TITLE AND SOVEREIGNTY: A SUBTLE DIFFERENCE THAT ZIONISTS WHO BUY LAND IN THE WEST BANK DON’T SEEM TO UNDERSTAND

If an immigrant community of, say, Papua New Guineans settled in Australia buying up large tracts of land, would they then be able to demand that the land they have bought title to be turned over to Papua New Guinean sovereignty subject to PNG laws, government and judiciary?

If the Papua New Guineans (or whoever) were to follow neocon Zionist Daniel Pipes’ logic then the answer is ‘yes’ they would be able to – not, of course, that the Australian government would accede to such demands.

In a recent article in National Review Online titled Not stealing Palestine, But Purchasing Israel, Pipes argues that Israel has been created as much as a result of Zionists purchasing land before the UN partitioned Palestine to create Israel in 1948, as was by occupation after a period of war.

Pipes argues that during the war of 1948/49 most Arabs fled their lands” and that “exceedingly few were forced off”. This is typical Pipes chutzpah. Why did they flee their lands? They fled because they feared being killed as the Israelis moved in, which in many places, as historians like Illan Pappe documents, is exactly what happened to many Palestinians. Fleeing before an advancing enemy with no right of return is the same as being ‘forced out’.

Pipes confines his argument to the purchase of lands prior to the creation of Israel when those lands did indeed revert to Israeli sovereignty. But he frames his argument in a somewhat deceitful way. He infers that Zionists bought all of the lands that became Israel in 1948 “acquiring property dunam by dunam, farm by farm, house by house”. This is complete nonsense. In reality only a small proportion of the land was purchased by Zionists. The rest was acquired by intimidation and force of arms. In short, it was the Arab states that attempted to put a hold on Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people rather than the Israelis being attacked by them. Right-wing Zionists have been pushing the lie that Israel was ‘attacked’ by the Arab states around them for years but, as Pappe shows, history and the facts tell an entirely different story.

During the period since the 1967 war, the Israeli government, through the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and the Israeli Lands Administration, purchased land in the Occupied Territories. At first, private purchasers were not allowed to purchase land in the Territories in order to avoid speculation but by 1979 these rules were relaxed and Israeli and Jewish developers were allowed to purchase land in the Occupied Territories. Many cases of trickery and outright intimidation as a means of purchasing land have been reported since. However, by far the greatest amount of land ceded to Israeli hands is that which Israel has acquired by simple expropriation and by military requisition.

The question now is: Does Israel intend at some stage in the future, possibly just prior to the Palestinian Authority’s attempt to get Palestine unilaterally recognised as a sovereign state at the UN, to annex all of the West Bank settlements to Israeli sovereignty based on title ownership or will the Israelis invade and fully occupy the West Bank under Israeli military governance, or will they do both.

The point here is; regardless of how much land people from one nation own elsewhere in other nations, title to that land does not, as Pipes and other Zionists suggest, confer sovereignty to the nation that the owners of that title are nationalities of.

Many Paua New Guineans live in communities in Australia but they live here either as permanent residents retaining their own nationality or as Australian citizens; either way they are subject to Australian sovereignty and Papua New Guinean.

One wonders what makes Zionists think that they are exempt from these norms?



Note

Folks interested in reading further on this subject should read George E. Bisharat’s in-depth scholarly article: Land, Law and Legitimacy in Israel and the Occupied Territories linked to above and here.

ISRAEL’S HISTORY OF CONCOCTED WARS OF EXPANSIONISM: PREPARING FOR THE FINAL CONFRONTATION.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Israel is preparing itself in a big way for war. Recent reports suggest that this war will be against Hamas, Hizbollah and Syria. Naturally, al Qaeda’s name has also been thrown in for good measure. Significantly, Iran hasn’t been mentioned in terms of war directly between Israel and Iran, at least not in the same context as a war against Hamas, Hizbollah and Syria, though the Israeli Air Force has been training hard separately from Israeli ground and naval forces for long range missions.

This has lead to speculation that a joint Israel/US operation is in the offing, hence the long range air force training, while the war against Hamas, Hizbollah and Syria will ostensibly be what they will term as a ‘defensive’ war as they respond to Hamas, Hizbollah and Syrian attacks that are in fact retaliatory after the Israeli/US attack on Iran – in short; planned escalation to achieve an end.

Ilan Pappe wrote:

“Clashes with Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948”. (1)

Over the last sixty odd years, nothing at all has changed! The Zionists still attack the Arab peoples based on what they tell the world is a ‘defensive retaliation’. The attacks on both the Gaza and Lebanon in June and August 2006 were based on three of their soldiers being captured yet it is abundantly clear that these attacks on the Gazan people and the people of Lebanon, particularly in the south, were meticulously planned long before their soldiers were captured. According to World Tribune piece the Israelis are simply waiting for the next casus belli to make their move: “Israeli military intelligence has projected that a major attack could come from any of five adversaries in the Middle East. Officials said such a strike could spark a war as early as July 2007.”

Naturally, if there is no casus belli forthcoming then one could always rely on the Zionists to concoct one. The difference this time is that this war really could be the war to end all wars!


ENDNOTE
(1) Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (Oxford: Oneworld Publications Ltd., 2007.) p. xii.

THE CHICKEN AND EGG ANALOGY APPLIED TO THE GAZA/ISRAEL CONFLICT.

