Transcription
Hello, my dear viewers. Welcome to another episode of El-Daheeh.
Imagine with me for a moment that you are a seagull flying over the Mediterranean Sea, heading east until you reach somewhere on the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa. There, you will find a charming and beautiful place known today as Dor; an ideal resort not less wonderful than the beaches of Greece, Cyprus, and Sicily.
Soft sand, a nice atmosphere, coral reefs, greenery around and beyond the beach, a museum, and some archaeological sites that date back to the Bronze Age. And many houses that, when you see them, you feel as though they came from Florida and were stationed here.
Of course, there are many resorts around with various services and facilities. Since you're still a seagull who knows nothing about the place, you'll see a modern resort from the sky called Nahsholim. A few meters away from it, there's a small building of a style different from that of the surrounding place, and it doesn't really fit in with the harmony of it.
A house built in an old Arab style stands in the heart of many Western and modern-styled buildings. In 1991, a resident of that place decided to build a diving center next to this house. Indeed, he brought workers and equipment and started the drilling. But they suddenly stopped when they found the remains of human bones buried at a shallow depth.
So, they back-filled the site, left, and never came back again. This was seen by a fisherman named Fouad Hasadiyeh, who lives in a nearby Arab village called Al-Faradis. When he went to the project owner and asked him why they left, the project manager told him, "We found bones and remains from Napoleon's age."
But Fouad said, "No... these are the remains of Palestinians who were killed in 1948 and were buried there." His father and grandfather told him about the massacre committed by Israeli soldiers in this place, and that the dead were buried in mass graves! One of these graves lies beneath the parking lot of that Nahsholim Resort!
All of this happened before the resort was built and before the place was even renamed as Dor. It happened when it was a Palestinian fishing village called Tantura! Tantura was a small Palestinian village located south of Haifa on the map. Until 1948, its population was about 1,500 Palestinians who depended on fishing and farming. It was a very quiet, very small, and very, very beautiful village.
After the Nakba and for 50 years, until approximately the year 2000, nothing was said about Tantura in Israel, other than being a village that witnessed a "battle" in the war of "Independence" between the Israelis and "Arabs." And the Israelis won, and these Arabs "immigrated" from the village and went to the nearby village of Al-Faradis. Then the settlers established Kibbutz Nahsholim there.
That remained the situation until 1998, when an Israeli student at the University of Haifa published his master's thesis. This student was called Teddy Katz. While preparing his research, he sat with a number of old soldiers; soldiers from a military brigade of the Israeli army called the Alexandroni Brigade. They were the ones responsible for entering Tantura on May 22, 1948.
With their testimonies, Katz discovered that the battle was not actually a real battle. That invasion wasn't a battle between two armies or two armed parties. Because despite the villagers' attempts to resist, they were poorly armed and had little experience in fighting, so the battle ended before it even started.
The families' surrender after their defeat wasn't an escape from death; it was, in fact, the beginning of a massacre. On the night of May 22nd and the morning of the 23rd, Israeli soldiers invaded the village of Tantura. At first, they separated men and women. Women were stripped of their money, gold, and anything of value. They were forcibly expelled from the village, wandering in the unknown with no place to go.
As for the village's men, the soldiers forced them to gather at the shore near the Arab house I was just telling you about. Don't think this only applied to real grown-up men; any boy who looked over the age of 13 was considered an adult man. By the Arab house, the witness of these events, the execution began.
The testimonies that Teddy Katz heard from the soldiers were terrifying and were later shown combined in a movie called "Tantura" by an Israeli director named Alon Schwarz. One of the soldiers said they placed individuals in barrels and shot them. He still remembers how the blood looked in these barrels.
Someone else said, "A soldier who would become a prominent figure in the Defense Ministry took out his pistol and started killing the hostages by the beach, one after another." A third soldier named Amitzur Cohen said literally while laughing, "I was a murderer. I didn't take prisoners."
