‘Gaza in Context’ Film Takes Aim At Media Coverage of 2014 Gaza Attacks

ED Noor: Gaza in Context offers a comprehensive teaching guide. To study this film in depth with full script and educational content, please head over to this page. The screen capture above says so much about the uneven treatment given to the inhabitants of Palestine.

By Noura Erakat and Tareq Radi
Source

In the summer 2014, Israel launched its most devastating offensive on the besieged Gaza Strip to date. It sealed the perimeters, expanded the buffer zones, concentrated the already dense population, and launched six thousand airstrikes and fifty thousand artillery shells in an air and ground offensive that lasted for fifty-one days. 

The register of death and destruction was harrowing and included the killing of 2,251 Palestinians, including 551 children; the complete or severe destruction of eighteen thousand homes; the forcible displacement of one hundred thousand Palestinians, and untold trauma that has left more than three hundred thousand children in need of psycho-social treatment. 

Palestinian forces killed seventy-two Israelis, six of whom were civilians. As Palestinian doctors struggled to treat the injured in under-sourced hospitals vulnerable to attack, Israel’s military industry boomed. Three hundred employees of one company, Israel Military Industries, worked twenty-four hours shifts for four weeks, to ensure that the Israeli Army would have a sufficient arsenal. One company CEO explained, that

“After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad…” because they can market their weapons as “battle-tested’.”

Indeed, Gaza’s captive population has become a laboratory for means and methods of warfare.

Israel used disproportionate fire power on a civilian population in Gaza, 2014 summer, committing every war crime in the book. From illegal weapons testing to human shields.

Despite the imbalance of military force, as well as the structural violence of siege, media narratives of victimhood and survival were exclusively reserved for Israel and Israelis. The harshest critique of Israel’s unparalleled use of force was that it was “too much” or “excessive” implicitly suggesting that the colonial relationship between Israel and its captive subjects is normal; the realm of abnormality was reserved for Palestinians who used crude weapons to challenge their condition. 

The de-historicization of the Gaza Strip and its severance from the rest of the question of Palestine functions as another site of violence, one that perpetuates colonial subjugation and all but ensures a repeat of the kinetic warfare necessary to maintain it. 

This pedagogical compendium, in combination with the short narrative documentary film Gaza in Context, uses Operation Protection Edge to demonstrate the temporal and spatial continuity of Israel’s settler-colonial policies across Israel and the Occupied Territories in order to disrupt the language of exceptionalism surrounding Gaza today. The volume scrutinizes Israeli settler-colonialism through a multi-disciplinary lens including history, law, development, political economy, and gender across Israel’s singular jurisdiction extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

While the scope of Israeli force deployed during Operation Protective Edge is unprecedented, warfare is not. The summer 2014 offensive was the eighth attack on the coastal enclave since unilateral disengagement in 2005 and the twenty-second attack since the exchange of letters between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and President George W. Bush in April 2004. 

In her contribution, originally published in The Nation, Noura Erakat surveys Israel’s aggressions towards Gaza and concludes that warfare is systemic, longstanding, and is an extension of Israel’s broader policy towards all Palestinians.

This policy is guided by two principles:

1. To obtain the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum number of Palestinian people; and 

2. To concentrate a maximum number of Palestinians onto a minimum amount of land.

ED Noor: Gaza stat: 1.8 M Palestinians of which 1.4 are homeless

Through this analysis, Erakat resituates the question of the Gaza Strip within a framework of settler colonialism that helps put the rest of the pieces within this publication in conversation with one other.

ED Noor: In the immortal (and immoral) words of Ariel Sharon:

"We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them, ... we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart." ~ Ariel Sharon

 

Illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied West Bank

Joel Beinin scrutinizes examples of incitement made by Israel’s governing officials that exemplify the “public devaluation of Arab life,” to expose the normalization of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments in Israeli society. For example, Uri Elitzur, a pro-settlement journalist and former aide to Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, argued that all Palestinians are enemy combatants and that rape should be used as a tool to deter Palestinian resistance. Beinin argues that this racism lays the foundation for domestic support of military operations and serves to shield the army from critiques of disproportionate uses of force.

