Roots of Israeli terrorism in the Middle East

Zafarul-Islam Khan, PhD

Terrorism : 'the threat or use of violence for political purposes by individuals or groups, whether acting for, or in opposition to, established government authority, when such actions are intended to shock or intimidate a target group wider than the immediate victims.'

CIA definition of the term in a 1980 reportThe murderous attack on the worshippers while they knelt during the Fajr prayers on Friday, 15 Ramadan 1414 (25 February 1994), in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (Hebron), was not an isolated event. It was a link in a very long chain of zionist terror in the Middle East which includes landmarks in modern terrorism like the murders of the British Minister Resident in Egypt, Lord Moyne (1944), the UN mediator in Palestine, Count Bernadotte (1948), massacres of Deir Yasin (1948) and Kafr Qasim (1956), the attack on Tammuz, the Iraqi nuclear plant (1981), siege of Beirut and the massacres of Sabra and Shatila (1982) and the attack on the PLO headquarters in Tunis (1985), to name a few. The latest attack in which, according to local Palestinian sources, 86 persons died instantly and 300 were injured, only proves that no equitable peace will ever be possible between the zionists and the legitimate owners of the land they forcibly occupy.

Israel, and before its emergence the Jewish terrorist organisations, have used all forms of violence against the people whose land they now occupy, and against all neighbours and their citizens. Israel has introduced and excelled in assassinations, aerial bombardment, indiscriminate killings, and arming and helping dictators around the world. It continues to do so with impunity because it has successfully cultivated a guilt conscience in the West about persecution in Europe and the Nazi crimes as well as making the West believe that it has a common cause with it.
'Terrorism,' meaning the senseless and indiscriminate use of terror to achieve political ends, was unknown to the Middle East until the advent of the zionist movement to uproot a whole people from their ancient homeland in order to convert it into the homeland of another, alien, people based on claims not accepted by any law in any country or age. All that the Middle East knew hitherto was the age-old method of the assassination of particular enemies. The zionists, from the very inception of the judaisation programme, understood clearly that they cannot create their homeland without expelling the original inhabitants en masse. At first they practised this from whatever land they could buy or get from the British mandatory authority. During the last few months of the Mandate they turned to expel Palestinians from as many areas of Palestine as possible in order to established their Jewish homeland in an empty country.

The zionist terror outfits were created to defend the illegitimate conditions caused by the zionists from the very beginning of the Jewish immigration into Palestine in early 1880s. The new arrivals settled mostly in lands sold by absentee Arab landlords, at times driving away Arab dwellers and farmers. The early Jewish immigrants lived in a hostile environment. The Arabs of Palestine, predominantly Muslim, perceived at a very early stage the long-term zionist intentions and used to attack zionist settlements in a bid to discourage Jewish immigration. To thwart such attacks the settlers set up small armed gangs. The first organised zionist terror gang was called Ha-shomer (The watchman). It was founded in Palestine in 1909 for the dual function of defending Jewish settlements and ensuring the employment of only Jewish workers by driving away Arabs found working in these settlements.
The Ha-shomer evolved into a more professional force, Haganah (Defence) in 1920, as the military arm of the Jewish Agency, officially recognised by the British Mandatory authorities. In 1948 Haganah was transformed into 'Israel Defence Forces' (IDF), the official Israeli army, which also absorbed other Jewish terror gangs like Irgun Tsvai Leumi (also known as Etzel), led by Begin, and Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang after its founder), led by Shamir. Both Begin and Shamir rose to become prime ministers of the country they helped to carve by terrorism out of mandated Palestine.

The first targets of Haganah were the Arabs of Palestine who resisted the uncontrolled Jewish immigration into their country (unleashed by the British since 1918) and acquisition of mostly public lands. Haganah protected Jewish settlements, organised illegal Jewish immigration (on top of the immigration targets sanctioned by the British for each year) and prevented Arab labour from work in Jewish settlements.

New terrorist groups were formed in the 1930s. The most prominent was Irgun (which later gave birth to an even more fanatic group, Lehi). They set out to attack Arabs directly and pressurise the British to give into ever-increasing Jewish demands for more land, bigger immigration quotas and more autonomy for the Jewish settlements. They did not even spare Jews. One of their famous victims was Chaim Arlosoroff, a prominent zionist leader, believed to be murdered by the Revisionist Movement of Jabotinsy (to which Begin belongs) in 1933.