How many do you think he killed? Actually, he doesn't know, and neither do we. He says while laughing, "I didn't count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets, and I finished them; I can't say how many." What I am telling you is not the testimonies of the victims, but those of the killers!
These are the ones who are supposed to try and tone down the severity of their actions, so imagine it's this horrific after being "toned down." The victims' testimonies are far more horrific than this; you can read them in detail in the sources below. Most of the victims who escaped murder were expelled as refugees in camps; some in Syria, and some still live today in the village of Al-Faradis.
This means that they went to live in a village a few kilometers away from where they lived, and their families were killed and buried. They don't even know where they're buried; it's all just guesses. Until May 2023, a research agency called "Forensic Architecture" published the results of an investigation conducted to answer this question: "Where were these people buried?"
They brought air-shot photographs of the Tantura village between the years 1946 and 1949. Pictures before and after the massacre. They did an analysis of these images and compared them with current maps of the place and recent satellite images. They did 3D modeling of the changes that occurred and also collected testimonies from people who survived the massacre.
They produced a report that accurately identifies the locations of mass graves. The largest two of them: one is located next to the cemeteries of the old village, and the second one is located under the parking lot serving a beach and resort. If you go to Google now and search for these places, the first thing you will encounter is hotel reservations and places for activities.
That is all despite the fact that all of this is built literally on top of execution fields and mass graves, as if Tantura is a metaphor for all of Israel; which is a very thin and fragile layer of "Western urbanization," and only a meter below that fragile layer is evidence of killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.
My dear, everything I told you so far is from Israeli sources, not Western but Israeli. The Arab sources contain much uglier details. But I have a reason for choosing these sources. I want to showcase some examples of the few Israeli voices that tried to dig into the roots of the Nakba and tell you what happened to them.
On the hands of "The Only Democracy in the Middle East"! These people were punished exemplarily. Teddy Katz, for example, who held interviews with soldiers, had a defamation case raised against him by war criminals! His master's thesis was withdrawn from the university library; he was forced to retract everything he said, and his academic career was completely destroyed.
Eyal Weizman, who founded Forensic Architecture, that you saw their picture a while ago, faced a lighter punishment; his books were banned in Israel, especially "Hollow Land," because this book is considered a book of conviction, where he explains the Israeli occupation's method in building settlements in a way that strangles and expels Palestinians.
These aren't individual cases; there are many examples of those who tried talking about the Nakba in Israel and how they were silenced. So much so that in 2011, the Knesset approved a law known as the "Nakba Law," granting the right to the Ministry of Finance to suspend government funding and official support from any institution that talks about the Nakba.
Meaning, in a university or a research institution, if a professor there gives a lecture about the Nakba, the government has the right to suspend its support and funding for the university. Because of this law, many books weren't published, many articles weren't issued, films weren't shot, and so on.
This is all to ensure that no one messes with the made-up narrative that Israel is trying so hard to tell about itself, especially if that person is Jewish and not Zionist. This is strange to them. To the point that these Anti-Zionist Jews, "Self-hating Jews," a humiliating name.
One of the most popular "Self-hating Jews" is Ilan Pappé, who was basically expelled from the University of Haifa, also the author of "10 Myths About Israel." These are "the fictional legends" Israel is feeding to the world, especially the Western imagination.
FOUNDING MYTHS
The narrative that Israel tells about itself, the national narrative dictated to children in schools, can be seen in two ways: either a bunch of lies in layers that we'd skip, or as a bunch of lies in layers that we need to understand, to know why the world believes them so badly.
This myth-like narrative begins with the Jewish kingdoms on the land of Palestine that fell apart, and the temple of Solomon was destroyed along with it. Since 70 A.D., Jews were dispersed throughout the world, and for 2000 years, they were subjected to discrimination and oppression that peaked at the Holocaust.
As a survival attempt, the remaining Jews decided to escape and return to the land of their ancestors. That's the first part of the narrative, where Israel presents itself in the weak moment of birth, earning sympathy, making it easier for people to buy their story later on.