ED Noor: Then there is this from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon:

“I don’t know something called international Principles. I vow that I will burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child are more dangerous than the man because the Palestinian child’s existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I’ve killed 750 Palestinians (In Rafah in 1956).I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian woman is but a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do.” ~ Ariel Sharon, 1956, interview with General Ouze Herham.

Israeli "authorities" often incite genocide in their Tel Aviv office. Palestine is Occupied by Zionist extremist "crazies." Occupied Jerusalem is NOT the "Jewish" capital. Even the American Government recognizes Palestine as "Occupied Jerusalem."

While Beinin scrutinizes the societal trends that have shielded Israel’s army from domestic critique and enabled its use of disproportionate force against Palestinians, Erakat’s article on Israel’s manipulation of the laws of war helps explain how such expanded force is legitimated in the language of law. She explains that Israel’s unprecedented use of force during Operation Protective Edge is a reflection of the new norms of war it has sought to establish since the second intifada in September 2000. She unpacks some of Israel’s most troubling claims including a radical understanding of force-protection, a forward looking analysis of proportionality, and a truncated definition of who is a Palestinian civilian. Erakat concludes that as a result of these changes in the law together with Israel’s longstanding policy towards Palestinians, Operation Protective Edge may not be the worst of what is to come.
 .

Oh the horrors! Over 500 children were needlessly slaughtered in Gaza, 2014 summer.

The four articles on development examine the use of development as a political tool to further subjugate, separate, and weaken Palestinian society. As Gaza’s economy reaches the highest stages of de-development yet, Sara Roy, Nuriya Oswald, and Max Ajl each scrutinize the international community’s futile policies adopted to “reconstruct” Gaza in the aftermath of OPE’s devastation.

Roy reaffirms that Israel’s attack on Gaza was not a response to Hamas rocket fire but, rather, continued its policy of incapacitating the coastal enclave. Roy highlights that not a single reconstruction plan has challenged the political status quo that produces vulnerability and deprivation. She argues that the current plans further entrench Israel’s blockade, and outsource the responsibility for its maintenance to the United Nations thus legitimizing Israel’s security narrative.

Despite the imbalance of military force, as well as the structural violence of siege, media narratives of victimhood and survival were exclusively reserved for Israel and Israelis.

The entire infrastructure of Gaza was targeted in the summer of 2014 by the Israeli    attack on the civilian population of Gaza. (ED Noor: Water collection then and now. A man collects water from a small container; behind him the former water system for his area lies in ruins.)

Similarly, Oswald dissects the United Nation’s Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) to expose the economic benefits Israel may enjoy from the plan. She also tackles Israel’s stated security concern regarding the application of imported materials towards military related activities. She highlights that, due to the current conditions in Gaza, recipients of the materials are unable to cover the cost of labor required for construction and, as a result, proceed to sell the items on the black market. Oswald argues that the absence of a mechanism to track how the materials are used once delivered reveals that the function of Israel’s oversight is control, rather than security.

Taking a step back, Ajl provides a historical analysis of the increasing scale of attacks on Gaza since 2006. He uses this historical analysis to interrogate the notion of “collapse” and its ability to separate Israeli policies from a settler-colonial framework. 

Through a critical reading of the World Bank report Gaza Economy on the Verge of Collapse, Ajl argues that the “World Bank’s analysis sidesteps the colonial genealogy of the siege,” by attributing Israel’s policies of warfare and blockade to the state’s inability to reconcile with Hamas. In doing so, it elides the state’s deliberate attempts to de-develop, isolate, and control the Gaza Strip since 1993, well before Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006. 

The World Bank’s economic prescriptions reflect this limited analysis.

It recommends that lifting the siege and reforming the economy requires that the Palestinian Authority (PA) replaces Hamas as the governing body of Gaza.

Ajl highlights that

the World Bank’s emphasis to work with the PA

is colonial in nature,

because it only accepts and supports interlocutors

that the colonial power has deemed legitimate.

.

Gaza, 2014 summer, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced from their homes and took shelter in UNRWA schools, hospital yards and the street.

As Roy and Oswald point out, the GRM strengthens Israel’s mechanisms of control over Gaza by granting Israel the authority to regulate the material that can enter the territory but relieving it of any responsibility for the territory. Israel possesses a similar mechanism of control under the veneer of development in the West Bank. 

