect, guide and assist Palestine to achieve its independence at the end of its Mandatory period, opted to abstain from voting. A typical cop-out.
The roll-call vote was as follows:
For the Resolution (33) – Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, Liberia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru Philippines, Poland, Sweden, Ukraine, South Africa, Uruguay, the Soviet Union, the United States, Venezuela, White Russia.
Against (13) – Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen.
Abstentions (10) – Argentina, Chile, China, Colombia, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Honduras, Mexico, United Kingdom, Yugoslavia.
Absent (1) – Siam.
See official Records of the General Assembly, Second Session Supplement No 11, Volume I-IV
Although the U.N. Charter is considered a “law-making treaty”, the United Nations itself is not an international legislature that can make laws or pass legislations.
it was not in the UN mandate to create states. The United Nations had no business offering the nation of one people to the people of many nations. Its General Assembly had neither the legal nor the legislative powers to impose such a resolution or to convey title of a territory; Articles 10, 11 and 14 of the UN Charter bestows the right on the General Assembly merely to recommend resolutions.
GA Res181 never went to the Security Council for approval, therefore it remained as a ‘recommendation’. Here is a paragraph from the UN Charter and The Security Council:
“Broadly speaking, while the General Assembly may discuss any international disputes or situations, it is the Security Council which recommends appropriate procedures or methods of adjustments or terms of settlement for the pacific settlement of disputes and takes preventive or enforecement measures with respet to threats to the peaces, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression”.
The UN Partition of Palestine
The reason why the General Assembly Resolution 181 never went to the Security Council for consideration was because it implied that if it were to be approved by the Security Council, then it would require military force to implement it, considering the Zionist position at that time.
Palestine was thus divided into 3 parts: a Jewish part, an Arab part and an internationally administered zone to include the city of Jerusalem as a Corpus Separatum to be under the responsibility of the United Nations. After 10 years, a referendum would be held to seek the views of the city’s residents. Today, that referendum remains dead history.
The Partition Plan for Palestine offered 55% of historical Palestine to a Jewish population constituting a mere third of the entire population (not more than 10% at the time of Balfour) where Jews owned about 7% of the land.
A painful reading of this illegal partitioning of a country goes like this:
“The area of the Arab State in Western Galilee is bounded on the west by the Mediterranean and on the north by the frontier of the Lebanon from Ras en Naqura to a point north of Saliha. From there the boundary proceeds southwards, leaving the built-up area of Saliha in the Arab State, to join the southernmost point of this village. Thence it follows the western boundary line of the villages of ‘Alma, Rihaniya and Teitaba, thence following the northern boundary line of Meirun village to join the Acre-Safad sub-district boundary line. It follows this line to a point west of Es Sammu’i village and joins it again at the northernmost point of Farradiya. Thence it follows the sub-district boundary line to the Acre-Safad main road. From here it follows the western boundary of Kafr I’nan village until it reaches the Tiberias-Acre sub-district boundary line, passing to the west of the junction of the Acre-Safad and Lubiya-Kafr I’nan roads. From the south-west corner of Kafr I’nan village the boundary line follows the western boundary of the Tiberias sub-district to a point close to the boundary line between the villages of Maghar and Eilabun, thence bulging out to the west to include as much of the eastern part of the plain of Battuf as is necessary for the reservoir proposed by the Jewish Agency for the irrigation of lands to the south and east.
The boundary rejoins the Tiberias sub-district boundary at a point on the Nazareth-Tiberias road south-east of the built-up area of Tur’an; thence it runs southwards, at first following the sub-district boundary and then passing between the Kadoorie Agricultural School and Mount Tabor, to a point due south at the base of Mount Tabor. From here it runs due west, parallel to the horizontal grid line 230, to the north-east corner of the village lands of Tel Adashim. It then runs to the north-west corner of these lands, when it turns south and west so as to include in the Arab State the sources of the Nazareth water supply in Yafa village. On reaching Ginneiger it follows the eastern, northern and western boundaries of the lands of this village to their south-west corner, whence it proceeds in a straight line to a point on the Haifa-Afula railway on the boundary between the villages of Sarid and El Mujeidil. This is the point of intersection.
The south-western boundary of the area of the Arab State in Galilee takes a line from this point, passing northwards along the eastern boundaries of Sarid and Gevat to the north-eastern corner of Nahalal, proceeding thence across the land of Kefar ha Horesh to a central point on the southern boundary of the village of ‘Ilut, thence westwards along that village boundary to the eastern boundary of Beit Lahm, thence northwards and north-eastwards along its western boundary to the northeastern corner of Waldheim and thence north-westwards across the village lands of Shafa ‘Amr to the southeastern corner of Ramat Yohanan. From here it runs due north-north-east to a point on the Shafa ‘Amr-Haifa road, west of its junction with the road to I’Billin. From there it proceeds north-east to a point on the southern boundary of I’Billin situated to the west of the I’Billin-Birwa road. Thence along that boundary to its westernmost point, whence it turns to the north, follows across the village land of Tamra to the north-westernmost corner and along the western boundary of Julis until it reaches the Acre-Safad road. It then runs westwards along the southern side of the Safad-Acre road to the Galilee-Haifa District boundary, from which point it follows that boundary to the sea.