The rest of the story can be seen in the sixth-grade geography book in Israeli schools, describing the return of the "brave" settler Jews who bought the land and built it by using all and every means of modern technology. If I stopped here, that's not enough; I need to add more details to paint the perfect picture in your mind.
So we'd see the book saying that the settlers arrived and found a land of ruins and swamps, so they began digging wells to provide fresh water and using fertilizers so that the land could be farmed, developed technologies, and cleared the swamps and filled them in, so they were able to eliminate the malaria that was killing them.
They also established cities like Tel Aviv, the first port in the region. Adding in the "detail" that the sea there in Tel Aviv is shallow with little depth, so it was hard to build a port, but the settlers managed to do it anyway.
If you reflect on this with me, you'd see this part is meant to entice admiration and paint a picture of the weak people who once sought a chance; they thrived. In a way that reminds us of the white settler who arrived in North America to build the United States of America.
Until this part of the story, they achieved two things: sympathy and admiration. Any story needs an important element, a conflict, and the conflict needs a villain. The first villain in the Israel story, surprisingly, is the British Mandate. That's not a typical villain, but one who hinders the Jews' migrations and tries to abort their dream of building a state.
Imagine a villain who's trying to stop Jews from escaping the Holocaust in Europe and resorting to the safety of their "new home," so in turn, you, as someone listening to the story, will hate that villain. And you're waiting for the moment when the hero will defeat the villain!
The Israeli fictional narrative gives you multiple heroes, not just one; heroes like Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and Shimon Peres, who joined military organizations such as Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi. If you focused, you'll see these names are smartly chosen.
Lehi meant "fighters for the freedom of Israel," so I'm giving you a story with an organization called "Freedom Fighters." Of course, you'll sympathize with me and believe in the Jewish bravery and sacrifice that succeeded in forcing Britain out of the land.
You'll also be happy for me that with Britain's exit, it'd be an independence from the mandate and the Jews' freedom from historical diaspora. You'll also be happy for me when the UN announces Resolution 181 in November 1947, that partitioned Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state.
All that I said now, my friend, you know it's a big fat lie, but what I'm trying to crystallize is that it's a well-made big lie that's highly believable. Imagine saying all this to someone who knows nothing.
Then after all this, tell him that on 14th May 1948, Israel became a country with a prime minister called David Ben-Gurion. And then tell him that only one day after the state is formed, a second villain attacked that dream. It feels like an American film's plot, where as the hero just won after defeating the first villain, and the film is almost over, a second villain shows up.
Whoever's watching the film will never believe that this second villain isn't actually a villain; the second villain was us. According to Israel's fictional narrative, one day after announcing their state, seven Arab armies decided to unite and attack this newborn state to exterminate the Jews: Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, KSA, Iraq, and forces from Palestine—all those are up against just one.
Does the story stop there? No. The Israeli narrative continues with a story from the Israelites, the story of David and Goliath: David, the young weak man who one day will fight the giant Goliath, the strong and mighty, and for David's faith and courage, he'll defeat Goliath.
In this story, Israel is David, and the seven Arab armies are Goliath. When I put the story in that context, who'd you sympathize with? You'll also believe me when I tell you a more insolent thing: when I tell you that the Palestinian Arabs left their lands to give the chance to the seven armies to annihilate the Jews.
And you'll believe me when I tell you that Israel tried its very best in all ways to convince Palestinians to return to their lands, but they refused and preferred to live as refugees. This is a story that tries to convince me that there are people who refused to return to their lands.
It's hard to believe, but they know how to tell the story well, so apparently some people do believe it. Some people even still believe to this day that Israel is doing nothing but trying to make peace with its neighbors that hate it.
The story ends with stating that Israel's only dream is peace, but at the same time always ready to defend itself. As proof of that, its army is called the Defense Army, and definitely after the odyssey I just told you, when I say that the IDF is the most noble army, you'll believe me.
