Refugees don’t leave their homeland for greener pastures. Emigrants do. Refugees are forced to leave their land by terror, persecution and inhuman injustice. After the second wave of Israeli terror against Palestinians in 1967 the estimated number of refugees who had fled to neighboring lands were three million. This figure may include the total number since the onslaught of the Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists which began even before 1948 (Israel’s year of independence as a Jewish state) and escalated in subsequent years. The massacre of Palestinians, old men, women, and children in the “buffer zone” village of Deir Yassin in April of 1948, was a signal to Palestinians to get out of the land alive while they could. Two hundred unarmed villagers were slaughtered by the Israeli army’s new recruits who were ordered to do the killing. Red Cross Palestine chief Jaques de Reynier described the carnage:
The gang [the Irgun detachment] was wearing country uniforms with helmets. All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women, armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine-guns, hand grenades, and also cutlasses in their hands, most of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young girl, with criminal eyes, showed me hers still dripping with blood; she displayed it like a trophy. This was the “cleaning up” team, that was obviously performing its task very conscientiously.
I tried to go into a house. A dozen solders surrounded me, their machine-guns aimed at my body, and their officer forbade me to move … I then flew into one of the most towering rages of my life, telling these criminals what I thought of their conduct, threatening them with everything I could think of, and then pushed them aside and went into the house
…I found some bodies, cold. Here the “cleaning up” had been done with machine-guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished off with knives, anyone could see that … as I was about to leave, I heard something like a sigh. I looked everywhere, turned over all the bodies, and eventually found a little foot, still warm. It was a little girl of ten, mutilated by a hand grenade, but still alive …
It was either David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, or (as another source has it) Joseph Weitz, founder of the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine, who famously said as early as 1949, “With0ut Deir Yassin there would be no Israel.” The Irgun acted against both the British and Arab natives. They often targeted bus stops in Arab towns. Their biggest operation, executed by Begin over Ben Gurion’s objections, was blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946 – 92 dead, mostly British and Arab civilians. In all, the Irgun committed some 1,000 acts of terrorism against civilians. The death toll of British and Palestinians was approximately 5,500. Menachim Begin was the leader of the Irgun. Ben Gurion, for strategic reasons, was opposed to shedding British blood, but not that of the native Arabs. He once said that when it came to the refugees “We must do everything to insure they never return. The old will die and the young will forget. We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.” Jacob Bleistein puts the plight of the Palestinians in a very clear light in his article titled, “A JEWISH DILEMMA: Occupation, terrorism and the security of Israel,” he writes: “You don’t need death camps and gas chambers to commit genocide. Denying a race of people its homeland, its culture and its chance to carve out an economic existence and most of all its HOPE is more than sufficient to doom them to non-existence.”
Statements by other Zionist leaders of the “fierce warrior” Jabotinski mold were unabashedly open about exterminating (they used the Communist term “liquidating”) the Palestinians or terrorizing them out of their homeland. Joseph Weitz, who emigrated to Palestine in 1908, wrote in his diary on June 22, 1941: “The land of Israel is not small at all, if only the Arabs were removed, and its frontiers enlarged a little, to the north up to the Litani, and to the east including the Golan Heights…with the Arabs transferred to northern Syria and Iraq…Today we have no other alternative…We will not live here with Arabs.” (Masalha, 1992, p. 134-135) When you read the propaganda of pro-Zionist pundits that condescendingly point out that the Jewish immigrants turned a desert into an oasis of luxury anyone’s stomach would begin to turn who valued culture, truth and justice. You know the propaganda cliché Israel loved to flaunt: “A land without people for a people without land.” Oh, and whose money (six billion in annual foreign aid grants) built this modern state of swimming pools, condos, trees (Ben Gurion’s “billion tree” project), and luxury hotels, with such massive military might and nuclear weapons? The American taxpayer’s money for the most part, and donations from Israeli-Firster Jews and Christian Zionists with dual loyalties. It’s rather astounding to read columns by Catholic writers on tradition-minded Catholic websites, well-informed on so many issues, but sadly ignorant when it comes to Israel.