The boundary of the hill country of Samaria and Judea starts on the Jordan River at the Wadi Malih south-east of Beisan and runs due west to meet the Beisan-Jericho road and then follow’s the western side of that road in a north-westerly direction to the junction of the boundaries of the sub-districts of Beisan, Nablus, and Jenin. From that point it follows the Nablus-Jenin subdistrict boundary westwards for a distance of about three kilometres and then turns north-westwards, passing to the east of the built-up areas of the villages of Jalbun and Faqqu’a, to the boundary of the sub-districts of Jenin and Beisan at a point north-east of Nuris. Thence it proceeds first north-westwards to a point due north of the built-up area of Zir’in and then westwards to the Afula-Jenin railway, thence north-westwards along the district boundary line to the point of intersection on the Hejaz railway. From here the boundary runs southwestwards, including the built-up area and some of the land of the village of Kh.Lid in the Arab State to cross the Haifa-Jenin road at a point on the district boundary between Haifa and Samaria west of El Mansi. It follows this boundary to the southernmost point of the village of El Buteimat. From here it follows the northern and eastern boundaries of the village of Ar’ara, rejoining the Haifa-Samaria district boundary at Wadi’Ara, and thence proceeding south-south-westwards in an approximately straight line joining up with the western boundary of Qaqun to a point east of the railway line on the eastern boundary of Qaqun village. From here it runs along the railway line some distance to the east of it to a point just east of the Tulkarm railway station. Thence the boundary follows a line half-way between the railway and the Tulkarm-Qalqiliya-Jaljuliya and Ras el Ein road to a point just east of Ras el Ein station, whence it proceeds along the railway some distance to the east of it to the point on the railway line south of the junction of the Haifa-Lydda and Beit Nabala lines, whence it proceeds along the southern border of Lydda airport to its southwest corner, thence in a south-westerly direction to a point just west of the built-up area of Sarafand el ‘Amar, whence it turns south, passing just to the west of the built-up area of Abu el Fadil to the north-east corner of the lands of Beer Ya’Aqov. (The boundary line should be so demarcated as to allow direct access from the Arab State to the airport.) Thence the boundary line follows the western and southern boundaries of Ramle village, to the north-east corner of El Na’ana village, thence in a straight line to the southernmost point of El Barriya, along the eastern boundary of that village and the southern boundary of ‘Innaba village. Thence it turns north to follow the southern side of the Jaffa-Jerusalem road until El Qubab, whence it follows the road to the boundary of Abu Shusha. It runs along the eastern boundaries of Abu Shusha, Seidun, Hulda to the southernmost point of Hulda, thence westwards in a straight line to the northeastern corner of Umm Kalkha, thence following the northern boundaries of Umm Kalkha, Qazaza and the northern and western boundaries of Mukhezin to the Gaza District boundary and thence runs across the village lands of El Mismiya, El Kabira, and Yasur to the southern point of intersection, which is midway between the built-up areas of Yasur and Batani Sharqi.
From the southern point of intersection the boundary line runs north-westwards between the villages of Gan Yavne and Barqa to the sea at a point half way between Nabi Yunis and Minat el Qila, and south-eastwards to a point west of Qastina, whence it turns in a south-westerly direction, passing to the east of the built-up areas of Es Sawafir, Esh Sharqiya and Ibdis. From the south-east corner of Ibdis village it runs to a point south-west of the built-up area of Beit ‘Affa, crossing the Hebron-El Majdal road just to the west of the built-up area of Iraq Suweidan. Thence it proceeds southwards along the western village boundary of El Faluja to the Beersheba subdistrict boundary. It then runs across the tribal lands of ‘Arab el Jubarat to a point on the boundary between the sub-districts of Beersheba and Hebron north of Kh. Khuweilifa, whence it proceeds in a south-westerly direction to a point on the Beersheba-Gaza main road two kilometres to the north-west of the town. It then turns south-eastwards to reach Wadi Sab’ at a point situated one kilometre to the west of it. From here it turns northeastwards and procee
ds along Wadi Sab’ and along the Beersheba-Hebron road for a distance of one kilometre, whence it turns eastwards and runs in a straight line to Kh. Kuseifa to join the Beersheba-Hebron-sub-district boundary. It then follows the Beersheba-Hebron boundary eastwards to a point north of Ras ez Zuweira, only departing from it so as to cut across the base of the indentation between vertical grid lines 150 and 160.
About five kilometres north-east of Ras ez Zuweira it turns north, excluding from the Arab State a strip along the coast of the Dead Sea not more than seven kilometres in depth, as far as Ein Geddi, whence it turns due east to join the Transjordan frontier in the Dead Sea.
The northern boundary of the Arab section of the coastal plain runs from a point between Minat el Qila and Nabi Yunis, passing between the built-up areas of Gan Yavne and Barqa to the point of intersection. From here it turns south-westwards, running across the lands of Batani Sharqi, along the eastern boundary of the lands of Beit Daras and across the lands of Julis, leaving the built-up areas of Batani Sharqi and Julis to the westwards, as far as the north-west corner of the lands of Beit Tima. Thence it runs east of El Jiya across the village lands of El Barbara along the eastern boundaries of the villages of Beit Jirja, Deir Suneid and Dimra. From the southeast corner of Dimra the boundary passes across the lands of Beit Hanun, leaving the Jewish lands of Nir-Am to the eastwards. From the south-east corner of Beit Hanun the line runs south-west to a point south of the parallel grid line 100, then turns north-west for two kilometres, turning again in a south-westerly direction and continuing in an almost straight line to the north-west corner of the village lands of Kirbet Ikhza’a. From there it follows the boundary line of this village to its southernmost point. It then runs in a southerly direction along the vertical grid line 90 to its junction with the horizontal grid line 70. It then turns south-eastwards to Kh. el Ruheiba and then proceeds in a southerly direction to a point known as El Baha, beyond which it crosses the Beersheba-El ‘Auja main road to the west of Kh. el Mushrifa. From there it joins Wadi El Zaiyatin just to the west of El Subeita. From there it turns to the northeast and then to the south-east following this wadi and passes to the east of ‘Abda to join Wadi Nafkh. It then bulges to the south-west along Wadi Nafkh, Wadi Ajrim and Wadi Lassan to the point where Wadi Lassan crosses the Egyptian frontier.
The area of the Arab enclave of Jaffa consists of that part of the town-planning area of Jaffa which lies to the west of the Jewish quarters lying south of Tel-Aviv, to the west of the continuation of Herzl street up to its junction with the Jaffa-Jerusalem road, to the south-west of the section of the Jaffa-Jerusalem road lying south-east of that junction, to the west of Miqve Yisrael lands, to the north-west of Holon local council area, to the north of the line linking up the north-west corner of Holon with the north-east corner of Bat Yam local council area and to the north of Bat Yam local council area. The question of Karton quarter will be decided by the Boundary Commission, bearing in mind among other considerations the desirability of including the smallest possible number of its Arab inhabitants and the largest possible number of its Jewish inhabitants in the Jewish State.
The boundaries of the Jewish State: The north-eastern sector of the Jewish State (Eastern Galilee) is bounded on the north and west by the Lebanese frontier and on the east by the frontiers of Syria and Transjordan. It includes the whole of the Hula Basin, Lake Tiberias, the whole of the Beisan sub-district, the boundary line being extended to the crest of the Gilboa mountains and the Wadi Malih. From there the Jewish State extends north-west, following the boundary described in respect of the Arab State.
