AS ISRAELIS CELEBRATE, PALESTINIANS MOURN - Logic demands that those who condemn Nazi Germany must condemn Nazi Israel also
TurkeyBoy
AS ISRAELIS CELEBRATE, PALESTINIANS MOURN
As Israelis celebrate, Palestinians mourn Posted: Wednesday, May 14,
2008 8:35 AM
Filed Under: Tel Aviv, Israel
By Lawahez Jabari, NBC News Producer
JERUSALEM – Women screaming and children trying to escape a village on
fire.
These are just two of the images that two Palestinian sisters, Fatima
and Zeinab Jaber, 65 and 71, live with from an event they witnessed 60
years ago.
They are haunted, too, by the memory of their mother, Nuzah, who they
recall crying as she rushed members of their family to safety.
And they are their last recollections of their home, the village of
Deir Yassin, as it was being overrun and destroyed by armed Jewish
militant groups.
AP
Palestinian relatives of residents of the Arab village of Deir Yassin
stand over plaques listing the names of more than 100 people killed by
pre-state Israeli paramilitant groups, as they mark the 60th
anniversary of the attack on April 10, 2008, at the site where the
village stood in 1948, which is currently in Jerusalem.
The attack on Deir Yassin in April 1948 is one of the most well-
documented in a series of expulsions the former British Mandate of
Palestine that led up to the foundation of Israel – an episode that
Palestinian recall bitterly as "Nakba" ("the Catastrophe").
So while Israelis are celebrating 60 years of independence on May 14,
many Palestinians will be commemorating what they call "Catastrophe
Day" on May 15 – an annual day of remembrance for the hundreds of
thousands of Arabs who were displaced as Israel was being born.
‘I still hear my brother's voice screaming’
As a result of fighting leading up to Israel’s declaration of
independence and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, approximately 700,000
Palestinians were forced off their land. They were either expelled by
the Haganah, a military force which later became the core of the
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and other paramilitary groups, or they
fled under the threat of more violence.
Up to 418 Arab villages in Palestine were taken over by Israelis
during the period, and the massacre at Deir Yassin is remembered as
one of the most brutal episodes of the time.
"I still hear my brother's voice screaming before they killed him, my
grandmother was begging them to leave him alone," said Fatima Jaber,
while her sister nodded in silent agreement during a recent interview.
(Fatima married, but kept her family name). They now live in a tiny
house in Beit Hanina, a predominantly Arab neighborhood in East
Jerusalem.
"We lost all our family. The Jews killed my father, grandmother and my
brother before we ran away with my mother that day. After a while we
knew that 47 relatives were killed," said Zeinab, as she started
crying like a child. "My brother was about to get married the same
week. He was 22 years old. [Now] we are living alone without any
family."
The Deir Yassin village was located in the hills next to the Jewish
neighborhood of Givat Shaul, on the outskirts of what is now West
Jerusalem. There are various accounts of what happened in Deir Yassin,
but there is agreement on the essentials – that two underground Jewish
paramilitary groups, the Lehi and the Irgun – the latter by headed by
Menachem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister – attacked the village
on April 9, 1948.
According to most reliable reports, a force of 132 men from these
units killed between 107-120 villagers – including men, women and
children. (For years the death toll was cited as 254, but Bir Zeit
University, a prominent Arab university on the West Bank, published a
comprehensive study in 1987 and found that the death toll did not
exceed 120).
Campaign of terror
The massacre is considered by many historians to be part of a strategy
to terrify the Palestinian populations enough so that they would leave
their homes and land, thus enabling them to be occupied by Jews.
Benny Morris, an Israeli historian who has written extensively about
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his books "The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49," first published in 1988, and
this year’s "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War," has
documented at least 24 massacres, including Deir Hassin, committed by
Israeli forces against Palestinians between 1947-49.
Fatima and Zeinab say that Deir Yassin left their mother a broken
woman. "She kept crying until she died. She was only 45 years old,"
said Fatima. "I will never forget it. She was missing my father and
brother all the time. The memories killed her."
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, noted that the Deir Yassin
massacre was a trigger for other evacuations of Palestinians, without
which the Israeli state could not have been born. "I support
compulsory transfer," he insisted at the time. "I don't see in it
anything immoral," Ben-Gurion is quoted as saying in Morris' book
"Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict,
1881-2001." In the Arab world, though, the perception hardened that
the birth of Israel came at the expense of the Palestinian refugee
problem.