In her article, Lamya Hussain discusses the implications of the Israeli Civil Administration’s (ICA) 2008 decision to appoint itself as the governing body that authorizes or denies any plans submitted by or on behalf of Palestinians in Area C. 

Today, the ICA serves as a planning regime designed to obstruct Palestinian development initiatives in order to take their spatial place. Hussain details the ICA’s use of urban planning as a tool to facilitate housing demolitions, restrict mobility, annex resources, and shift local geographies.

Nur Arafeh’s examination of Israeli policies aimed at removing Palestinians from Jerusalem rebuts the explanatory framework of religious conflict. She argues that Palestinian resistance in the city should be viewed as a response to colonial policies, as opposed to religious differences, and that religion is being exploited to obfuscate Israeli political goals.

Furthermore, Arafeh criticizes the Palestinian Authority’s

lack of investment in Jerusalem

as a contributing factor to the Judaization of the city.

As Israeli development initiatives advance, leaderless Palestinians in Jerusalem are left to fend for themselves in the face of forced displacement and economic strangulation.

Tariq Dana’s contribution on the Palestinian Authority’s security coordination with Israel helps contextualize the formal leadership’s apathy towards Jerusalem. Dana identifies the major factors that transformed the Palestinian security sector into a proxy apparatus of Israel’s occupation regime. Upon Hamas’s legislative victory in 2007, Israel and its Western allies moved swiftly to support the PA in the West Bank and rework the doctrinal foundation of Palestinian security. 

Over the next three years and with President Mahmoud Abbas’s cooperation, the US State Department allocated ninety-nine million dollars to restructure the PA’s security infrastructure and an additional 392 million dollars to train and equip its security forces.

Together with other critical junctures,

today the raison d’etre

of Palestinian police forces

is their ability to meet Israel’s security concerns.

Mouin Rabbani uses the PA’s fidelity to Israeli and American plans to scrutinize the potential of an impending intifada. He explains that the interlocking nature of the Palestinian security forces and the Israeli occupation, together with the Palestinian leadership’s aversion to popular mobilization, makes resistance to Israel’s colonial authority highly improbable. 

Despite the increasing ferocity of Israel’s attacks, Rabbani notes that a third Palestinian mass uprising is unlikely because “rebellions are almost never instigated by reality alone.” He highlights that the first and second intifadas were not simply reactions to particular events; rather they emerged and continued as a result of a confluence of cumulative factors that spanned several years. Rabbani sheds light on why and how a colonized people can endure sustained structural violence and not respond with sustained collective resistance.
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Nobody is spared Israeli brutality. American/Palestinian child, Tariq Abu Khedair

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud and Suhad Dahir-Nashif center sexual violence as a tool within the larger structure of colonial domination. The authors draw on Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination,” the understanding that settler colonialism is a structure, and not a singular event, that seeks to destroy and replace indigenous populations, to unpack Israel’s racialized logic of sexual violence. 

In this framework, genocide is intricately connected to settler colonialism. They expand on the sexualized discourses of OPE to demonstrate the embedded nature of sexual violence within Israel’s eliminatory logic. Maya Mikdashi builds on this intersectional analysis of gender and settler colonialism by calling into question the lack of public mourning for Palestinian men killed during the large scale offensive.

ED Noor: At the time of this Palestinian holocaust, there was little mention of male casualties and deaths in the media, all male deaths apparently listed as Israeli combatants regardless of status. 

She takes a critical look at Western-based media’s emphasis on the killing of women and children and argues it “further normalizes and erases the structures and successes of Israeli settler colonialism.” Mikdashi asserts that the Palestinian people are one, regardless of their gender. They live together under settler colonial conditions and should not be separated in death not least because even the most advanced weapons technology does not distinguish them upon lethal contact.

The following contributions, combined with the previously published Gaza Revisited and the short narrative documentary film Gaza in Context, serve to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip within a settler-colonial framework. In doing so, it emphasizes the non-exceptional nature of violence endured by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. 

The articles in both volumes provide in-depth and multi-disciplinary resources that disrupt the current production of knowledge surrounding the “conflict.” Operation Protective Edge, and any past or future Israeli onslaughts, should be read within this framework in order to highlight the abnormality of the Palestinian condition and to realize a viable and just alternative.