The Jewish section of the coastal plain extends from a point between Minat et Qila and Nabi Yunis in the Gaza sub-district and includes the towns of Haifa and Tel-Aviv, leaving Jaffa as an enclave of the Arab State. The eastern frontier of the Jewish State follows the boundary described in respect of the Arab State.
The Beersheba area comprises the whole of the Beersheba sub-district, including the Negeb and the eastern part of the Gaza sub-district, but excluding the town of Beersheba and those areas described in respect of the Arab State. It includes also a strip of land along the Dead Sea stretching from the Beersheba-Hebron subdistrict boundary line to Ein Geddi, as described in respect of the Arab State.
The City of Jerusalem shall be established as a corpus separatum under a special international regime and shall be administered by the United Nations. The Trusteeship Council shall be designated to discharge the responsibilities of the Administering Authority on behalf of the United Nations.
The City of Jerusalem shall include the present municipality of Jerusalem plus the surrounding villages and towns, the most eastern of which shall be Abu Dis; the most southern, Bethlehem; the most western, Ein Karim (including also the built-up area of Motsa); and the most northern Shu-fat, as indicated on the attached sketch-map (annex B [following p. 236 in the present Yearbook]).
It should be noted that the status of Jerusalem within the Corpus Separatum included in the above resolution, was re-asserted by Resolution 303(IV) of the General Assembly dated 9 December 1949 as the Armistice Line was being finalised at the end of hostilities between the Zionist forces and the neighbouring Arab countries.
Jerusalem as “Corpus Separatum” under the UN Partition Plan
UN Resolution 181 called for the immediate creation of The Palestine Commission to oversee the implementation of the Partition Plan. It was composed of 5 member states: Bolivia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Panama and The Philippines. This Commission, however, was disbanded in May 1948 when it became clear that the Partition Plan could not be implemented as the land of Palestine was being ethnically cleansed by the Jewish underground which lead to the creation of Israel in May 1948 and beyond (see below).
Irony has it that the Jewish Provisional Government’s ‘foreign minister of Israel’ Moshe Shertock, chose the first anniversary of UN Res 181 to apply for Israel to be admitted as a member of the UN. The Jewish underground massacres and conquests of Palestine were rewarded when Israel’s application for UN membership was approved, first, by the Security Council through its Resolution 69 on Mach 4 1949 and, later, passed by the General Assembly through its Resolution 273 on 11 May 1949 – a mere 4 days short of Israel’s first anniversary of its creation.
The Arab League rejected the plan to partition Palestine by any outside power. The stage was thus set for the Zionists to make their dream a reality. They dusted off the map they showed to UNSCOP in May 1947 and decided it was time to act. They immediately faced the problem of having 1 million Palestinians in the part of Palestine allocated to them in the Partition plan. But since the 1880’s, the Zionists had been preparing for such an eventuality. Now was the time to act.
The Palestinians rebelled as the Zionist underground forces attacked Palestinian villages and towns in order to secure more than their portion of Palestine allocated to them by the Partition Plan. As noted above, the United States admitted around March 1948 that the partitioning of Palestine could not be carried out in a peaceful manner and proposed that Palestine be placed under a temporary UN Trusteeship. This plan and calls for a ceasefire fell on deaf ears. The Jewish forces exerted all military efforts to achieve maximum land gains as the British prepared to end their Mandate in Palestine in mid-May 1948. By April 1948, they had achieved a military superiority and set in motion all political machinery to declare their Jewish State. Herzl’s prediction to establish a Jewish State in Palestine within 50 years was missed by only 1 year.
The context of the next stage is summarised thus: After FDR, the 4-term U.S. president, died of illness on 12 April 1945, his vice president Harry S Truman assumed office as the U.S struggles in a global WW2. 1948 was an election year in American and all the predictions were that Truman’s opponet Thomas Dewey was going to win the election in November of that year. The Zionist lobby went out in full force to ensure that Truman secures the White House. It does not take a big brain to realise that this has a price attached to it. As the Jewish Agency was about to declare the birth of Israel, Truman was ready to reward it with a political recognition against all advice from his State Department officials. But Zionist pressure proved too much to resist (see Truman’s quote above).
On May 14, 1948 Eliahu Epstein of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (and the Agent for the Provisional Government of Israel) wrote a letter to US President Harry Truman which read in part: “I have the honour to notify you that the state of Israel has been proclaimed as an independent republic WITHIN FRONTIERS APPROVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS IN ITS RESOLUTION [181] OF 29 NOVEMBER, 1947…” [our emphasis].
At 6:00pm Washington time, on Friday May 14, 1948 the Jewish State of Israel was proclaimed just as the Sabbath began at sunset that day. At 6:11pm, U.S. President Harry Truman authorised the recognition of Israel, and America became the first nation to do so. Truman’s decision to recognise the new State was not shared by many of his high ranking advisors, such as Dean Rusk, Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defence James Forrestal and Secretary of State George Marshall. Details of such reservations by these high ranking advisors to Truman can be found in “A Calculated Risk” by Evan W Wilson.
On the day after Truman’s recognition of Israel, Epstein wrote to Moshe Shertok, Israel’s then Foreign Minister saying that “...THE UNITED STATES RECOGNIZES THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AS THE DE-FACTO AUTHORITY OF THE NEW STATE OF ISRAEL” [our emphasis]. “De-Facto” mean a state of affairs that is true in fact but that is not officially sanctioned.
With the Jewish underground forces ravaging and ethnically cleansing the Palestinian landscape, even as the US recognition landed on Ben-Gurion’s desk, the status of congered borders and frontiers was not far the mind of US State Department officials. Loy Anderson was keen for Israel to ‘define’ its borders. Eliahu Epstein sought to assure him that “…any territory taken until peace was achieved would be returned to the Arab State”. Israel would not have been recognised by Truman had it nor declared its borders on the basis on UN Resolution 181.
No sooner had Truman won the election on 3 November 1948, than Chaim Weizmann, the President of the World Zionist Organization and Israel’s first President shot a letter of congratulation to him dated 5 November in which he states: “We have special cause to be gratified at your re-election because we are mindful of the enlightened help which you gave our cause in these years of our struggle“.
The rest is history: the British mandate ended the next day on 15th May 1948 at noon.
Palestine was not only partitioned. It was destroyed.
