Singapore has been called the “Little Switzerland”, and also “Little Israel”. The 1st designation is meant to flatter, as Switzerland is well known for its hospitality, efficiency, food and that icon of precision and excellence, the Swiss Watch. One could say that Singaporean society is exquisitely crafted just like a Swiss Watch.
But what of the 2nd designation? It is an open secret that the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) system of conscription at 18 and reservist duty for 10 years is modeled upon that of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), and in the early days our soldiers were trained by IDF experts who came disguised as Mexican agricultural advisors to avoid offending the sensibilities of our neighbors. Reputedly, Lee Kuan Yew “opted for the Israeli pattern” after noting Israel’s success as a small country dealing with “larger neighbors”. To this day according to our government, Singapore’s “independence, survival and growth are always at risk” because we are surrounded by powerful neighbors, because we have no hinterland or natural resources, and also somewhat paradoxically, because we are a diverse and multi-cultural society vulnerable to “subtle” “hybrid threats” which “can target hearts and minds, and are aimed at breaking our social unity and resilience”.
The Malay Citizens of Singapore
There is a not-so-subtle subtext to the alleged threat posed by our own “diversity”, which is that the Malays who make up 13.5% of Singapore’s population are vulnerable to manipulation by external Islamist terror groups (I apologize for this ugly terminology, but there is no other commonly understood umbrella term for groups like ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah etc). Even less fortunately, our leaders often imply equivalences between Singapore’s Malay citizens and the 21% of Israel’s population who are Palestinian Arabs, in that both groups are susceptible to the perception of discrimination, and even to the belief that their land was stolen by Chinese and Jews respectively. Is there any validity to this comparison?
The Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel “have it far better” than their stateless cousins in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. But even these “lucky” Arabs are not equal citizens by any measure of the norms of the Western states which laud Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East”. According to Amnesty International, Arab Israelis are “effectively blocked from leasing on 80% of Israel’s state land as a result of racist land seizures and a web of discriminatory laws on land allocation, planning and zoning”. Since its founding in 1948, “Israel has demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian homes”. 35 Bedouin villages containing 68,000 people inside Israel are “unrecognized” and “cut off from healthcare and education”. “Israel’s treatment of Palestinians across all areas is pursuant to the same objective: to privilege Jewish Israelis in distribution of land and resources, and to minimize the Palestinian presence and access to land.” And since the outbreak of the current war in Gaza, Arab Israelis can be imprisoned for watching so-called “terror content” on their smartphones.
Notably, Israel gave up all pretense of equal citizens’ rights in 2018 with the enactment of the “Jewish Nation-State Law”, which states that “the state of Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people,” and “the fulfillment of the right of national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” Israel is certainly a democracy if you’re a Jew.
There is no doubt that Malays in Singapore face institutional discrimination, the standard bearer of which is the “Chinese-medium” SAP school system. Controversy exists over the tudung ban up to secondary public school. Malays are underrepresented in the Cabinet and the judiciary, and they are excluded from sensitive military sections such as Intelligence, the Navy and Air Force. A slight majority of Malays perceives discrimination against themselves during job interviews and “come promotion time”.
This is not the place to discuss these important issues. But it is worthwhile questioning whether the level and nature of discrimination faced by Singapore’s Malays is comparable to that faced by the Arab citizens of Israel.
It is interesting that the position of Malays in Singapore’s military is only slightly different from that of Arab Israelis, who are exempt from conscription, but may join the IDF voluntarily. Israel’s position is in fact more rational than Singapore’s. It is unlikely that an Arab Israeli would be willing to conduct a genocide against his brothers and sisters in neighboring Gaza, but were an Arab Israeli so patriotic towards Israel that he was willing to enlist in the IDF, it is likely that he would have no problem committing genocidal acts.
Singapore’s policy of including Malays in conscription but excluding them from sensitive postings is a hit-or-miss affair, and it is also irrational. Our government’s distrust of Malays dates to the era of communal riots which reached an apex in 1964, which coincided with the Indonesian-instigated Konfrontasi which included terrorist bombings in Singapore in 1965. Of these two separate strands of turmoil, the communal riots were seen as more existential, as the enemy lay within. Ordinarily, civil strife is dealt with by the police, not the military. But it was alleged that the chief instigators of Singaporean Malay discontent were in Malaysia, which had just expelled Singapore from the Federation, and hence there arose the specter of Malaysia as a potential national enemy, as well as the scenario of a 5th column of Singaporean Malays in the event of a military conflict with Malaysia.