To read more and for a comprehensive teaching guide, please visit Gaza in Context website.

PLEASE NOTE:

Here is a refreshment of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity which took places extensively all throughout Palestine, but most horrifically in Gaza the summer of 2014.  

The interview is with Miko Peled and Abby Martin on RT’s, Breaking the Set. Miko Peled an Israeli born to “The General’s Son.” 
.

THE REAL STORY OF HOW ISRAEL WAS CREATED

 By Alison Weir

October 14, 2011

To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 U.N. action on Israel-Palestine. 

The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect. 

In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council. 

Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.

Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.

It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish.

And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.

Let us look at the specifics.

BACKGROUND OF THE U.N. PARTITION RECOMMENDATION

In 1947 the U.N. took up the question of Palestine, a territory that was then administered by the British. 

Approximately 50 years before, a movement called political Zionism had begun in Europe. Its intention was to create a Jewish state in Palestine through pushing out the Christian and Muslim inhabitants who made up over 95 percent of its population and replacing them with Jewish immigrants.

As this colonial project grew through subsequent years, the indigenous Palestinians reacted with occasional bouts of violence; Zionists had anticipated this since people usually resist being expelled from their land. In various written documents cited by numerous Palestinian and Israeli historians, they discussed their strategy: They would either buy up the land until all the previous inhabitants had emigrated or, failing this, use violence to force them out. 

When the buy-out effort was able to obtain only a few percent of the land, Zionists created a number of terrorist groups to fight against both the Palestinians and the British.

Terrorist and future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin later bragged that Zionists had brought terrorism both to the Middle East and to the world at large.

Finally, in 1947 the British announced that they would be ending their control of Palestine, which had been created through the League of Nations following World War I, and turned the question of Palestine over to the United Nations. 

At this time, the Zionist immigration and buyout project had increased the Jewish population of Palestine to 30 percent and land ownership from 1 percent to approximately 6 percent.

Since a founding principle of the U.N. was “self-determination of peoples,” one would have expected to the U.N. to support fair, democratic elections in which inhabitants could create their own independent country. 

Instead, Zionists pushed for a General Assembly resolution in which they would be given a disproportionate 55 percent of Palestine. (While they rarely announced this publicly, their stated plan was to later take the rest of Palestine.)

U.S. OFFICIALS OPPOSE PARTITION PLAN

The U.S. State Department opposed this partition plan strenuously, considering Zionism contrary to both fundamental American principles and U.S. interests.

Author Donald Neff reports that Loy Henderson, Director of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs, wrote a memo to the secretary of state warning:

[S]upport by the Government of the United States of a policy favoring the setting up of a Jewish State in Palestine would be contrary to the wishes of a large majority of the local inhabitants with respect to their form of government. Furthermore, it would have a strongly adverse effect upon American interests throughout the Near and Middle East ….” [Citations.]

Henderson went on to emphasize:

At the present time the United States has a moral prestige in the Near and Middle East unequaled by that of any other great power. We would lose that prestige and would be likely for many years to be considered as a betrayer of the high principles which we ourselves have enunciated during the period of the war.

When Zionists began pushing for a partition plan through the U.N., Henderson recommended strongly against supporting their proposal. He warned that such a partition would have to be implemented by force and emphasized that it was “not based on any principle.” He went on to write:

[Partition] would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future ….

Henderson went on to emphasize:

[Proposals for partition] are in definite contravention to various principles laid down in the [U.N.] Charter as well as to principles on which American concepts of Government are based. These proposals, for instance, ignore such principles as self-determination and majority rule. They recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state and even go so far in several instances as to discriminate on grounds of religion and race ….

Henderson was far from alone in making his recommendations. He wrote that his views were not only those of the entire Near East Division but were shared by

“nearly every member of the Foreign Service or of the Department who has worked to any appreciable extent on Near Eastern problems.”

Henderson wasn’t exaggerating. Official after official and agency after agency opposed Zionism.

In 1947 the CIA reported that Zionist leadership was pursuing objectives that would endanger both Jews and “the strategic interests of the Western powers in the Near and Middle East.”