Most of Palestine’s indigenous population were expelled and, together with their descendents, became numbers in an UNRWA refugee register. Today, they total about 5.5 million people living in miserable refugee camps in Lebanon (12 camps), Syria (10 camps + 3 unofficial sites), Jordan (10 camps), in the occupied West Bank (19 camps) and in blockaded Gaza (8 camps). These Palestinian refugees hold the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest suffering and largest refugee population in the world.
Where did the refugees go?
Partition and The Law
In front of Congress in January 1918, Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) the 28th president of the United States, proposed a 14-point Plan for a Programme of Peace, as WW1 was still raging. He wanted to promote the idea for a League of Nations which would avoid the repetition of such was in the future. Wilson had campaigned hard for its establisment, and harder for the US to ratify it. On 28 June 1919, 44 nations signed the Covenant to establish the League of Nations, but the US was not amongst them. Despite Wilson’s national campaigns to get the US to join the League, Republicans in Congress opposed it. For his efforts, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October of that year.
Two points in his programme related to the territories which were placed under the Mandates systems. Point 12 specifically stated: “The Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire [now Turkey] should be assured a secure sovereignty….the other nationalities which are under Turkish rule, should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous developments…”.
In his February 1918 address to Congress, President Wilson stated that: “Peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were chattels and pawns in a game. National aspirations must be respected; people may be dominated and governed ONLY by their consent. Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their own peril”.
In July of the same year, he formulated his vision further: “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement or of political relationship, [must be] upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery”.
On the other side of the planet where the booty is the recious, the Middle East, Britain and France scanned the landscape and planned to share this booty. As WWI was coming to an end and the Allies were sensing victory there against the Ottoman Empire, promises and counter promises were made by Britain’s leaders to the Arabs to reward the latter for their hep in defeating the Ottomans. The famous pledges by Sir Henry McMahon to Sherif Hussein of Mecca known as The MacMahon-Hussein Correspondence (14 July 1915-30 January 1916). These documents were fully exmined for the first time by George Antonius in his seminal book “The Arab Awakening” written in 1939 two years before this notable historian died. Anyone interested in this chapter of British interigue towards the Arabs should read this book.
After the end of WW1, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (PPC), the principles of nationality and self-determination of peoples was advocated by President Wilson with two dozen other world leaders marking the beginning of the end of Colonialism. It proclaimed that no new territories should be annexed by the victors, and that such territories should be administered solely for the benefit of their indigenous people and be placed under the trusteeship of the mandatories acting on behalf of the League of Nations, until the true wishes of the inhabitants of those territories could be ascertained.
The PPC decided to recognise the territories under the mandatory system as “provisionally independent nations subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand by themselves”.It follows from this phrase that the mandatory mission is not intended to be prolonged indefinitely, but only until the peoples under tutelage are capable of managing their own affairs.
All these declarations turned out to be not worth the paper they were written on.
Class A mandates (Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and Transjordan) recognised the peoples of these territories to have reached advanced stage of development and their independence could be recognised once they have achieved a capacity to govern themselves. It is universally and legally accepted that sovereignty in the mandatory territories lie in the inhabitants of the territory in question (Article 22 of the Covenant of The League of Nations).
The League of Nations Covenant defines the Class A Mandates in the following manner:
“Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone”.
Palestine was Class A Mandated Territory. In Palestine, citizenship status for those living in the country was governed by The Palestine Citizenship Order-in-Council of 24 July 1925 which came into force on 1 August 1925. It regulated Palestine citizenship for the duration of the Mandate. All subjects habitually resident in Palestine on 1 August 1925 became Palestine citizens. Citizenship could also be acquired by birth. Persons born to Palestinian fathers (no matter where that birth took place) acquired Palestine citizenship. Any other person could also acquire citizenship by means of naturalization, subject only to the length of period of residency.
Under International Law, Palestine, throughout the Mandatory period, was to receive administrative assistance and advice from the Mandatory to help it set up its own government. Already, Palestine had its fixed boundaries, its government institutions, its own currency and, in 1934, its national anthem.
Palestine’s legal position under International Law was clear: The United Kingdom was mandated Palestine in one piece. Article 5 of the Mandate required the Mandatory Power (the UK) to ensure that “no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way, placed under the control of the government of any foreign power”. Under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the people of Palestine were to emerge as a fully independent nation at the end of the Mandate. Hence, Palestine was considered a provisionally independent state receiving administrative assistance and advice from the Mandatory. The sovereignty was vested in the people of Palestine. It was a dormant sovereignty exercised by the Mandatory power on behalf of the people of Palestine.
Article 28 of the Mandate stipulated that at the end of the Mandate, the territory of Palestine would pass on to the control of ‘the Government of Palestine’. The termination of the Mandate on 15 May 1948 was to signal the birth of a free and sovereign Palestine in fulfilment of Paragraph 4 of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. It was supposed to pave the way for the establishment of an independent and sovereign government in Palestine without the intervention of either the United Nations or any other foreign government for that matter.
It was under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 that Turkey finally renounced its administration of the Middle East territories after nearly 500 years of occupation. We repeat until the world listens, that Britain was the Mandatory power in Palestine and the guardian and the trustee of Palestine. Its duty was to guarantee the interest and well-being of the country’s inhabitants until the termination of the Mandate and the assumption by Palestine of its independence as a sovereign nation. When that happens, the newly independent nation would then be admitted to the League of Nations. This was the case with Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. They became sovereign nations. Indeed, this was Britain’s intention in Palestine when it issued its White Paper in 1939.
All Class A Mandates achieved full independence: But that was not to be the fate of Palestine.
The UN had no right in 1947 to even debate the idea of partitioning any country, to dispose of any part of it, deprive the majority of its indigenous population of their territory or to transfer it to the exclusive use of illegal immigrants. The General Assembly had no right or jurisdiction to destroy the territorial integrity of Palestine or to propose its partition.
The General Assembly Resolution 181 (the Partition Plan for Palestine) was passed as a recommendation and not as a binding resolution. It would have had to go to the Security Council for it to be binding. Here is what the UN Charter states on this point:
“Broadly speaking, while the General Assembly may discuss any international disputes or situations, it is the Security Council which recommends appropriate procedures or methods of adjustments or terms of settlement for the pacific settlement of disputes and takes preventive or enforecement measures with respet to threats to the peaces, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression”.