There is a plethora of reasons why an armed conflict between Malaysia and Singapore does not merit a place on anyone’s radar screen. Despite the inevitable odd flare-up of a territorial dispute, Singapore is in a good neighborhood, and its self-avowed principal threat comes from “Islamist terror” groups which are also the enemies of our neighbors and of all devout law-abiding Muslims regardless of race or sect. By contrast, Israel has been massacring and maiming Palestinian women, children and elderly civilians in the West Bank and Gaza with gusto and without interruption since its founding in 1948, continually filling the reservoir of hatred towards itself with its matchless brutality and oppression of its “neighbors”, ensuring an inexhaustible supply of future generations of Palestinians committed to fighting Israel to the death. Singapore and Israel are moving in the opposite direction in the march of civilization. And yet our leaders somehow find it so hard to shake off the legacy of self-identification with the Jewish State.
The Myth of the Muscular Israeli
Israeli historian Nurit Peled-Elhanan: “The idea of Judaism at the beginning was to create a Jew with muscles, because the Jew of the diaspora was considered a weak, spiritual, effeminate man”, “despised for not fighting back and going like sheep to the slaughter” (of the Nazi Holocaust). The icon of the muscular Jew is complemented by the myth of a tiny nation honing its instruments of invincible self-reliance through being surrounded by people who wanted to harm it (Arab terrorists), and in the words of a Jewish friend of mine, “nobody gives a shit about poor little Israel”. In modeling the “Israeli pattern”, Lee Kuan Yew sought nothing less than the cultivation of muscular Singaporeans protecting a tiny nation standing alone and surrounded by powerful, potentially hostile neighbors.
The fatal flaw in our founder’s thinking is that while the Israelis may have succeeded over the years in overpowering their enemies through superior brute force, the means by which the State of Israel was founded and is maintained run counter to the norms of the post-world war II international order, which require “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion”, and prohibit “the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”
To this day, Israel is fully committed to the fool’s errand of killing and destroying its way to peace and security. But Palestinian families tend to be very large. When Israel wipes out 18members of a Palestinian family including 11 children aged from 2 to 22, it can be sure that the surviving children will become dedicated freedom fighters whom Israel will paint ever more unconvincingly as “terrorists”. When Israel kills the former political leader of Hamas and stupidly posts his last heroic moments before he is blown to pieces by a tank shell, it is simply creating the inspiration for a generation of Palestinians prepared to fight the Israelis without the fear of death.
Israel’s longstanding mistreatment of the Palestinian people is not merely counter-productive, it is also illegal. If Israel were any other country, the international community would long ago have crippled its economy with sanctions, applied arms embargos and even intervened militarily under the auspices of R2P - the “Responsibility to Protect populations from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing”. This means that Israel’s invincibility stems not from its muscularity, but from the impunity it enjoys. Israel could not survive without the special privileges, protections and dispensation from humanitarian law and ordinary human decency that it is consistently accorded by the Western powers acting in concert under the tutelage of the United States.
The Invention of Israel
The precedent-setting event for Israel’s boundless special protection by the world’s dominant power (at the time Britain) was the issuance of a document - the Balfour Declaration of 1917 - which consists of a single sentence: “His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The ideology which to this day confers to any Jew the right to settle in Israel is known as political Zionism or simply Zionism.
The Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as “the most improbable document of all time, where one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”, because Palestine at the time was a territory of the Ottoman Empire, not of Britain. Palestine was placed under British administration by the League of Nations only in 1922, a fact which attests to the uncanny ability of the world’s dominant power to foresee future decisions of supposedly multilateral world-representing institutions. The Balfour Declaration was emblematic not only of Britain’s God-like privilege, but also of Albion’s perfidy, for Britain had promised the same territory to 3 different parties. In 1915 Britain offered Sharif Hussein of Mecca support for an Arab state that included Palestine, in return for his rebellion against the Ottomans. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 provided for Palestine to be governed jointly by Britain, France, and Russia. And finally the Balfour Declaration “gave” Palestine to the Jewish people.
At the time of the Balfour Declaration, the population of Palestine consisted of 700,000 Arabs (both Muslims and Christians), and 60,000 Jews. Two thirds of the Jews were Ottoman citizens, i.e. Palestinian Jews who had been living peacefully with Palestinian Muslims and Christians for centuries. In the non-Zionist Jewish perspective, “even the distinction between Jew and Arab was difficult to make. Palestinian Jews were Arabs too.” According to the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, all of the Palestinian Arabs and half the Palestinian Jews, i.e. 95% of the population of Palestine, were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Palestine. Why then were the British so adamant in their support for it?
