“A voluntary agreement between us and the Arabs of Palestine is inconceivable now or in the foreseeable future…Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement …Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force behind an iron wall, which they will be powerless to breakdown.”
—Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of Revisionist Zionism, “The Iron Wall,” 1923
“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader, I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country …So, it’s simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there.”
—David Ben-Gurion, first Israeli prime minister, quoted in Nahum Goldman’s “The Jewish Paradox,” 1956
The failure of the Israeli military to achieve victory in its 34-day, U.S.-backed war against Lebanon has created a crisis
|
The Lebanese resistance punched a hole in Israel’s “iron wall”—the widely held perception of Israeli military invincibility. Despite lacking an air force, navy and tanks, they fought the high-tech Israeli army to a standstill inside southern Lebanon, causing heavy casualties among the invaders. Such military reverses have been rare in Israel’s history.
That a relatively lightly armed guerrilla force could stand-off the Israeli war machine was highly unexpected. The shock waves reverberated in Tel Aviv and Washington, which has provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry over the years. U.S. leaders encouraged and supported the Israeli assault on Lebanon as an integral part of the U.S. drive to dominate the entire Middle East.
The failure of the U.S.-Israeli attack to achieve its desired result of crushing Hezbollah and subduing Lebanon is a watershed event that has changed the political dynamics in the region. It has strengthened and energized all the anti-imperialist forces in the area.
At the same time, the possibility of a wider war is very real. The government of Ehud Olmert is under fire from the dominant right-wing inside Israel for its conduct of the war and may seek a new military campaign to recoup its standing. Washington’s goal of domination remains unchanged. Israeli and U.S. leaders are united in wanting to deal a blow to the forces of resistance throughout the region.
The Sept. 3 edition of the Times of London carried an article headlined, “Israel Prepares for War with Iran and Syria.” The article quoted an “insider” in the Israeli military establishment as saying: “In the past we prepared for a possible military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, but Iran’s growing confidence after the war in Lebanon means we have to prepare for a full-scale war, in which Syria will be an important player.”
The relentless brutality with which it conducted the war against Lebanon, and similar tactics used against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, should open the eyes of people in the United States who still harbor the illusion that there is anything progressive or supportable about the state of Israel.
Zionism, colonialism and the ‘Iron Wall’
Since its beginnings in the late 19th century, the leaders of the Zionist movement shared a common goal: the establishment of an exclusively Jewish state. By the early 20th century they envisioned a large state that would include what is today Jordan, parts of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as present-day Israel.
For the creation of the new state to become a reality, the movement’s leaders knew they needed three elements:
|
Maintaining the “iron wall” has been a key element in the establishment and expansion of Israel as a colonial, settler state in the Middle East.
The “iron wall” doctrine was first put forward by Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the Revisionist Zionist movement, in a 1923 book of the same name. Leaders of Jabotinsky’s Betar movement included avowed supporters of the Italian fascist dictator, Mussolini.
The party gave birth to a number of self-proclaimed terrorist paramilitary organizations Irgun and Lehi—the Stern Gang—in the 1940s. Two future Israeli prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were among the groups’ leaders.
After the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, Betar became the Herut party. Two decades later, Herut became the core of the Likud block, which emerged as the dominant force in Israeli politics in the 1970s.
Current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was a member of the Betar movement as a youth in the early 1950s. He reportedly celebrated May Day by tearing down red flags from in front of the trade union office in the town where he lived.
The mainstream Zionist movement of the 1920s, 30s and 40s was led by David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir and other “Labor Zionists” who promoted a more diplomatic course and publicly disavowed the extreme racism and terrorism associated with the Revisionists.
But in the end, and precisely because Israeli was a colonial implantation, the “iron wall” became an integral and necessary part of Israeli ideology and strategy.
The similarity of the quotes at the beginning of this article by the leaders of the two main “rival” currents of Zionism explain why overwhelming military force has been understood as essential across the Israeli political spectrum. The dispossession of an entire people has never been possible anywhere except by extreme violence. Palestine is no exception.
