Hart speech

Alan Hart at SIHRG on Wednesday 28 January 2009

PALESTINE AND ISRAEL – NO LAW, NO PEACE

I’ll start with a question for you. Who described Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians as “one of the worst abuses of human rights I know”?

It was former President Jimmy Carter in a television interview with the Hardball programme on MSNBC. He made that observation long before Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. Though he might not be prepared to say so in public today, I’d be surprised if he didn’t agree with me (and perhaps some or even many of you) that operation Cast Lead was pure and unbridled Israeli state terrorism.

Israel’s assertion that it acted in self-defence to stop the rockets was just another of Zionism’s propaganda lies. Adolf Hitler best defined “The Big Lie”. It was, he wrote in Mein Kampf, a lie so enormous that people “would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. Zionism is the master of that art. In my opinion, Prime Minister Olmert took Orwellian double-speak, Israeli-style, to a fantastic new height when, announcing Israel’s unilateral cease-fire, he said, “We genuinely never wanted to cause any discomfort to the people of Gaza.”

It was Israel not Hamas that broke the cease-fire (on 4^th November to be precise), and the rockets provoked were the pretext for a war Israel had long planned, actually from the moment in June 2007 when democratically elected Hamas moved against Fatah in the Gaza Strip to pre-empt an Israeli and CIA supported Fatah coup against it.

The prime purpose of Israel’s all-out war on the Gaza Strip was to de-grade Hamas enough, militarily and politically, to give Israel’s leaders greater freedom, no doubt with the assistance of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to bully and bribe President Abbas and his quisling Palestine National Authority into accepting crumbs from Zionism’s table - crumbs defined as only a token Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank to make the space for two or three bantustans which the Palestinians could call a state if they wished.

In my view it’s not enough to say that most of the regimes of the existing corrupt, repressive and impotent Arab order were complicit, again, in a Zionist crime. The governments of all the major Western powers were also complicit if only by default. The question is - WHY did our governments not act to stop Israel’s obscenely disproportionate and criminal use of force? In my view there are only two possible answers.

• One is that our governments fully support Zionism’s agenda.

· The other is that our governments believe - but dare not tell us - that the Zionist state of Israel is, has long been, a monster beyond control and, therefore, there’s no point in seeking to oblige it do what it won’t do.

I have a view on which of those two answers is most likely the correct one, but it’s beyond the scope of my talk this evening.

Back to former President Jimmy Carter..... For saying what he said, he was, of course, accused of anti-Semitism (and vilified in many other ways) by the Zionist lobby in America and by supporters of Israel right or wrong everywhere.

I am fully aware that criticism of Israel - a Zionist not a Jewish state - is pregnant with extreme danger because it could provoke anti-Semitism throughout the mainly Gentile nations of the Judeo-Christian or Western world where most Jews live. But there is a way to exorcise this danger. It is by explaining the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Knowledge of this difference is the key to understanding.

Supporters of Israel right or wrong conflate Judaism and Zionism because the assertion that they are one and the same appears to give credibility to the claim that criticism of the Zionist state of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Often, almost always these days, the accusation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism is false. And this false charge is a blackmail card played to silence criticism of, and suppress informed and honest debate about, the Zionist state and its policies. The reality is that Judaism and Zionism are total opposites.

Judaism is the religion of Jews, not “the” Jews because not all Jews are religious. Like Christianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. As holocaust survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer states in his recently published book An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, The End of Judaism, these were values and principles which put Jews “at the forefront of humanitarian and socially constructive endeavours” throughout much of history. A sort of light unto nations, I add, until Zionism came along.

Even the shortest definition of Zionism must begin by recognising that there is what might be called spiritual Zionism and political Zionism. In the sense that they look to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital or centre, all Jews who are religious could regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. The Zionism of my book’s title and substance and the Zionism I am speaking about is political Zionism (from here on Zionism).

It is Jewish nationalism in the form of a sectarian, colonial enterprise which, in the process of creating in the Arab heartland a state for some Jews - mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing - made a mockery of, and demonstrated contempt for, Judaism’s moral values and ethical principles. Judaism insists that the return of Jews to the Israel of the bible must await the Second Coming of the Messiah. Zionism said, in effect: “We can’t wait for Him. Zionism is the Messiah.” As noted by Yehoshafat Harkabi in his book Israel’s Fateful Hour, the “return” of Jews by the efforts of man and thus Zionism was “proscribed” by Judaism. (As I’ll explain later, there is another reason why the return of Jews was a deeply flawed concept).

· For those who may not be familiar with Harkabi - he was Israel’s longest serving Director of Military Intelligence. In the same book he said Israelis had to be aware that “the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also by Jews throughout the world.” And he gave this warning: “It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.” Those warning words were published in Hebrew in 1986 and in English two years later. Today, more than two decades on, I think Israel’s “misconduct” and its appalling self-righteousness has become not only a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism, it is becoming the prime factor. And that’s why my latest book is titled Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews - a title which I believe has been given additional meaning by the latest display of Israeli state terrorism.