This is an entirely fake story, my friend, filled with tons of lies and half-truths, but it shows Israel as the underdog, and apparently that's what made it easy to sympathize with. I know that the story is as fake as it gets, and you know it too, but apparently the average white citizen with little to no knowledge of the world around him, and only lives for the iced coffee, like Abod Btah said, the best press reporter in the world, it appears so that this citizen doesn't know that it's fake.
Because for many decades, Israel invested in invading the Western mind with this story in a way that assures the burial of the real story beneath. I'm here today to tell you about the real story: the Nakba.
FIRST MYTH 'ONE PEOPLE'
My dear audience, the first myth is that there's something called "The Jews," all of them as an entity since the beginning of history, one people, one race, same hopes, oppressed for 2000 years, not individuals, but one entity.
While if we took a look at Jewish communities in Europe and compare them to Jewish communities in Arab countries by the end of the 19th century, a quick look will tell us that this isn't real. Jews in Morocco, for example, were 150,000; in Egypt, 80,000; by the beginning of the 20th century, Jews in Baghdad, Iraq, were 50,000—that's 25% of Baghdad's population.
These Jewish communities were part of the Arab countries they lived in, Jewish Arabs whose life and properties were safe. They had their own schools and places of worship. There's no doubt they faced issues faced by any minority, but they were a part of the fabric of our society.
All these countries belonged to the Ottoman Empire, which was tolerant with the Jews there. On the other side, in Europe, Jews faced a different reality. A reality created by the changes Europe was going through at the time.
If we looked at Europe's map in the beginning of the 19th century, Europe was changing from grand empires into nation-states. These empires spread over huge lands, containing different people, races, and religions. Kings take heirs from each other, while the minorities are second-degree citizens, sometimes with good conditions and other times not.
Jewish communities in European empires were a minority, a self-enclosed minority, living in what's called "Ghettos." Their communication with the outer world was limited. They saw themselves as different. But the new idea of the nation-states that replaced empires changed that situation.
Germany turned from a few scattered small kingdoms into a unified German state. Same goes for Italy and Poland. "I'm confused, Abo Hmeed, what's the difference between them?" Just the names; never mind.
Dr. Fawzy El-Bedwy, professor of Jewish Studies at Université de la Manouba, says that nation-states offered a promise of a new reality: no more minorities or majorities, just citizens. We're all German, or Italian, or Polish; we all have an identity that binds us, which is the nation, even if we have differences in religion or race; we're all citizens and integrated into one nation.
The Jewish reaction to this ideology was different. Some of the Jewish communities refused the idea; they saw that the only way they could still be Jews and not integrate and forget their origins and history was to isolate themselves and refuse this new reality.
This fear was fueled by the violence that many European Jewish communities faced, especially in Russia and Poland, so much so that the name "Pogrom" appeared, which is a Russian word meaning killing the Jews, destroying their properties, and burning their houses.
On the other hand, some other European Jewish communities saw that this violence was temporary and would disappear over time, and that integration is the solution. They saw a chance to learn and benefit from the modern fast-changing European knowledge and melt into society when they got modern jobs, doctors, poets, and bank clerks.
They believed their culture wouldn't vanish because religion and language would preserve their culture. In both cases, whether those in favor or oppose this new reality, they saw themselves as European citizens in European countries.
All that I said denies the existence of a separate entity called "Jews." At the end of it all, Jews are individuals in communities with their conditions changing from best to worst or vice versa, according to the historical age and geographical place they lived in.
The Zionist ideology is trying to do the opposite: to picture Jews as a unique condition in history, and that aggression against them is fixed and fateful. It's to the extent that a Zionist thinker called Leon Pinker says about Antisemitism that it's a 2000-year-old incurable genetic disease and infection.
SECOND MYTH 'ZIONISM IS JUDAISM'
The Anti-Zionism Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said that the worst thing Zionism did was manipulating Judaism to use religion as a justification for implementing an originally colonial ideology.
'Abo Hmeed, please break it down; I don't get it.' I know you; you like stories. You want a story with a conflict and a villain, right? I told you a while ago, some Jews accepted integration, and others didn't.
