As the anniversary of the establishment of Israel approaches, it is useful to recall the pattern of deception behind Israeli policies, writes William A. Cook* As Israel attempts today to gloss over the reality of its birth 62 years ago with a sweeping public-relations campaign extolling the miraculous "resurrection" of ancient Zion in contemporary times, a new nation seeking only peace with its neighbours, it might be enlightening and valuable to examine the truth. On 14 May 1948 US president Harry S Truman received a letter from the Jewish Agency for Palestine announcing the impending proclamation of the independent state of Israel (Harry S Truman Library, document filed 22 August 1949). That date marks not only the beginning of the state of Israel but, submissa voce, the assumption by the state of Israel of the calculated, systematic and determined ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population of the land of Palestine that had been the business of "The Consultancy" and its agents before 14 May as identified by Ilan Pappe in his monumental book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. The letter notes that the state has been established within "frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of 29 November 1947, and that a provisional government has been charged to assume the rights and duties of government for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel, for defending the state against external aggression, and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law." The letter was signed by Eliahu Epstein, Agent, Provisional Government of Israel. The letter is notable not for what it announces, but for what it does not reveal. Truth requires the revelation of all the facts, not concealment by omission of that which would prejudice proper understanding. During the six months between the adoption of UN Resolution 181 and the date of this letter, and in subsequent months, the prospective state of Israel launched a massive military incursion into territory designated by that same resolution for the Palestinian people, creating in its wake "three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees," the destruction of "hundreds of entire villages... not only depopulated but obliterated... and houses blown up or bulldozed," as noted by Walid Khalidi in his All that Remains. Khalidi's massive study focuses on 418 villages, once the homes of Palestinians, 292 of which were completely destroyed, 90 others "largely destroyed", and the remainder re- inhabited by Jews called Israeli settlers. In blunt terms, the Jewish Agency for Palestine lied to the US president when it said that it had established a provisional government that "has been charged to assume the rights and duties... for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel... and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law." The agency's deception made no reference either to the president or the international community that it had created the "Catastrophe", or as the Palestinians termed it, the Nakba, being the days of infamy that created what has become the largest Diaspora of refugees in the world and a time of remembrance for those killed in a series of massacres, estimated at 24 by Benny Morris, Israel's pre-eminent historian of that period. Indeed, the agency had acted against international law in invading Palestinian land as designated by the very resolution that had given it the right to a state of Israel, even as it lied without remorse to the international community when it said that it would live in accordance with international law. The 14 May 1948 letter, coupled with an earlier one to the US president dated 10 May 1948, serves as a microcosm of the political deceit characteristic of the Zionist-led forces that controlled the nascent state of Israel. This second letter from the Nation Associates, the organisation behind the publication of the US Nation magazine, notified the US president of the following: "Tomorrow morning, The Washington Post will carry, in the form of a full-age [sic] advertisement, the text of an open letter to you requesting the implementation of the November 29 resolution on Palestine... I have been requested to send you the enclosed text of this open letter by the signators... It is our hope that in the week which remains before the end of the British Mandate, action will be taken by you to insure the recognition of the Jewish state as a means of maintaining the prestige of this country, the authority of the United Nations, and peace in the Middle East" (signed by Freda Kirchwey, president, of a document available at the Truman Library). The Nation Associates supported the establishment of the state of Israel and used its publishing arm to further that goal. The "open letter" referred to above argued against moves by "the British and our own State Department" to "sabotage" the partition resolution despite the president's determined effort to support Israel. Indeed, the Associates went so far as to publish "The British Record on Partition" in The Nation, America's leading liberal weekly, on 8 May 1948, detailing a selective reading of "British Military Intelligence Sources". This document was simultaneously submitted to a special session of the General Assembly of the United Nations. The open letter published in The Washington Post at the same time amounted to a synopsis of this larger document, including its primary argument that "there was no reason why the Jewish state could not be set up [if the Arabs resisted partition] and the Arab area turned over to the Trusteeship Council." Note that this argument was being made even as the Jewish Agency and its affiliates were driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and villages and massacring untold thousands in the area designated for the Palestinians and recommended to be turned over to the Trusteeship Council. The open letter cited an amendment to the UN Resolution inserted by Truman's representative, Herschel Johnson. "The Security Council," this read, "should determine as a threat to peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, in accordance with Article 29 of the Charter, any attempt to alter by force the settlement envisaged by this resolution." Yet, no mention is made here of the invasion by Jewish forces of the towns and villages in the area designated for the Palestinians. Rather, the Nation Associates allege that it was the British Mandate government that had supported the Arab League against Israel since 1945, "under the direction of Foreign Minister Bevin, [who has] resisted every American proposal for a decent settlement of the Palestinian question." "This was