Rise of political Zionism
Modern political Zionism arose as one response to the anti-Semitism that prevailed in so much of Europe, as well as the United States. In Eastern Europe, horrific anti-Jewish pogroms were commonplace. The Czar and feudal lords of the Russian Empire actively promoted anti-Semitism as a way to divert the anger of the peasants away from themselves.
For many decades in the late 19th and early 20th century, Zionism represented a small minority among the Jewish people, and was mainly a movement of the middle class. Jewish workers and intellectuals played a major role in the socialist, communist and other progressive movements, fighting for equality rather than separation.
Before World War II, political Zionism was generally regarded as a reactionary, extreme nationalist and dangerous ideology in progressive circles, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
From its beginnings, political Zionism was a consciously colonial settler project. European Jewish settlers began arriving in Palestine in the 1880s, at first in small numbers. At the time, Jews comprised about five percent of the Palestinian population. About 20 percent of the population was Christian and 75 percent Muslim. By a large majority the indigenous Jewish population opposed the Zionist project.
Theodore Herzl, an Austrian journalist, is considered the founder of the modern Zionist movement. Herzl organized the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.
The Congress sent a investigatory delegation of two Austrian rabbis to Palestine after its meeting. The delegation’s telegrammed report was brief and telling: “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” (Avi Schlaim, “The Iron Wall,” 2000)
In other words, Palestine was already inhabited by another people. A British report two decades later stated that there was virtually no arable land in Palestine that was not already under cultivation. (John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice,” 1990)
This undeniable reality did not deter the Zionist leaders, who shared the predominant European racist and colonialist attitudes of the day toward the Arab people. Nor did it interfere with them propagating the myth that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without a land.”
Instead, the Zionist movement intensified its efforts to promote settlement in Palestine. The movement raised funds and purchased land, mostly from absentee feudal landlords, evicting Palestinian peasants in the process. This led, as the indigenous Palestinian Jewish population had feared it would, to new friction between religious groups, which had been minimal previously.
Contrary to Zionist propaganda claims, the hostility toward the settlers was not based on anti-Semitism any more than the resistance of the Native peoples of the Americas to the genocide carried out against them was because they were “anti-white.”
The Balfour Declaration and British sponsorship
Early Zionist leaders like Herzl and Chaim Weizmann were well aware that settlement by itself could not produce an
|
To the empires of Europe, the early Zionist leaders offered a proposition: support our project and the resulting state will serve your interests in the region. This quid pro quo was essential.
After attempts to interest the leaders of the Russian and Ottoman empires failed, the British Empire became the sponsor of the Zionist project with the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917. Arthur James Balfour, the Foreign Secretary of the British government, issued a letter to a Zionist leader, which read:
“His Majesty’s Government views 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.”
While the declaration calls for national rights for Jewish people, then about eight percent of the population in Palestine, it supports only civil and religious rights for the “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”—92 percent of the population was Arab.
Palestine was still part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the time, but the British were planning to take over the entire region as part of the spoils of World War I.
Chaim Weizmann had outlined both the value that a future Israeli state could have for British imperialism and the colonialist character of the project in a 1914 letter: “Should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence and should Britain encourage Jewish settlement … we could develop the country, bring back civilization to it, and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
With British sponsorship and new sources of funding from the United States, the Zionist project took off after World War I.
Jewish settlements and land acquisition rapidly grew. Though now a British colony, a de facto government, the Jewish Agency, was set up in Zionist-controlled areas. It began building its own militia and, later, an army.
Following the colonial-settler pattern—like the one already established in the United States and South Africa—when the Zionists acquired an area, their aim was generally to make it exclusively Jewish. Zionist settlements or businesses were urged or required to hire only Jewish labor.
As the settler population increased from about 10 percent in the early 1920s to nearly 30 percent by the end of the 1930s, the discussion of “transfer” intensified. “Transfer” meant moving the indigenous Palestinian Arab population out of Palestine to make way for the future Israeli state.
The Palestinian population knew what was happening. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there were numerous revolts against both British colonialism and Zionist settlement.