From those who accepted integration was an Austrian journalist called Theodor Herzl. He grew up in a very rich Jewish family, well-educated with German education, only knowing the word "Shalom" in Hebrew; his relationship with religion is almost non-existent. Some people say he was on the verge of atheism.
'Wait, Abo Hmeed, Herzl, the father of Zionism and Israel, had a non-existent relationship with religion and wanted to integrate in Europe?' That's the dramatic plot; it's the coming of age; the genre.
In 1894, Herzl went to Paris to cover an important case for a Jewish French officer called Alfred Dreyfus. This man was accused of leaking classified information to the Germans. This case had shaken France; the people divided, some advocated for his innocence while others accused him of treason.
Till here, everything is okay; a case and a court with some acclaim, all news. But what wasn't normal was that some demonstrations against Dreyfus were cheering with, "Death to the Jews." That's where? In Paris, the beating heart of modernism.
It's true that some sources say Herzl over-exaggerated and that the cheer was "Death to the Traitor," but what's sure is that in both cases, Herzl saw this as a turning point. This made him lose his faith in integrating into societies.
'So he was now prone to isolation?' Honestly, he let go of the whole integration vs. isolation ordeal; he went to a third option that wasn't known at the time, nor had an audience in the Jewish European communities: an idea called Zionism.
'So Jews weren't Zionists to begin with?' Nope. Zionism is an ideology that appeared in the 16th century; it appeared between Christians, especially Protestants, and even more precisely in Britain.
The idea is simply that Jews go to Jerusalem and build the temple in preparation for the Second Coming of Jesus. The idea stayed the same until the 19th century. A normal idea that exists and no one cares for. Jews used to hear this and not give it much thought.
'You don't want us to be citizens and want us to leave so you can be citizens alone? We get it all.' Jewish Zionism in the 19th century, however, was different than this, especially Herzl's Zionism. It wasn't as simple as taking Jews back to Jerusalem.
The Egyptian writer Al-Sayed Yassin, in his book "Dissecting the Israeli Mind," tries to give us a clearer and more detailed picture of Jewish Zionism. The Jewish Zionism is a racist ideology. It sees that all humans everywhere in all times have deep hatred for Jews.
If you get a four-year-old who just learned how to talk and asked him if he loves Jews, he'll say, "Yes, no biggie." Then a Jewish Zionist would reply, "He's just saying that, but deep inside he doesn't."
Zionism opposes the other who's not Jewish and sees that this hatred is deep inside this other for no alternative reason other than he's not Jewish. So the only solution for Jews to be safe is to create a state purely for them without those others.
All Jews. No integration or isolation or communication; a state for only them. No one lives with them. Or at least they'd be the vast majority that rules. This ideology will be documented by Herzl in his book "The Jewish State."
'Abo Hmeed, now who exactly are the Jews?' I don't have an answer to this question, but I can tell you the Zionist definition of it. The Zionist definition is that Jews are one pure race, from the beginning of times till the last of it.
And that they don't just represent a religion; Judaism isn't a proselyte religion; they don't seek inviting others to their faith or marry inside their faith, so Zionism sees Jews as a pure people or race, which is also a racist ideology.
Not just that, but according to the researcher Badiaa Amin, she says that one of the Zionist principles is that Jews are only oppressed by others, but there could never be a Jew who oppresses another Jew. Remember the thing about the self-hating Jew?
Zionism gets shaky when a Jew criticizes it. In short, Zionism is based on a belief that the whole world hates Jews. That the entire world is Antisemitic, and those who aren't are prone to. Herzl saw that oppression, hatred, and Antisemitism were the power that would lead Jews to the solution, and in his words: "We are one people; our enemies have made us one."
I find this idea a little scary, my friend, that the unification of some people is based on the hatred of others towards them, so you're defined by the people who hate you. Indeed, without Antisemitism, Zionism wouldn't have existed.
