- Recent articles in Israel's daily Ha'aretz sharply criticize
Israel's failure to effectively punish violence of Israeli settlers against
Palestinians.
-
- Ha'aretz says of Jewish settlers that "the coexistence
approach often seems to make way for violent struggle that aims to deprive
the Palestinians of their land." Jewish settlers "openly discuss
their intention of making the lives of Arab residents a misery and pushing
them out" Israeli media has reported a number of violent attacks by
settlers on Palestinians this spring. Yet Ha'aretz complains, "Even
those that are heard by a court usually end in acquittal or a light sentence."
-
- The Israeli human rights group Yesh Din "argues
that police in the West Bank have failed in completing investigations on
suspected attacks against Palestinians there." "The weak arm
[of the law] avoids enforcing laws on Israelis living in the West Bank,
causing the State of Israel to violate its ethical and international obligations
vis-à-vis the population under our control."
-
- Historic Injustice
-
- Is such official injustice toward Palestinians
a recent phenomenon in Israel? Hardly. Israel was birthed through terrorizing
and expelling Palestinians from their ancestral lands.
-
- Of course, Israel denies it expelled the Palestinians.
They say the 700,000 to 800,000 indigenous Palestinians who fled Israel
during the 1948 Arab-Israel war deserved to lose their properties; they
were disloyal to the emerging State of Israel, defecting to Israel's Arab
enemies at a crucial, vulnerable moment in Israel's struggle for nationhood.
-
- Israel says that the Palestinians eagerly obeyed
when Arab generals urged the Palestinians to vacate Israel so that the
Jews could be slaughtered and driven into the sea. Such refugees, Israel
alleges, were confident the conquering Arabs would return their land and
property -- and more, once the Zionist experiment in Palestine was destroyed.
Considering such alleged treachery, to this moment Israel remains adamant
that no property of refugees who fled in 1948 will be returned to them.
-
- What Really Happened
-
- Let's turn from propaganda to reality. Here's what
really happened in 1948.
-
- In his book The Revolt, 1 former Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, then head of the Zionist terror organization Irgun, recounts
how Irgun fighters attacked the small Arab town of Deir Yassin east of
Jerusalem on April 9, 1948. Begin ridicules the "Arab hysteria"
that says Irgun massacred its inhabitants. Yet the International Red Cross
was on the scene, even as the butchery continued, counting the maimed and
dismembered corpses of 250 men, women, and children. Their representative
counted 150 bodies stuffed inside a well. The Encyclopedia of the
Palestine Problem 2 says, "Of those 250 people, 25 pregnant women
were bayoneted in their abdomens while still alive. 52 children were maimed
under the eyes of their own mothers, and then they were slain and their
heads cut off. Their mothers were in turn massacred and their bodies mutilated."
(p.271) (See, <http://www.truthtellers.org/alerts/israelfoundedonterror.htm>Israel:
Founded on Terror)
-
- Word of this atrocity quickly spread throughout
Palestinian Arabs, causing terrified awe and panic before the ferocity
of Irgun. Irgun trucks, mounted with loud-speakers, drove throughout Arab
communities, proclaiming in Arabic that if the inhabitants did not flee
immediately they would soon experience the same horrific fate. Irgun also
loaded trucks with the surviving Muslim women of Deir Yassin, parading
them naked through the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. 3 Such humiliation
and insult to Muslim morals and womanhood intensified the searing effect
of the massacre. It heightened the mystique that Zionist terrorists were
cruel and vindictive beyond imagination.
-
- Begin Tells All -- Almost
-
- Begin, mixing lies with reality, explains further:
"The enemy propaganda was designed to besmirch our name. In the result
it helped us. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel." He tells
of strategic Arab towns, resistant to Irgun attacks, suddenly evacuated.
"In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror,
even before they clashed with the Jewish forces. Not what happened at Dir
Yassin, but what was invented about Dir Yassin, helped to carve the way
to our decisive victories on the battlefield. The legend of Dir Yassin
helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberius and conquest of Haifa."
"Arab headquarters at Ramallah broadcast a crude atrocity story, alleging
indiscriminate massacre by Irgun troops of about 240 men, women, and children
in Dir Yassin." 4
-
- Begin confirms that indeed word of what happened
at Deir Yassin induced Arab commanders to instruct Palestinians to flee.
But it was not primarily to avoid the violence of Arab destruction of Israel.
At first, Arab leaders commanded Palestinians to stay put. But as butchery
by Zionists escalated, most acceded to the fact that the Zionists were
capable of such unrestrained atrocities and carnage that literally no Arab
was safe in Palestine. A large part of the purpose of the Arab invasion
was not just to restore Palestinians to their property but to insure that
many more Deir Yassins would not happen in the months ahead. In fact, in
the six months following Deir Yassin Zionist troops committed at least
nine more massacres against Palestinians, with the Arabs striking back
with two against Jews. 5
-
- Begin concludes, "Arabs throughout the country,
induced to believe wild tales of "Irgun butchery," were seized
with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight
soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. Of the about 800,000
Arabs who lived on the present territory of the State of Israel, only some
165,000 are still there. The political and economic significance of this
development can hardly be overestimated." 6
-
- Zionists Give Chase
-
- Zionist forces, realizing a tremendous opportunity,
used whatever means necessary to persuade Arabs to join the stampede. The
Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem presents dozens of contemporary accounts,
largely from Israelis, describing the Zionist-induced panic of the Arabs
and resultant carnage. The preferred strategy was to convince Palestinians
that, in view of the present "national emergency" posed by invading
Arab armies, Israeli Arabs should flee until hostilities subsided. They
could then return to their properties. Of course, this proved a lie. If
that stratagem failed, whole Palestinian towns were given the ultimatum
to flee immediately, taking only the clothes on their backs. Those who
delayed, or attempted to bring belongings, were shot.
