Issa Nakhleh: the Fascist Character of the Israeli State
Ehud Olmert’s political party, Kadima, currently leading the murderous charge in Lebanon, was forged out of Likud, and Likud out of Herut, the political party of Zeev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, a movement at odds with socialist Zionism and taking its cues from Benito Mussolini and fascism.
In 1940, Avraham Stern, inspired by Jabotinsky, formed Irgun Zvai Leumi be-Yisrael, or simply Lehi, a terrorist group dedicated to killing not only officials and soldiers of British colonialism in Palestine, but anybody, regardless of race or religion (including Jews), who stood in the way of realizing a “homeland in the Land of Israel within the borders delineated in the Bible,” as Stern declared in his 18 Principles of Rebirth (see David Ohana’s Zarathustra in Jerusalem: Nietzsche and the “New Hebrews”). Stern and Lehi, also called the Stern Gang, attempted to team up with the Nazis during the Second World War, declaring a “common interests could exist between the establishment of a new order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO (Lehi).”
“Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can negate the use of terror as a means of battle,” an article published in a Lehi underground newspaper stated in 1943. “We are quite far from moral hesitations on the national battlefield. We see before us the command of the Torah, the most moral teaching in the world: Obliterate—until destruction. We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation in regard to an enemy whose moral perversion is admitted by all…. But primarily terror is part of our political battle under present conditions and its role is large and great.” In other words, as commanded in the Old Testament (the reference to “obliteration” is taken from Exodus 17:14 and Numbers 14:45), enemies should be destroyed completely and their “remembrance” blotted out for all history. Such mass murder and brutality, uncoupled from any moral restraint, “shakes the Yishuv [settlers] from their complacency” (see the Wikipedia entry on Lehi and the justification for terrorism).
After assassinating Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, followed by the murder of the UN Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948 (Bernadotte was assassinated in part for revealing the depth of Zionist efforts to murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians), Lehi was integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces on May 31, 1948, and a member was elected to the first Knesset. In short, terrorism became a military and state policy after the British decided to withdraw from the Palestine Mandate and the UN General Assembly approved a 1947 UN Partition Plan dividing the Palestine into two states (or rather one state, as the Israelis not only reneged on the promise to abide by the plan, but began ethnically cleansing Arabs in short order).
In the months prior to declaring a Zionist state (in fact, declared one day before the expiry of the Palestine Mandate), according to British Colonial Office and Foreign Office files, “the Irgun Z’vai Leumi and the Stern Gang, in coordination with the Hagana, committed the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin, where 250 men, women and children were butchered and many of their houses blown up over their heads,” writes the Palestinian Christian Issa Nakhleh, a representative of the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine in New York City 1947-1948 (see Nakhleh’s Encyclopedia of the Palestinian Problem, Chapter 7, Zionist Crimes and Terrorism in Palestine; at the end of this chapter there is a detailed description of numerous terrorist crimes committed by Irgun-Hagana).
The details of the crimes committed by Zionist terrorist organizations in 1948 are … verbatim reports photocopied from the War Office, Colonial Office and Foreign Office files i d Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, Surrey, the United Kingdom. Following is a summary of the types of crimes committed by Zionist terrorists in 1948:
1. Sneak attacks on many Arab villages, resulting in the death of many men, women and children.
2. Blowing up of bridges in different parts of the country.
3. Blowing up of Arab houses and hotels.
4. Firing on Arab cars and killing many Arabs.
5. Robbery of Barclay’s Bank.
6. Assaulting British officers walking alone.
7. Firing into cafes and streets and cars, killing many innocent civilians.
8. Blowing up Arab trucks and killing occupants.
9. Attacking Arab shepherds and stealing their flocks.
10. Throwing hand grenades into churches.
11. Robbery of arms, ammunition, trucks, provisions and equipment from British Army depots.
12. Throwing bombs into Arab markets, killing and injuring many men, women and children.
13. Blowing up of trains and killing many passengers; in one incident alone, 40 Arabs were killed.
As Nakhleh notes, it was the fascist orientation of the Jabotinsky Zionists that permitted and excused these terrorist crimes. “By reason of their very objectives, Nazis and Zionists are fascists, a fact confirmed by their methods of doing things, and their attitude toward human life. This is demonstrated in their attitude toward war,” a method of war completely at odds with international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, a fact demonstrated once again with the invasion and ethnic cleansing of Lebanon. In essence, the bombardment and invasion of Lebanon is a repeat of the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians:
In the first period of the Zionist war for the partition of Palestine, the Zionist forces bombarded indiscriminately every possible Arab village with mortar fire, killing innocent men, women and children. In some cases the villagers fled the murderous fire on their own; in other cases Arab authorities recommended flight to the villagers to escape the murderous fire raining down upon them for no apparent military reason…. In many cases the Zionists killed Palestinian villagers by bombardment from the air, the same type of war crime they continued for decades afterwards against Palestinians in refugee camps…. When bombing and shelling and the shooting of unarmed civilians to set an example of the fate awaiting those who would remain in their village was insufficient to force the Palestinians out, the Zionists would simply order the inhabitants to leave…. After expelling those Palestinian Arabs they had not murdered, the Zionists wantonly burned and destroyed the houses of the inhabitants they had expelled…. Many times Palestinian Arabs from villages on main roads fled temporarily for safety to nearby villages, expecting to return to their homes when the fighting died down. When they tried to return home, they found that the Zionists had wantonly destroyed their homes to make it impossible for the indigenous Arab populace to return. (Nakhleh, Chapter Nine, The Conspiracy to Expel and the Expulsion of Palestinian Arabs 1948-1950).
Although the pro-Israel (and some would contend Zionist controlled) corporate media engages in nothing short of a herculean effort to portray Israel’s invasion and bombardment of Lebanon as a justified response to Hezbollah provocation, the fact is Israel is repeating what is now an established historical pattern. In a preface to Livia Rokach’s Israel’s Sacred Terrorism, Nasser H. Aruri writes:
The personal diary of Moshe Sharett [the second prime minister of Israel, 1954-1955] sheds light … by amply documenting the rationale and mechanics of Israel’s “Arab policy” in the late 1940s and the 1950s. The policy portrayed, in its most intimate particulars, is one of deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion. Sharett’s records document this policy of “sacred terrorism” and expose the myths of Israel’s “security needs” and the “Arab threat” that have been treated like self-evident truths from the creation of Israel to the present, when Israeli terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and against Palestinians and Lebanese in South Lebanon, has reached an intolerable level. It is becoming increasingly evident that the exceptional demographic and geographic alterations in Israeli society within the present generation have been brought about, not as the accidental results of the endeavor to guard “Israel’s security” against an “Arab threat,” but by a drive for lebensraum.
In addition to the Nazi philosophy of Lebensraum (ethnically cleansing an area in the interest of colonial settlement), the Israeli scorched earth policy in Lebanon, as in Gaza and the West Bank, is designed to destroy the economic infrastructure of the Arabs (a process well along in the latter areas). “The exact parallel between Nazi Germany’s willful destruction of the economies within Axis-occupied Europe, and Israel’s willful destruction of the economy of the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is of fundamental importance,” notes Issa Nakhleh. “The destruction of the economies of Nazi-occupied Europe was not implemented solely for the purpose of exploiting the assets and labor of the occupied nations. It was not simply transitory wanton destruction in acts of war. It was for the purpose of expanding the Third Reich through the integration of the territories of occupied nations into Nazi Germany and utilizing the destruction of the economies of the indigent inhabitants as a prelude to their expulsion” (Chapter Nineteen, the Willful Destruction of the Palestinian Economy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).
In grotesque fashion, the corporate media papers over the repeat of these crimes by Olmert and the supposed “centrist” Kadima dominated government of Israel, refusing to note the obvious pattern of pathological and murderous Zionist behavior. Instead of noting or even hinting at the fascistic character of this behavior, we are told “some civilians are more innocent than others” (Dershowitz) and Hezbollah is responsible for Israel’s extermination of hundreds, possibly thousands of Lebanese civilians. “The Zionist and Israeli leaders have followed in the footsteps of the Nazis. 3,000 Zionist and Israeli political and military leaders, during a period from 1939-1989, participated as organizers, instigators and accomplices in the commission of crimes of terrorism, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Palestinians and peoples of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt,” writes Nakhleh in the preface to his online book.
All members of the Hagana, Palmach, Irgun Z’vai Leumi, the Stern Gang, the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund are charged with these crimes. Many of them became Presidents, Cabinet Ministers, Generals, officers of the Armed Forces and continued to participate in the commission of the aforementioned crimes. Many of them occupy high positions in Israeli society. It seems that participating in the commission of these crimes was, and still is, an essential qualification for advancement in the Israeli government and charged with these crimes are still at large, enjoying the fruits of their crimes. They are referred to as heroes. Many of them are being honored and received as heads of State, Prime Ministers, cabinet ministers, high government officials and scholars of an allegedly democratic state. The Palestinians who have been victims of these crimes are until today condemned to a life of a nation in exile deprived of all their rights. Their homeland is occupied. Thousands of them were murdered, hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned and tortured, suffering until today under barbaric Israeli occupation.
The victims are called terrorists, murderers and criminals and the real terrorists and war criminals are being received as respectable representatives of a democratic society.
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