Between April 1936 and July 1939 these gangs killed at least 135 Arabs and injured many more. Their main targets were Arab shops, restaurants, markets and buses. The great Arab Revolt of 1936-39 against the British judaisation policies forced the British administration to concede to many of the Arab demands and grievances. This took the shape of the 1939 White Paper which watered down Jewish expectations of eventual statehood through unhindered immigration and acquisition of private and public lands. Now these gangs, including Haganah (which was officially tolerated by the British) started to attack the British army, police and government offices all over Palestine in a bid to terrorise the British into withdrawing the White Paper. The British finally gave in to the Jewish terror. Short of withdrawing the White Paper, they reneged on all its positive aspects. The Jewish terror against the British was particularly treacherous since it was Britain which inaugurated and implemented the judaisation programme and now it was at war with Germany.
The Jewish terror gangs introduced many forms of modern terrorism to the Middle East. In the summer of 1939 the zionists blasted the oil pipeline near Haifa. In 1940 they blew up SS Patria, off Haifa, in protest against immigration controls, killing 240 Jewish immigrants. Between 1942 and 1948 a number of British police officers were gunned down in the streets of Palestine. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to assassinate the British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael. The British Minister Resident in Cairo, Lord Moyne, was assassinated by Stern agents on 6 November 1944. The Egyptian police caught the assassins and frustrated the Stern's plans to show it as an Arab crime.

The Irgun Gang blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which served as the headquarters of the British Government in Palestine, killing 88 people, including Jews, Arabs and British and destroying valuable official records, on 22 July 1946.
On 30 July 1947 two British soldiers were brutally murdered by the Stern gang. Their bodies were hung with wire, the ground underneath the bodies was booby trapped. Many government offices, installations, police stations and economic targets, such as oil pipelines were bombed by the Jewish terrorists during this period. On 1 October 1946 the British Embassy in Rome was badly damaged by a bomb explosion for which Irgun claimed responsibility. The Stern gang sent dozens of letter-bombs during this period to prominent British political leaders and military officers who were thought to be hindering the development of the Jewish 'homeland' into a State. Addressees included the Prime Minister Clement Atlee. In most cases these letter-bombs were detected. One such bomb exploded in a British sorting office on 3 September 1947 killing two post office workers. In May 1948 a parcel-bomb killed Rex Farran, brother of Roy, a former officer in the British army in Palestine who had been acquitted of murdering a Jewish youth. His story has been told in a book entitled The Winged Dagger. The Stern gang had threatened to kill Roy Farran.

In October 1947 the UN General Assembly 'recommended' the partition of Palestine into two states, Jewish and Arab. It gave the Jews, then constituting only one third of the population, around 60 percent of the land, including the coastal and most fertile areas. Even in this area the Jews had a majority of only one thousand souls (498,000 Jews as against 497,000 Arabs). Many of these Jews were 'illegal' immigrants who had sneaked into Palestine using forged papers violating the immigration quotas fixed by the British authorities. In the area of Jerusalem, which was to be 'internationalised' according to the UN recommendation, there were 105,000 Arabs as against 100,000 Jews. The zionists were not content with the area awarded to them; they wanted to grab as much territory as possible with as less Arabs as possible.

The Jews had a large regular army in the shape of Hagana which was equipped with heavy equipment including tanks and aircraft. It was controlled by the Jewish Agency and cooperated with the British army in Palestine. Other terrorist gangs, like Irgun and Stern, worked in tandem with Haganah and executed its dirty plots but the Jewish Agency always claimed that it had no connection with such groups. When Ben Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, dissociated his organisation and Haganah from the massacre of Deir Yasin, Begin angrily published details of his organisation's coordination with Haganah to execute the massacre.

Over thirty thousand Jews residing in Palestine had attained warfare training by joining the British army during the Second World War. The British had established a Jewish Brigade which fought in Europe. It was brought to Palestine at the end of the war and disbanded in February 1946. The soldiers and officers of the Jewish Brigade either joined Haganah or acted as its reserve. In addition to the officially sanctioned arms of Haganah, the Jewish terror gangs had stockpiled huge quantities of arms in their secret arsenals in the Jewish settlements, by gun-running and looting government arms depots. The Jewish population in Palestine was thus ready to start a military campaign while the Palestinian Arabs were continuously harassed, contained and disarmed by the British occupation forces since the revolt of 1936-39.
As soon as it became clear to the zionists that the major powers will now support an independent Jewish state (the cliché hitherto used by the British to pacify the Arabs was the creation of a Jewish 'homeland' instead of a 'State'), the Jewish gangs embarked on a policy of creating terror among the Arab majority to drive out as many Arabs as possible from the future Jewish State and to expand its boundaries. Thus these gangs started to stage merciless raids on Arab towns and villages in all parts of Palestine to create terror. People were indiscriminately killed, houses burnt and pillaged.

The most brutal of these was a joint Irgun-Stern-Haganah raid on the small Arab village of Deir Yasin in the north-west of Jerusalem. The raid was conducted in the early hours of 9 April 1948 while the villagers were still asleep. There were 700 people in the village. Only 50 persons managed to escape and 254 were slaughtered in cold blood according to the report of Jacques de Raynier, the Chief Delegate of the International Red Cross in Palestine who visited the site the next day. The victims were dumped in the village well and included 60 women, including 25 pregnant ones, and 52 children. The village was plundered. 80 of the victims were killed after being taken in captivity. Some Deir Yasin women were stripped of their clothes, made to get into the trucks of the terrorists and taken to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem where they were paraded naked, spate at and later killed. Jacques de Raynier said in his report to the Red Cross : '.. about 700,000 Arabs became refugees, leaving everything behind in their haste, their one hope being to avoid the fate of the people of Dier Yasin.. ' [see separate report].