In 1936, Palestinians launched a general strike that lasted six months—the longest general strike ever—followed by nearly three years of guerrilla warfare. It was not until 1939, the year that World War II broke out in Europe, that the British army defeated the uprising. In the course of the struggle against the Palestinian Arabs, the British had aided—and were aided by—the Haganah, the armed wing of the Jewish Agency.
As a result of these developments, by the time World War II broke out, the Zionist forces had been greatly strengthened while the Palestinian side had been decimated.
The Zionists were emboldened and hoped to meet their goals quickly. The way to do this, they noted, was by ethnic cleansing.
This policy was made clear in a 1940 statement by Joseph Weitz, director of the Jewish National Land Fund: “Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people’ in this country … and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, to transfer them all … we must not leave a single village, a single tribe.” (Quoted by Edward Said in “The Question of Palestine,” 1979)
Nazi genocide, World War II and Israel
David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister, said in 1939 that World War I had brought the Balfour Declaration; a second world war would result in the creation of a state. This was before the Nazi holocaust—the mass murder of six million Jews, along with millions of others killed because of their nationality, political beliefs, sexual orientation or disability.
The capitalist ruling class in Western Europe and the United States paid little attention to the massacres of Jews and
|
During the war, the U.S. high command was so indifferent to people suffering in the Nazi death camps that they refused to bomb the rail lines that brought the boxcars crammed with victims into the camps. (Arthur D. Morse, “While Six Million Died,” 1968)
But after the war ended, U.S. leaders hypocritically channeled world sympathy for the suffering of the Jews and others into support for the creation of the Israeli state—at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.
Overwhelmingly, the European Jewish survivors of World War II who wanted to leave Europe hoped to come to the United States. The Truman administration was opposed. The Cold War was getting underway, and the U.S. ruling class viewed the European Jewish population as too radical and pro-communist.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine
Under intense U.S. pressure, the United Nations passed Resolution 181 on Nov. 29, 1947, allocating 56 percent of historic Palestine to Israel. Forty-four percent was to go to the creation of a Palestinian state. Palestinians comprised 70 percent of the population at the time.
The UN vote was rigged by the United States; it was also illegal. The Palestinian population was not consulted about the fate of Palestine before the UN voted to partition the country.
In the war that followed, Israel, with support from Europe and the U.S., conquered 78 percent of Palestine. The Israeli military strategy included driving out as many Palestinians as possible. Despite their differences, the avowedly terrorist paramilitaries Irgun and Lehi were brought together with the Haganah under a unified military command.
What happened in 1948 is called the “War of Independence” by Israelis, and
 |
The terrorists in Irgun and Lehi played a key role in the most thorough ethnic cleansing of the 20th century. In the early stages of the war, even when the Palestinian militias were defeated in battle, the Palestinian population would move to a nearby village, but remain in the country waiting for the situation to calm down so they could return home.
Under Plan Dalet, implemented in February 1948, the Israeli military strategy changed to one of clearing the Arab population from areas that would become part of the Israeli state. Terror became the preferred method of “encouraging” the population to leave. The most infamous incident was the massacre of more than 110 residents of the village of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948, at the hands of Begin’s Irgun.
The Zionist military broadcast threats to other Palestinian cities, towns and villages. They said, “Flee or the fate of Deir Yassin will be yours.” Zionist forces also claimed they possessed atomic bombs. The campaign was successful in spreading widespread panic.
More than 750,000 Palestinians were dispossessed of their farms, shops and homes and forced into wretched concentration camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank, Gaza and other places. The remaining 22 percent of Palestine was divided. The West Bank became part of Jordan; Gaza came under Egyptian administration
Not one of the now six million Palestinian refugees has been allowed to return.
Many supporters of Israel portray its victory in 1948 as some kind of “miracle.” But in reality it was the “iron wall”—military supremacy combined with ruthless terror against the Palestinian civilian population—that made possible the creation of the new Israeli state.
Maintaining and increasing its military superiority has been the cornerstone of Israeli policy ever since.