Refugee problem persists
Today, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), at least 5 million
Palestinians and their descendants are registered as refugees. The
figure includes hundreds of thousands who became refugees as a result
of the Six-Day War in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza
and East Jerusalem. As refugees, those living in other countries such
as Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, are not recognized as citizens and have
few rights, despite living there for decades. In effect they are
stateless unless and until a Palestinian state is created.
The fate of the Jaber family is typical of many Palestinians. They
lived in Jordan for two years, then moved to Jericho and after five
years moved to Jerusalem, when the sisters’ mother wanted to be close
to what was once their home.
Many have given up hope of returning to the homes they lost in 1948;
instead, they watch with bitterness and sadness the celebrations for
Israel's 60 years of statehood, which they feel came at their
expense.
"I feel ashamed to be a refugee," said Zeinab. "Three months ago we
went to Deir Yassin; our house is used as a storage place for hospital
workers. I want my family house back," she said.
And as the U.S. struggles to keep Israel and the Palestinian Authority
committed to making an arrangement that will lead to the creation of a
two-nation state, it is the plight of the refugees – most
particularly, whether they should be allowed to return to their
original homes or what is sufficient compensation – that still proves
to be one of the biggest obstacles for a lasting peace.
"How can Israel celebrate when we still have this refugee problem?"
said Fatima, who is the mother of 11 children.
"They created it, and now it's worse. This is the question my children
are now asking."
Lawahez Jabiri is an NBC News Producer based in the Tel Aviv bureau.
alittlesanity
TurkeyBoy <atat...@hotmail.com> wrote:
[...]
Yes, isn't it a pity that the Arabs refused the partition plan
which the UN agreed upon, and invaded Israel with the declared
intent of exterminating all its citizens:
"One day after the State of Israel declared itself as an independent
nation (May 14, 1948), Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, Egyptian, and
Transjordanian troops, supported by Saudi and Yemenite troops,
attacked the nascent Jewish state, triggering the 1948 Arab-Israeli
War. On that day, Azzam Pasha [the secretary-general of the Arab League]
announced: 'This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre
which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades' ".
(from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Rahman_Hassan_Azzam).
Yes... those kind, peaceful Arabs.
Joe Bruno
Joe Bruno
Forget the first one.. Try this one....
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.revisionism/msg/65bdbfddebf6a2f7
ElParedon
War Party, opening up the exciting prospect that some neocons might well
wind up behind bars.
The charge? Espionage, as Sidney Blumenthal informs us:
"At a well-appointed conservative think tank in downtown Washington and
across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet
calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an
investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who
gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S.
government and military?"
This information, says Vince Cannistraro, formerly at the CIA and the
Pentagon, was so "very, very sensitive" that only a few U.S. government
officials had access to it:
"The evidence has pointed quite clearly, not only the fact that Chalabi
might be an agent of influence of the Iranian government and that Chalabi's
intelligence chief, Aras Karim Habib may be a paid agent of the Iranian
intelligence service, but it is shown that there is a leak of classified
information from the United States to Iran through Chalabi and Karim and
that is the particular point that the FBI is investigating. In other words,
some U.S. officials are under investigation on suspicion of providing
classified information to these people that ended up in Iran."
Blumenthal has more:
"A former staff member of the Office of Special Plans and a currently
serving defense official, two of those said to be questioned by the FBI, are
considered witnesses, at least for now. Higher figures are under suspicion.
Were they witting or unwitting? If those who are being questioned turn out
to be misleading, they can be charged ultimately with perjury and
obstruction of justice. For them, the Watergate principle applies: It's not
the crime, it's the coverup."
The lies Chalabi fed to Washington policymakers, who eagerly scarfed them up
and regurgitated them to the American public, originated with Iranian
intelligence, as we are beginning to learn. But the neocon-Tehran
information superhighway ran in both directions. As Julian Borger reports in
the Guardian:
"An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held
suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic
communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in
Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had
been restricted to a handful of officials. 'This was 'sensitive
compartmented information' – SCI – and it was tracked right back to the
Iranians through Aras Habib,' the intelligence source said."
UPI's Richard Sale reports that "the Federal Bureau of Investigation has
launched a full field investigation into the matter," and gives more
information on what was compromised and how the Iranians pulled off this
intelligence coup:
"Chalabi allegedly passed National Security Agency/CIA intercepts to
intelligence agents of the Iranian government using intermediaries or
'cut-outs' or 'gophers' within the INC, another former CIA agent said. Some
of the intercepts, dated from December, were the basis for a recent Newsweek
story, but there are others of a later date in possession of the FBI, this
source said."