Can you imagine that there's an ideology that's based on people rejecting it, and once everyone accepts it, it'll fall apart? Herzl saw that Antisemitism would be the power that would enable the Jews to build their state.
In short, after all this, Zionism was an idea that reacted to discrimination against Jews with discrimination against everything that's not Jewish. So the solution is for Jews to live in a state by themselves. Herzl kept thinking, where would this state be?
There were suggestions like Argentina, Uganda, Madagascar, and Russia because, like I told you, it had nothing to do with religion; all that mattered was to establish a state for protection from the hatred of Jewish that's deep within the non-Jewish.
Let me tell you a surprise: most Jewish communities whom Herzl suggested to the Zionism and state solution completely swept it aside. 'You go, and we'll come later.' Those were the oppressed themselves. They were questioning why emigrate from the places they had been living in, rather than demanding their rights.
'Even if we emigrate, we will emigrate to the new world, America; it was already the first destination for European Jews, transforming New York in the late 19th century into the most important Jewish city in the world.
The first Zionist congress was set to be held in Munich, but interestingly enough, the German Jews refused, so much so that many hakhams saw Zionism as a challenge against the divine fate of diaspora for the Jews.
That's when Herzl thought of the idea we spoke about earlier, which is to convince all these people I need a really nice story, even if it's not real; I need a legend for people to believe in. In her book, "A Short History of Myth," Karen Armstrong says that a myth is true because it's effective, not because it's fact.
Herzl understood that Europeans were afraid of traveling to a place they did not know. What would we do in Uganda? Too hot. What would we do in Russia? Too cold. Imagine being oppressed and also cold! But what if the destination was known, guaranteed, and holy? A happy ending to a sad story.
This was the only way he managed to convince them. 'We won't immigrate to a new place; we'll go back home.' At that time, in the first Zionist congress in Basel in 1897, the Zionist movement announced its destination: Palestine.
According to the Argentinian sociologist Pedro Bridger, Herzl turned the biblical idea of diaspora, this epic story, into a modern ownership document to own Palestine, for the immigration to be seen as not a political solution but a religious duty.
That's when the mix-up started between Zionism and Judaism. That's what created the fallacy that Judaism equals Zionism and that Anti-Zionism is the same as Anti-Judaism.
THIRD MYTH 'A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE'
A land without people is the most famous Zionist idea, despite the fact that Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a fully integrated society with a Muslim majority, Christians, and a Jewish minority.
A society, despite its religious diversity, was still culturally homogenous. Jaffa, the biggest city on the East coast, had more than 60,000 Palestinians; it had cinemas, theaters, and a port that was hundreds of years older than Tel Aviv's new port.
The British delegate that came to Palestine between 1871 and 1877 wrote about Palestine an encyclopedia of 12 parts, where it wrote the names of 13,000 places! This leaves us with two possibilities for the meaning of the sentence "Land without People":
The first possible meaning is interpreted by Pedro Brieger that the leaders of the Zionist movements demanding going to the promised land, the holy land where their dreams would come true, knew nothing about, because to them, the world was just Europe.
Their entire knowledge about Palestine was from adventurers and travelers. If you're a traveler, you won't go tell people in Europe that in your adventure to Jaffa you saw things we have, like cinemas or theaters; it's not exotic enough.
You've been to the east; paint them a picture of the primitive east with tents, camels, and the Thousand Nights and One Night stories, and an empty land that awaits the return of the Jews. This is the first interpretation for "Land without People."
The second interpretation is proposed by the Palestinian historian Salman Abu-Senna, who said that a land without people was the Zionist intention: to get the land to be without people, and let me explain. Until the end of the 19th century, the percentage of immigrants did not exceed 3% that was at the time under the Ottoman rule.
Herzl's attempts to get the Ottoman Sultan to specify a land for the Jews were refused, but left the immigration going. Because Ottomans and Arabs didn't have a problem with Jews for being Jews; if you're a Jew and want to live with us in peace, our pleasure.