Additionally, the purpose of GA Res181 was to create a process from the end of the Mandate which would lead to the division of Palestine into two states. As the Arab side rejected the Resolution, it could not have been implemented. It would have taken the full military force of the young UN to implement it. As history has shown, the Jewish gangs were implementing it by force.
The United Kingdom did not own Palestine and had no relationship whatsoever with it in 1916 when it agreed with Zionist leaders to issue the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. This Declaration remains illegal, invalid and inapplicable even though it was injected into the Mandate for Palestine through power politics and lobbying.
The International Law Digestdefines a state as “ a people permanently occupying a fixed territory, bound together by common law, habits, and customs into one body politic, exercising, through the medium of organised government, independent sovereignty and control over all persons and things within its boundaries”. In the area labelled Israel today, the majority of the people, at the time of the Balfour Declaration and later when Palestine was partitioned in 1947, were indigenous Palestinians. In International Law, the territory of any state must belong to the people of that state. The possession of the territory must be a legitimate possession and could not have been acquired by war, conquest or through annexation.
BUT:
It was at the Paris Peace Conference that Chaim Weizman put forward Zionist claims to Palestine calling for the imposition of the Mandate over all of Palestine including areas up to the Litani River in Lebanon (to the north) and to the Hijaz Railway line which is well east of the Jordan River. He then famously declared his wishes for a Palestine to be “as Jewish as England is English”.
Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention states that an entity cannot be considered a state until it possess the following qualifications: a) A permanent population; b) A defined territory; c) A government; d) The capacity to enter into relations with other states. What existed in the so-called Jewish state in 1948 were illegal immigrants from Europe and Russia, and three Zionist terrorist organisations: the Irgun, the Hagana and the Stern gangs.
Despite this miscarriage of justice, this so-called State embarked on a massive military project to ensure the total and final expulsion of the Palestinian people from their historic homeland.
To achieve this objective, they had their Village Files ready.
The Village Files
In pursuit of their aims to take over the land of Palestine, the Zionist leadership founded the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 1901 whose sole aim was to provide funds for the pupose of purchasing Palestinian land to settle Jewish immigrants. Its first donation came from Johann (also known as Yona) Kremenezky, who was later appointed as its head at the age of 51. Herzl, the founder of Zionism, made Kremenezky his personal advisor. He possessed grand dreams of planting a million trees throughout Palestine (as referenced in Herzl’s diaries).
But it was due to one colourful character in the Zionist movement that land purchases in Palestine reached their climax. Yehoshua Hankin (1864-1945) arrived in Ottoman Palestine from Russia in 1882 at the age of 18 and based himself in Yafa. He possessed a keen sense of real-estate shrewdness, and was known to have ‘acquired a fluency and familiarity with Palestinian Arabs and their business practices’. He has been credited with helping the JNF acquire over 1 million dunams (100,000 hectares) of Palestinian land prior to 1948.
The activities of the JNF were closely associated with those in the Zionist Settlement Department whose main aim was to facilitate the eviction of Palestinian tenants from Palestinian land bought by the JNF from absentee Palestinian and other Arab landlords. The tenants came with the land, but, in Zionist eyes, they did not have the right to stay on it.
The brain behind the JNF was a Ukraine-born Zionist called Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) who, like Yehoshua Hankin, was 18 when he entered Palestine in 1908. Under his tutelage, the ‘Village Files’ were compiled. These files comprised aerial photographs of Palestinian villages, topographical maps and detailed records of their inhabitants. They contained information on the quality of the land in the village, the water sources, the names of the village inhabitants, their political and religious affiliations, their ages and their marital status, etc. The files took years to collate and were nearly complete by the late 1930’s. (Refer to Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine).
The leaders of the Zionist movement were nothing if not meticulous record keepers, and their records of the Village Files were and still are kept in official government archives to this day.
Names associated with the Village Files project included the following people who were the core of The Consultancy Council: Ezra Danin (1903-1985), a Syrian-born Zionist who played a key role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine; Moshe Pasternak (1920-1976) from Poland; Yaacov Shimoni; Yehoshua Palmon; Tuvia Lishanski; Eliyahu Sassoon; Yohanan Ratner; Fritz Eisenshtater; Yaacov Tahon and an Anglo-Jewish professor of chemistry, Sasha Goldberg who conducted experiments in biological weapons in what became later The Weizmann Institute. Later, this project was developed further under the directorship of a physical chemist called Ephraim Katzir (born Ephraim Katchalsky 1916-2009) who became the 4th president of Israel (in office from 24 May 1973 to 19 April 1978). Special units in the service of the Village Files project were trained and recruited in the Zionist youth village of Shefeya in Upper Galilee. It is from here that they went out on reconnaissance missions of Palestinian villages gathering detailed information from village elders whose traditional hospitality they abused.
The Village Files included ‘Most Wanted’ lists which included names of young Palestinians who, after a village had been occupied by Zionist forces, would be lined up, identified, taken away and shot on the spot. Many names belonged to Palestinian National Movement fighters who were fingered out by masked collaborators. As the villages were invaded and later occupied, the pattern of ethnically cleansing them became efficient, direct and swift.
Yigael Yadin (1917-1984) who later became Israel’s second Chief of Staff, admitted once that it was the detailed information gathered on these villages (i.e., the Village Files) which enabled the Zionist undeground forces in November 1947 to sweep through the Palestinian landscape with such speed and efficiency and with little resistance from the ‘Arab side’. In fact, it was not ‘Arab resistance’ that they feared. It was the British forces. Had it not been for the British presence, Yadin declared, the Palestinian resistance to the Partition Plan would have been quelled in one month.
He knew what he was talking about.
Plan Dalet and The NAKBA
Zionist operations outside the UN designated Jewish part of Palestine
Terrorism and terrorist operations were first introduced in Palestine by the Jewish underground to demoralise the British Army. These operations were carried out by the same Jewish elements trained by the British Army in North Africa as an adjunct to their WWII effort against the Nazis. By 1939 this Jewish auxiliary force numbered 20,000 strong.
This force, which was given the innocent-sounding name of ‘The Jewish Settlement Force’, employed terrorist tactics against British troops supplemented by terrorist operations carried out by their underground brethren throwing bombs in bus stops, cafes and marketplaces. These bombs were hidden in milk cans, fruit baskets and similar daily objects. Parallel with these operations, terrorist innovations included the kidnapping of British officers, whipping them, hanging them and booby-trapping their hanging bodies which made for shocking headlines back home in the UK.
