In July 1954 Egypt was plagued by a series of bomb outrages directed mainly against American and British property in Cairo and Alexandria. It was generally assumed that they were the work of the Moslem Brothers, then the most dangerous challenge to the still uncertain authority of Colonel (later President) Nasser and his two-year-old revolution. Nasser was negotiating with Britain over the evacuation of its giant military bases in the Suez Canal Zone, and, the Moslem Brothers, as zealous nationalists, were vigorously opposed to any Egyptian compromises. It therefore came as a shock to world, and particularly Jewish opinion, when on 5 October the Egyptian Minister of the Interior, Zakaria Muhieddin, announced the break-up of a thirteen-man Israeli sabotage network. An 'anti-Semitic' frame-up was suspected.
Indignation increased when, on 11 December, the group was brought to trial. In the Israeli parliament, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett denounced the 'wicked plot hatched in Alexandria ... the show trial which is being organized there against a group of Jews who have fallen victims to false accusations and from whom it seems attempts are being made to extract confessions of imaginary crimes, by threats and torture . . .'49 The trade union newspaper Davar observed that the Egyptian regime 'seems to take its inspiration from the Nazis' and lamented the 'deterioration in the status of Egyptian Jews in general'.50 For Ha'aretz the trial 'proved that the Egyptian rulers do not hesitate to invent the most fantastic accusations if it suits them'; it added that 'in the present state of affairs in Egypt the junta certainly needs some diversions'.51 And the next day the Jerusalem Post carried this headline: 'Egypt Show Trial Arouses Israel, Sharett Tells House. Sees Inquisition Practices Revived.'
The trial established that the bombings had indeed been carried out by an Israeli espionage and terrorist network. This was headed by Colonel Avraharn Dar --alias John Darling-- and a core of professionals who had set themselves up in Egypt under various guises. They had recruited a number of Egyptian Jews; one of them was a young woman, Marcelle Ninio, who worked in the offices of a British company. Naturally, the eventual exposure of such an organization was not going to improve the lot of the vast majority of Egyptian Jews who wanted nothing to do with Zionism. There were still at least 50,000 Jews in Egypt; there had been something over 60,000 in 1947, more than half of whom were actually foreign nationals. During the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, the populace had some times vented its frustration against them, and some were killed in mob violence or by terrorist bombs. In spite of this, and of the revolutionary upheaval which followed four years later, few Jews-including the foreign nationals-left the country, and fewer still went to Israel. A Jewish journalist insisted: 'We, Egyptian Jews, feel secure in our homeland, Egypt.'
The welfare of Oriental Jewry in their various homelands was, as we have seen, Israel's last concern. And in July 1954 it had other worries. It was feeling isolated and insecure. Its Western friends-let alone the rest of the world-were unhappy about its aggressive behaviour. The US Assistant Secretary of State advised it to 'drop the attitude of the conqueror'. More alarming was the rapprochement under way between Egypt, on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other. President Eisenhower had urged Britain to give up her giant military base in the Suez Canal Zone; Ben-Gurion had failed to dissuade her. It was to sabotage this rapprochement that the head of Israeli intelligence, Colonel Benyamin Givli, ordered his Egyptian intelligence ring to strike.
Givli's boss, Defence Minister Pinhas Lavon, and the Prime Minister, Moshe Sharett, knew nothing of the operation. For Givli was a member of a powerful Defence Ministry clique which often acted independently, or in outright defiance, of the cabinet. They were proteges of Ben-Gurion and, although 'The Old Man' had left the Premiership for Sde Boker, his Negev desert retreat, a few months before, he was able, through them, to perpetuate the hardline 'activist' policies in which he believed. On Givli's instructions, the Egyptian network was to plant bombs in American and British cultural centres, British-owned cinemas and Egyptian public buildings. The Western powers, it was hoped, would conclude that there was fierce internal opposition to the rapprochement and that Nasser's young r6gime,faced with this challenge, was not one in which they could place much confidence. Mysterious violence might therefore persuade both London and Washington that British troops should remain astride the Canal; the world had not forgotten Black Saturday, 28 January 1951, in the last year of King Farouk's reign, when mobs rampaged through downtown Cairo, setting fire to foreign-owned hotels and shops, in which scores of people, including thirteen Britons, died.
The first bomb went off, on 2 July, in the Alexandria post office. On 11 July, the Anglo-Egyptian Suez negotiations, which had been blocked for nine months, got under way again. The next day the Israeli embassy in London was assured that, up on the British evacuation from Suez, stock-piled arms would not be handed over to the Egyptians. But the Defence Ministry activists were unconvinced. On 14 July their agents, in clandestine radio contact with Tel Aviv, fire-bombed US Information Service libraries in Cairo and Alexandria. That same day, a phosphorous bomb exploded prematurely in the pocket of one Philip Natanson, nearly burning him alive, as he was about to enter the British-owned Rio cinema in Alexandria. His arrest and subsequent confession led to the break-up of the whole ring-but not before the completion of another cycle of clandestine action and diplomatic failure. On 15 July President Eisenhower assured the Egyptians that 'simultaneously' with the signing of a Suez agreement the United States would enter into 'firm commitments' for economic aid to strengthen their armed forces. On 23 July --anniversary of the 1952 revolution-- the Israeli agents still at large had a final fling; they started fires in two Cairo cinemas, in the central post office and the railway station. On the same day, Britain announced that the War Secretary, Antony Head, was going to Cairo. And on 27 July he and the Egyptians initiated the 'Heads of Agreement' on the terms of Britain's evacuation.
