Zionism's sordid history

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I'm especially pleased to be able to speak to a forum of Socialist Action, not only because 1 sympathize with both of those words but in particular with the organization that bears the name.

Much has been said lately about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which culminated in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila. Much was made of the Kahan report, the official nominal inquiry on the part of the Israeli authorities of that series of massacres in the Palestinian camps in Beirut-massacres, by the way, which followed upon like events throughout the Lebanese south.

There are mass graves in the Palestinian camps in Ain el Helwehi and Rashidiya. There is a mass grave adjacent to the government hospital in Saida. There is a mass grave at the crossroads that lead to Suhr or Tyre coming from the town of Saida just facing the St. Joseph Convent School where so many of the Palestinian and Lebanese detainees were subjected to torture.

According to the Kahan report, the Israeli authorities were guilty at best of a certain laxity. But even the bourgeois media had to present some of the facts about what really happened. London's Sunday Times of Sept. 26, 1982, stated that, "This carefully pre-planned military operation to purge the camps (Sabra and Shatila) was called Moah Barzel, Iron Brain. The plan was familiar to Sharon and Begin and was part of Sharon's larger plan...discussed by the Israeli cabinet on July 17."

Time Magazine of Oct. 4, 1982, reported that, "Top Israeli officers planned many months ago to enlist the Lebanese Forces, made up of the combined Christian militias headed by Bechir Gemayel, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps once an Israeli encirclement of West Beirut had been completed." And according to Ha'aretz of Sept. 26, 1982, "The aim was to create a panic to convince all the Palestinians of Lebanon that they were no longer safe in that country."

On July 23, 1982, Major Saqr of the Lebanese Phalange, also known as Abu Arz, gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post. "It is the Palestinians we have to deal with. Ten years ago there were 84,000; now there are between 600,000 and 700,000. In six years they will be two million. We can't let it come to that," he said. When asked by the Jerusalem Post how he would "solve" this, Major Saqr replied, "Very simple. We shall drive them to the borders of "brotherly" Syria. Anyone who looks back, stops or returns will be shot on the spot."

After the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, Major Saqr held a press conference in Jerusalem in which he took responsibility for the slaughter, declaring that "no one has the right to criticise us; we carried out our duty, our sacred responsibility. •99 Well, one of the colleagues of Major Saqr gave an interview to Der Spiegel, called "Each of You is an Avenger" on Feb. 14, 1983. He said:

"It was Wednesday, the 15th of September. Some days before our leader, Bechir Gemayel, had fallen victim to murderers. We were approximately 300 men from East Beirut, south Lebanon, and the Akkar Mountains in the north— almost all members of the Phalange militia. All of us wore their uniform, including those who, like I, belonged to the Tiger Militia of ex-President Camille Chamoun. Phalange officers had summoned us and brought us to the meeting place. They told us that they needed us for a "special action." Then a good Ralph Schoenman is presently the director of the Committee in Defense of the Palestinian and Lebanese Peoples. He is the former executive director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation.

14 Socialist Action March 1984 dozen Israelis in green uniforms without indication of rank came along.

"Our officers told us that we had the honorable task of freeing Lebanon of its last enemies. We were to comb the camps and take prisoner all able-bodied men. We were quite proud. The next afternoon our group met once again. We had to swear an oath never to divulge anything about our action.

"At about 10 p.m. we climbed into an American army truck that the Israelis had given over to us. We parked the vehicle near the airport tower. There, immediately next to the Israeli positions, several such trucks were already parked. bodies, shot and stabbed all eye witnesses. What else could you do? Killing others is easy once you have done it a few times.

"Now came the first Israeli army bulldozers. "Plow everything under the ground," the Israelis said. "Don't let any witnesses stay alive."

Now the atrocities committed by the Zionist state against the Palestinian people in Sabra and Shatila did not constitute some sort of abnormal excess on their part. The very Zionist state is predicated upon the eradication of the national existence of the Palestinian people. We can see this clearly by reviewing PEACE identity, nationhood, existence, right to hold property, right to labor on the land, right to exist as a national organized community, right to have any cultural, social, political, historical claim to the land in which they lived.

The decision to partition Palestine joined in by the leading imperialist powers and the Soviet Union gave 50 percent of the fertile land to the Jewish population-—to the Zionist movement— but before the state of Israel was established the Irgun and the Haganah had already seized three-quarters of the land and expelled virtually all of the inhabitants.

In 1948 there were 475 Palestinian villages and towns. Of these, 385 were razed to the ground and 90 remained stripped of their land. Today, some 93 percent of the land in what is called the state of Israel is administered by the Jewish National Fund under the following rules:

"In order to be entitled to live on land, to lease land or to work on land, you must prove that you have a Jewish mother, grandmother and great grandmother."

The Israeli government's Koenig Report stated this policy even more bluntly: "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." (Al Hamishmard Sept. 7, 1976)

Zionist-Nazi collaboration There is another important aspect of Zionism which has been purposefully hidden from world public opinion. And this is the fact that the early Zionists and later the entire history of the state of Israel has been replete with collaboration with the most explicit advocates of antisemitic racism.

This is true of Herzel and Weizman who swore to the Russian czar that they would help rid Eastern Europe and Russia of those "noxious and subversive Anarcho-Bolshevik Jews." And it was the leaders of the Zionist movement who