[Hat-tip to Clo]
Wiping whom off the Map???By Dr. Elias Akleh July 16, 2007
Since the establishment of their terrorist state on usurped Palestinian land Israelis keep regurgitating their phobic mantra "Arabs want to wipe Israel off the map" in order to draw international sympathy, and to cover up their war crimes throughout the Arab World. To build their divinely racist "God's promised Jewish only" state from Nile to Euphrates Israeli government is conducting the policy of graduated wiping Palestinians off their own existence. Israel had, so far, successfully wiped Palestine off the map. Palestine had become to be known as occupied territories, disputed territories, and finally West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestine, a name used for the last three thousand years, to describe the land between Mediterranean shores west to Jordan River east, and from Lebanon north to Egypt south, can no longer be found on any modern map. PALESTINE HAS BEEN WIPED OFF THE MAP!!!
Israel was established and built on Zionism, a colonialist expansionist political movement based on religiously elitist ideology (God's chosen people), and a complete denial of the other. Its ultimate goal is to build a super power state, which they hope would eventually exceed the US in controlling the globe, within the heart of the Arab World to control their resource-rich region. Its first step was to establish Israel in place of Palestine and to win (force) its international legitimacy through imperial power (unfortunately might is still right in our age). Thus Palestinians became the primary target of Zionist terror and occupation to evacuate the land, since an independent viable Palestinian state would negate the essence of Israel's right to exist on occupied land, and would put an end to the Zionist's expansionist dreams. The birth of the Zionist entity is based not only on wiping Palestine off the map, but also wiping all Palestinians, their history and their culture off existence. Zionist Israel, thus, had adopted a graduated genocidal policy against Palestinians in specific and against Arabs in general.
Zionists perceived seeds of conflict among Arabs due to the variety of their culture, ethnicity, and religious backgrounds. To build their divinely racist Jewish-only Greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates through the division of Arabs, Zionist Israel developed its own expansionist geopolitical policy inspired from and akin to the German Nazi geopolitical policy of 1890 to 1933 of dividing Europe into smaller states to be swallowed up by strong Germany. Where Nazi Germans prescribed to a biological elitist ideology of the superior pure Arian blood (the Superman), Zionist Israelis prescribed to a divine elitist ideology of the superior pure Jewish
blood (God's chosen people).
In occupied Palestine Israel differentiates between Christian and Muslim Palestinians, between Fatah and Hamas, between West Bank and Gaza Strip, and between citizens of one town and the other. Within the neighboring Arab states (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq) Israel is inciting conflict and hatred between the citizens of those countries and Palestinian refugees, between Christians and Muslims, between Shiites and Sunni Muslims, between Kurds and Arabs, and between different political parties.
On the Palestinian front Israeli government had adopted a three-dimensional graduated genocidal policy. First comes uprooting Palestinians from their land and towns and transferring them to neighboring countries. Second is perpetrating massacres and ethnic cleansing through military incursions, shelling, and air raids against Palestinian communities to coerce the rest of them to immigrate. Third is the distortion and destruction of all physical, cultural, and historical evidence tying Palestinians to the land. Palestinian villages have been completely demolished (wiped off existence), Palestinian culture was hijacked and many had been claimed to be Jewish, and history was distorted to reflect Palestinians as invader terrorist Muslim tribes from the Saudi Desert that never had any right in God's Promised Land. Israel has sought to negate, falsify, demonize and wipe off every aspect of Palestinian life to a point where ex Israeli PM Golda Meier stated in 1969: "There is no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed."
The policy of wiping Palestine off the map and wiping Palestinians off existence had been adopted early since the founding of Zionism. Here follows quotes of only few of noted Zionist leaders. Theodor Herzl, father of political Zionism, had written in his diaries in 1898, "The Palestinians would be spirited across the border." Israel Zangwill, a British Zionist Jew, is known for his slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" describing Zionist dream of Israeli state in Palestine. This slogan, though, was invented by a Zionist British Member of Parliament Lord Shaftsbury, who in 1853 wrote to Foreign Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was "a country without a nation in need of a nation without a country… the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews".
Chaim Weitzman, the first president of Israel, saw no room for Palestinians in Palestine. In his autobiography, "Trial and Error", he wrote "Palestine will become as Jewish as England is English."
In chapter four of his book, "Birth of Palestinian Refugee Problem", Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote about Yousef Weitz, the director of the Jewish National Fund's Land Department, a man noted for his strong Zionist convictions. Weitz wrote in his diary on December 20th 1940: "It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (Palestinians and Jews) … the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise … There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries … Not one village must be left, nor one Bedouin tribe." In 1948 Weitz was given the task of creating the "Transfer Committee", which supervised the destruction of evacuated Arab villages, and repopulating others with recent Jewish immigrants in order to make any return of Palestinian refugees to their villages impossible.