In the last year of the British Mandate, the ratio of British officers dead to Jewish terrorists killed was 4 to 1 – a very high ratio even in today’s standards. No wonder Britain wanted out of Palestine.
The Zionist plan to transfer Palestinians out of their land was headed by no lesser character than David Ben-Gurion himself. He plotted these schemes in his own home aided by a small ad hoc group of people referred to as The Consultancy. Its aim was to plot and carry out the disposession of the Palestinian people.
As early as February 1947, when the British Cabinet voted to pull out of Mandatory Palestine, the Zionist leadership knew that the road ahead was clear for their aims to be achieved. The Consultancy first met (according to Ben-Gurion’s diary) on 18 June 1947 and continued to meet regularly during the months leading to October 1947 when it transpired that the UN will now issue its Resolution 181 to partition the land of Palestine.
The Zionist leadership and its Consultancy group also knew that the Palestinians and the Arab leadership in general would reject the Partition Resolution. The Consultancy realised that this would be the time not only to forge forward their plan to clear the Palestinian population from the UN-designated future Jewish state, but also from the areas accorded to the Arab state.
Prior to 1947, the Zionist agenda concentrated on building a political, ideological, cultural and economic enclave within historic Palestine. Now, during these crucial months leading to UN Resolution 181, it was decided that the time has come to translate these ideologies into realities on the ground.
Just before the UN voted to partition Palestine in November 1947, Ben-Gurion secretly mobilised Jewish groups inside and outside Palestine and dispatched them to Europe to purchase massive quantities of arms for the next phase: the military plan to conquer as many Palestinian villages and to expel their inhabitants.
Their plan was called Plan D better known as Plan Dalet, (Dalet being the fourth letter in the Hebrew alphabet) which was launched nearly six weeks prior to the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. It is worth noting that Plan D had been preceeded by Plan A (February 1945), Plan B (May 1947) and Plan C (November 1947) – all with the single intention of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.March 1948: two months before the so-called Declaration of Independence, the Zionist leadership gathered in Tel Aviv and agreed to put Plan D into action. Over 13 military underground operations were carried out (according to The History of the Palmach archives released in full in 1972) before the Arab forces entered the areas allotted to the Palestinians by the UN in their Partition Plan. Both Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion wrote extensively about their underground military campaigns to cleanse Palestinian villages of their indigenous inhabitants.
At the onset of Plan Dalet in April 1948, Jewish immigration into Palestine had exceeded 600,000 (compared to 56,000 in 1917). With that many immigrants, the Zionist leadership was able to deploy an army of 65,000 well armed and well trained soldiers, (a number that increased to 120,000 in early 1949, amounting to 20% of the total Jewish population of the newly declared State). This is an unprecendented percentage when compared to 1%-2% for a typical country at the time.
As the execution of Plan Dalet proceeded with clockwork precision, the Haganah created a ‘Committee for Arab Properties in Villages’ the purpose of which was to register and take possession of all Palestinian properties in the villages the Zionist forces had conquered. Similar committees were established in major Palestinian cities like Haifa, Safad, Yafa and Tabariyah.
All this was taking place BEFORE Israel was even born!
When the Zionist leadership unilaterally declared their so-called state of Israel on 15 May 1948, they purposefully avoided declaring its boundaries to keep their options open for future expansion. That expansion has since covered the whole of historic Palestine. Soon after 15 May 1948, the Arab armies entered Palestine in an attempt to defend Palestinian civilians expelled from their homes and villages in what became Israel. The Jewish forces, better equipped and more organised, swept through the part of Palestine allocated to the Palestinians in UN Resolution 181, and grabbed more land including the Galilee, and west Jerusalem part of the International Zone called Corpus Separatum under UNRes 181 ( see later sections).
At the end of Plan Dalet, the Haganah set up “The Committee For Abandoned Arab Property” – The CFAAP – which was entrusted with the disposal of all Arab possessions into Yishuv hands. The intention was to obliterate any sign of ‘life’ in the abandoned Palestinian homes and villages.
By June 1948, approximately 370,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, and by the end of that year the number was nearer 780,000. Josef Weitz declared, at a cabinet meeting chaired by Ben-Gurion on 18 August 1948, that 286 villages had been cleared or evacuated and about 3 million dunums had been left behind by their Palestinian owners as they fled the Zionist terror. The last of the villages to be cleared was Al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon by Israel).
Within 6 months, Zionist terrorist organizations went on a rampage expelling and murdering Palestinians and destroying their homes and villages. They expelled 452,780 Palestinians men, women and children from the areas allocated to the Jews in the Partition Plan, and a further 347,220 were uprooted from areas beyond the allocated boundaries. All in all, a total of 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes, 530 of their villages destroyed and 11 of their urban neighbourhoods were emptied. Massacres, such as at Deir Yaseen, spread fear and terror in the hearts of Palestinian families and forced them to take flight.
By November 1948, Israel completed the occupation of the most fertile and populated areas of Palestine, and by December, it issued “the Emergency Regulations Relative to Property of Absentees”. This was followed by yet another discrimanatory law called the “Law of The Acquisition of Absentee Property”, (Absentees Property Law, 4L ST. Israel 68, 1949-1950). This law effectively classified all Palestinian refugees as “absent” and immediately transferred the control of their private properties to a Custodian who has the sole discretion to determine whether any Arab Palestinian is “absent’ and to confiscate his/her property. This arbitrary definition was applied, not only to those who were expelled beyond the ‘Armistice Line’, but was extended to Palestinians who remianed in Israel.
Those who remained in Israel, but were not in the specified place on a particular date (i.e., they may have been in the next village or away for a day or so), were declared “absent”. Since these people, thus declared, eventually became Israeli citizens, they were dubbed as “present absentees”, an ironical but accurate description of this Israeli fictitious legislation.
The Palestinian Exodus was one of the largest in post war history, and the reasons for it were confirmed by IDF intelligence as follows: Haganah operations (55%), operations by Irgun (15%) and whispering campaigns of psychological warfare (14%).
Chaim Weizmann later commented that this Palestinian Exodus had been “a miraculous clearing of the land: the miraculous simplification of Israel’s task”.