Now to why knowledge of the difference between Judaism and Zionism is the key to understanding. It explains two things:

· One is why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist - opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise - without being in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic.

· The other is why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Palestine that became Israel.

I gave more than five years of my life to researching and writing my book not only because I want justice for the Palestinians. I was also driven by the need to do my Gentile bit to stop Holocaust II, shorthand for another great turning against Jews.

In passing it’s worth noting that virtually all Arabs and other Muslims have always known the difference between Judaism and Zionism. And it can be said without fear of contradiction that throughout much of their history, Arabs and other Muslims were the best protectors of Jews in need of sanctuary. It was Zionism’s colonial enterprise that poisoned the relationship, but not to the point, yet, at which most Arabs and other Muslims blame all Jews for Zionism’s crimes.

I titled my talk PALESTINE AND ISRAEL - NO LAW, NO PEACE because I believe there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of peace unless and until the Zionist state is called and held to account for its crimes. I also believe there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening unless and until the citizens of the Western world are informed about the difference between the lies and truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine, a conflict I describe as the cancer at the heart of international affairs.

In my view governments will never use the leverage they have to call and hold Israel to account unless and until they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion - by manifestations of real democracy in action. The problem throughout the Western world, and America most of all, is that most citizens, the voters, are too uninformed to do the pushing; and that’s because they’ve been conditioned by the corporate-controlled mainstream media to believe a version of history, Zionism’s version, which is simply not true. It follows, or so it seems to me, that the name of the game is, must be, empowering the citizens of nations to make what passes for democracy work for justice for the Palestinians and peace for all. (In verbal parenthesis I’ll add that I believe it’s wrong to say - as many Arabs and other Muslims do say - that “the Jews control the media”. It might like as though they do, but they don’t. The problem in the mainstream media, generally speaking, is one of self-censorship, which is born of the fear of offending Zionism too much or at all).

The core assertion of Zionist mythology, upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed, can be simply stated. Poor little Israel has lived in danger of annihilation - the “driving into the sea” of its Jews.

The truth of history, which flows fully documented through both volumes of my book as published in the UK (it’s going to be three volumes with possibly a fourth in America) is that Israel’s existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most - in America and Western Europe - with having its aggression perceived as self-defence and presenting itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is theoppressor.

I write and speak as an eye-witness to the Six Days war of June 1967. For ITN I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis; and because of the quality of my contacts - they included one of the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence - I was privy to some of the plotting behind closed doors on the Israeli side in the countdown to war.

Nearly four decades on, almost all Jews everywhere and most other people still believe that Israel went to war either because the Arabs attacked (that was Israel’s first claim), or because the Arabs were intending to attack (thus requiring Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike). The truth about that war only begins with the statement that the Arabs did not attack and were not intending to attack. The complete truth includes the following facts:

· Israel’s prime minister of the time, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. And nor did his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. They wanted only very limited military action, an operation far, far short of war, to put pressure on the international community to cause Egypt’s President Nasser to re-open the Straits of Tiran. (Nasser was, in fact, looking forward to that pressure to help him save face).

· Israel went to war because its military and political hawks insisted that the Arabs were about to attack. They, Israel’s hawks, knew that was nonsense - years latter some of them admitted that much, but at the time they promoted it to undermine Eshkol by portraying him to the country as weak. The climax to the campaign to rubbish Eshkol was a demand by the hawks that he surrender the defence portfolio and give it to Moshe Dayan, Zionism’s one-eyed warlord and master of deception. Four days after Dayan got the portfolio he wanted, and the hawks had secured the green light from the Johnson administration to smash Egypt’s air and ground forces, Israel went to war.

· What actually happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup, executed quietly behind closed doors without a shot being fired. For Israel’s hawks the war of 1967 was the unfinished business of 1948/49 - to create Greater Israel with all of Jerusalem its capital. (In reality Israel’s hawks set a trap for Nasser and, for reasons of face, he was daft enough to walk into it).

Now to my main point for this evening.

The single most catastrophic happening of 1967 was NOT the war itself and the creation of Greater Israel. At America’s insistence, and with the eventual complicity of the Soviet Union, it (the single most catastrophic happening) was the refusal of the Security Council of the United Nations TO CONDEMN ISRAEL AS THE AGGRESSOR…. If it had done so, the history of the region and the world might well have taken a very different course. There might well have been a negotiated end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a comprehensive peace within a year or two… If you think that’s a far-fetched notion of what could have been - read my book, which includes a chapter headed Goodbye to the Security Council’s Integrity.