The trial lasted from 11 December to 3 January. Not all the culprits were there, because Colonel Dar and an Israeli colleague managed to escape, and the third Israeli, Hungarian-born Max Bennett, committed suicide; but those who were present all pleaded guilty. Most of them, including Marcelle Ninio, were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. But Dr Musa Lieto Marzuk, a Tunisian-born citizen of France who was a surgeon at the Jewish Hospital in Cairo, and Samuel Azar, an engineering professor from Alexandria, were condemned to death. In spite of representations from France, Britain and the United States the two men were hanged. Politically, it would have been very difficult for Nasser to spare them, for only seven weeks before six Moslem Brothers had been executed for complicity in an attempt on his life. Nevertheless Israel reacted with grief and anger. So did some Western Jews. Marzuk and Azar 'died the death of martyrs', said Sharett on the same day in the Knesset, whose members stood in silent tribute. Israel went into official mourning the following day. Beersheba and Ramat Gan named streets after the executed men. Israeli delegates to the Egyptian-Israeli Mixed Armistice Commission refused to attend its meeting, declaring that they would not sit down with representatives of the Cairo junta. In New York there were bomb threats against the Egyptian consulate and a sniper fired four shots into its fourth-floor window.
This whole episode, which was to poison Israeli political life for a decade and more, came to be known as the 'Lavon Affair', for it had been established in the Cairo trial that Lavon, as Minister of Defence, had approved the campaign of sabotage. At least so the available evidence made it appear. But in Israel, Lavon had asked Moshe Sharett for a secret inquiry into a matter about which the cabinet knew nothing. Benyamin Givli, the intelligence chief, claimed that the so-called 'security operation' had been authorized by Lavon himself. Two other Ben-Gurion protégés, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, testified against Lavon. Lavon denounced Givli's papers as forgeries and demanded the resignation of all three men. Instead, Sharett ordered Lavon himself to resign and invited Ben-Gurion to come out of retirement and take over the Defence Ministry. It was a triumphant comeback for the 'activist' philosophy whose excesses both Sharett and Lavon had tried to modify. It was consummated, a week later, by an unprovoked raid on Gaza, which left thirty-nine Egyptians dead and led to the Suez War of 1956.
When the truth about the Lavon Affair came to light, six years after the event, it confirmed that there had been a frame-up; not, however, by the Egyptians, but by Ben-Gurion and his young protégés. Exposure was fortuitous. Giving evidence in a forgery trial in September 1960, a witness divulged on passant that he had seen the faked signature of Lavon on a document relating to a 1954 'security mishap'. Ben-Gurion immediately announced that the three-year statute of limitations prohibited the opening of the case. But Lavon, now head of the powerful Histradut Trade Union Federation, seized upon this opportunity to demand an inquiry. Ben-Gurion did everything in his power to stop it, but his cabinet overruled him. The investigation revealed that the security operation' had been planned behind Lavon's back. His signature had been forged, and the bombing had actually begun long before his approval --which he withheld-- had been sought. He was a scapegoat pure and simple. On Christmas Day 1960, the Israeli cabinet unanimously exonerated him of all guilt in the 'disastrous security adventure in Egypt'; the Attorney General had, in the meantime, found 'conclusive evidence of forgeries as well as false testimony in an earlier inquiry'. Ben-Gurion was enraged. He issued an ultimatum to the ruling Labour party to remove Lavon, stormed out of a cabinet meeting and resigned. In what one trade unionist described as 'an immoral and unjust submission to dictatorship', his diehard supporters in the Histradut swung the vote in favour of accepting Lavon's resignation. Lavon, however, won a moral victory over the man who twice forced him from office. In the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, students demonstrated in his favour. They carried placards reading: 'Bengurion Go to Sde Boker, Take Dayan and Peres with You. We do Not Accept Leaders with Elastic Consciences.' The affair rocked the ruling establishment, split public opinion, forced new elections and contributed largely to Ben-Gurion's eventual disappearance from public life.
But Lavon was not the only real victim. There were also those misguided Egyptian Jews who paid with their lives or long terms of imprisonment. It is true that when, in 1968, Marcelle Ninio and her colleagues were exchanged for Egyptian' prisoners in Israel, they received a heroes' welcome. True, too, that when Miss Ninio got married Prime Minister Golda Meir, Defence Minister Dayan and Chief of Staff General Bar Lev all attended the wedding and Dayan told the bride 'the Six-Day War was success enough that it led to your freedom'. However, after spending fourteen years in an Egyptian prison, the former terrorists did not share the leadership's enthusiasm. When Ninio and two of her colleagues appeared on Israel television a few years later, they all expressed the belief that the reason why they were not released earlier was because Israel made little effort to get them out. 'Maybe they didn't want us to come back,' said Robert Dassa. 'There was so much intrigue in Israel. We were instruments in the hands of the Egyptians and of others ... and what is more painful after all that we went through is that this continues to be so.' In Ninio's opinion, 'the government didn't want to spoil its relations with the United States and didn't want the embarrassment of admitting it was behind our action'.
But the real victims were the great mass of Egyptian Jewry. Episodes like the Lavon Affair tended to identify them, in the mind of ordinary Egyptians, with the Zionist movement. When, in 1956, Israeli invaded and occupied Sinai, feeling ran high against them. The government, playing into the Zionist hands, began ordering Jews to leave the country. Belatedly, reluctantly, 21,000 left in the following year; more were expelled later, and others, their livelihood gone, had nothing to stay for. But precious few went to Israel.
The King David Hotel Bombing
Written by Jim Kerr - April 2007
On 29th June 1946, agents of the occupying British forces in Palestine raided the premises of the Jewish Agency. They departed with a large number of documents, many of which were considered sensitive. The seized documents were taken to the King David Hotel for assessement by intelligence analysts. The King David Hotel served as a base for the British Military Command in Palestine. The hotel also served as the headquarters of the British Criminal Investigation Division.
Around the same time, the British arrested 2,500 Jews in Palestine. The Irgun, a Jewish organisation considered by the British to be to be a terrorist organisation, targeted the King David Hotel, primarily as an act of retaliation, and second, as a means of destroying the documentation that had been seized during the British raid on the Jewish Agency.
On the morning of the 22nd of July 1946 a party of between 15 and 20 Jews, disguised as Arabs entered the King David Hotel. The disguised Jews carried with them 225 kilograms of explosives concealed in milk churns. After having transported the milk churns from their lorry to the basement of the wing of the hotel occupied by the British, the gang then tried to leave the premises, but were challenged by a suspicious British officer who began asking questions. The urnarmed officer was shot by the Jewish gang and later died of his injuries.