TRUMAN ACCEDES TO PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY

President Harry Truman, however, ignored this advice. Truman’s political adviser, Clark Clifford, believed that the Jewish vote and contributions were essential to winning the upcoming presidential election and that supporting the partition plan would garner that support. (Truman’s opponent, Dewey, took similar stands for similar reasons.)

Secretary of State George Marshall, the renowned World War II general and author of the Marshall Plan, was furious to see electoral considerations taking precedence over policies based on national interest. He condemned what he called a “transparent dodge to win a few votes,” which would cause “[t]he great dignity of the office of president [to be] seriously diminished.”

Marshall wrote that the counsel offered by Clifford

“was based on domestic political considerations, while the problem which confronted us was international. I said bluntly that if the president were to follow Mr. Clifford’s advice and if in the elections I were to vote, I would vote against the president ….”

Henry F. Grady, who has been called “America’s top diplomatic soldier for a critical period of the Cold War,” headed a 1946 commission aimed at coming up with a solution for Palestine. Grady later wrote about the Zionist lobby and its damaging effect on U.S. national interests. 

Grady argued that without Zionist pressure, the U.S. would not have had “the ill-will with the Arab states, which are of such strategic importance in our ‘cold war’ with the Soviets.” He also described the decisive power of the lobby:

I have had a good deal of experience with lobbies but this group started where those of my experience had ended …. I have headed a number of government missions but in no other have I ever experienced so much disloyalty …. [I]n the United States, since there is no political force to counterbalance Zionism, its campaigns are apt to be decisive.

Former Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson also opposed Zionism. Acheson’s biographer writes that Acheson “worried that the West would pay a high price for Israel.” Another Author, John Mulhall, records Acheson’s warning:

[T]o transform [Palestine] into a Jewish State capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.

Secretary of Defense James Forrestal also tried, unsuccessfully, to oppose the Zionists. He was outraged that Truman’s Mideast policy was based on what he called “squalid political purposes,” asserting that “United States policy should be based on United States national interests and not on domestic political considerations.”

Forrestal represented the general Pentagon view when he said that “no group in this country should be permitted to influence our policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.”

A report by the National Security Council warned that the Palestine turmoil was acutely endangering the security of the United States. A CIA report stressed the strategic importance of the Middle East and its oil resources.

Similarly, George F. Kennan, the State Department’s director of policy planning, issued a top-secret document on Jan. 19, 1947, that outlined the enormous damage done to the U.S. by the partition plan (“Report by the Policy Planning Staff on Position of the United States with Respect to Palestine”). 

Kennan cautioned that “important U.S. oil concessions and air base rights” could be lost through U.S. support for partition and warned that the USSR stood to gain by the partition plan.

Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s nephew and a legendary intelligence agent, was another who was deeply disturbed by events. He noted:

The process by which Zionist Jews have been able to promote American support for the partition of Palestine demonstrates the vital need of a foreign policy based on national rather than partisan interests …. Only when the national interests of the United States, in their highest terms, take precedence over all other considerations, can a logical, farseeing foreign policy be evolved. No American political leader has the right to compromise American interests to gain partisan votes ….

He went on:

The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict. It is to be hoped that American Zionists and non-Zionists alike will come to grips with the realities of the problem.

The head of the State Department’s Division of Near Eastern Affairs, Gordon P. Merriam, warned against the partition plan on moral grounds:

U.S. support for partition of Palestine as a solution to that problem can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter ~ a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of U.N.’s own charter.

Merriam added that without consent, “bloodshed and chaos” would follow, a tragically accurate prediction.

An internal State Department memorandum accurately predicted how Israel would be born through armed aggression masked as defense:

[T]he Jews will be the actual aggressors against the Arabs. However, the Jews will claim that they are merely defending the boundaries of a state which were traced by the U.N. …. In the event of such Arab outside aid the Jews will come running to the Security Council with the claim that their state is the object of armed aggression and will use every means to obscure the fact that it is their own armed aggression against the Arabs inside which is the cause of Arab counter-attack.

And American Vice Consul William J. Porter foresaw another outcome of the partition plan: that no Arab State would actually ever come to be in Palestine.

PRO-ISRAEL PRESSURE ON GENERAL ASSEMBLY MEMBERS

When it was clear that the partition recommendation did not have the required two-thirds of the U.N. General Assembly to pass, Zionists pushed through a delay in the vote. They then used this period to pressure numerous nations into voting for the recommendation. A number of people later described this campaign.