Question: Why, really, was it so important from the Zionist state’s point of view that it NOT be branded the aggressor when actually it WAS? The full answer is in my book, the short version of it comes down to this.

Aggressors are not allowed to keep the territory they take in war, they have to withdraw from it UNCONDITIONALLY. This is the requirement of international law and, also, a fundamental principle which the UN is committed to uphold. Eisenhower was the first and last American president to uphold it with regard to Israel when he read the riot act after it had colluded with Britain and France in 1956 to invade Eygpt. That is on the one hand.

On the other hand is the generally accepted view that when a state is attacked, is the victim of aggression, and then goes to war in genuine self-defence and ends up occupying some (or even all) of the aggressor’s territory, the occupier has the right, in negotiations, to attach conditions to its withdrawal.

In summary it can be said that although Security Council Resolution 242 of 23 November 1967 did pay lip-service to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, it effectively put Zionism in the diplomatic driving seat. By not condemning Israel as the aggressor and thereby giving Israel the scope to attach conditions to its withdrawal, Resolution 242 effectively gave Israel’s leaders and the Zionist lobby in America A VETO OVER ANY PEACE PROCESS.

In 1956, when he insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai without conditions, President Eisenhower said that if a nation which attacked and occupied foreign territory was allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal, “this would be tantamount to turning back the clock of international order.” That’s what happened in 1967. President Johnson, pre-occupied with, and distracted by, the war in Vietnam, and mainly on the advice of those in his inner circle who were hardcore Zionists, turned back the clock of international order. And that effectively created TWO SETS OF RULES FOR THE BEHAVIOUR OF NATIONS - one set for all the nations of the world excluding only Israel, which were expected to behave in accordance with international law and their obligations of members of the United Nations; and one set for Israel, which was not expected to behave, and would not be required to behave, in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the United Nations. THAT DOUBLE-STANDARD IS THE MOTHER AND FATHER OF ARAB AND ALL OTHER MUSLIM HURT, HUMILIATION AND ANGER.

And that’s where we still are today, with two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations. But it’s no longer one set of rules for the Zionist state of Israel only. Under President George “Dubya” Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, America and Britain became associate members of Israel’s Club of One and demonstrated complete contempt for international law. They turned back the clock on it.

Still on the subject of international law, I’d also like to say a few words about Israel’s right (or not) to exist.

According to first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is nonsense.

· In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own. (I’ll be returning to the subject of “alien” immigrants).

· Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. It was a formula for a massive injustice. Some 56.4 percent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to a people (many of them recently arrived alien immigrants) who constituted 33 percent of the population and owned 5.57 percent of the land.

· But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal - meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.

· The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for a vote! Why not? Because the US knew that if approved it could only be implemented by force; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

· So the partition plan was VITIATED (became invalid), and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine - after Britain had been driven out of it by Zionist terrorism - was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel UNILATERALLY declared itself to be in existence - actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which (it bears repeating) came into being mainly as a consequence of Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist unless ….. Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.

Also true is that most if not all of the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism’s call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. The incoming Zionist Jews were mainly foreign nationals of many lands, descended from those who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel and what is called the “dispersal” into “oblivion” of its people. The notion that there were, are, two entire peoples with an equally valid claim to the same land is an historical nonsense. The relatively few Jews with a valid claim were the descendants of those who stayed in Palestine through everything. They numbered only a few thousand at the time of Zionism’s birth in 1897; they regarded themselves as Palestinians; and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism’s colonial enterprise - because they rightly feared that it would make them as well as the incoming, alien Zionist Jews enemies of the Arabs among whom they had lived in peace and security).

The question that should be addressed to all who demand that Hamas recognise Israel is this: WHICH ISRAEL is to be recognised? Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war or a Greater Israel?

In a recent article for Counterpunch, Virginia Tilley, associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at South Africa’s Hobart and William Smith Colleges wrote: “It should be incumbent on the international community to confirm where the borders will be before asking that Hamas recognise Israel’s ‘right’ to them.” Nobody could put it better or more honestly.

IT’S MY VIEW THAT UNLESS PRESIDENT OBAMA IS PREPARED TO DECLARE AND INSIST THAT THE ISRAEL TO BE RECOGNISED IS THE ONE THAT EXISTED ON THE EVE OF THE 1967 WAR, THERE WILL BE NO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ON HIS WATCH (however long or short that may be).

There was, in fact, no mystery about Hamas’s real position prior to Israel’s all-out declaration of war on it. If prior to that Israel had said and meant it was ready to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine two-state solution - one that would see Israel back to its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem the capital of two states, Hamas would have said, “Let’s do the business”. And Hamas’s leaders would have said that and meant it because they are not stupid. They knew that a genuine two-state solution was still what the vast majority of Palestinians were prepared to settle for…. But how much longer that will remain the case is a good question.