A policeman stationed at the tradesman's entrance of the hotel was also gunned down after he too challenged the Jewish terrorists. He was also unarmed. A gun battle then ensued between the terrorist gang and British guards. While fire was being exchanged, the terrorists detonated their explosives and fled the building. Although, several of the bombers were shot and wounded, most still managed to escape.
The explosives detonated with devastating effect. Ninety-two people died, many of whom were killed instantly as the entire wing of the building collapsed around them. The majority of the dead were members of the British Security Forces, although fifteen Jews and several Arabs were also among the dead. A further fifty-eight were injured as a consequence of the blast.
The bombing of the King David Hotel was an act of cold-blooded murder - premeditated murder. The Irgun's massacre took place with the full co-operation of highest Jewish political authoritiy in Palestine - the Jewish Agency. The head of the Jewish Agency was David-Ben-Gurion, who later became the first Prime Minister of the Zionist state, holding office between May 1948 and December 1953, and again between November 1955 and June 1963.
The leader of Irgun, Menachem Begin, claimed that since the hotel was being used as a military building, it was therefore a legitimate target. On 17th May, 1977, the Likud, headed by Begin, won the parliamentary election and became the largest party in the Knesset. Begin became the sixth Prime Minister of Israel on 21st June, 1977, a position that he occupied until October, 1983.
Less than two years after Jewish terrorists had bombed the King David Hotel, the United Nations declared the existence of Israel, and Israel became a state on 15th May, 1948. The Zionist state was immediately recognised by the United States and the Soviet Union. The British rapidly withdrew what remaines of its forces, and the rest is history.
The state of Israel was, quite literally, founded on terrorism, and several descendants of the Jewish terrorists responsible for the King David hotel bombing, the Deir Yassin massacre, and a host of other atrocities now occupy positions of power and influence in Israel and the USA. The father of the current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, was part of Irgun. Eitan Tzipi, father of Israel's incumbent foreign minister, Livni Tzipi, was the Irgun's chief operations officer. Congressman Rahm Emanuel, is the son of Benjamin Rahm who was also a member of the Irgun.
The photograph above dates from 1947, and shows a poster issued by British police forces seeking 18 wanted Jewish terrorists from the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Stern Gang.
Pictured top left is Irgun commander and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
1947: A Year of Terror
12th January: Four killed by Irgun terrorist bombing of British headquarters.
13th January: Arab kidnapped and castrated by Jewish terrorists.
10th March: Jewish informer killed by Jewish terrorists.
11th March: Two British soldiers killed by Jewish terrorists.
8th April: British constable killed by Jewish terrorists.
8th April: Jewish boy killed by British troops. Jew beaten to death by Arabs.
22nd April: Eight killed in Jewish terrorist bombing of the Cairo-Haifa train.
25th April: Five killed in Jewish terrorist bombing of British camp.
26th April: British police official killed by Jewish terrorist.
8th May: Three Jewish shops in Tel Aviv whose owners refused to contribute to Jewish terrorist groups burned down by Jewish terrorists. Jew killed near Tel Aviv by Arab terrorists.
12th May: Two British policemen killed in Jewish Jerusalem.
15th May: British policeman killed in terrorist ambush. Two British soldiers killed in terrorist Stern Gang attack.
16th May: Two British police officers killed by terrorists.
18th May: One Jew killed, one wounded by Arab terrorists.
5th June: Jewish terrorists introduce letter bombs in Middle East.
28th June: Four British soldiers killed in Jewish terrorist raids.
3rd July: 3 'Anti-terrorist' Jewish families beaten up by Irgunists.
18th July: British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
19th July: Another British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
20th July: Yet another British soldier killed by Jewish terrorists.
23rd July: Jews killed when Haganah sinks immigration ship.
26th July: Two British soldiers killed in booby trap.
29th July: Three Jews executed by hanging. Jewish terrorists retaliate by hanging two British soldiers.
5th August: Three British police killed by bomb; plot discovered to poison the water supply of non-Jewish parts of Jerusalem with botulism and other bacteria
10th August: Four Jews killed in Arab terror attack on Tel Aviv café.
12th August: Five Jews, four Arabs killed, others injured, in spread of violent incidents over three days.
15th August: Twelve Palestinians killed in raid by Haganah troops.
18th August: Shops of five Jews in Tel Aviv destroyed by Jewish terrorists.
23rd August: Five Arabs of one family - two men, a woman and two children - killed by Jewish terrorists.
7th September: French foil Stern Gang plot to air bomb London.
21st September: British messenger killed by Jewish terrorists.
26th September: Four British policemen killed in Irgun terrorist bank robbery.
27th September: Illegal Jewish immigrant killed by British.
29th September: 13 killed, 53 wounded in Irgun terrorist attack on British police station.
4th October: Two Jews killed in ambush, two Arabs killed in retaliation.
13th October: Two British troops killed by Jewish terrorists in Jerusalem.
26th October: Jewish settlement policeman found killed near Gaza.
3rd October: Jewish policeman killed, reportedly by Stern Gang after refusing to reveal secret police matters.
12th November: 21 killed in British-Jewish clashes.
14th November: Jewish terrorists kill 4 Britons in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
30th November: Violent riots erupt throughout Arab world following adoption of United Nations partition plan. In Palestine, seven Jews killed and eight wounded in the first day. All told, during the first week at least 159 persons were killed in the Middle East, 66 of them in Palestine.
2nd December: Palestinians begin 3-day protest strike; 20 Jews, 15 Arabs killed. Five Arabs and seven Jews were killed the next day during a six-hour battle on the Tel Aviv-Jaffa border.
13th December: Palestinian civilians killed in Jewish terrorist attacks.
14th December: Jews killed by Arab Legion in retaliation.
18th December: Palmach ('assault companies') kills 10 Arabs, including 5 children, in nighttime raid on northern Galilee village of Khissas. The following day Haganah troops blew up the home of the village elder of Qazaza in central Palestine, killing several inhabitants.
Wrote The Times of London:
"While the Jews are suffering mainly through sniping at their road convoys, the Arabs have lost many lives through Jewish assaults on their villages."
20th December: Haganah raid on village of Qazaza kills one Palestinian.
24th December: Stern Gang member killed for betrayal of another member.