And so it was: the Zionist dream of transfer and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine came to fruition with the Palestinian Exodus of 1948 when more than 80% of the inhabitants of what became Israel were expelled and became refugees until this day. Some 140,000-150,000 Palestinians had remained behind in what became Israel and were allowed to stay. The borders of this new state, remain unrecognised and unofficial, since they have been expanding through military conquest from the 55.5% of Mandatory Palestine (under the Partition Plan of November 1947) to 78% of historic Palestine (at the time of the 1949 Armistice Agreement). Of course, the conquests continued in 1967 when Israel swept through and occupied the whole of historic Palestine.
The Massacres
In their drive to gain control of not only the part of Palestine allocated to the Jewish State under UN Resolution 181, but also land allocated to the Palestinian State, the Zionist forces committed the following massacres:
Al-Tira Massacre: December 1947
Haifa Oil Refinery Massacre: December 1947
Balad el-Sheikh Masacre: December 1947
Yehiday Massacre: December 1947
Khisas Massacre: December 1947
Qazaza Massacre: December 1947
Jaffa Massacre: January 1948
Semiramis Hotel (Jerusalem) Massacre: January 1948
Sa’sa’ Massacres: February and October 1948
Cairo-Haifa Train Massacre: March 1948
al-Lajjun Massacre: April 1948
Deir Yasin Massacre: April 1948
Qaluniya Massacre: April 1948
Ayn el-Zaytoun Massacre: May 1948
Abu Shusha Massacre: May 1948
al-Tantura Massacre: May 1948
Beit Daras Massacre: May 1948
Al-Burayr Massacre: May 1948
Lydda Massacre: July 1948
al-Dawayima: Massacre October 1948
Safsaf Massacre: October 1948
Saliha Massacre: October 1948
Eilaboun Massacre: October 1948
Hula Massacre: October 1948
The Dayr al-Balah & Khan Younis Massacre: January 1949…
For a chronology of key events in the history of Palestine which led to these massacres and to the Palestinian Nakba, please log on to:
www.alnakba.org/chronolgy/chronlogy.htm
The Declaration of Independence of the so-called State
David Ben-Gurion declaring the birth of Israel
Having carried out their massacres and having expelled over 725,000 Palestinians from their homes, and while the UN General Assembly was considering the Trusteeship Plan for Palestine, 37 Zionist leaders representing Zionist parties worldwide hurried to meet at 4:00 PM on Friday, May 14, at the Tel Aviv Museum on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv to sign what they called a “Declaration of Establishment of The State of Israel” in the land of Palestine which they referred to (and still do) as Eretz-Israel. This biblical name encompasses a land of indefinite geographical extension depending on which version of the Hebrew Bible you read. This bestowed ‘religious legitimacy’ to acquire land to satisfy Zionist appetite.
Of the 37 Zionist leaders who gathered for this proclamation, the oldest was 82, the youngest not yet 30. Three became prime ministers, one became president, and 14 became cabinet ministers.
Of these 37 Zionists, only 1 was born in Palestine.
Of the remaining 36 Zionists, 13 were born in Russia, 11 in Poland, 2 in Romania, 2 in Germany, 2 in Latvia, 2 in Lithuanian, 1 in Austria, 1 in Hungary, 1 in Denmark and 1 in Yemen. Most of them migrated to Palestine between 1920 and 1940. One of them came to Palestine only in 1947.
We name 35 of the signatories to give credence to this project which started back in 1897:
David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Daniel Auster (1893-1962), Mordekhai Bentov (1900-1985), Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (1884-1963), Eliyahu Meir Berligne (1866-1959), Perez (Fritz) Bernstein (1890-1971), Rachel Cohen (1888-1982), Eliyahu Dobkin (1898-1976), Rabbi Wolf Gold (1889-1956), Meir Grabovsky (Argov) (1905-1963), Abraham Granott (Granovsky) (1890-1962), Yitzhak Gruenbaum (1879-1970), Rabbi Kalman Kahana (1910-1991), Eliezer Kaplan (1891-1952), Sa’adia Kobashi (no dates available), Moshe Kol (Kolodny) (1911-89), Rabbi Yitzhak Meir Levin (1894-1971), Zvi Lurie (1906-1968), Rabbi Yehudah Leib Maimon (Fishman) (1875-1962), Golda Meir (Myerson) (1898-1978), Avraham Nissan (Katznelson) (1888-1956), Nahum Nir-Rafalkes (1884-1968), David Zvi Pinkas (1895-1952), Moshe David Remez (1886-1951), Berl Repetur (1902-1989), inhas Rosen (Felix Rosenblueth) (1887-1978), Zvi Segal (1901-1965), Moshe (Hayyim) Shapira (1902-1970), Mordechai Shattner (no dates available), Moshe Sharett (Shertok) (1894-1965), Behor Shalom Shitrit (1895-1967), Ben-Zion Sternberg (1894-1962), Meir Vilner-Kovner (1918-2003), Zerah Warhaftig (1906-2002), Aharon Zisling (1901-1964).
Most of Israel’s elected prime ministers, past and present, belonged to, or are known to be members of terrorist organisations in their heyday.
Their so-called Declaration was couched in legal and civilised phrases to give it legitimacy. For a detailed account of how this Declaration was agreed, please refer to Shelley Kleinman’s article on Israel’s Ministry of FA website: http://mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFA-Archive/1999/Pages/Shelley%20Kleiman%20-%20The%20State%20of%20Israel%20Declares%20Ind.aspx
It said that “the state of Israel will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.
On that eventful day, 14 May 1948, the new state was recognised by the United States of America followed by the USSR 3 days later.
As Ben Gurion and his Zionist colleagues were issuing that declaration, their underground forces were sweeping through the land of Palestine conquering villages and expelling Palestinians from their homes. Seventeen massacres were carried out including Deir Yaseen and Tantura massacres.
The previous chapter of this website documented many of the massacres perpetrated by these gangs in pursuit of that goal. As they swept eastward, they invaded the UN declared ‘Corpus Separatum‘ of Jerusalem and its environs in defiance of UN Resolution 181 and attacked west Jerusalem which surrendered to them at 16:36 on Friday 28 May, 1948.