In my analysis, Zionism’s own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestine problem leaves nothing to the imagination…. Israel’s leaders still believe that by means of brute force, reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty and more generally making life hell for them, they can break their will to continue the struggle for their rights…. The Zionist assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries….. In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded to the point of clinical madness. Some - including some Israelis - say that Israel is well on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.

The question that’s almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the in-Israel Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that they can’t destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?

My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing - to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, will be Zionism’s final solution to the Palestine problem…… If that is allowed to happen, the West Bank (as well as the Gaza Strip) will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.

But that does not have to be the end of the story of Palestine. There still could be a new beginning.

Many years ago, in the Introduction to my first book, Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? I said that, generally speaking, the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western civilisation and the Palestinians the intellectual elite of the Arab world. What those two peoples could do together in peace and partnership was, I suggested, the stuff that real dreams are made of. They could change and develop the region for the better and, by so doing, give much needed hope and inspiration to the whole world… I still believe (perhaps I’m very naive) that dream could be made to come true, but only within the context of a One State solution to the Palestine problem. The only alternative I can see to One State for all is Catastrophe for All; and by “all” in the catastrophe scenario I don’t mean only the Jews and Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, no matter where we live.

Am I suggesting that a genuine and viable two-state solution is dead if not yet formally buried? Yes! Though the pragmatic Arafat prepared his people to be ready for such an unthinkable compromise, the truth is that Zionism has never been interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. That, I know, is a very big statement to make but there’s a mountain of evidence to support it including explicit statements by various Israeli leaders over the years. Zionism’s real position was and is as stated by Moshe Dayan many years ago: “It’s them or us.”

I’ll draw to a close by quoting the words of an Israeli I greatly admire and respect. He is Major General (now retired) Shlomo Gazit. For about two decades he was the head of research at Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence. That meant he was the world’s leading authority on the reality of the Arab military threat to Israel’s existence. In 1973 he was called upon to become the Director of Military Intelligence, with a brief to make sure there could never again be an intelligence failure of the kind that had occurred in the countdown to the war of that year. He was, in short, the man to whom the government of Israel turned for salvation in the aftermarth of what it perceived at the time, wrongly, to be a real threat to the Zionist state’s existence. Shlomo didn’t want the job but he took it out of duty. I got to know him in 1980 when I was the linkman in an exploratory, secret dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres, who was then hoping to become prime minister and deny Menachem Begin a second term in office. In our conspiracy for peace, Shlomo Gazit was advising Peres. (I call it a conspiracy because if Prime Minister Begin had been aware of what we were doing, he probably would have had Peres and Gazit hanged as traitors and me shot).

Over coffee one morning I took a deep breath and said to Shlomo: “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.”

Through a sad smile he replied: “Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.”

I end the Prologue to Volume One of my book with that Gazit quote. (The Prologue is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse). I didn’t tell my readers how that conversation continued, but I’ll tell you. I said to Shlomo, “Would you object if I said the name of the game is saving Israel from itself?” He replied, “No.”

In my opinion the question today is not so much how can Israel be saved from itself, but how can the Jews be saved from Zionism?

At this point the Gentile me takes a deep breath as he steps into a mine field..... Most of Israel’s Jews and many Jews of the world are in desperate need of some shocking and awesome therapy. What, really, do I mean?

It’s long been my view that most Israelis and Jews everywhere don’t want to know the truth of history as it relates to the creation of the Zionist state and its policies. The truth is apparently too uncomfortable and morally challenging. Over the last two and three years I’ve discussed this phenomenon with some of my dearest Jewish friends, including Dr. Hajo Meyer who I quoted earlier. He was born in Germany, served in the Jewish underground, was captured by the Gestapo and transported to Aushchwitz. In a recent conversation, he said he had come to the conclusion that his Jewish people - traumatized by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust and brainwashed by Zionism’s exploitation of it - were sick and beyond reason. That, I believe, as Hajo does, is why it has been, and still is, impossible for most Jews - Israelis and others - to engage in rational discussion about who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East.

About the shocking and awesome therapy required, I’ll say this much. There needs to be a declaration by the international community, led by President Obama, to the effect that the days of the double-standard are over, and that Zionism will now be called and held to account for its crimes - not only its most recent crimes in the Gaza Strip, but the crime on which the Zionist state was founded, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

I’ll conclude with a question. In the wake of Israel’s latest demonstration of state terrorism, could it be that charging some of is political and military leaders with war crimes and prosecuting them would be the catharsis needed to open very many if not all Jewish minds to the idea that Zionism - not the Arabs and other Muslims - IS their real enemy; and that silence is not the way to refute and demolish a charge of complicity in Zionism’s crimes?

Thank you.