But if you're a Zionist... The immigration continued, and in 1907, the Zionist Chaim Weizmann established a land development company in Jaffa. Chaim Weizmann is an extremely important character in the Zionist history, a Jew whose relationship with religion is almost non-existent.
'What's with all the non-God-fearing people, Abo Hmeed?' This company's goal was to purchase land in an organized manner from Palestinians. But according to the American professor Walter Lehn, in a farming society like this, landlords refused to give up their land for money because it was the base of their lives and livelihood, especially the deal conditioning expelling Arab farmers from the land.
To make it a land without people, so we can get our own people. That's why the Zionists will only succeed in purchasing lands from so-called people who own many lands but don't live there. Like one of the Lebanese families living in Europe, who—in 1910—sold 200 KM² in Marj Ibn Amer to Jewish entities.
Till this point, it seems innocent. Jews immigrating from Europe to live and farm in a new place. But the structure of the farms they built didn't really insinuate this. What the Zionists did since the beginning and continued doing with every land they took was to refuse Palestinian workers on the land.
You're not there to work with them; you're there to replace them. Remember, a land without people. So this means all workers have to be Jewish. To the point where Marj Ibn Amer witnessed the displacement of 60,000 Palestinians and were replaced by immigrant Jews.
The second thing was Land Guards; Jewish security troops were formed called Hashomer, whose goal was to protect these lands. Because they always thought about anything outside this land as an enemy. This guard strengthened relations between Jews and the "new land."
The third condition was boycotting. 'We'll economically boycott Palestinians; I'm not here to make business with them; I'm here to make Jewish products and work with Jews.' This way of handling the land was a Zionist strategy.
It probably wasn't so clear at that time, but it hasn't changed much since the beginning of the 20th century. Although this strategy wasn't so clear at the beginning, it aroused concern with some Palestinians. It started appearing in some newspapers like Al-Karmel issued in 1909 that publicly warned against the Jewish settlement movement.
But the immigrations continued. Before World War I, the number of Jews in Palestine increased from 24,000 to 50,000. The number was doubled but still wasn't big enough. This made the Zionist settler movement feel it'd take them a hundred years.
'What would we do with 50k? We need to pace things up, and like anyone who wants to pace the project's growth up, we need an investor, and who was the perfect candidate in that case? Britain.
FOURTH MYTH 'BRITAIN THE ENEMY'
In the normal fictional Israeli narrative, Britain is an enemy that tries to hinder establishing the Israeli state. While if you look at history, you'll see it's exactly the opposite, and that without Britain, the Zionist project wouldn't have worked.
Until before World War I in 1914, and years after the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, their number didn't exceed 50,000, while the Palestinians were 500,000. Like I told you, in the Zionist belief, if the Jews are a minority anywhere, they'll be oppressed.
'We'd escape from being a minority in Europe to be a minority in a new land?' That's when Chaim Weizmann makes a move and leans into the UK, 'Don't you want to help us leave you and go to Palestine?' 'We're all Europeans; we'll be your arms and legs there for your interests in the region.'
The truth is, Britain did agree. It helped Zionism and eased the European Jews' immigrations to Palestine. One would ask, 'Why would Britain so willingly offer help?' That question is a shame; if you focused on the episodes, you wouldn't have asked.
I'll tell you, Britain in World War I was fighting Germany, and who was Germany's ally? The Ottoman Sultan's empire. It was falling apart at that time. - Was it poorly? - No, like really collapse.
Britain, as a colonial power in its prime, had its eyes on some Ottoman states, or actually, many states. One of these states was Palestine. Britain had intense fear that Germany would invade Palestine during the war. Hence it would be close to the Suez Canal, which for Britain represents its route to its colonies in India.
'You want to be as close to Palestine and the Suez Canal so you'd close it up and deny my access to my colonies in India?' Of course not. Not just that; Palestine's geographical location is close to the Mediterranean and Red seas, and between the two most important Arab capitals at the time: Cairo and Damascus.
