Top 10 Israeli Obfuscations

Political Theatrics
The following can be found on Mona Baker’s official website under Israeli Obfuscations.
OBFUSCATION 1: Israelis and Zionists never target Jews
REALITY
“about 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, mostly because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs [referring to the bombings done at Synagogues and other areas of Jewish public concentration]” Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew in his book: Ben Gurion’s Scandals (Flushing: Glilit Pub. Co., 1995).

On November 25, 1940, Zionists attacked with explosives in Haifa Harbor the S.S. Patria carrying illegal Jewish immigrants. The attack was meant to embarrass the British and was also a result of rivalry among Zionist groups. In that incident 268 Jewish immigrants drowned. See these books for details on many more of these issues.
-The Transfer Agreement (Edwin Black)
-Original Sins (Benjamin Beit-Hallami)
-Beyond Innocence and Redemption: Confronting the Holocaust and Israeli Power (Dr. Marc H. Ellis)
-Ben-Gurions Scandals (Noam Giladi)
-Unholy Alliance (Marc H. Ellis)
-Ending Auschwitz (Marc H. Ellis)
-Selected essays in the compendium “Walking the Red Line” (ed. Deena Hurwitz). For example, the essay “Living Comfortably with —-Taboos” by Rabbi Gary Nitzan-Ginzberg, asserts that many aspects of Zionism in theory and as practiced can be categorized as racist.
-The Seventh Million (Tom Segev)
-The Holocaust Industry (Norman Finkelstein)- Perfidy (Ben Hecht)
-The Holocaust Victims Accuse (Neturei Karta)
-Ben-Gurion and the Holocaust (Shabbtai Teveth)
-Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (Lenni Brenner)
-51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (Lenni Brenner)

OBFUSCATION 2: “We don’t start wars: This war was forced on us. Arafat is responsible for all. He made his strategic decision of terrorism to reach diplomatic achievements by murdering. In this, he chose terrorism.” Ariel Sharon, December 2, 2001
REALITY
In a Los Angeles Times column published October 13, Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote:
“The preponderance of responsibility lies with Israel and with an international media that continue to obscure the basic realities facing the Palestinian people, and continue to treat the death of Israeli soldiers enforcing a brutal occupation as somehow more outrageous and barbarous than the killing of many times as many Palestinian teenagers who were resisting the occupation.”
See also http://al-awda.org/media/myths.html

OBFUSCATION 3: Zionism is a rational discourse in a world of turmoil
REALITY
” You would like me to look at it objectively. Objectively, I agree: we are only breeding more hatred and violence. You want me to imagine how I would feel if I were a Palestinian. I suppose that if I were, I might want to kill Israelis myself. But I am not objective and I am not a Palestinian. It’s not that the lives of Palestinians don’t matter to me. But Israeli lives matter more. I know this doesn’t sound terribly enlightened. And it certainly doesn’t lead to any of the political solutions that we both know are necessary if this horror is going to end.” Hillel Halkin ,?Objectivity is morally overrated?, Jerusalem Post, 14 November 2002. Also on the web at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1037248935749

OBFUSCATION 4: Israel is a state like any other state
REALITY
“The Jewish State cannot exist without a special ideological content. We cannot exist for long like any other state whose main interests is to insure the welfare of its citizens.” Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, New York Times, 14 July 1992
A 1975 resolution of the Organization of African Unity stated that “the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regime in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being.”
“In Israel for example, several laws are explicitly discriminatory. These can be traced back to Israel’s foundation in 1948 which, driven primarily by the racist genocide suffered by Jews in Europe during the Second World War, was based on the notion of a Jewish state for Jewish people. Some of Israel’s laws reflect this principle and as a result discriminate against non-Jews, particularly Palestinians who had lived on the lands for generations. Various areas of Israeli law discriminate against Palestinians. The Law of Return for instance provides automatic Israeli citizenship for Jewish immigrants, whereas Palestinian refugees who were born and raised in what is now Israel are denied even the right to return home. Other statutes explicitly grant preferential treatment to Jewish citizens in areas such as education, public housing, health, and employment.” A report on “Racism and the Administration of Justice”, Amnesty International (2001), also found at
http://www.amnestyusa.org/stoptorture/racismreport.pdf.

OBFUSCATION 5: Israeli leaders tell the truth when speaking about the Israeli Palestinian Conflict
REALITY
Binyamin Netanyahu, a leader of the Likud Party and an ex-prime minister of Israel had an interesting advice to Israelis. He was giving a speech to dozen’s of Likud Party members in Eilat. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (7/15/01) reported that: “…giving his audience a bit of advice on how to deal with foreign interviewers [Netanyahu said]: ‘Always, irrespective of whether you’re right or not, you must always present your side as right.’ ”


OBFUSCATION 6: Israel is a reliable ally and a true friend of the US
REALITY
Time and time again, Israel has been shown to be a strategic liability for America and counter to America’s national interest. By being associated with Israel’s actions, America’s standing in the entire Muslim world is damaged.
Israel routinely spies on the United States and carries out espionage and political assassinations on the soil of America’s allies.
And on June 8, 1967, with no other combat taking place nearby, Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats repeatedly attacked the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai coast, killing American sailors and wounding 171. Though Israel insists the attack was an accident, abundant evidence has surfaced that Israel deliberately attacked the ship, fearing it would monitor Israeli preparations for an attack on the Golan Heights the next day. In 1991, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak discovered that the US embassy in Beirut had intercepted Israeli radio traffic in which an Israeli pilot reported: “It’s an American ship.” The Israeli command ignored the report and ordered the pilot to press the attack.
Even in commercial areas important to a few in the US, Israel has become a major competitor of the US by selling American technology given free to Israel to others (this includes military and military related high tech sales which are now Israel’s biggest exports).
Research has also shown that Israel’s cost to US taxpayers ranged from a few hundred billion dollars to nearly $4 Trillion.