true," the letter continues, "in 1946 when he refused to accept the proposal of the Anglo-American Committee and your own, for the admission into Palestine of 100,000 Jews." What is left unsaid by the Associates is the British promise to the Arabs in the 1917 Balfour Declaration that Britain would maintain a strict ratio of Jews entering Palestine to the indigenous population, the second of the Balfour Declaration's promises never referenced as the companion piece to the establishment of a "home" for the Jews in Palestine. Now the strategy of the Zionists in manipulating the US president can be seen. This consisted of: the advance publication of a major document detailing British subterfuge in eroding the possibility of establishing a Jewish state sent to the United Nations, thereby placing blame for the deterioration of conditions in Palestine on the British; a subsequent letter to the US president informing him that a public "open letter" would be published in The Washington Post detailing subversion of the Jewish people, placing him in the unenviable position of not aiding the "victims" of this subversion or carrying through with recognition of the Jewish state "as a means of maintaining the prestige of this country"; and another letter, this time from the Jewish Agency for Palestine on the 14th, seeking his recognition by "welcoming Israel into the community of nations" with no reference to the breaching of international law by the very agency seeking his support. Control and manipulation of events regarding Palestine has been and continues to be the modus operandi of the Zionist leaders of the state of Israel. The above letters to US president Truman offer insight into this manipulation. Moreover, Truman was acting on behalf of the American people in recognising the state of Israel on 15 May 1948, at a time when what the American people knew was the suffering of the Jews under Hitler and the apparent logic of the United Nations partition plan to provide a state for the two peoples residing in Palestine. What they did not know was that the Zionist entity had different goals and that there was a will to deceive the citizens of America in order to achieve them. But the American people were not alone in being deceived. More important was the deception of the British people about these "disappeared years", as British journalist Robert Fisk terms them. What's missing is the perspective of the Palestinians and the British mandate government. The United Kingdom had mandatory authority from the League of Nations to govern Palestine with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922, an action that imposed a Western colonial mindset on the area. Prior to the official implementation of the mandate, the British government had enunciated a "declaration" concerning the desire of His Majesty's government regarding the "establishment of a national home for the Jewish people," called the Balfour Declaration, in 1917. Discussions that resulted in the final text of the Balfour Declaration clarify the intention behind its wording. The use of the words "national home" was used intentionally instead of "state". Additionally, the first draft of the declaration referred to the principle "that Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people." In the final text, this was replaced in order to avoid committing all of Palestine to the Jews. Between 1939 and 1947, the mandate government found it more and more difficult to maintain its position as a responsible governing force for the Arab population and the growing Jewish population, determining by 1947 that these two populations could not coexist. As a result, the British government placed the resolution of the problem in the hands of the United Nations. That in turn resulted in a partition plan for Palestine, proposed in November 1947 to the UN General Assembly, to be implemented in May 1948, 62 years ago this May. British authority in Palestine continued under the United Nations until the implementation of the partition plan in May 1948. Consequently, the mandate government had to abide by the charter of the UN and its conventions. Ironically, as the Zionist forces, estimated by Jewish Agency personnel in documents seized by the mandate police at 20 to 60,000, continued their massacres of Palestinians into 1948, the UN debated the adoption of a convention defining "genocide" based on Nuremberg principles, a definition approved that same year. In 1944 the term "genocide" first appeared in Raphael Lemkin's Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, created out of the conditions that allowed for Nazi actions against those suffering in German concentration camps. Therefore, once the state of Israel was created by the Jewish leaders by the declaration of 14 May 1948, and, subsequently, was recognised for membership of the UN in 1949, it was expected to abide by UN conventions. The United Nations does not appropriate to itself the authority to create states. The United Nations is only authorised to recognise states for membership, states that are formed or proclaimed by the people of the said states. What should be obvious by now, after the carefully researched and scholarly work of Ilan Pappe in his Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and the equally well-researched work of Benny Morris in his Righteous Victims, both based on recently released evidence from Israeli archives and those of the Israel Defence Forces Archives, complemented now with materials preserved by Sir Richard Catling, to be made available in The Plight of the Palestinians in June, is the truth about the creation of the state of Israel. The acceptance of UN Resolution 181 by the Jewish Agency Provisional Government as the designated Jewish state was not done with the intent to abide by the goals of the UN General Assembly to provide a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine, but was rather to use it as a means of subterfuge to gain eventual control of all the land and cleanse it of its indigenous people to whatever extent possible. Put bluntly, what was true then is true today. The current government in Israel continues the practices of past Israeli governments, cleansing the land of its rightful inhabitants to make that land part of the Jewish state. This is what is termed, "slow-motion genocide", not, one would hope, a civilised policy to be extolled either by the Israelis or the international community. * The writer is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in Southern California. His books include Tracking Deception: Bush's Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, and the forthcoming The Plight of the Palestinians.