25th December: 16 Arabs, Jews and British killed on Christmas. Palestinian landowner killed for selling land to Jews.
26th December: Ben-Gurion proposes major offensive to reduce Arab population. Jewish terrorists get $107,000 in heists of diamond plants.
29th December: 14 Arabs killed by Irgun bomb in Jerusalem. Irgun flogs British major and three sergeants.
30th December: 41 Jews, 6 Arabs killed in riot sparked by Stern Gang. Irgun claims to have killed 374 Arabs and British during year.
Olmert Should Have More Of An Insight Than Most Into Terrorism
After Tony Blair's latest - and perhaps final - trip to the Levant, the TUC must have seemed almost a relief. There were no banners in Brighton reading "Blair, you killer, go to hell", like those that greeted him in Lebanon last weekend - on a visit that seemed a very long time since the prime minister told the Labour conference, in the wake of September 11: "The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalour from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause."
Last January the wretched and dispossessed in the slums of Gaza helped elect Hamas, and were duly told by Blair, as well as the Americans, that this was an unacceptable way to vote - a curious reflection on the much-trumpeted project of "democratising the Middle East". Apart from the question of recognising Israel, Hamas stands condemned for espousing terrorist violence.
There have indeed been outrageous and indefensible killings of Israeli civilians, but even that raises more questions than it answers. It is a platitude to say that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Palestinians will point out that Israeli state violence has always more than matched that of its opponents - notably in the numbers of civilians killed - and they could point out also that this dates from before the creation of the state of Israel.
An anniversary in July was a reminder of that, though it passed unnoticed here. And it has also been barely remarked that Israel has today the purest Revisionist government in its history. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, has been described as "one of Likud's princes from a prominent Revisionist family", which makes Tzipi Livni, his photogenic foreign minister, a princess.
In an interview with the Spiegel, the German magazine, she said that as a girl "All I ever heard about was that we Jews have the right to a state on both sides of the Jordan". Her father's grave bears the old map of that Greater Israel of Revisionist dreams, and she is one of the few prominent Israelis who can still quote the works of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the brilliant and charismatic man who founded the political tradition from which the groups called Betar, Irgun Zvei Leumi, Herut, Likud and now Kadima descend: a tradition to which she and Olmert belong by birth.
After the 1917 Balfour declaration had promised a Jewish homeland ("it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine"), the British became rulers of Palestine under the somewhat dubious guise of a League of Nations mandate, and violence between Jews and Arabs erupted at once.
In the 1920s Jabotinsky created the Revisionist Zionist movement, defiantly nationalistic and militaristic, with an aim of admirable clarity: "The revival of the Jewish state with a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan." For Jabotinsky, Zionism was a psychological as well as political project. In an essay entitled Against Excessive Apology, he told the Jews to stop cringing and tell the goyim "to go to hell", which Olmert may be said to have taken to heart.
Instead of pretending that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land", or that the existing inhabitants would welcome the Zionists, Jabotinsky insisted that they would not: "The native population, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists." It was thus "utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs", and the Zionists must be ready to use force by building an "Iron Wall". His famous phrase has now been interpreted literally by the Israeli government.
Only elements on the far left and some radical Islamists today care to call the Israeli government fascist. And yet, just as the strongest opponents of Zionism a hundred years ago were not antisemites (some of whom rather liked the idea of shipping the Jews off to the east) but other Jews, so in the early years of Revisionism its harshest critics were not gentiles (few of whom knew much about these intestine scissions), but other Zionists. In the 30s, David Ben Gurion, the Labour leader who became Israel's first prime minister, called his antagonist "Vladimir Hitler", and the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann told the New York lawyer Morris Rothenberg that the Jewish extremists evinced "Hitlerism in its worst possible form". That was, of course, before anyone knew what horrors Hitler would inflict on the Jewish people, but the phrase was startling even then.
By the late 1930s some Revisionists had formed the Irgun, an armed militia committed to driving out the British and dealing with the Palestinian Arabs - by whatever means seemed necessary. "In blood and fire did Judea fall, In blood and fire will Judea rise again," ran one Revisionist song, and the Irgun were as good as those words.
On July 22 1946 they blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British headquarters of the military command, killing 91 people, among whom 28 were British, 41 Arab and 17 Jewish. In a ceremony this July, old Irgun hands unveiled a plaque to mark the 60th anniversary. The following year, in reprisal for the execution of Zionists, the Irgun hanged two captured British sergeants, and they habitually attacked Arab civilians, culminating in the bloodshed that accompanied the birth of the state.
We are now meant to be waging a "war on terror", and "terrorist" is a curse supposed to end all argument. But those who once supported the Irgun didn't shirk that word. The playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, famous in his day as the co-author of the classic newspaper black comedy The Front Page, was also an ardent Revisionist and adherent of the Irgun.
In May 1947 he published an advertisement in New York newspapers saluting the bombers of the King David: "The Jews of America are for you. You are their champions." Every time they "let go with your guns and bombs at British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts". Still more striking was Hecht's admiring and intransigent headline above his ad: "Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine".
There is no way of knowing what Jabotinsky would have made of that, since he died in 1940. But he had specifically repudiated the political assassination that Israeli governments have practised in recent decades, and he said that: "It must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens." Such "removal" was just what was practised by the Irgun in 1948, and later by Labour governments that uprooted Palestinian villages.
All of this ought to be a potent memory for Ehud Olmert, who spent his early years in an Irgun camp where his father was one of the leaders, and for Tzipi Livni, whose father ran guns for the Irgun. Mightn't that possibly give them some insight into the other "terrorists of Palestine" who have been tempted by "blood and fire", and who also believe they have the right to a state?
The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.
The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back – for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten "to a pulp" when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.
The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.
But his frequent, if nervous, grins and giggles occasionally show just a hint of the bravado he might have displayed if boasting of his exploits to his mates in a bar. Repeatedly he turns to the older former soldier who has persuaded him to speak to us, and says as if seeking reassurance: "You know how it is in Hebron."