OBFUSCATION 7: Israel seeks peace based on International law
REALITY
” It seems almost inevitable that the United States will initiate new peace efforts, but it is unlikely that real progress can be made on any of these issues as long as Israel insists on its settlement policy, illegal under international laws that are supported by the United States and all other nations. There are many questions as we continue to seek an end to violence in the Middle East, but there is no way to escape the vital one: Land or peace?” President Jimmy Carter, Washington Post, November 26, 2000
Israel is currently in violation of 69 UN Security Council resolutions and countless UN General Assembly resolutions.


OBFUSCATION 8: Zionism was a rational response to anti-Semitism of Europe
REALITY
Zionism and Nazism were twins in their narrow nationalism and even collaborated against the public. The Zionists thus found no reason not to collaborate with the Nazis in the mid-thirties to rid Europe of its Jews. The details of this transfer agreement were given by Edwin Black’s book, The Transfer Agreement: the Untold Story of the Secret Pact Between the Third Reich & Jewish Palestine (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1984). After commencement of attacks on Jews under German control, the British, in the hope of easing the pressure for increased immigration into Palestine, proposed that thousands of Jewish children be admitted directly into Britain. Ben-Gurion, the recognized leader of labor Zionism at the time was absolutely against the plan, telling a meeting of Labour Zionist leaders on 7 Dec. 1938:
“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel” Lenni Brenner, The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir (Zed Books, 1984). cites as reference no. 23: Yoav Gelber, ‘ Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1939-42)’ Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, p. 199.
Below are two other relevant quotes.
“It is inconceivable from a physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of pure Jewish blood over several generations can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a Frenchman. A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical-racial type are Jewish … And a man whose body is Jewish can not possibly mold within himself the spirit of a Frenchman … It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own” Vladimir Jabotinsky (ideological father of Sharon’s Likud party), ‘A Letter on Autonomy, 1904′, reprinted in Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis (New Jersey: Barricade, 2002) p. 10.
“Wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity. Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal swarmed with a people, which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to Germans. And whatever doubts I may still have nourished were finally dispelled by the attitude of a portion of the Jews themselves. Among them there was a great movement, quite extensive in Vienna, which came out sharply in confirmation of the national character of the Jews: this was the ZIONISTS (emphasis in original)” Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, reissue edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 56.


OBFUSCATION 9: Zionists tried to accomodate the native people in their colonization efforts
REALITY
” Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population ? an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs.” Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall: We and the Arabs” First published in Russian under the title “O Zheleznoi Stene” in Rasswyet,” November 4, 1923. Translated by Lenni Brenner. It can be downloaded at http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm
“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist.” Golda Meir statement to the Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969.
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz, 3 November 2000:
“Terrible things were done [even] after the War of Independence, too; for example, in the town of Majdal in 1950. …Some 10,000 Palestinians lived in Majdal before the war ….In 1949, Yigal Allon demanded “to transfer all the Arab inhabitants.” Ben-Gurion objected. An inter-ministerial committee for the “transfer of Arabs from place to place” — yes, we had one of those as well — decided to thin out the population somewhat; another ministerial committee — “on abandoned property” — decided to settle Majdal with Jews. From committee to committee, Majdal was “Judaized,” until, with 2,500 Jewish residents, it became known as Migdal-Ad. In December 1949, more Arabs were deported so as to vacate a few more houses — “abandoned property” — for a few more discharged soldiers. The IDF made the life of those Arabs who remained a misery, hoping they’d get the message. The new commanding officer of the Southern Command, Moshe Dayan, rekindled the ideas of his predecessor, Yigal Allon. ‘I hope that perhaps in the coming years, there will be another opportunity to transfer these Arabs [170,000 Israeli Arabs - G.L.] out of the Land of Israel,’ he said at a meeting of the Mapai faction, outlining its ideas while in uniform. Dayan backed up his words with actions: He submitted a detailed proposal for “the evacuation of the Arab inhabitants of the town of Majdal.” the chief of staff agreed and Ben-Gurion authorized the plan.
The government was circumvented, the Histadrut labor federation objected, and Rabin informed the residents. The transfer began at the beginning of 1950, although the “official operation” took off in June. There were still those who spoke of dispersing the Arabs around the country; in the end, they were deported to Gaza. They were loaded onto trucks and dropped off at the border — “deliveries,” as they were termed. Just to remind you again, the state already existed. The last delivery of 229 people left for Gaza on October 21. Back in Israel, the officials pondered over how to distribute the “abandoned” houses, most of which went to individuals who had some political clout. In 1956, Migdal-Ad changed its name to Ashkelon. To this very day, the former residents of Majdal live in the shacks and shanties of the refugee camps in Gaza. But, there were also incidents in which they shot — oh, how they shot — and didn’t weep at all. And lied. This is the picture that emerges from the chapter about the Israeli press at the time of the Kibiya affair, which expresses the dark side of the then already five-year-old state: no longer a community struggling to establish a country, but an orderly, victorious state, thought of as a democracy, with David Ben-Gurion, who lies, poker-faced, and its press, which brazenly conceals scandalous information from its readers and even lies knowingly – all for the glory of the State of Israel.”


OBFUSCATION 10: Asking for Palestinian refugee return is unreasonable and is not conducive to peace
REALITY
http://www.al-awda.org/therefugeeprimer/
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/651/op11.htm