The Failure of the British Mandate
Before discussing the motivations of the various parties involved in the creation of the Jewish state, it is appropriate to explain Britain’s utter failure in fulfilling the terms of its mandate over Palestine.
After the end of World War I, national self-determination came into being as the foundational principle of international politics. It was the brainchild of the 28th US president Woodrow Wilson, firmly rooted in the principles of the American Declaration of Independence, and standing in stark opposition to the entrenched system of colonialism, whose moral justification lay in the purported burden of the “advanced races” to control the land and manage the affairs of indigenous peoples. To this day, Israeli settlers justify their appropriation of Palestinian lands by the claim that the Arabs neglected the land or grew inferior crops, and it was Jewish immigration that made possible the successful agriculture for which Israel is famous today. One may stop for a moment and ponder the rationality of Singapore’s self-identification with a colonial project.
The privileges of the colonial system included the right of war victors to plan the destinies of the colonies of the vanquished party. In the case of the Ottoman Empire which was on the losing side of World War I, this meant that in 1916 Britain and France gave themselves the authority to carve up the Ottoman territory of the Levant into the nations of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, well before the outcome of the war was decided, as it were “dividing the bear skin while the bear is still alive”.
The Europeans had failed to foresee the world’s embrace of the American model of national governance, but perhaps sensing the dominant influence that America would soon exercise on the world stage, they concocted the League of Nations with its system of Mandates which attempted to “reconcile the contradictions” between national self-determination and colonialism. The Mandate system rationalized its existence as a “sacred trust of civilization” wherein certain territories were placed under the “tutelage... of advanced nations”. The system further stratified the territories according to their stage of “advancement”. In the case of the most advanced Class A Mandates, “their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wish of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory.” The less advanced ‘B’ and ‘C’ mandates could be subject to the Mandatory’s rule far beyond mere “administrative advice and assistance”.
All the Arab territories of the former Ottoman Empire, including Palestine, were ‘A’ mandates. Hence the purpose of the Palestine Mandate was to advise and assist the territory in becoming an independent nation according to the wishes of its inhabitants and in line with the principle of national self-determination. But for some reason the British chose to incorporate the Balfour Declaration into the Mandate, or rather, giving itself two mutually irreconcilable mandates, one for the Palestinians and another for the Jews. In 1922, upon pressure from the Zionist Organization, the authority of the Mandatory was changed from “advice and assistance” to “full powers of legislation and of administration”, and the purpose of the Mandate was changed from stewarding the Palestinian nation on its path towards “standing alone”, to one of securing the establishment of a national home for Jewish immigrants in the land of Palestine.
In 1922, the number of Jews in Palestine had risen to 83,794. They were still only 11% of the total population. Hence, in order to arrive at the decorum of a state founded upon “self-determination”, there began the project to flood the territory of Palestine with immigrant Jews until such time as they constituted a majority of the population.
A sequence of Arab “revolts” and “uprisings” erupted in the ‘20s due to increasing unemployment and land scarcity caused by the influx of foreigners, and also in the words of the Shaw Commission in 1929, because of “a feeling of resentment among the Arab people of Palestine consequent upon their disappointment at the continued failure to obtain any measure of self-government.”
The years 1936 to 1939 were marked by “full scale rebellion” which the British put down with the help of Jewish auxiliaries. “At least 10% of the Palestinian male population were killed, wounded, exiled or imprisoned by the end of the revolt.” The Haganah, predecessor to the IDF, as well as much more extreme groups like the Irgun and the self-professedly terrorist Stern Gang, all came into being over the period of the rebellion.
Even as the British succeeded in overcoming the Palestinian Arab rebels, they were made ever more acutely aware of their responsibility for the strife and violence that plagued their Mandate. The Peel Commission noted in 1937 (italics mine):
“. . .To foster Jewish immigration in the hope that it might ultimately lead to the creation of a Jewish majority and the establishment of a Jewish State with the consent or at least the acquiescence of the Arabs was one thing. It was quite another thing to contemplate, however remotely, the forcible conversion of Palestine into a Jewish State against the will of the Arabs. For that would clearly violate the spirit and intention of the Mandate System. It would mean that national self-determination had been withheld when the Arabs were a majority in Palestine and only conceded when the Jews were a majority, it would mean that the Arabs had been denied the opportunity of standing by themselves: that they had, in fact, after an interval of conflict, been bartered about from Turkish sovereignty to Jewish sovereignty”.