The older ex-soldier is Yehuda Shaul, who does indeed "know how it is in Hebron", having served in the city in a combat unit at the peak of the intifada, and is a founder of Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence, which will publish tomorrow the disturbing testimonies of 39 Israelis – including this young man – who served in the army in Hebron between 2005 and 2007. They cover a range of experiences, from anger and powerlessness in the face of often violent abuse of Arabs by hardline Jewish settlers, through petty harassment by soldiers, to soldiers beating up Palestinian residents without provocation, looting homes and shops, and opening fire on unarmed demonstrators.
The maltreatment of civilians under occupation is common to many armies in the world – including Britain's, from Northern Ireland to Iraq.
But, paradoxically, few if any countries apart from Israel have an NGO like Breaking the Silence, which seeks – through the experiences of the soldiers themselves – as its website puts it "to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created" in the occupied territories.
The Israeli public was given an unflattering glimpse of military life in Hebron this year when a young lieutenant in the Kfir Brigade called Yaakov Gigi was given a 15-month jail sentence for taking five soldiers with him to hijack a Palestinian taxi, conduct what the Israeli media called a "rampage" in which one of the soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place, and then tried to lie his way out of it.
In a confessional interview with the Israeli Channel Two investigative programme Uvda, Gigi, who had previously been in many ways a model soldier, talked of "losing the human condition" in Hebron. Asked what he meant, he replied: "To lose the human condition is to become an animal."
The Israeli military did not prosecute the soldier who had fired on the Palestinian, as opposed to Gigi. But the military insists "that the events that occurred within the Kfir Brigade are highly unusual".
But as the 22-year-old soldier, also in the Kfir Brigade, confirms in his testimony to Breaking the Silence, it seems that the event may not have been exceptional. Certainly, our interview tells us, he was "many times" in groups that commandeered taxis, seated the driver in the back, and told him to direct them to places "where they hate the Jews" in order to "make a balagan" – Hebrew for "big mess".
Then there is the inter- clan Palestinian fight: "We were told to go over there and find out what was happening. Our [platoon] commander was a bit screwed in the head. So anyway, we would locate houses, and he'd tell us: 'OK, anyone you see armed with stones or whatever, I don't care what – shoot.' Everyone would think it's the clan fight..." Did the company commander know? "No one knew. Platoon's private initiative, these actions."
Did you hit them? "Sure, not just them. Anyone who came close ... Particularly legs and arms. Some people also sustained abdominal hits ... I think at some point they realised it was soldiers, but they were not sure. Because they could not believe soldiers would do this, you know."
Or using a 10-year-old child to locate and punish a 15-year-old stone-thrower: "So we got hold of just some Palestinian kid nearby, we knew that he knew who it had been. Let's say we beat him a little, to put it mildly, until he told us. You know, the way it goes when your mind's already screwed up, and you have no more patience for Hebron and Arabs and Jews there
"The kid was really scared, realising we were on to him. We had a commander with us who was a bit of a fanatic. We gave the boy over to this commander, and he really beat the shit out of him ... He showed him all kinds of holes in the ground along the way, asking him: 'Is it here you want to die? Or here?' The kid goes, 'No, no!'
"Anyway, the kid was stood up, and couldn't stay standing on his own two feet. He was already crying ... And the commander continues, 'Don't pretend' and kicks him some more. And then [name withheld], who always had a hard time with such things, went in, caught the squad commander and said, 'Don't touch him any more, that's it.' The commander goes, 'You've become a leftie, what?' And he answers, 'No, I just don't want to see such things.'
"We were right next to this, but did nothing. We were indifferent, you know. OK. Only after the fact you start thinking. Not right away. We were doing such things every day ... It had become a habit...
"And the parents saw it. The commander ordered [the mother], 'Don't get any closer.' He cocked his weapon, already had a bullet inside. She was frightened. He put his weapon literally inside the kid's mouth. 'Anyone gets close, I kill him. Don't bug me. I kill. I have no mercy.' So the father ... got hold of the mother and said, 'Calm down, let them be, so they'll leave him alone.'"
Not every soldier serving in Hebron becomes an "animal". Iftach Arbel, 23, from an upper-middle class, left-of-centre home in Herzylia, served in Hebron as a commander just before the withdrawal from Gaza, when he thinks the army wanted to show it could be tough with settlers, too. And many of the testimonies, including Mr Arbel's, describe how the settlers educate children as young as four to throw stones at Palestinians, attack their homes and even steal their possessions. To Mr Arbel, the Hebron settlers are "pure evil" and the only solution is "to remove the settlers".
He believes it would be possible even within these constraints to treat Palestinians better. He adds: "We did night activity. Choose a house at random, on the aerial photo, so as to practise combat routine and all, which is instructive for the soldiers, I mean, I'm all for it. But then at midnight you wake someone up and turn his whole house upside down with everyone sleeping on the mattresses and all."
But Mr Arbel says that most soldiers are some way between his own extreme and that of the most violent. From just two of his fellow testifiers, you can see what he means.
As one said: "We did all kinds of experiments to see who could do the best split in Abu Snena. We would put [Palestinians] against the wall, make like we were checking them, and ask them to spread their legs. Spread, spread, spread, it was a game to see who could do it best. Or we would check who can hold his breath for longest.
"Choke them. One guy would come, make like he was checking them, and suddenly start yelling like they said something and choke them ... Block their airways; you have to press the adams apple. It's not pleasant. Look at the watch as you're doing it, until he passes out. The one who takes longest to faint wins."
And theft as well as violence. "There's this car accessory shop there. Every time, soldiers would take a tape-disc player, other stuff. This guy, if you go ask him, will tell you plenty of things that soldiers did to him.
"A whole scroll-full ... They would raid his shop regularly. 'Listen, if you tell on us, we'll confiscate your whole store, we'll break everything.' You know, he was afraid to tell. He was already making deals, 'Listen guys, you're damaging me financially.' I personally never took a thing, but I'm telling you, people used to take speakers from him, whole sound systems.
"He'd go, 'Please, give me 500 shekels, I'm losing money here.' 'Listen, if you go on – we'll pick up your whole shop.' 'OK, OK, take it, but listen, don't take more than 10 systems a month.' Something like this.
