Condemning the occupation

Richard Flantz, Wilsons Creek


Under the headline “In Defence of Israel” (Echo, January 18, 2017) Vic Alhadeff and Michael Burd barefacedly repeated Zionist lies about Israel’s foundation and its occupation of Palestine.

Responding to FastBuck$’ letter of a week earlier, Alhadeff accused him of ‘wild claims’, the most ‘egregious’ of which was ‘that “Israel was founded on terrorism”; it was in fact founded by a majority vote of the General Assembly of the United Nations.’

This is the first lie, repeated by Burd: ‘If the Arabs [had] accepted the umpire’s decision – United Nations Resolution 181, which Australia supported, one state for the Jews and one state for the Arabs […] then the Palestinian Arabs would have their own state today.’

But FastBuck$ is closer to the truth. The Zionist State of Israel was NOT founded by the UN. Indeed preceded by terrorist acts, it was established unilaterally, by the Zionist-dominated ‘People’s Council’ of the Jewish colonies in Palestine – concurrently with massive acts of conquest, dispossession and expulsion of indigenous Palestinians.

The way the UN works, the General Assembly could and did only recommend its Partition Plan to the Security Council, requesting that it ‘take the necessary measures’ to implement it, and calling ‘upon the inhabitants of Palestine to take such steps as may be necessary to put this plan into effect’.

But the Security Council did not ‘take the necessary measures”.

Nor did the ‘inhabitants of Palestine’ – around 70% of whom were Arabs, who owned over 80% of the land  – ‘take such steps as may be necessary’. How could they have accepted such an inequitable plan that allotted almost 60% of Palestine to a “Jewish state”?

Burd also refers to the invasion of ‘millions of Arabs’ after the Zionist state was declared, ignoring the fact that the Zionists were aware of the Arab states’ ultimatum that they would intervene, and declared their state nevertheless, confident in their own military superiority, and seeing it as a pretext for conquering more land than was allocated to them in the Partition Plan.

There are more lies in these two letters than space allows in this response. But FastBuck$ too can’t be left of the hook for one thing: He writes that ‘there are many Jews who would kill any Arab on sight’, adding ‘How sad it is that the Jews, of all people, would be so lacking in insight and empathy’.

No. Like many others, here FastBuck$ disseminates the basically anti-Semitic, but also Zionist, conflation of the nation of Jewish Israelis with ‘the Jews’, even though the majority of Jews in the world are citizens of other countries, and many of them, like myself, condemn the Zionist occupation of Palestine.