The author of the Peel Commission admitted to a hidden fact that the Gaza genocide is finally exposing to the entire world today. A Palestinian life is simply not worth as much as a Jewish life, and whereas an Israeli death is the heartbreaking extinguishment of a vibrant human with his unique loves and dreams and aspirations, a Palestinian death is just a statistic.
The Peel Commission concluded:
“After studying the course of events in Palestine since the start of the war, we have no doubt as to what were the underlying causes. They were… the desire of the Arabs for national independence… their hatred and fear of the establishment of the. Jewish National Home… They were the same underlying causes which brought about the disturbances of 1920, 1921, 2929 and 1933. They were and always have been linked together…. They were the only underlying causes.”
The Britons’ solution to the intractable dilemma of their own making was the partition of Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with Jerusalem being placed under a League of Nations mandate. But the Zionist Organization rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the Arabs likewise rejected having a Jewish state on Palestinian soil. The prototype of the “two-state solution” thus came to a rapid end and was replaced by the Macdonald White Paperof 1939, which contained 3 earth-shattering measures:
1) A quota of 10,000 Jewish immigrants per year for the next 5 years.
2) Restrictions on Jewish settlement and land acquisition.
3) Constitutional measures that would lead to the end of the Mandate and a single state under Arab majority rule within 10 years, with provisions to protect the rights of the Jewish minority.
By 1939, large scale immigration facilitated by various organizations acting under the aegis of the Jewish Agency had swelled the number of Jews in Palestine to over 445,000, but they were still just 30% of the population. The British immigration quota allowed for only 75,000 Jewish immigrants over the next 5 years (including war refugees), and was clearly designed to prevent a Jewish majority from taking hold. Taking advantage of the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, the Zionist Organization lobbied in the US for “non-restrictive Aliyah” (unlimited immigration of Jews into Israel) and the creation of a Jewish state. David Ben-Gurion, the future 1st prime minister of Israel organized a program to bring 1 million Jews into Israel within 18 months.
At the same time, the Irgun and Stern Gang began a terror campaign against their new enemy, the British. They began with targeted killings of British officials. In August 1944, The High Commissioner “narrowly escaped death” in an ambush outside Jerusalem. 3 months later the British Minister of State in the Middle East was assassinated in Cairo by two members of the Stern group. The scope of Israeli terror escalated dramatically on the 22nd of July 1944 when the Stern Gang bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which contained the headquarters of the Government Secretariat as well as part of the military headquarters, killing 86 Arabs, Jews and British, including public servants and innocent bystanders. In October 1946, the Irgun blew upthe British Embassy in Italy, and a few months later the Stern Gang, now rebranded as the Lehi, drove an explosive-laden truck into the Haifa police station, killing 4 and injuring 142. A full list of Irgun terror attacks can be found here and those of the Lehi here.
The Jewish terror groups invented most of the terror methods that we know of today, including IEDs, car bombs, letter bombs, book bombs, coat bombs and explosive prostheses, building explosives, railway sabotage, convoy ambushes and village massacres.
By 1947, the British bowed out ungraciously from the disastrous failure of their Palestine Mandate, saying “we have decided that we are unable to accept the scheme put forward either by the Arabs or by the Jews, or to impose ourselves a solution of our own. We have, therefore, reached the conclusion that the only course now open to us is to submit the problem to the judgement of the United Nations.”
Israel – a European Problem
It is well known that Lord Balfour was antisemitic and saw the Zionist cause was a wonderful opportunity to cleanse Britain of its Jewish citizens. He was also contemptuous of Arabs, and the perfunctory reference to Palestinian civil rights in the Balfour Declaration was contradicted by his assertion in 1919 that “in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.” Balfour’s pure form of antisemitism, that is prejudice against the Semitic race regardless of religion, may be enough to explain his personal motivation in issuing his Declaration. But his views also represented those of his government. The single Jewish member of the British cabinet in 1917, Edward Montagu, wrote: “I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic and in result will prove a rallying ground for anti-Semites in every country in the world.” Montagu saw the encouragement of Jewish emigration as an extension of the restrictions of the Aliens Act of 1905, whose main purpose was allegedly to stop the influx of Jewish refugees from the pogroms of Russia, soon to be repeated in Ukraine and Poland.