"'I'm already going bankrupt.' He was so miserable. Guys in our unit used to sell these things back home, make deals with people. People are so stupid."
The military said that Israeli Defence Forces soldiers operate according to "a strict set of moral guidelines" and that their expected adherence to them only "increases wherever and whenever IDF soldiers come in contact with civilians". It added that "if evidence supporting the allegations is uncovered, steps are taken to hold those involved to the level of highest judicial severity". It also said: "The Military Advocate General has issued a number of indictments against soldiers due to allegations of criminal behaviour ... Soldiers found guilty were punished severely by the Military Court, in proportion to the committed offence." It had not by last night quantified such indictments.
In its introduction to the testimonies, Breaking the Silence says: "The soldiers' determination to fulfil their mission yields tragic results: the proper-normative becomes despicable, the inconceivable becomes routine ... [The] testimonies are to illustrate the manner in which they are swept into the brutal reality reigning on the ground, a reality whereby the lives of many thousands of Palestinian families are at the questionable mercy of youths. Hebron turns a focused, flagrant lens at the reality to which Israel's young representatives are constantly sent."
Sixty-five years ago today Japanese bombers launched an early morning surprise attack on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor killing some 2,400 seamen and bringing the United States into World War II. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called December 7, 1941 "a date which will live in infamy" as he asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan. September 11, 2001 is another date which will live in infamy. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was a surprise attack to most Americans - but not all.
Like the Japanese attack on the U.S. fleet, 9/11 was a catastrophic and transforming event that brought the United States into war - the so-called "War on Terror."
Unlike Pearl Harbor, however, 9/11 was not committed by an easily identifiable foe. Pronouncements by President George W. Bush and senior government officials notwithstanding, the solid evidence pinning the blame for the catastrophic terror attacks of 9/11 on 19 Arabs with box cutters has yet to be seen.
Despite the various government sponsored reports and commissions about the events of September 11, 2001, the attacks and the destruction they caused remain uninvestigated. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has not released the evidence that it has or should have to support the stated position of the government that 19 Arabs working with Al Qaida carried out these attacks on their own.
To this day, the FBI has not even provided the physical evidence to identify the aircraft involved in the attacks, although there must be an adequate number of identifiable airplane parts from the four crash sites to do so. The FBI is clearly not interested in proving anything about 9/11 to the nation or the public.
Who's In Control
So what's going on? Why are the most catastrophic terror attacks in U.S. history uninvestigated and why is the interpretation of the attacks left to the controlled media and politicians? Who has the power to control the media, the government, and the FBI to conceal the truth about what really happened on 9/11?
To understand who is really behind 9/11 requires a comprehensive investigation of the key players who played a role or who controlled the non-investigation and subsequent media-driven "interpretation" of the terror attacks.
Today, five years and three months after 9/11, we are able to look back at the people who have played these key roles. What we find is a small group of people who are linked in a global Zionist network, individuals who are connected by family, ethnic, and business ties to an organized network dedicated to supporting the state of Israel and its agenda.
By exposing the members of this Zionist network and their connection to 9/11 and the so-called "War on Terror," we can identify the chief architects, sub-contractors, and workers who pulled off the false-flag terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Architects
Shortly after 9/11, I spoke with Eckehardt Werthebach, the former president of Germany's domestic intelligence service, the Verfassungsschutz. He said that "the deathly precision" and "the magnitude of planning" behind the attacks would have required "years of planning."
Such a sophisticated operation, Werthebach said, would require the "fixed frame" of a state intelligence organization, something not found in a "loose group" of terrorists like the one allegedly led by Mohammed Atta.
Many people would have been involved in the planning of such an operation, Werthebach said. The absence of leaks indicates that the attacks were "state organized actions," he said.
Andreas von Bülow, the former German parliamentarian, served on the commission which oversees the three branches of the German secret service from 1969 to 1994. Von Bülow told me in the fall of 2001 that he believed that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, was behind the 9/11 terror attacks. These attacks, he said, were carried out to turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending.
"You don't get the higher echelons," von Bülow said, referring to the "architectural structure" which masterminds such terror attacks. At this level, he said, the organization doing the planning, such as Mossad, is primarily interested in affecting public opinion.
In a classic false-flag terror attack, the architectural level planners will use unwitting or corrupt "guns for hire" in order to have the blame assigned to the desired target. The terrorists who actually carry out the crimes are what von Bülow calls "the working level," such as the 19 Arabs who allegedly hijacked the planes on Sept. 11. "The working level is part of the deception," he said.
"Ninety-five percent of the work of the intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation," von Bülow said. The deception is then widely propagated in the mainstream media creating an accepted version of events.
"Journalists don't even raise the simplest questions," he said. "Those who differ are labeled as crazy."
Years Of Planning
The "years of planning" that Eckehardt Werthebach referred to are obvious to anyone who has read the real history of 9/11. The smaller false-flag terror attacks that preceded the catastrophic terror of 9/11 were meant to instill in the mind of the public the fear of a massive attack in the United States.
The equally suspect and unproven bombings of the federal building in Oklahoma City and the first attack in the World Trade Center were meant to prepare public opinion for "the transforming event" of 9/11.
At the academic level, the architects of 9/11 have been working on U.S. public opinion since the mid-1980s to prepare the political and media elites for a catastrophic terror attack on American soil, and beyond that to focus on how the U.S. should respond to such an attack.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the American-educated hard-line former prime minister of Israel, is probably the most conspicuous architect of terrorism and the so-called "War on Terror." Netanyahu, a Jabotinsky Zionist of the right wing Likud party, published a book in 1986 entitled Terrorism: How the West Can Win in which he laid out precisely the blueprint for what has become the "War on Terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Netanyahu's book, and its seriously flawed and racist thesis, has been rewritten, reprinted, and propagated ad nauseam.
Netanyahu's thesis is that Israel is attacked by "terrorists" only because it is "western and democratic," like European nations and the United States. For this reason, Netanyahu says, Americans and Europeans need to join the fight against those who are opposed to the Zionist state of Israel.