Many Palestinian villages, which survived destruction during 1948 war, were later erased (wiped off) after the war. Records of the Association of Archeological Survey, housed in the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, show that a plan to wipe off Palestinian villages was implemented jointly by the Israeli Lands Administration and the Jewish National Fund in 1965, and was carried on for several years. The plan intended to wipe off all traces of Palestinian villages in order to destroy any hope for the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes.
The Israeli Association of Archaeological Survey was established in 1964 to issue permits for the destruction of Palestinian villages. By 1967 this association had approved the wiping off of about 100 villages inside 1948-occupied Palestine (Israel). After 1967 the Association turned its attention to destroy Palestinian villages in West Bank and Golan heights. On December 2006 Roni Bar-On, Israeli Interior Minister declared his ministry's approval on a plan to demolish more than 42,000 homes of Palestinian Bedouins in Negev Desert. This plan will wipe off 45 Palestinian villages housing more than 86,000 Palestinian Bedouins, who in 1958 were evacuated out of their land and confined to a piece of land in the desert known as the Triangle. Although paying taxes to Israeli government like any other town, these 45 villages were not recognized by the Israeli government, and received no civil services at all.
The destruction of Palestinian history and culture, and the wiping off Palestinian names of towns and replacing them with Jewish names was accelerated to a point where Moshe Dyan, a previous Israeli Defense Minister, bragged about it in a lecture he gave at the Technion University in Haifa in March 19th 1969. He stated: "we came here to a country that was populated by Arabs, and we are building here a Hebrew, a Jewish state; instead of the Arab villages, Jewish villages were established. You even do not know the names of those villages, and I do not blame you because these villages no longer exist. There is no single Jewish settlement that was not established in the place of a former Arab Village. 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 here either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul, Kibbutz Gv'at in the place of Jibta, Kibbutz Sared in the place of Huneifis, and Yehushua in the place of Tel al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population." (Haaratz, April 4th, 1969).
The policy of wiping off Palestinian names and replacing them with Jewish names was adopted by first Israeli PM David Ben Gurion since the establishment of Israel in 1948 when he established a special committee from historians, geographers, geologists and Torah experts, whose task was to wipe off the Canaanite and Palestinian Arabic names and substitute them with Jewish names. So Tel Rabi' became Tel Aviv, Al-Quds became Urushalaim, Um Rashrash became Eilat, Shu'fat became Nevi Yachob, Beit Jala became Gilo, Za'tara became Tabbuch, Beisan became Beit Shean, Qualandia became Atarot, Beit Mahseer became Beit Me'er, Artof became Hartuv, and so on.
Israeli government came up with a set of despotic laws to justify its robbery of Palestinian property. For example the "Expulsion of Invaders" amendment to land laws was designed to allow Israel to expel Palestinians from their land under the excuse that Palestinians are invaders. Palestinian refugees, who tried to return to their land, are considered invaders by Israel. The law of "Abandoned Properties" is designed to make it "legal" for Israeli government to seize any land belongs to absent (evacuated, transferred) owners. This law "legalized" the general confiscation of almost 450 Palestinian villages and associated farm land that were later either wiped off or Judaised. According to a report drawn up in 1952 Israel had succeeded in expropriating all Palestinian quarters in mixed towns, 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7800 Palestinian shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and most importantly 300 thousand hectares of land (see Simha Flapan's "The Birth of Israel; Myths and Realities" p. 107)
Israel is intent on destroying all Palestinian and Islamic cultural city landmarks. Religious places and buildings, especially Muslim mosques, were claimed as Jewish, destroyed, neglected to collapse, and turned into museums, art galleries, whore houses, clubs, senior citizens shelters, and stables for farm animals. Muslim Palestinians were not allowed to renovate or build new mosques. Renovation and strengthening the bases of Al-Aqsa mosque was hindered by Jerusalem municipality. Building permits were withheld, and building materials were not allowed to pass through old gates to the mosque. The ancient Islamic Council building and its adjacent Islamic "Ma'man Allah" cemetery in West Jerusalem are important historic and cultural Palestinian landmarks. The Israeli government is destroying the internals of the Islamic Council building to build western-style apartments, and digging up the cemetery to build a
Jewish Museum of Tolerance on its place. What hypocrisy!!!
Israel had always rejected, obstructed, or violated all peace treaties with Arabs since 1948 for fear of establishing permanent borders and repatriating Palestinian refugees, as explained explicitly by their first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in his "The War Diary 1948/9". For Zionists peace means the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes (a demographic threat to the pure exclusive Jewish state), and specifying permanent borders putting an end to Zionist expansionist dreams. In December 1948 the UN established a Palestine Conciliation Commission (PCC) with representatives from US, France and Turkey to mediate between Arabs and Israel. Peace negotiation held in Lausanne, Switzerland on April 26th 1948. Israel was forced to attend negotiation after US threatened to prevent Israel's admission to the UN. In the negotiation Arabs offered Israel peace and recognition providing Israel implements UN resolution 194 of returning Palestinian refugees to their homes. Israel rejected the offer.