Other massacres of this period include :

Balad al-Shaikh village : attacked during the night of 30-31 December 1947. Sixty Arabs, including women and children, killed in their homes.
Sacsac village : attacked in the night of 14-15 February 1948. Twenty houses dynamited and over 60 persons killed.
Kafr al-Husainiyyah : attacked by the Haganah on 13 March 1948, killing 30 Arabs.
Nasruddin village, near Tabariya : attacked on 10 April 1948. All inhabitants, except 40, were butchered to death by the zionists terrorists.
Karmal town : attacked between 18 to 20 April 1948. Twenty two Arabs indiscriminately killed.
Beit Darras village : attacked on 3 May 1948. All inhabitants butchered.
Beit al-Khuri village : attacked on 5 May 1948. All inhabitants, except old men, killed.
Al-Zaitun village : attacked on 6 May 1948. All inhabitants assembled in the village mosque and blasted alive.

These are only a few examples of the systematic terror that was unleashed before any regular Arab soldier entered Palestine (in the wake of the Jews' unilateral declaration of independence) and before the British withdrew from Palestine (being the only instance of British withdrawal without transferring power to any administration in their whole colonial history) and before the Jews announced the UDI on 14 May 1948.

The sole purpose of this calculated terror, unleashed on a defenceless and peaceful population, was to drive the majority of the Palestinian Arabs out of their country before the formal inauguration of the Jewish State. The terror was utterly successful and within weeks at least 700,000 Arabs (Red Cross/UN estimates) fled from their homes and became refugees in Ghazzah, West Bank, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Whole traditional Arab cities like Yafa (Jaffa), Safed, cAkka (Acre), Tabariyyah (Taberias), Haifa (Jaffa), Majdal, Bisan, Shafa cAmr, Ludd (Lydda), Isdud (Ashdod) alongwith hundreds of Arab villages became depopulated and were taken over by the Jews. The new ratio of the Arabs in the Jewish-controlled areas plummeted to only 18 percent of the population (156,000 Arabs in a total population of 872,700 as estimated on 11 November 1948).

About 80 percent Palestinian Arabs had become refugees. The percentage of Arabs in Israel further went down over the years as a result of unhindered Jewish immigration from all over the world under the Israeli 'Law of Return' (1950) which enables any Jew in the world to become an Israeli citizen automatically by simply setting his foot on any part of Israel, that is occupied Palestine, while Palestinian refugees rot in refugee camps in neighbouring countries.

The Jews maintained the same policy of terror against the remaining Palestinian Arabs, after the establishment of their State. In July 1948, two months after the emergence of 'Israel' a force led by Moshe Dayan (who later became the commander-in-chief of the Israeli army and a defence minister) drove into the Arab town of Ludd, indiscriminately firing in the town's streets, killing many bystanders and pedestrians. The terror created led 30,000 Arabs to flee within hours. The Arabs of cAkka were similarly driven out in May, the Arabs of Ramleh in July and the Arabs of Bir al-Sabc (Birsheba) and western al-Jaleel (Galilee) in October 1948. The rest of the Arab areas inside Israel remained under complete and continuous night curfew for the next fourteen years, i.e., until 1962 when it was lifted after a policy assessment that the Arabs left inside 'Israel' no longer posed a threat to the 'security' of the Jewish State.

In A.D. 1948 the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by them from their encounter with the Nazi Gentiles should have been not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deed that the Nazis had committed against the Jews.
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. VIII, p. 290

Through a number of 'legal' measures Israel ensured to acquire Arab properties and expel Arabs at will. Thus a law was enacted on 29 November 1948 allowing the Israeli government to acquire Arab properties for considerations of 'security, construction and development.' The Law of the Absentees, enacted in 1950, allowed the government to sell properties of the Arab refugees and to use the funds to rehabilitate Jewish immigrants! Another 'law' passed in 1952 allowed the zionist government to acquire private lands for recolonisation and development. This authorised the government to demolish hundreds of Arab villages and the Arab areas in the towns of Haifa, Yafa, Safed, Tabariyyah, Ramleh and Majdal etc. Needless to say that the Israeli government through the UDI took over all the Miri (public) lands which in fact belonged to the Arab majority of Palestine and were owned as a trust (waqf) by the Ottoman Khalifah before the British occupation in 1918.