How did Chalabi get his hot little hands on highly secret information?
That's why the FBI – instead of going after, say, Brandon Mayfield, or some
other completely innocent person, as per usual – is now calling on
"prominent" neocons at Washington's poshest thinktanks. I hope they're
bringing an ample supply of handcuffs. But whom might they be handcuffing
and frog-marching out the door, into a waiting paddywagon? UPI gives us the
scoop, citing "a former very senior CIA official" as saying:
"'Chalabi passed specially compartmented intelligence, extraordinarily
sensitive stuff, to the Iranians.' This source said that some of the
intercepts are believed to have been given Chalabi by two U.S. officials of
the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because
UPI could not reach them for comment."
Well, they aren't named, but they might as well have been:
"One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed
at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said,
a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment. The other is
still a working Pentagon official, federal law enforcement officials and
former CIA officials said."
Independent journalist Bob Dreyfuss, whose excellent articles on the neocons
in The American Prospect and Mother Jones puts him up there with Jim Lobe,
Michael Lind, and Joshua Marshall as a veritable maven of neocon-ology,
names names:
"The two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold
Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael
Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute."
Rubin, formerly of the Office of Special Plans and the CPA, who served as
liaison with Chalabi's group, the Iraqi National Congress, certainly fits
the bill. No wonder he's been so … cranky lately, what with FBI agents
barging into his office and giving him the third degree.
Rhode, a longtime Pentagon official assigned to the Office of Net Assessment
and a specialist on Islam, is reportedly Douglas Feith's chief enforcer of
the anti-Arab party line among the civilian Pentagon hierarchy. In refusing
to be interviewed by Dreyfuss for a piece on the neocons in Mother Jones,
Rhode's laconic reply was:
"Those who speak, pay."
Prescient words, and truer than perhaps even Rhode realized at the time.
Hauled up before a grand jury, however, Rhode, Rubin, and the rest of
Chalabi's Pentagon fan club may have no choice about speaking – especially
with the prospect of a long "vacation" at a federal facility staring them in
the face.
Much is being made of how the Iranians "duped" us into invading Iraq, and
"used" the U.S. in getting rid of Saddam Hussein and "paving the way," as
Julian Borger puts it, for a Shi'ite-ruled Iraq. But a simple map of the
region and rudimentary knowledge of the history of the past decade or so
would have revealed as much. As I wrote in this space over a year ago:
"In view of Iran's growing sphere of influence in Iraq, it seems rather
disingenuous to destroy the Sunni minority government run by the Ba'ath
Party and then deny any responsibility for the Shi'ite-y outcome. The U.S.
has made a gift of Iraq to Teheran, reigniting the religious passions that
overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah Reza Pahlavi of Iran and propelled Khomeini
to power."
In charting the outlines of "phase two" of the invasion of Iraq, that same
week last year, I pointed out:
"The main political consequence of the war, internally, is to increase
Iranian influence: if free elections were held in the southern Shi'a
provinces of Iraq, they would undoubtedly usher in some sort of 'Islamic
Republic.' The effort by the neocons in the administration to install Ahmed
Chalabi as the Pentagon's puppet, far from forestalling this possibility,
only makes it a more credible threat to the postwar order."
But why would the militantly pro-Israel neocons, American partisans of the
ultra-nationalist Likud party, act as patrons and promoters of an outfit,
Chalabi's INC, that was really a cover for Iranian intelligence – their
alleged mortal enemies? That's what I couldn't quite figure out, at least
not until I read Robert Parry's excellent piece on the subject, and here's
the money quote:
"As Chalabi's operation fed anti-Saddam propaganda into the U.S.
decision-making machinery, Bush also should have been alert to the Israeli
role in opening doors for Chalabi in Washington. One intelligence source
told me that Israel's Likud government had quietly promoted Chalabi and his
Iraqi National Congress with Washington's influential neoconservatives. That
would help explain why the neoconservatives, who share an ideological
alliance with the conservative Likud, would embrace and defend Chalabi even
as the CIA and the State Department denounced him as a con man.