Two come to mind, as I am introducing this topical article by Stephen Sneigoski “Neocon Krauthammer Sees Israel as Victim in Flotilla Massacre,” one by a blogger for Inside Catholic, Simcha Fisher, who is not a pundit, but whose comments illustrate the pro-Israel bias that still infects the thinking of leading Catholic conservatives. First, Mrs. Fisher accuses aged reporter Helen Thomas, whom everyone knows by now, of “publicly root[ing] for the annihilation of an entire people.” Thomas didn’t say any such thing. Everyone knows what she said, after a drink or two, and after some reporter came out of the blue and accosted her by sticking a microphone into her face as she was walking with a friend on the White House lawn. So, why does Mrs. Fisher add an extra to the old reporter’s remark. Helen Thomas is hardly a lone voice in wanting the Israelis to get out of Palestine and keep to their own borders. On the other hand, ask any American pro-Zionist and they’ll tell you that the gentile Palestinians should get out of Palestine and cede their own borders to Israel.
Then, Mrs. Fisher ends with this incredible comment: “Here’s what I have to say: the Israelis are guilty of atrocities, and everyone knows it. But I also know this: if the Arabs laid down their arms, there would be peace. If Israel laid down their arms, there would be no Israel.” Mrs. Fisher, in case you didn’t know, the Palestinian Arabs felt no need to aggressively militarize themselves while they were living in relative (after reading Bonifacius’ comments below, let me stress relative) peace with native Semitic Jews prior to the creation of the Zionist state. After World War II, and several years prior to the creation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, things began to change. With the massive immigration to Palestine of the eastern European Jews, the newcomers soon overtook the native population through the force of sheer numbers. They also formed resistance groups such as the Irgun and the Stern Gang to overthrow the British whose mandate held the territory as it were a colony since the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Turkish hegemony. After the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 the US began sending the Jewish State foreign aid, war machines. and technology, which grew to massive amounts (the largest given to any foreign nation) in the 1960s and afterward. Nor does Mrs. Fisher ask what might ensue if, assuming Palestine were recognized internationally in its statehood, both nations laid down their arms. Truly, the best case scenario, although it will never happen — no, at least not without a miraculous conversion to the Catholic Faith.
The other even more one-sided Catholic writer is Donald McClarey of The American Catholic (you can add Tito Edwards as well from the same site). In criticizing Helen Thomas for her thoughtless outburst concerning the Israeli Jews’ returning to Poland and Germany as a move toward peace, McClarey writes that the Jews “have been inhabiting the Holy Land for several thousands of years.” If he is referring to the Arabic Jews (now included among the Spanish and North African Sephardim), then he is correct. These Arabic Jews, who have always lived in the Middle East, are true racial Semites, descendants of Noah’s son Sem, not of Japheth. They are called “Arabic” because they they have been Arabic speaking for many centuries. If McClarey is referring to the majority of people in Israel today, who are Ashkenazi (German) Jews, then he is clearly in error. I find this kind of sweeping statement very odd for a historian, which McClarey most certainly is. Wikipedia has the figures thus: “Today, Ashkenazi Jews constitute the largest group among Jews, and among Israeli Jews as well. They have played a prominent role in the economy, media, and politics of Israel since its founding. During the first decades of Israel as a state, strong cultural conflict occurred between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews (mainly east European Ashkenazim). The roots of this conflict, which still exists to a much smaller extent in present day Israeli society, are chiefly attributed to the concept of the ‘melting pot.'” It is important to note that the leaders of the Irgun and Stern Gang terror campaigns have been eastern European Jews. In fact all of Israel’s twelve prime ministers have been born in eastern Europe or, in the case of the more recent PMs, all military vets, their parents were. The same is true for the presidents of Israel, an office that is largely decorative. Israel’s second Prime Minister, Moshe Sharret, actually served as an enlistee in the Turkish army during the first world war.
Here is Stephen Sneigoski’s article refuting that of Charles Krauthammer, “Those troublesome Jews,” which appeared in the June 4 edition of the Washington Post:
Neocon Krauthammer Sees Israel as Victim in Flotilla Massacre
While the inhabitants of Gaza are suffering under a stifling blockade and a number of peace activists have been killed (bullets in the head at close range) and wounded by Israeli commandoes, whom does prominent neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer view as the victim: Israel, of course. For hyper-Zionists such as Krauthammer, Israel is always the victim. Read more here.