Another law promulgated in 1953 allowed the Israeli government to acquire any land for the purposes of security and re-settlement. According to a study by the Jewish author, Marion Wolfson (Prophets in Babylon, London: Faber, 1980, p. 125) Israel demolished 385 Arab villages in Palestine since 1948. The demolition is always total so as not to leave any trace of the place including cemeteries. Then new Jewish settlements are built on the spot with new Hebrew names. Interestingly a home for the mentally-ill has been built on the place where Deir Yasin once stood and was brutally attacked by Irgun, Begin's terrorist organisation. M.R. Mehdi in his book, A Palestine Chronicle (London: Alpha (1973?)), gives a complete list of these demolished villages between 1948-1967. (He also gives a list of 1480 Palestinians deported to the East Bank in the wake of the zionist occupation of West Bank and Ghazzah in 1967, and a list of 369 Arab families expelled by the occupation authorities from their homes in Jerusalem from 1 January 1969 to 1 March 1971 as well as a list of the Arab lands confiscated by the Jews in West Bank and Ghazzah between January 1968 to August 1972.)

The Israeli government's official Year Book for 1959 (pp 74-75) says that application of the law of the absentees on Arab properties resulted during 1952-53 alone in the acquisition of 300 vacant Arab villages, three million dunam land, 25,416 buildings, 57,497 houses and 10,729 workshops. The value of these properties, left behind by the Arab refugees, (who were now languishing in squalid refugee camps surviving on a daily food ration from UNRWA worth US$ 0.07 (seven cents) giving them 1500 calories in the summer and 1600 calories in the winter per day/person), were estimated at the time at £Stg. 2000 million yielding an estimated annual income of £47.5 million at that time. Their worth at current rates is mind-boggling.
Meanwhile disturbances in Palestine had led many countries to reawaken to the realities and the great injustice caused to the Palestinians. A special UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte (president of the Swedish Red Cross), was now despatched to Palestine to seek the return of the Arab refugees to their homes and lands and to try to devise a new partition plan to do justice to the Arab majority. Bernadotte took his responsibilities seriously and as a result Stern Gang terrorists (in Israeli army uniforms) gunned him down in Jerusalem on 17 September 1948 (see separate report). Count Bernadotte's French aide, Col. Serot, was also killed with him.

At the same time Jewish gangs were busy planning mass murder of Germans to avenge Nazi crimes against the Jews (who had collaborated with the Allies wholeheartedly even in Germany and were not alone to be victimised by the Nazi). The zionists were able to mass-murder one thousand SS prisoners (by poisoning their bread) held in an interrogation centre of the Joint Allied Control Council outside Nuremberg. A diabolical plan to poison the principal German cities' water supplies, that was to kill three million Germans, broke down when the British Police in Palestine arrested one of the key conspirators. These exploits have been narrated by the Jewish journalist, Michael Elkins (BBC correspondent in Jerusalem during the 1970s and early 1980s when he was recalled for his biased reports) in his book Forged in Fury (London 1980). (In March 1989, an 'ultra-nationalist' Israeli movement (believed to be Rabbi Kahane's Kach) claimed responsibility for the cyanide found in Chilean grapes exported to the US. The poisoning, according to the group, was meant to punish the US government for talking to the PLO. It also threatened to poison Brazilian and Columbian fruit exports to the US if these talks continued (MEI, 31 Mach 1989.)

The Jewish terrorism until 1948 was confined to secure two aims : to drive the British out and to expel as many Arabs as possible. After 1948 the Jewish terror unleashed by the so-called 'Israel Defence Force,' which had absorbed all the terrorist gangs in addition to Haganah, was directed to achieve three aims : to expand the Jewish State territory, to force Arab states to recognise Israel, and to drive away the refugee concentrations next to the borders of Israel (such as Ghazzah) in order to force them to assimilate in larger Arab communities like Lebanon, Jordan and the Gulf.

Major incidents during the pre-1967 period include :
Wadi cArabah attacked by the Israeli army on 31 May 1950, killing 30 Arabs.
The Arab tribe of Al-Sani (4071 souls) was driven into Jordan at gun-point on 19 September 1952.
Refugee camps in Ghazzah bombed on 28 August 1953, killing 20 and injuring 62 people.
Qibyah, a Jordanian village, was attacked in the night of 14-15 October. 70 Palestinian, men, women and children, were killed and 41 homes were blasted. The incident was severely condemned by the UN Security Council (see separate report).
Water-works of Ghazzah bombed on 13 August 1954.

Ghazzah shelled in August 1956 killing 56 and injuring 103 people.
Kafr Qasim, an Arab village, near Tulkarem, inside Israel near the Jordanian border, was attacked by an army force, led by Ariel Sharon (who later besieged Beirut) in the evening of 29 October 1956 on the eve of the Tripartite Aggression on Egypt. 47 Arabs were mercilessly gunned down in cold blood for 'defying' a curfew order they did know nothing about. Israel kept the incident secret but word got out two months later. Officers and soldiers responsible were tried and given light prison sentences. This cruel operation aimed at subduing the Arabs remaining in Israel (see separate report).

During 1956 Israelis sent letter-bombs to Egyptian officials. Many were intercepted. One such bomb killed Col. Mustafa Hafez, an Egyptian officer, in Ghazzah in July 1956. A day later the Egyptian Military Attaché in Amman, Salah Mustafa, was killed.