-
- Palestinian towns were bombed and strafed from
the air. Leaflets threatening massacre were dropped from airplanes. Arabs
were mowed down in the streets by machine gun fire. With perhaps 800,000
Arabs in flight, the surrounding Jewish population descended on evacuated
Arab towns, ransacking and looting their homes and businesses. In fact,
a small "new rich class" was established in Israel as Jews actively
bought, sold, and traded the wealth of hundreds of Arab cities, towns,
and villages. Meanwhile, many Zionist soldiers robbed fleeing Arabs and
raped Arab women. It was imperative to the Zionists that Arab property
was destroyed as much as possible, to prevent them from returning. 7
-
- With exodus of the majority of Arabs from Palestine,
Begin says the struggle to create a unified state of Israel was largely
won. Twelve cities or major towns and 830 small towns and villages were
occupied by Zionists. Most were soon bulldozed, replaced by modern Jewish
towns or kibbutzes. They were given Jewish names, their original ones soon
forgotten. 8 In the decades that followed, Israeli propaganda encouraged
the world to believe the original Arab towns never existed. In fact, it
says today that before the Israelis created the towns now bearing Jewish
names Palestine was empty, virtually deserted land. It says that, untended
and underdeveloped by a tiny indolent Arab population, the many Jewish
towns, collectives, orchards, and fields in Israel are a testament to fulfillment
of divine prophecy that God would make Israel "blossom as the rose."
-
- Who Gave Victory to Israel?
-
- In defense of their Palestinian brethren, the Arab
armies at first prevailed over Zionist forces. But then, in what Zionists
and evangelicals describe as one of the very greatest miracles of divine
intervention on behalf of Israel, Zionists rallied and were able to repulse
the Arabs.
-
- In reality, it was not God but Joseph Stalin who
delivered Israel. (This was the same Stalin who, 15 years earlier, systematically
starved to death five million Ukrainian Kulaks. Their crime? They wanted
to grow vegetables in their backyards for themselves, not collectives.)
Stalin personally ordered the Skoda Works in communist Czechoslovakia to
send massive shipments of the latest arms, equipment, and fighter planes
to help Israel in her time of need. Such military firepower, not the power
of God or a righteous cause, empowered Israel to prevail.
-
- Most evangelicals believe that mass exodus of the
Arabs, making room for "God's chosen people" to dwell in their
promised land, plus Israel's victory over vastly outnumbering Arab armies,
are two of the greatest miracles of history, making possible Israel's prophesied
rebirth as a nation. Zionists, both Jewish and evangelical, believe these
are undeniable proofs that God fought and still fights for His people,
as in the Old Testament. As a result, Christian America should unflinchingly
support Israel today, right or wrong.
-
- We see, however, that Israel was founded by terror
and the deviousness of the most wicked men, not God. Her rebirth as a nation
happened not because of heaven-sent successes but as a result of something
very different:
-
- What the Bible calls "lying wonders"
of the last days that "deceive, if possible, even the elect."
9
-
-
- Endnotes:
-
- 1. The Revolt, Menachim Begin, Henry Schuman, NY, 1951
-
- 2. The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, Intercontinental
Books, 1991. This definitive work by Christian Palestinian lawyer and diplomat
Dr. Issa Nakhleh is available in most university libraries.
-
- 3. Ibid, p. 271
-
- 4. The Revolt, p. 164
-
- 5. Israeli historian Benny Morris chronicles massacres
by Jewish or Arab terrorists of at least 10 civilians or disarmed soldiers
in the months following Deir Yassin. Israel committed many more slaughters
of unarmed Palestinian townspeople but under the cover of a "military
operation."
- A. Massacres of Arabs by Jews:
- · Qalunya, April 12, 1948 -- 14.
- · Ein al Zeitun, May 3, 1948 -- 37 to 70.
- · Abu Shusha, May 14, 1948 -- estimated at
60 to 70.
- · Al-Kavri, May 21, 1948 -- undetermined.
- · Al-Dawayima, October 29, 1948 -- 80 to
100.
- · Sassaf, October 29, 1948 -- 50 to 70 (?).
- · Saliha, October 30, 1948 -- 60 to 80.
- · Hula, October 1948 -- 35 to 50.
- · Arab al-Mawasi, November 2, 1948 -- 14.
- B. Massacres of Jews by Arabs:
- · Hadassah medical convoy, April 13, 1948
-- 78.
- · Kfar Etzion, May 13, 1948 -- 50 to 120.
- (Wikipedia, "List of Massacres Committed during
the 1948 Arab-Israeli War)
-
- 6. The Revolt, p. 164. In 1914, at the beginning of Zionist
presence in Palestine, the census showed there were 606,619 non-Jewish
inhabitants of Palestine. Contrary to Begin's figure of 800,000 non-Jews
in Palestine at the time of the Deir Yassin massacre, there were an estimated
1,440,274.
-
- 7. The Encyclopedia of the Palestine Problem, p.251-68
-
- 8. Ibid, p.234
- 9. 2 Thess. 2:9, Matt. 24:24
-
-
- Comment
-
- Mary Sparrowdancer
-
- The Jewish "war god" has never been a universal
God, nor is it the god of Jesus. Instead, it has always been nothing more
than well-armed men slaughtering others in order to satisfy Jewish
wants and land grabs. This is why their so-called god, Jehovah, who was
"with Judah" as he laid waste to Gaza once before in Judges
1:19, was unable to drive out the inhabitants of a certain
valley because they were better armed. They had "chariots of
iron," and "god" was powerless against those chariots
of iron.
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