In Netanyahu's distorted view of the world, Palestinian grievances and nationalist aspirations have no place or merit. Palestinians and Arabs are simply "terrorists," he says, upon which the West should do battle, as we now do. Reading the controlled press or listening to the pundits on the U.S. mass media, it is clear that they have been the key agents of Zionist propaganda who should be held accountable for having snookered the United States into fighting costly and disastrous wars against Israel's enemies.
Catastrophic Terrorism
There are other agents, many of them highly-placed Americans, who clearly and specifically pushed the agenda, which we call the "War on Terror," as a response to a catastrophic terror attack - long before 9/11.
Three men authored an article in 1998 in Foreign Affairs, the bi-monthly publication of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which they laid out what changes would need to be made within the U.S. government in the wake of "catastrophic terrorism," which is also the title of the article.
The "Catastrophic Terrorism" article, written by Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch, and Philip D. Zelikow, appeared in the last issue of Foreign Affairs in 1998. It begins with the strange subtitle "Imagining the Transforming Event," as if what was actually desired by the authors was a transformation of the U.S. government and the way Americans live.
The authors of the article, like Netanyahu, do not even mention the political causes of terrorism. Understanding the causes of terrorism in an effort to prevent it does not even occur to them. No, these three architects are busy "imagining the transforming event" - and how to respond to it.
This article is clearly an architectural level document. It is meant to explain what should be done in the event of the catastrophic terror attack its authors are "imagining." For this reason, the authors deserve to be investigated to see what kind of relationship they might have to those who carried out the false flag terror attacks of 9/11.
Like Pearl Harbor
"Catastrophic terrorism has moved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen next month," the essay warns. "Although the United States still takes conventional terrorism seriously…it is not yet prepared for the new threat of catastrophic terrorism.
The bombings in East Africa killed hundreds. A successful attack with weapons of mass destruction could certainly take thousands, or tens of thousands, of lives. If the device that exploded in 1993 under the World Trade Center had been nuclear, or had effectively dispersed a deadly pathogen, the resulting horror and chaos would have exceeded our ability to describe it.
Such an act of catastrophic terrorism would be a watershed event in American history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America's fundamental sense of security, as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949. Like Pearl Harbor, this event would divide our past and future into a before and after.
The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and use of deadly force. More violence could follow, either further terrorist attacks or U.S. counterattacks. Belatedly, Americans would judge their leaders negligent for not addressing terrorism more urgently.
With amazing prescience the authors were right about all eight things they said "might" happen as a result of an attack of "catastrophic terrorism" like Pearl Harbor.
The authors go on to recommend specifically what the U.S. government should do in the wake of such an event of "catastrophic terrorism," which they concluded is "an eminent threat."
• The U.S. government should have the authority to monitor any group and its potential state sponsors that might have the motive and the means to use weapons of mass destruction
• The United States needs a new institution to gather intelligence on catastrophic terrorism - a National Terrorism Intelligence Center - that would collect and analyze information so it could warn of suspected catastrophic terrorist acts ahead of time
• Washington must now work with other countries to extend the prohibitions against development or possession of weapons of mass destruction
• International norms should adapt so that states are obliged to reassure other states that are worried and to take reasonable measures to prove they are not secretly developing weapons of mass destruction. Failure to supply such proof or to prosecute the criminals living within their borders should entitle worried nations to take all necessary actions for their self-defense
• The United States should aspire as a long-term objective to identify every person and all freight entering the country
• The United States should support a system to ensure that every country's passports are computer readable, with every country's passport control station linked to a database
In the same issue of Foreign Affairs in which the prescient essay on "catastrophic terrorism" appeared there is another essay about Usama bin Ladin's "License to Kill" by Bernard Lewis, the British Zionist mastermind of academia. After reading the Lewis article, in which he says Usama bin Ladin calls on Muslims to "kill the Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can" there can be no doubt who should be the prime suspect behind any event of "catastrophic terrorism."
So who are the authors of this prescient article about how the U.S. should respond to an act of "catastrophic terrorism?"
Ashton B. Carter
Ashton B. Carter is a Ford Foundation Professor of Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense. The 1998 essay he co-wrote with Deutch and Zelikow was published in a book he wrote with William Perry entitled Preventive Defense: An American Security Strategy for the 21st Century.
Carter is also a member of the Board of Trustees for MITRE, where he was a trustee from 1988 to 1993. The MITRE Corp. is a major defense contracting organization based in Bedford, Massachusetts, which is headed by the former Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), Dr. James Rodney Schlesinger. MITRE's crucial communication, command and control systems clearly failed on 9/11, something that deserves investigating.
From 2001 to 2002, Carter served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism and advised on the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.
Carter is also a senior partner in a company called Global Technology Partners, LLC (GTP), of which William J. Perry is the chairman. John Mark Deutch, the former Director of Central Intelligence and co-author of the article, is also a senior partner in GTP.
Affiliate Of Rothschild
What is GTP? Global Technology Partners, LLC is "an exclusive affiliate of Rothschild North America, formed to make acquisitions of and investments in technology, defense and aerospace-related companies," according to a biographical sketch of one of the corporation's senior partners, Paul G. Kaminski.
Elsewhere it is described as "an aerospace and defense investment banking boutique affiliated with the Rothschild Group" or "a professional services firm associated with the Rothschild Group of investment banks."
So Ashton B. Carter, John M. Deutch, William J. Perry, and the other fellows at GTP work for and with the Rothschild family, the Jewish financiers of governments and founders of the state of Israel.
John Mark Deutch
This explains how Deutch, who was born in Belgium, and his father, who was born in Russia and who only came to the United States in 1940, were so quickly advanced within the Washington power structure.
Deutch's father, Michael J. Deutch, was born in Smolensk, Russia in 1907. The Deutch family came to the United States in 1940 where Michael quickly became deputy director at the War Production Board, in charge of making synthetic rubber.
A December 27, 1946 article in the Chicago Tribune entitled "List Alien 'Rulers' in U.S." listed some of the foreigners found in a secret 71-page report who had received high government wartime posts. Michael J. Deutch was one of them. Correspondence passing between the Secretary of the Interior and the Office of War Mobilization indicate that Deutch was pushed up the ladder of promotion with unusual vigor by some one," the secret report from the House Committee on Un-American Activities said.