Israel attacked Khan Yunis, in the Ghazzah Strip, on 3 November 1956 killing 275 Palestinian refugees. On 12 November an Israeli attack on the refugee camps in Rafah resulted in the killing of 111 Palestinians.
Israel attacked the village of Sammuc in Jordan on 13 November 1956, killing 18, injuring 54 people and destroying 125 houses including a school building.

The zionists killed their own people, too, in order to bring them into line. Israeli agents unleashed 'Operation Ezra Nehemiya' in 1950-51 which finally led 120,000 Iraqi Jews to flee their homeland. During this operation, Jewish agents bombed synagogues in Iraq to force reluctant Iraqi Jews to migrate to Israel. Anti-Jewish leaflets and deliberate rumours spread it in the Jewish community that Muslims were behind the bombs. This persuaded the Iraqi Jews, a very prosperous community, to flee to Israel from fictitious Muslim persecution (details in Wolfson, op.cit.). The American Cultural Centre in Baghdad was also bombed by the zionist agents to sour relations between Iraq and the US. This diabolical operation was overseen by Ben Porat, an influential Israeli politician of Iraqi origin who later became a minister without portfolio in Begin's cabinet and was, thoughtfully, charged with dealing with the problem of the Palestinian refugees in the Arab world (with a view to settle them where they happen to live and barter their properties in Palestine with those left by the Jews [who mostly emigrated voluntarily, and many, as in the case of the majority of the Egyptian Jews who left after 1956, had foreign nationalities] in their previous Arab homelands).

The zionists also bombed American targets in Egypt, including the USIS offices in both Cairo and Alexandria, in July 1954 in what became to be known as 'Lavon Affair' (Pinhas Lavon was the then Israeli Minister of Defence who masterminded it). These bombings were planned to be shown as an Egyptian affair in order to prevent a forthcoming US-Egypt rapprochement. The culprits, all Jews, were promptly arrested. Two were hanged; the rest jailed. Initially Israel denied the charges but only a few months later a major political scandal erupted in Israel and the secret unveiled that those termed by Egypt as 'Israeli spies' were indeed highly-trained members of the Israeli military intelligence. The purpose of the bombings was to show to the US that Egypt was unstable and anti-American.

On 12 December 1955 Israel carried out a three-pronged attack by land and sea against Syria on the north-eastern shore of Lake Tiberias. More than 50 Syrians were killed in this operation. Israel told the UN Security Council, which condemned the attack, that it was a reprisal for Syrian hindrance of Israeli fishermen on the lake but UN truce observers reported that there was no hindrance from the Syrian side. UN Truce Observers Commander EH Hutchinson brilliantly summed up in his report the strategy behind all Israeli aggressions : 'it was a premeditated raid of intimidation, motivated by Israel's desire to test the strength of the Egyptian-Syrian mutual defence pact, to disrupt Arab unity further, to bait the Arab states into some overt act of aggression that would afford it the opportunity to overrun additional territory.' (It has been shown that the Israelis committed as many aggressions as their declarations seeking 'peace' with their neighbours (Ibrahim al-cAbid, Al-cUnf wa'ssalam: dirasah fi'l-istratijiyyah al-suhyuniyyah (Beirut 1967.))

In October 1956 Israel took part, alongwith Britain and France, in a full-scale war against Egypt, although Israel was in no way connected with the Suez Canal Crisis.
In November 1962 Israeli agents sent letter-bombs to German scientists working on military projects in Egypt. Two such bombs killed six Egyptian scientists and led the Germans to leave Egypt.

On 13 November 1966 the Israelis attacked the Jordanian village of al-Sammuc, killing 18 people, injuring 130 and dynamiting 120 houses.

According to UN figures, Israel violated the truce with neighbouring Arab countries 43,000 times between 1948 to 1967. For many of these violations Israel was condemned by the UN Truce Observers. No Arab country was ever condemned.

In June 1967 Israel, in a 'pre-emptive strike,' attacked and conquered large chunks of Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian territory. This aggression finally exposed the myth the zionist propagandists had painstakingly built over the years about the tiny and weak Israel surrounded by powerful Arab countries bent upon throwing her into the sea. Now it became clear to any intelligent person that it was Israel which threatened its neighbours and was the real threat to peace in the Middle East. Israel at once started deporting as many Palestinians as possible, exploiting the prevailing chaos, from the newly occupied territories. According to UNRWA report to the UN General Assembly (A/72/3/1968) a total of 350,000 people at least became homeless (out of these 175,000 became refugees for the second time in their life-time (first in 1948)). In November 1991, Israeli MK (MP) Mier Cohen Avidov disclosed that Chaim Hertzog, then military governor of the occupied West Bank (later president of Israel) had expelled 200,00 Palestinians from the area under his administration shortly after occupation and pressed buses and trucks into duty in order to transport them across the borders to Jordan (Hertzog accepted this in a statement on 10 November 1991).