Oslo Agreement was forced on Israel by Bush, the father, to appease Arab Gulf states, which joined his first Gulf War against Iraq, knowing very well that Israelis will eventually circumvent the Agreement somehow, and they did.
Benjamin Netanyahu, in June 1996, gave his famous three "NO"s to peace process: no withdrawal, no Palestinian State, and no refugee's return. Dov Weisglass, Sharon's senior adviser and one of the initiator of Sharon's disengagement plan, stated "The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda." (Ha'aretz, October 6th 2004)
Israel has also rejected the generous peace offer of March 2003 by the Arab League, which promised recognition, putting an end to all resistance, and full diplomatic relations with ALL Arab states. This offer would have fulfilled Israelis' dreams and aspirations for the peace they claim to always have called for. Yet Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, at the time, responded by driving his tanks into all major Palestinian cities. Israel also rejected all Syrian peace offers, and violated all agreements with the Palestinian Authority.
Zionist Israeli settlers are worse than their government in their terrorist genocidal attacks against Palestinians. Zionist settlers have their own underground terrorist militias allegedly formed to protect their settlements. Given implicit permission by their government, and under the protection of the Israeli army, terrorist militias routinely attack Palestinian farmers, burn their crops, cut and uproot their trees, burn their shacks, poison their water wells, shoot and poison their farm animals, terrorize and assault members of International Solidarity Movement, who travel to Palestine to protect farmers in their fields and students on their way to schools. Some of these extremist militias (Shlomo Dvir, Yarden Morag and Ofer Gamliel) planted car bombs near Palestinian high schools in Jerusalem's suburbs in April 2002. Others (Chahr Zliger, Naom Federman, and undisclosed other terrorists) arrested in September 2003, planned to bomb many Islamic mosques, including al-Aqsa mosque, across West Bank at the same day.
The extremist settlers encourage such terrorist acts against Palestinians and consider them religious duty. This could be seen in the way the settlers of Keryat Arba' had sanctified the terrorist Baruch Goldstein by building a shrine for him and calling him a saint. Goldstein had shot 29 Muslim prayers in the back and injured 129 others while praying in the Ibrahimi
Mosque in Hebron in February 1994
Settlers' terror increased up to a point where, in April 27, 2005, Amnesty International (AI) urged the Israeli occupation authorities to launch immediate probes into the Jewish settlers' poisoning of Palestinian agrarian fields. The Israeli government ignored such a request.
Despite all the media cover up, and the Zionist propaganda, the international community, on the civic level, understands and sympathizes with the Palestinian just cause. Many civil walks and protests demanding justice for Palestinians take place in major cities all over the world. People from all over the world join International Solidarity Movement to travel to Palestine to protect Palestinians from Israeli terror, and to protest Israeli imprisoning wall designed to choke Palestinian towns. Polls, especially in Europe, had shown that Israel is considered the most dangerous threat to world peace even before Iran.
Unfortunately the blackmail of World Zionist Organization and the pressure of the pro-Zionist neoconservative American administration and that of AIPAC made criticizing Israel a "political suicide" as described by previous American President Jimmy Carter. World leaders and politicians had ignored the plight of Palestinian people. They had ignored the illegal establishment of the terrorist state of Israel on usurped Palestine, ignored Israeli massacres against Palestinian civilians, the destruction of their villages, and the expulsion of almost 750 thousand Palestinian out of their homes, ignored the right of return for the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and the implementation of UN resolution 194 of 1948 demanding their return to their land, ignored the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli terrorist occupation for the last 60 years, denied the Palestinians' right of self-defense and resisting occupation, as guaranteed by UN charters, and called this right terrorism, ignored Israeli terrorism, on the other hand, and called it self-defense, ignored and turned against the UN democratic principles when they rejected the Palestinian government that was elected by the most democratic election as witnessed and testified by UN and international well known monitors, and imposed financial and economic siege to starve Palestinians for their democratic process.
As the international political community, alas including some Arab leaders, had shown sympathy for the capture, as a war prisoner, of the Israeli soldier (Shalit), who was sent to Gaza Strip to shell and destroy the homes of Palestinian civilians and to kill their women and children, and expressed their understanding of the Israeli terrorist war against Lebanon (July 2006) in response to the capture of two Israeli soldiers sent across Lebanese borders to incite anticipated trouble, this international "civilized" community expressed no sympathy towards the 12 thousand Palestinian civilians, including women and children, rotting in miserable Israeli jails after being snatched out of their families in the middle of the night from their homes, nor did they express any understanding for the Palestinian attacks against Israeli settlers, who usurped Palestinian land.
The international community knows that Israel is perpetrating ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, yet none of its governments is doing anything about it or objecting it, giving Israel the wrong message that it is OK to kill Palestinians. That is why wiping Palestinians off existence is still going on until today. Palestinians have long joined native Australians and Native American Indians in the category of "endangered species". Today it is Palestinians; tomorrow it is the rest of Arab nations.
http://www.miftah.org
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