It must not be forgotten that the crimes committed in Palestine and which paved the way for the creation of the so-called State of Israel, were the work of over 3000 Zionist and Israeli leaders since 1939. In the words of Dr Issa Nakhleh, author of the massive ‘Encylopedia of the Palestine Problem’, “these zionist and Israeli leaders were all members of the Hagana, Palmach, Irgun Z’vai Leumi, the Stern Gang, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Many of them became presidents, cabinet ministers, generals, officers of the armed forces…and occupied high positions in Israeli society. They are still at large enjoying the fruits of their crimes, and many of them are [today] being honoured as heads of state, Prime Ministers, cabinet ministers, and scholars of an allegedly democratic state…The victims of their crimes are called terrorists, murderers and criminals, [while] the real terrorists and war criminals are being received as respectable representatives of a democratic society”.
As these fateful events were engineered in such a relatively short span of time, culminating in one people expelling another and taking over their land, they exposed a well orchestrated and carefully executed Zionist project with the blessing and connivance of major world powers and a huge amount of financial muscle. The Holocaust tragedy was injected into this project to silence any opposition to its swift and perfect execution.
By the time the Armistice Lines were drawn in 1949, approximately 20,770 square kilometers (of a total area of 26,990 square kilometers) – or 77% of Mandated Palestine were occupied by the new Zionist State…
…until, of course, June 6, 1967 when Israel conquered all of historic Palestine.
Contrary to Zionist propaganda, Israel was not invaded in 1948 by the five Arab States. Historical records show that all the fighting took place within the terriory of Palestine allocated to the Arab State – outside the newly declared Zionist state.
Soon after its recognition, and as the battles raged, the Provisional Zionist government declared that it will not respect the Partition Resolution 181 lines. Additionally, Ben Gurion issued a statement that “…we will remain on the offensive which will not be confined to the borders of the Jewsih State”.
By the time the Armistice Agreement was signed in 1949, Israel had added, through military conquest, 23% of Palestine beyond the 55% of Palestine allocated to it in UN Res181. Israel did not only violate ‘a sacred trust’, it violated the Geneva Conventions as well.
Then, 1967 change
The Right of Return
The UN emissary, Count Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) arrived in Palestine in May 1948 to mediate a cease fire. The recently proclaimed Israeli government consented to his appointment because, as president of the Swedish Red Cross, he saved 15,000 Jews from the Nazi Camps during WW2. Now, in Palestine, having witnessed the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and villages, he called for the unqualified return of all Palestinian refugees expelled as a result of the conflict. He declared:
“It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine”.
For this, he was assassinated by Jewish underground terrorists, the Stern Gang headed by Itzhak Shamir, on 17 September 1948, as his motorcade drove through Katamon west of Jerusalem. Shamir later became Israel’s Pime Minister in 1983 and also in 1988.
It was partly as a tribute to Count Bernadotte that the UN General Assembly issued its Resolution 194 on 11 December 1948 calling for:
1. Return of all expelled Palestinians (Art. 11)
2. Protection of and free access to the Holy Places (Art. 7)
3. Demilitarization and UN control over Jerusalem (Art. 8)
4. Free access to Jerusalem (Art. 9)
Only the day before, on 10 December 1948, The UN published The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 13 of that Declaration states that every person has the right to return to his/her home. To prevent that person from returning, no matter what the reasons are for his/her exodus, is itself a war crime.
The right of the refugees to return to their homes is not only a sacred and legal right, but also a possible one. Studies show that 80% of Jews live on 15% of historic Palestine. The remaining 20% of Jews live on 85% of land that belongs to Palestinians.
The Right of Return is an inalienable right sacredly held by all refugees and entitles them to return at any time to their homes. This Right can never be diminished by the passage of time or by any treaty unless the refugees themselves declare otherwise, or forfeit that Right altogether, but under no duress of any kind.
The expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. Approximately 750,000 indigenous Palestinians became homeless
Children of a Palestinian family from Haifa 1 year after their expulsion (L) and 60 years later (R)
We repeat: The Right of Return is an inalienable and non-negotiable right. Period.
International Law considers agreements between occupiers and occupied as null and void if they deprive civilians of their right to return to their homes, of their right to repatriation and of their right to restitution.
Acceptance and implementation of Resolution 194 was made a condition for Israel’s entry into the United Nation.
No surprise, then, that the Zionist leadership quickly welcomed it. But Resolution 194 has never been implemented despite its reaffirmation by the UN on more than 130 occasions. Despite this miscarriage of justice, Israel was admitted as a member of the UN on 11 May 1949 “as a peace-loving State which accepts the obligations contained in the Charter and is willing to carry out those obligations”. This peace-loving State has defied more UN Resolutions than any other member state of the UN.
Resolution 194 remains the major legal foundation on which the Right of Return is based. It states that the General Assembly “resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at their earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return…”
A number of international conventions including the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 9, 13 and 30, the UN Resolution 242 passed in 1967 and many others, call on Israel to permit the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes. It must now be forced to do so, or be expelled from the UN.
Israel and those who support it on the international political stage are responsible for over 4.6 million UNRWA registered Palestinian refugees (2008 figure). As the tragedy drags on, this figure will have reached 6.3 million by June 2012. What a debt on the conscience of the free world.
As a result of the Nakba (1948) and the Naksa (1967), 55 Palestinian refugee camps dot the region.
Copyright 1996-2004 The Palestinian Return Centre
By the end of 2015, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistic (PCBS) estimated that there were 12.37 million Palestinians living in the world. This means that since the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian population worldwide has increased by eightfold.
The present (2015) population distribution looks like this:
4.75 million live in the State of Palestine (38.4% of the total Palestinian population in the world), 1.47 million in the Palestinian areas occupied by Israel in 1948 (11.9% of the total Palestinian population in the world), 5.46 million Palestinians live in Arab countries (44.2% of the total Palestinian population in the world), while there are 685,000 Palestinians in foreign countries (5.5% of the total Palestinian population in the world).
Pre-1948, a small percentage of Palestinian lived outside their historic homeloand of Palestine. The above figures now show that more than half of the Palestinians in the world live outside historical Palestine.
The present Palestinian refugee figures look like this (UNRWA data 2015):Percentage of Registered Refugee status of all Palestinians:
Lebanon: 8.8%, Syria: 10.3%, Palestine: 39.8%, and Jordan: 41.1%
This shows that 54% of all Palestinians residing outside Palestine are refugees.
They Shall Return…Homeland Is Not For Sale.
For a chronology of key events in the history of Palestine up to The Nakba, please log on to:
www.alnakba.org/chronlogy/chonlogy.htm
d all that….again.