During the early years of occupation, Israel expelled thousands of leading citizens from the occupied territories, especially from the West Bank, who opposed the occupation and could lead the struggle of their people. The very long list includes mayors (including the Mayor of Jerusalem, Ruhi al-Khateeb), professors (including the President of Beirzeit University, Dr Hanna Nasser), journalists, the Qadi of al-Khalil (Hebron), Shaikh Rajab al-Tamimi, the imam of the Aqsa Mosque, Shaikh Ascad al-Tamimi, etc.

During the first five years after this war (1967-72) Israeli attacks on Arab targets, especially refugee camps, resulted in the murder of 2500 civilians alone. This included 46 small children (all under 11 years) of Bahr al-Baqar School in the Nile Delta whose school was attacked with napalm bombs on 8 April 1970. There were no military installations in the area. Prosperous and populous cities along the Suez, like Ismailia, Suez and Port Said, were bombed into deserts forcing the majority of their inhabitants to become 'internal refugees' in Cairo and other Egyptian cities.

Both in Ghazzah and West Bank some Palestinian refugees have been forcibly resettled away from their camps in a bid to liquidate the Palestinian refugees issue. This operation was initially looked after by Ben-Porat.

In Ghazzah, according to the testimony of Muhammad al-Gharib, an UNRWA official, Israelis killed 23 Arabs in cold blood in one incident only soon after the occupation and left their bodies on the streets for many days to terrorise the population into submission. During these early days, as David Holden of the London Sunday Times reported, the Israelis dynamited 144 homes in one night only and the Red Cross discovered a mass grave here containing 23 bodies. The inhabitants of West Bank and Ghazzah have been reduced into cheap labour for Israeli farms and factories, and large chunks of their lands have been acquired for security and settlement purposes. Village and town limits have been drastically narrowed in order to usurp vacant lands to build illegal Jewish settlements.
On 28 December 1968 four Israeli helicopters, carrying about 120 soldiers, reached Beirut International Airport through the sea. They dropped Israeli commandos led by General Rafael Eitan (who later led the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982). As astonished passengers watched, the Israelis blew up 13 civilian aircraft on the airport and went away. The Israeli aim was to instigate Lebanon against the Palestinian resistance and to force the Lebanese army to stop Palestinian resistance activities in the south. The Lebanese picked the message promptly and a number of confrontations took place between the Lebanese army and the PLO forces. This confrontation later developed into the Lebanese civil war which continued for over 15 years and still remains an unfinished business.

As the Palestinian resistance movement gained momentum, the Israeli secret service, Mossad, became active to assassinate PLO leaders all over the world. A number of Palestinian fedayeen leaders were killed in 1970 during a Mossad raid on Beirut. Victims of Israeli assassination squads include poet and editor Ghassan Kanafani (8 July 1972), Wael cAdel Zucaitar, PLO representative in Rome (16 October 1972), Dr Mahmoud al-Hamshari, PLO representative in Paris (8 December 1972 - he died a month later of multiple injuries caused by a bomb planted under his telephone table), Hussain Abu-Khair, PLO representative in Cyprus (25 January 1973), Dr Basil al-Kubaisi, Professor at the American University in Beirut (gunned down in a Paris street, 6 April 1973), Muhammad Boudayya, head of the Parisienne Orientale, killed in Paris by bomb planted in his car (29 June 1973). Israeli agents gunned down a Moroccan citizen, Ahmed Bouchiki (mistaking him as cAli Hasan Salamah, a military commander of al-Saciqah, who was later killed in Beirut in 1980) in Oslo, Norway, on 21 July 1973. Noted Palestinian writer, Dr Anis Sayegh, then director of the PLO Research Centre in Beirut, lost his eyes and injured hands as he opened a letter-bomb on 19 July 1972.

On 10 April 1973, on the 25th anniversary of Deir Yasin, Begin despatched two hit squads to Beirut to assassinate PLO leaders. As a result Kamal cAdwan of Fateh, Muhammad Yusuf Hajjar of the PLO alongwith his wife and Kamal Nasser (PLO official spokesman) were all killed in their beds at night; Mrs Nadia Yashruti, of the Palestinian Women's League, was machine-gunned at the entrance of her apartment. Mahmoud Saleh, PLO representative in Paris, was killed outside a bookshop on 4 January 1977.

On the West Bank and Ghazzah, Israeli occupation forces resorted to crude tactics to demoralise the people like firing at demonstrators, permanently closing down shops of striking shopowners and bulldozing houses from where a stone has been thrown at settlers or the occupation forces. The best lands and water resources have been confiscated for Jewish settlements or security and army centres. Curfew is imposed at will and people are exiled internally in addition to banishing them to Jordan or Lebanon. Editors of Arab papers and magazines are subject to censorship and many have been internally exiled living away from the offices of their publications and having contact with their colleagues over the phone only. Arab universities and schools remain closed for months and years at stretch at occupation army orders on the flimsiest of pretexts like student demonstrations and distribution of leaflets against the occupation. Students are systematically arrested just before the examinations in order to spoil their school year.