According to the Jewish scholar Shlomo Sand, the overriding impetus for mass Jewish immigration to Israel was the US’ 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, aimed once again mainly at Jews, whom the chief architect of the Act, congressman Albert Johnson, described as “filthy, un-American, and often dangerous in their habits.”
What Montagu and Sand imply is that, though Zionists typically turn to the Old Testament as the authority for their claim to the land of Palestine, European Jews flooded into Israel primarily because they were denied immigration to their preferred destination or encouraged to leave the European countries where they had settled for centuries, and not because of their ancestral connection to the Land promised them by God. The mass immigration initiatives of Ben-Gurion and the Zionist Organization would have been ineffective without the precondition of Western antisemitism.
At the end of World War II, an appreciation of the full scale of the Holocaust arose in the Western political consciousness, and with it came a powerful new stimulus for the support of Zionism - collective guilt for the horrific apex of historical antisemitism that had been perpetrated by the Nazi régime. In the words of Israeli historian Ilan Pappé:
“Israel is the project that Europe has built in the last 19th century in order to solve a European problem, and Europe had a huge problem that lasted from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century. That problem was antisemitism. Europe was plagued by antisemitism which culminated in the genocide of the Jews during the Holocaust. And the European solution for a European problem was to build a Jewish state in Palestine through the dispossession of the Palestinians. If you think about it, it’s illogical, immoral and it’s not practical. The fact that it has survived so long has a lot to do with the support of the West which did not want to face its own racism, and also because it served some ideas among Christian Zionists. And unfortunately while this support was gained, more oppression, colonialism and ethnic cleansing were directed against the Palestinians.”
But it took a key player outside of Europe to realize the European solution to a European problem. The United Nations (UN) had replaced the beleaguered League of Nations in 1943, with the main difference between the two organizations being that the UN included and would become dominated by the US, which had also replaced Britain as the primus inter pares of the Western world. As of February 2024, The US has wielded its veto in the UN Security Council (UNSC) 45 times to shield Israel from official condemnations and coercive measures, with Britain and France serving as faithful appendages by abstaining in these resolutions.
But the picture was not always so clear cut. While Winston Churchill was a staunch Zionist, his opposite number in the US, Franklin Roosevelt, assured the Saudi king Faisal that he would “take no action… which might prove hostile to the Arab people”, and that as long as he were president, “the dream of the Jewish people of return to their homeland would not be fulfilled.” However, Roosevelt passed away 7 days after giving this assurance and was succeeded by his vice president, Harry Truman, a figure who would prove to be instrumental in establishing the state of Israel.
American Support and Israeli Terror
When the British handed over the Palestine problem to the UN, there were 1.2 million Arabs and 600,000 Jews living in Palestine. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was set up to deal with the question of Palestine. After a great deal of internal dispute, the problem of the disposition of the European Jews living in refugee camps was folded into the purview of UNSCOP. The blatant reality was that no country in Europe or anywhere else was willing to take them, and so UNSCOP opted by majority vote for the 1937 British plan for the partition of Palestine, though at terms far more generous to the Jews than the British had envisaged.
The UNSCOP partition plan allocated 56.47% of Palestine to the Jews who made up one-third of the population, 42.88% to the Arabs, and 0.65% comprising Jerusalem, Bethlehem and their environs to an international mandate. Moreover, the Jewish state was to be territorially contiguous, while the 3 sections of Arab territory were discontinuous.
The UNSCOP partition plan was submitted to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as a resolution for approval. There was controversy over the UNGA’s legal competence to partition a nation. A move to refer the matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) failed by one vote. As the resolution needed a 2/3 majority to pass, hesitant members became subject to “intense pressure from the Truman administration”. At least 3 countries who had previously opposed the resolution voted in favor, as did others who had previously declared their intention to abstain. In the end, the UNGA passed Resolution 181 by a vote of 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions (including the United Kingdom), dividing the nation of Palestine into two states according to the terms of the UNSCOP partition plan.