The Western mainstream media propaganda is portraying the Gaza/Israel conflict as one that the Palestinians, Hamas in particular, started. For example, in today’s New York Times there is an article which says: “Tens of thousands of Gazans protested Israel’s repeated raids to halt persistent Palestinian rocket attacks…“

It explicitly says that Israel is bombing and killing Palestinians because of the rockets that Hamas is launching into Israel. The reality is; Hamas is launching rockets into Israel in order to get the Israelis to stop killing Palestinians in the Gaza.

Let’s be clear about this; the Israelis were killing Palestinians in the Gaza long before the Palestinians started launching rockets at the Israelis.

The Israelis began killing Palestinians in 1947 when they began their ethnic cleansing of the Arab peoples out of Palestine in order to create the Zionist state of Israel. But not content with just the lands allotted to them by the UN in their totally misguided decision to partition Palestine, the Israeli Zionists wanted more – and still do.

Their long-term aim is to create a Greater Israel that includes the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank (or, as the Israelis call it, Judea and Sumaria) and, if they can get away with it after having tried twice before, southern Lebanon up to the Litani River; a Greater Israel that is free of all Palestinian Arabs.

Up until now the Israeli Zionists have always managed to hoodwink the West into believing that any actions they take against Palestinians and Arabs is as a reaction to actions the Palestinians or Arabs made first. This is a complete and utter myth. As the Israeli historian Illan Pappe wrote: “Clashes with Palestinian militias provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine. The Zionist policy was first based on retaliation against Palestinian attacks in February 1947, and it transformed into an initiative to ethnically cleanse the country as a whole in March 1948”.(1)

Nothing has changed.

A classic example is the last war Israel launched against the Lebanese people in 2006. They claimed that they attacked Hezbollah and the Lebanese people because Hezbollah had captured an Israeli soldier. Pure nonsense. The Israelis had planned their attack on Lebanon months before their soldier was captured.

Today the Israeli Zionists are claiming they are attacking the Palestinians in the Gaza to stop the Palestinian fighters launching rockets against Israel. This is rubbish. The Israelis are attacking the Palestinian people in the Gaza for the same reason that they’ve always attacked the Palestinian people in the Gaza – in order to eventually squeeze them out.

Even the ordinary Israeli people are slowly starting to wake up to what’s going on. It’s about time the rest of the western world did too!


ENDNOTE

(1) Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (Oxford: Oneworld Publications Ltd., 2007.) p. xii.

A FOLLOW UP TO WILL HOWARD’S LIES

The extent to which a blogger on the left, such as my self, is having an effect on the right can be measured by the extent to which the right respond on their blogs. The more response, and the more vehement the response, then the greater the indication that ones left wing comments are hitting home – in short, they’re worried that people will actually be swayed by the lefts argument as against their own. Of course, for most on the right, argument doesn’t actually exist; they have no ideas of their own, they simply react to ideas that they don’t agree with by insulting the left-winger and hoping that the insults will be just too unbearable and be enough to stop the left blogger having a go at the right-wingers.

Yesterday I targeted Will Howard’s lies – again. His response was entirely predictable. Apart from the insults – which is fine, after all I have insulted him by calling him a liar – there is the non-existent rebuttal which consists of ‘everyone knows the Arabs attacked the Jews in Palestine in 1948’ neglecting to mention in classic Zionist propaganda style the fact that the Arabs attacked the Jews in Palestine only because the Zionists were attacking the Palestinians as their well-planned and deliberate ethnic cleansing program got under way in 1947. (The bottom line is, and one can’t help but notice it, is the fact that it is Israelis that are now living in places that were once lived in by Palestinians; not the other way round.) As I’ve mentioned before, this trait of Zionists accusing their enemies of casting the first stone in order to justify their actions as they pursue their dream of creating a Greater Israel is nothing new. David Ben-Gurion and his so-called ‘Consultancy’ of ultra Zionists and thugs in the Irgun and Stern Gang have been practicing this method of lies and deceit since 1947.

Will Howard asks for evidence, though provides none to support his own ‘claims’, yet the evidence is there for all to see in the official documents. No one is saying that atrocities were not committed by the Zionists as they expelled the Palestinians from their homes but Zionist propagandist and apologists like Will Howard do try minimising the extent of those atrocities defending such actions as retaliatory. Historians like Pappe and Finkelstein have broken away from the tradition of Israeli historians trying to brush their inglorious past under the carpet and have exposed the historical truth of what the Zionists really did to the Palestinians in the name of creating a Greater Israel. Apologists, liars and deceivers like Will Howard, Geoff Pahoff and others can foam and carry on with all the insults and garbage they like, it doesn’t in the least bit detract from the reality of the Ziononazis crimes against the Palestinian people. Even those that some consider more left-leaning and aren’t as vehement as these two loons, like Michael Park at Heidelberg’s blog, are sucked in to this frenzy of denial and reduced to simply levelling insults and no argument.

The world is waking up to these realities and the liars and deceivers that are Zionist propagandists know it; hence whole tirades of right-wing denial and insults against those that seek and reveal the truth (not to mention whole threads on these hate-sites devoted to, in this case, me). The more the right-wing Islamophobic warmongers and lunatics from hate sites like Tim Blair and Harry Heidelberg/David Davis froth and foam denial and insults then the more we on the left can rest assured that our exposure of the truth is hitting home.