In addition to the occupation forces, even the Jewish settlers are fully armed and use their guns with impunity. Their many victims include a number of Palestinian mayors who were targets of these terrorists since 1980 when three mayors, including Bassam al-Shakcah of Nablus were seriously hurt. The killers were supported by the local Israeli administration and therefore it took five years to unearth the gang and only two persons were ultimately sentenced, one (Gilad Peli) to 10 years imprisonment and another to 18 months' imprisonment. After the bombing of the Arab mayors, Rabbi Haim Druckman, prominent member of the National Religious Party, part of the then ruling Likud, welcomed the bombings, quoting exultantly from Bible's Book of Judges to the effect: 'Let all thine enemies perish thus.' Yuval Neeman, the then Israeli minister of science, shocked even the Israelis when he said that there had been 'positive results' from the Jewish terror attacks which maimed the two West Bank mayors in 1980 (London Times, 11 May 1984).

The zionist gangs have made many attempts to blast the Aqsa, the third holiest mosque in Islam, in order to build their temple on the site.

The Israelis have also been active in high sea piracy. One glaring example was their hijacking of a 200-ton uranium shipment from a West German freighter in 1968. The freighter was heading from Antwerp to Genoa and stopped at Rotterdam en route. Here the uranium shipment mysteriously disappeared. An enquiry by the CIA and four West European intelligence agencies established that Mossad had stolen the shipment and whisked it away to Israel. Since the matter was connected with Israel nothing was announced. Nine years later, in June 1977, the Norwegian Chief Prosecutor, Dr Haakon Wiker, disclosed that an Israeli agent had confessed to the Norwegian police that he had helped to divert the 200-ton uranium shipment to Israel nine years ago.
On Christmas eve 1969 Israeli agents spirited away five gunboats from the French port of Cherbourg. The French, following the raid on Beirut airport in 1968, had imposed embargo on military shipments to Israel. In May 1985 US officials disclosed that Israeli agents have smuggled 800 krytrons which are precision timing devices used to detonate nuclear weapons. Israel first denied but later conceded that smuggling of the devices took place between 1979 to 1983.

The Israeli navy has been continuously harassing civilian ships off Lebanese and Syrian coasts for many years. One incident, which provoked international condemnation, was the hijacking of Cyprus ferry Alizur Blanco on 29 June 1984 en route from Cyprus to West Beirut. It was forced by the Israeli gunboats to sail to Haifa where it was detained for 24 hours and released after detaining nine of its passengers. International condemnation led Israel to release seven of the passengers within the next two weeks including a Palestinian youth, Mazin al-Masri, who was studying in Britain and was on his way to Beirut for summer holidays.

The Israelis want to monopolise nuclear power in the Middle East. They opposed the Iraqi nuclear programme from its very inception. The head of Iraq's Atomic Energy Agency, Dr Yahia al-Meshadd, 48 (an Egyptian), was bludgeoned to death in his Hotel Meridian room in Paris in June 1980. The Israeli Radio gloated at the time that the murder has set back Iraqi nuclear plans by two years. A month later, in July 1980, Israeli agents blasted the site offices of SNIA, an Italian company building the Iraqi reactor installations. They had first tried to steal vital components of the two French nuclear reactors sold to Iraq while still in transit to Baghdad. They managed to blow up one of the plants. Later Israeli jets bombed the other reactor as well in June 1981.

The Israelis have set world records in air piracy. Like other forms of international terrorism, it were they who introduced skyjacking in the Middle Est. Israel hijacked a Syrian civil airliner in 1954, a (Lebanese) Middle East Airlines (MEA) aircraft in 1970, a Libyan civil aircraft on 4 February 1984 while on a scheduled flight from Tripoli to Damascus. It was released after seven hours of search and interrogation at an Israeli airbase. A Libyan Airlines Boeing jet, on regular flight from Cairo to Tripoli, in February 1973, was misled by Israeli radio signals as it left Cairo airport. The plane was made to drift to occupied Sinai and there it was shot down by Israeli military jets killing hundreds of passengers, including a well-known Libyan writer, Saleh Bu-Yaseer, a former foreign minister. On 10 August 1973 Israeli fighter aircraft intercepted an Iraqi Airways plane on a regular flight from Beirut to Baghdad and forced it to land in Israel. The Israelis worked on a tip off from their agents in Beirut that George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) was aboard. But Habash had changed his mind at the last minute. This incident was condemned by the UN Security Council.

Israeli planes bombed Beirut on 18 July 1981, killing more than 300 civilians. The Israeli army's chief of intelligence told reporters that the motive behind Israel's massive raid on densely populated quarters was to generate Lebanese civilian resentment against the presence of the Palestinian guerrillas there. 'I would say at least they have something to think about now,' he said. A few days later Israeli jets again strafed Lebanon. The New York Times reported at the time that 'witnesses, including western reporters caught in the attack, said nearly all of the casualties appeared to be civilians, most of them burned alive in their cars, trapped in clogged traffic.'