Michael Deutch was a Russian Jew whose family supposedly "fled the Bolshevik Revolution for Belgium." In Belgium, where he studied chemical engineering, he married Rachel Fischer, the daughter of Jean "Yonah" Fischer, a diamond merchant of Antwerp who ran the Zionist Federation of Belgium. This connection could explain why Deutch was promoted so quickly when he came to Washington.
John Deutch's maternal grandfather, Yonah Fischer, was a prominent Zionist and friend of Israel's first president, Chaim Weizmann. Fischer was a very high level Zionist within the international military-political network centered in London. Yonah had extensive business arrangements in Palestine/Israel and even started a town which is named after him - Kefar Yonah.
John Deutch has served as a director of Citigroup and Citibank since 1987. He is also a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Philip D. Zelikow
Philip David Zelikow is all over 9/11, its aftermath, and the subsequent wars in the Middle East. Three years after warning of "catastrophic terrorism," Zelikow became the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, the appointed government whitewash which utterly failed to address the key questions and evidence of the terror attacks of 9/11.
Zelikow, from Houston, served on President George W. Bush's transition team in 2001. After Bush took office, Zelikow was named to the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and served on the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, which produced the extremely flawed Help America Vote Act of 2002.
Zelikow had been a career foreign service officer overseas and served on to the National Security Council. More recently, Zelikow was a member of the Iraq Study Group, which pretended to study what went wrong with the disastrous, illegal, and ill-advised war that Jewish Zionist Neo-Cons, the controlled media, and the Bush administration all pushed so hard for.
Zelikow, the grandson of a Russian Jewish immigrant tailor, is very close to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He can be seen as having been her legal and Zionist handler. Zelikow joined the National Security Council in the George H.W. Bush administration, at the same time as Condoleezza Rice. Only recently Zelikow resigned as Counselor of the U.S. Department of State, where he served as a senior policy advisor to the Secretary of State.
Ehud Olmert and the criminal gang behind the Likud party in Israel are directly implicated in 9/11 and the subsequent so-called "war on terror."
This is not an opinion - this is what the evidence reveals.
The far right Likud party of Israel grew out of the Zionist terrorist gang known as the IRGUN - a fascist organization created by Vladimir Jabotinsky of Odessa. This is the same terror gang that blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and committed terrorist acts across Palestine and beyond in the 1930s and 40s.
Terrorism, particularly "false-flag" terror in which the blame for a terror attack is wrongly assigned to the enemy, is a strategy and tactic developed and perfected by the Zionists.
The so-called "war on terror" is also a Zionist construct first articulated by Benjamin Netanyahu in the early 1980s. There was a earlier concept developed in Israel called "TNT" which stood for the Hebrew "Terror Neged Terror" or "terror against terror."
The blueprint for the "war on terror" is found in Netanyahu's 1986 book "Terrorism: How the West Can Win." In his speeches and writings, Netanyahu, whose father was the secretary for Vladimir Jabotinsky, and a leader in his New Zionist Organization, promotes the "war on terror" to be waged against Israel's enemies.
The evidence and the motivation for 9/11 all point to the criminal Likud party and their hard-core Zionist supporters in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia.
It should be obvious that people like Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Ariel Sharon, and Shimon Peres were involved at the architectural level in the planning of 9/11 in order to bring the United States military into a shooting war in the Middle East.
The same Zionist gangsters who support the Likud also support the Republican Party. Lewis Eisenberg, Ronald Lauder, and Steven L. Friedman are among the U.S. based Zionists that are deeply involved in the attacks of 9/11.
When looking at the terror attacks of 9/11, one should ask more than "Cui bono?" It should also be asked: "Who else?"
Who else could have done it? Who else would want to do it? Who else has any reason to do it?
These Zionist leaders are more than war criminals - they are a threat to all of humanity. They must to be stopped, for our sake and the sake of the peace of the world.
"It’s very good.....Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel"
"We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them."
Goldwin Smith - Professor of Modern History at Oxford University - October 1981
"Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves."
Menachem Begin - Israeli Prime Minister 1977–1983
"The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish planning and Jewish dissatisfaction. Our Plan is to have a New World Order. What worked so wonderfully in Russia, is going to become Reality for the whole world."
The American Hebrew Magazine - 10th September 1920
"If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"
David Ben-Gurion - Israeli Prime Minister 1948-53, 1955-63
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
David Ben-Gurion - From 'Ben-Gurion, a Biography' by Michael Ben-Zohar (May 1948)
"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."
David Ben-Gurion - May 1948
"We must do everything to insure they ( the Palestinians) never do return. The old will die and the young will forget."
David Ben-Gurion - 1948
"The Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs."
Menahim Begin - Quoted in 'Begin and the Beasts': New Statesman 25th June 1982
"The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."
Menahim Begin - Israeli Prime Minister - New York Times 1st April 1988
"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more."
Ehud Barak - Israeli Prime Minister - 28th August 2000
"There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed."
Golda Maier - Israeli Prime Minister - 15th June 1969
"How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."
Golda Maier - Israeli Prime Minister - 8th March 1969
"Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything we don't grab will go to them."
Ariel Sharon - Israeli Foreign Minister - Addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse - 15th November 1998
"There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies - not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."
Moshe Katsav - Israeli president - Jerusalem Post - 10th May 2001
"The state.... must see the sword as the main if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may no it MUST invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation and revenge.... And above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space."
Moshe Sharett - Israeli Foreign Minister 1948-1956, Prime Minister 1954-1956
"There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. [I] tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish...with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 (and) it is entered in my diary."
Joseph Weitz - Head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department - From 'Israel: An Apartheid State' by Uri Davis (p.5.)
"When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."
Raphael Eitan - Chief of Staff of Israeli Defence Forces - 14th April 1983
"We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."
Rafael Eitan - Chief of Staff of Israeli Defense Forces - New York Times 14th April 1983
"Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."
Moshe Dayan - Haaretz 4th April 1969
"The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."
Matityahu Peled - Israeli General - Ha'aretz - 19th March 1972
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."
Israel Koenig - 'The Koenig Memorandum'
"It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization
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