"The idea of Israel promoting an Iranian agent also is not far-fetched if
one understands the history. The elder Bush could tell his son about the
long-standing strategic ties that have existed between Israel and Iran, both
before and after the Islamic revolution of 1979. It was Menachem Begin's
Likud Party that rebuilt the covert intelligence relationship in 1980. Since
then, it has been maintained through thick and thin, despite Iran's public
anti-Israeli rhetoric."
The enemy of my enemy is my friend: it's a principle often invoked to
justify a course of action seemingly in contradiction to the professed
ideology of the actors. Lined up against a common enemy, American Likudniks
and Ahmed Chalabi, an Iranian intelligence asset, teamed up to drag us into
the Iraqi quagmire, with both members of this oddly coupled tag-team
benefiting from the deal. While the neocons fed Chalabi – and his
intelligence chief, Arras Karim Habib, a paid Iraqi agent – a steady diet of
U.S. secrets, Chalabi fed the neocons (in government and much of the
American media) a fresh serving of tall tales cooked up in the INC's
kitchen, and delivered piping hot to Judith Miller's doorstep.
The Iranians, for their part, feasted on U.S. secrets so deep and dark that
only a few top officials were privy to them – and had a good chunk of Iraq
handed to them, while a de facto Kurdish state emerged as a buffer between
Israel and the Shi'ite power rising in the East. The whole thing was
supposed to have been presided over by the ostensibly pro-Western Chalabi,
the neocons' Alger Hiss. That was the plan, at any rate, but something seems
to have gone awry….
As in the Abu Ghraib photo-gallery of horrors, the nature of the crime
suggests that a few lowly spear carriers – Rubin is just barely out of knee
pants, and Rhode was certainly not in the loop on super-sensitive
intelligence – didn't pull this off all on their own. Before it's all over,
Chalabi-gate will reach into the favored nesting place of the neocons, the
very top echelons of the Pentagon.
As UPI editor Martin Walker reports:
"The real target goes beyond Chalabi. The hunt is on, in the Republican
Party, in Congress, in the CIA and State Department and in a media which is
being deluged with leaks, for Chalabi's friends and sponsors in Washington –
the group known as the neo-cons. In particular, the targets seem to be
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the former assistant secretary (in
Reagan's day) Richard Perle, Vice President Dick Cheney's national security
aide Scooter Libby, and the National Security Council's Middle East aide
Elliott Abrams. The leaking against them – from sources who insist on
anonymity, but some CIA and FBI veterans – is intense. Some of the sources
are now private citizens, making a good living through business connections
in the Arab world."
Speaking of business connections, how does Richard Perle make his living
except by using his government connections to profit handsomely from the
war-driven neocon agenda? Oh well, never mind that: let's get to the juicy
part. Walker also reports that these poor persecuted neocons "are now
beginning to fight back," and in a familiar fashion:
"Richard Perle told this reporter Tuesday that the gloves were off. … Perle
has no doubts that some of the attacks on him are coming directly from the
CIA, in order to cover their own exposed rears, attacking Chalabi's
intelligence to distract attention from their own mistakes. 'I believe that
much of the CIA operation in Iraq was owned by Saddam Hussein,' Perle said.
'There were 45 decapitation attempts against Saddam – and he survived them
all. How could that be, if he was not manipulating the intelligence?'"
Gee, I guess this means that, on account of all those failed "decapitation
attempts" on Fidel Castro over the years, the Cuban Communists exercised
joint ownership of the CIA along with Saddam's Ba'athists. Oh, what a Perle
of wisdom, but the Prince of Darkness was just getting started:
"Perle went on to suggest an even darker motive behind the attacks on the
neo-cons; that the real target was Israel's Likud government and the staunch
support for Israel's prime minister Ariel Sharon in the Bush administration.
When this was put to one CIA source, the reply was mocking: 'That's what
they always do. As soon as these guys get any criticism, they scream Israel
and anti-Semitism, and I think people are finally beginning to see through
that smokescreen.'"
How and why an investigation into Iranian penetration of our most closely
guarded secrets constitutes evidence of "anti-Semitism" is a question I'll
leave for weightier intellects to ponder. But such an unseemly outburst
ought to put to rest any doubts about a neocon-Iranian convergence of
interests: we know something's afoot when both Richard Perle and the Iranian
mullahs sound absolutely identical in tone as well as content.
We knew what the neocons were capable of: smearing their enemies, lying
about practically anything, even outing a CIA agent doing high-priority
undercover work. Is anyone surprised that they're capable of espionage?
Perle is right about one thing: it's time to take the gloves off.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2683