In 1982 a combination of factors, including neutralising Egypt through the Camp David Accords, led Israeli adventurers to invade Lebanon in a grand scheme to rechart the Middle East map into smaller states subservient to the zionists. Their first announced objective was to seize parts of south Lebanon where the Palestinian resistance was active in order to secure 'peace for Galilee.' The Israelis, however, kept moving further north to lay their first siege to an Arab capital, Beirut. It lasted seventy days culminating in the expulsion of the PLO leadership (with 14,000 resistance fighters) and massacres of Sabra and Shatila which were plotted by the Israelis and executed under their direct planning and supervision by their cronies, the Phalangists. Israeli tanks cordoned off the ill-fated refugee camps shortly before the massacres started and guided them through the night by shooting flares in the sky and directing floodlights into the camps. An estimated 3,700 Palestinian men, women and children were brutally massacred in these two camps (see separate report).

Israeli secret service agents were involved in the abortive kidnapping of Dr Omar Dikko, a former Nigerian minister in July 1984 in London. He was discovered in a crate which was about to be shipped to Lagos from a London airport. In 1961 the zionists had kidnapped Adolph Eichmann, a former German Nazi leader, and whisked him from Argentina to Israel where he was hanged for his alleged crimes against Jews in Nazi Germany.

In yet another violation of the terms of the Palestinian surrender at Beirut, Israeli jets attacked the PLO headquarters in Hammam Lif, near the Tunisian capital, on 1 October 1985, killing at least 160 people. During the same month (October 1985) an Arab activist, Iskandar Oudeh, was killed by a bomb planted by a terrorist Jewish outfit.

In April 1988 Mossad agents infiltrated into Tunis and killed the PLO's second in command, Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir) while an Israeli aircraft jammed telecommunications in the area.

Shaikh Abbas Musawi, leader of the Hizbullah in South Lebanon, his wife and baby son were burnt alive in their car on 16 February 1992 when their motorcade was attacked by Israeli gunships avenging resistance activities in the Israeli-occupied 'security zone.'

Buried alive

After Abdul Shtiyeh and his three friends finished shoving aside the burning tires with their bare hands and scraping away the debris of the makeshift barricade, he hoped the Israeli sergeant would let them go.

But the sergeant had other plans. According to three Palestinian witnesses, he ordered the four young men to lie face down in the mud along the main road at the entrance to their village and commanded a military bulldozer to bury them alive. A Jewish settler, looking on, shouted encouragement, they said.

The witnesses say that after the bulldozer poured a scoop of earth on the four, the sergeant ordered the driver to run over the men but he refused. The soldiers then withdrew from the village and residents pulled out the unconscious men from under the mound of dirt. All of them survived. (Two soldiers including the master sergeant were arrested.)

International Herald Tribune, 16 February 1988

In recent years Israel has been preoccupied by the Intifadah, uprising, in the West Bank and Ghazzah Strip which erupted in December 1987 as a result of a realisation in the occupied areas that liberation will not come from outside. It is a legitimate resistance movement against foreign military occupation and has won the admiration of all peoples around the world. As the Intifadah gained momentum, Israel stepped up its terrorist tactics to silence the resistance. Following are some of the methods Israel has used to subdue the Intifadah:

Shooting live ammunition at demonstrators with the intention to kill;
Shooting plastic and rubber bullets which leave colour marks on injured bodies;
The use of internationally-banned Dum Dum bullets;
The use of explosive- piercing bullets;
The use of highly-explosive fireworks and sound bombs during the night in order to intimidate the population;
Throwing bodies of different shapes (films and toys) by soldiers in villages and population centres which explode when touched or moved;
Planting booby traps at the entrances of Palestinian villages by settlers;
Using bombs filled with small metal-covered plastic pellets which disperse in all directions at varying ranges;
Using special guns for firming pigeon-egg size glass balls at demonstrators in large quantities;
Using various illumination projectiles at low altitudes which cause fires in trees and farms;
Arming settlers in order to terrorise the local population centres around them;
Breaking bones of protesters as a matter of policy;
Blasting of thousands of houses of resistance fighters and stone-throwers or sealing them with concrete;
Pulling thousands of fruit trees (citrus, olive etc) as punishment to villagers;
Appropriating hundreds of thousands of dunams of public and private land in order to build illegal and exclusive Jewish settlements;
Deportation of Intifadah leaders without recourse to any legal procedures, etc etc.

These measures were devised and sanctioned by the Israeli political and military authorities but even the Israeli judiciary sympathises with them. 'By its very nature, the deterrent effect must impinge on those surrounding the terrorist, particularly those members of his family living with him,' said an Israeli High Court judgment (Guardian Weekly, Manchester, 26 March 1989).

Israeli terrorism and occupation continue, so does the Palestinian and Lebanese people's heroic resistance.