Robert Nathan, a Zionist who had worked for the U.S. government and who was particularly active in the Jewish Agency, wrote afterward,

“We used any tools at hand,” such as telling certain delegations that the Zionists would use their influence to block economic aid to any countries that did not vote the right way.

Another Zionist proudly stated,

“Every clue was meticulously checked and pursued. Not the smallest or the remotest of nations, but was contacted and wooed. Nothing was left to chance.”

Financier and longtime presidential adviser Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition. Top White House executive assistant David Niles organized pressure on Liberia through rubber magnate Harvey Firestone, who told the Liberian president that if Liberia did not vote in favor of partition, Firestone would revoke his planned expansion in the country. Liberia voted yes. 

Latin American delegates were told that the pan-American highway construction project would be more likely if they voted yes. 

Delegates’ wives received mink coats (the wife of the Cuban delegate returned hers); 

Costa Rica’s President Jose Figueres reportedly received a blank checkbook. 

Haiti was promised economic aid if it would change its original vote opposing partition. 

Longtime Zionist Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, along with 10 senators and Truman domestic adviser Clark Clifford, threatened the Philippines (seven bills were pending on the Philippines in Congress). 

Before the vote on the plan, the Philippine delegate had given a passionate speech against partition, defending the inviolable

“primordial rights of a people to determine their political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of their native land.”

He went on to say that he could not believe that the General Assembly would sanction a move that would place the world “back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic documents of theocratic governments.” 

Twenty-four hours later, after intense Zionist pressure, the delegate voted in favor of partition.

The U.S. delegation to the U.N. was so outraged when Truman insisted that they support partition that the State Department director of U.N. affairs was sent to New York to prevent the delegates from resigning en masse.

On Nov. 29, 1947, the partition resolution, 181, passed. While this resolution is frequently cited, it was of limited (if any) legal impact. General Assembly resolutions, unlike Security Council resolutions, are not binding on member states. 

For this reason, the resolution requested that “[t]he Security Council take the necessary measures as provided for in the plan for its implementation,” which the Security Council never did. Legally, the General Assembly Resolution was a “recommendation” and did not create any states.

What it did do, however, was increase the fighting in Palestine. 

Within months (and before Israel dates the beginning of its founding war) the Zionists had forced out 413,794 people. 

Zionist military units had stealthily been preparing for war before the U.N. vote and had acquired massive weaponry, some of it through a widespread network of illicit gunrunning operations in the U.S. under a number of front groups. 

The U.N. eventually managed to create a temporary and very partial cease-fire. 

A Swedish U.N. mediator who had previously rescued thousands of Jews from the Nazis was dispatched to negotiate an end to the violence. Israeli assassins killed him, and Israel continued what it was to call its “war of independence.” 

At the end of this war, through a larger military force than that of its adversaries and the ruthless implementation of plans to push out as many non-Jews as possible, Israel came into existence on 78 percent of Palestine. 

At least 33 massacres of Palestinian civilians were perpetrated, half of them before a single Arab army had entered the conflict, hundreds of villages were depopulated and razed, and a team of cartographers was sent out to give every town, village, river, and hillock a new Hebrew name.

All vestiges of Palestinian habitation, history, and culture were to be erased from history, an effort that almost succeeded.

Israel, which claims to be the “only democracy in the Middle East,” decided not to declare official borders or to write a constitution, a situation which continues to this day. 

In 1967 it took still more Palestinian and Syrian land, which is now illegally occupied territory, since the annexation of land through military conquest is outlawed by modern international law. 

It has continued this campaign of growth through armed acquisition and illegal confiscation of land ever since.

Individual Israelis, like Palestinians and all people, are legally and morally entitled to an array of human rights.

On the other hand, the state of Israel’s vaunted “right to exist” is based on an alleged “right” derived from might, an outmoded concept that international legal conventions do not recognize and in fact specifically prohibit. 

FOR GREATER DETAILS, PLEASE GO TO:

SNIPPITS AND SNAPPITS: ISRAEL BORN OR TERRORISM, NOURISHED BY BLOOD

[Detailed citations for the above information are available at "The History of Israel-U.S. Relations, Part One."]