Harry Truman was the sine qua non of the passing of the resolution. In fulfilling this role he expressly contravened the advice given him by the CIA, which included the following prescient analysis m(italics mine):
“Armed hostilities will break out between the Jews and Arabs if the UN General Assembly accepts the plan to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states as recommended by UNSCOP…
The US, by supporting partition, has already lost much of its prestige in the Near East. In the event that partition is imposed on Palestine, the resulting conflict will seriously disturb the social, political and economic stability of the Arab world, and US commercial and strategic interests will be dangerously jeopardized…
Despite the fact that Arabs and Jews have lived peacefully side by side, determination to make Palestine an independent Arab state is strong in all the Arab states, from the more educated and ambitious classes down to the poorest and most politically naïve peasants. Arab national fervor is so explosive and pervasive a force that Arab government officials who recognize the political implications involved in flouting a UN decision will nevertheless have to oppose any decision for partition or run the risk of losing office…
The Zionists will continue to wage a strong propaganda campaign in the US and in Europe. The “injustice” of the proposed Jewish boundaries will be exaggerated, and the demand for more territory will be made as Jewish immigration floods the Jewish sector. In the chaos which will follow the implementation of partition, atrocities will undoubtedly be committed by Arab fanatics; such events will be given wide publicity and will even be exaggerated by Jewish propaganda. The Arabs will be accused of aggression, whatever the actual circumstances may be…
If the UN recommends partition, it will be morally bound to take steps to enforce partition, with the major powers acting as instruments of enforcement. The dangerous potentialities of such a development to US-Arab and US-USSR relations need no emphasis…”
The Nakba (The Catastrophe)
Resolution 181 passed on November 27th 1947. As the CIA predicted, the entire Arab world rejected the decision and war broke out immediately. The Arab forces were a motley crew of Palestinian militias and Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Jordanian and Egyptian military units, which together lacked proper military coordination. The Arab heads of state were beset with division and intrigue. King Abdullah of Jordan presented himself as the leader of the Arabs, but he held secret talks with the Jews, was not particularly interested in establishing a Palestinian state, and was mostly concerned with annexing the West Bank to Jordan. “The ex-Mufti of Jerusalem hatedKing Abdullah with a bitter hatred, while King Farouk’s principal complaint against his Allies was that some of their contingents displayed bigger flags than did the Egyptians!”
The Jews were much more united, better organized and secretly supplied with Western arms. Though nominally neutral, France permitted air transit of arms shipments from Czechoslovakia to Israel, while cancelling its own existing arms contracts with Syria. By the autumn of 1948, the Haganah had transformed into the IDF, and the Israeli Air Force (IAF) had established air superiority, with many foreign volunteer pilots who were World War II veterans.
But there was more to this war than simply soldiers killing soldiers. In November 1947, Jews made up 60% of the future Jewish state, a number which Ben-Gurion told his colleagues was “not viable”.
What the CIA did not foresee was that the Israeli leadership would take advantage of the cover of war to reduce the Palestinian population in the territory allocated to Israel, and they would achieve this goal through civilian expulsion and mass atrocities. The 1st phase of the campaign to cleanse Israel of Palestinians ran from December 1947 through February 1948. It targeted both the city élites in Haifa and the peasants of the surrounding villages, ultimately forcing thousands to flee.
The 2nd phase of ethnic cleansing began with the formal adoption of the Plan Dalet, a military blueprint for winning the war and defending the borders of the Jewish state.
Plan Dalet called for “gaining control of the areas of Jewish settlement and concentration which are located outside the borders [of the Hebrew state] against regular, semi-regular, and small forces operating from bases outside or inside the state”. That is, long before the occupationof Palestine that followed the 6-day War of 1967, the Israeli leadership was already intent on controlling territory beyond its borders in the name of self-defense.
Self-defense was also invoked as the justification for ethnic cleansing through the following methods:
“Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the. armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
The Plan Dalet articulated two strategic goals that went far beyond the scope of Resolution 181. As the CIA had predicted, the Jews were not satisfied with the 56.75% of Mandatory Palestine that had been allocated to them. The CIA was mistaken in thinking that the Jews would appeal to the world’s conscience over the “injustice” of the boundaries of the Jewish state. Rather, Israeli propaganda is founded on the thesis of “Arab aggression” and the enduring trope that Israel is surrounded by “terrorists” whose sole purpose is to harm Israel. Hence the justification for Israel’s continual invasion, occupation and control of areas not only of Palestine, but also of Jordan, Eqypt, Syria and Lebanon, while the execrable fiction that its enemies hide among the civilian population is constantly adduced to justify the periodic leveling of entire city blocks by carpet bombings with 2,000 lb. munitions, among other mass atrocities which the Israelis call “mowing the grass”.
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