So if you—as Britain—laid your hands on it and allowed some European settlers there, they'll be loyal to you because you helped them. Here, the Jewish Zionism found its interest with Britain's colonial dreams. Damn colonialism.
In 1915, the British Zionist minister, Herbert Samuel, submitted a secret document to the British Cabinet titled "The Future of Palestine," where he says that the idea of establishing a state for Jews in Palestine is perfect, but it can't be done without a full British Mandate over the land.
This mandate would ease the immigration and increase Jews to 4 million Jews. Then in 1917, this suggestive document turned into a British declaration known as The Balfour Declaration. A letter written by the British Exterior Minister, Arthur Balfour, who was a Zionist Antisemitic Christian.
'What? How, Abo Hmeed?' I just told you. There's no Zionism without Antisemitism. Again? Again. The Zionist idea owes it to the Antisemitic idea. Anyway, The Balfour Declaration promised establishing a national state for Jews.
But there's a trick here. What's a "national state" for Jews? Does it mean that Europe's Jews would live in Palestine, which is under the British Mandate? Or does it mean establishing an actual Jewish state with only a Jewish population and ruled by them?
What this exactly meant wasn't even clear to the British themselves, but at that time, no one cared enough to clarify. Britain continued its plan to support Jews' immigration. In the same year, the British General Allenby entered Jerusalem.
He entered Jerusalem with a Jewish military corps, and with this crops a man called David Ben Gurion. You may think that they went in like a hot knife through butter, but no! In 1918, Jews were about 50,000 while Palestinians were around half a million!
85% of these Palestinians rejected the idea of a Jewish state. In fact, a committee sent by US President Wilson to examine the situation said that in order to achieve Mr. Balfour's declaration, it will require a military force of 50,000 soldiers.
However, despite all that, Britain didn't give up, and they went on with their plan. Especially as World War I ended with Britain's victory against the Ottoman Empire. In 1920, the League of Nations—which is the UN's former organization name—granted Britain the mandate over Palestine.
That's when Britain appointed Herbert Samuel as the first High Commissioner. This guy made everything so easy. From 1919 to 1921, the Jewish migrations would greatly increase, where 185,000 Jewish immigrants arrived, while the Jewish National Fund bought 240,000 acres from Jezreel Valley, Northern Palestine.
With the idea of settlement turning into a full-scale European project, violent demonstrations spread across Palestine starting from Jaffa, where 95 Jews and 64 Arabs died. Then Churchill announced in June 1922 the Churchill White Paper.
This white paper by Churchill says: "Why are you worried, guys? Don't be so angry! I see no reason for you to be worried." Now you know why we were worried? Let me tell you that some sources indicate that Churchill was also antisemitic.
So, Churchill tried to calm the Arabs down and tell them: "Guys, the Jews won’t occupy Palestine. They will just create a society in it with what works for the nature of the country, its economy, and its population. Don't misjudge them."
The truth is that the reality and future will beg to differ with Churchill. Jews were creating closed communities. Ones that didn't blend with Palestinians but were made to replace them.
It was to the extent that some Jewish towns were granted local autonomy like Tel Aviv, which developed separate Ministries of Works, Energy, and Water. Education in a different language, and universities like the Hebrew University, which Balfour attended its opening himself.
Things will stay that way for a while. Until in 1929, when Jewish immigrant numbers started to double. Not only that, but in 1929, a Jewish prayer was organized in Jerusalem calling for the revival of the temple and claims their historical right in the "Wailing Wall," which is called 'Buraq Wall' by Muslims.
And the Jewish day of mourning the Temple's destruction coincided with the Muslim Mawlid, so Palestinians got angry. That's the revolution we know as the Buraq Uprising in 1929. That's when Palestinians were dismayed by the violent oppression led by the British.
They didn't only arrest hundreds of rebels; they executed the uprising leaders! The British treated Palestinians as if they were the "Red Indians" or the "Black Australians." These are British colonizer terms given by the British to who they deem as barbaric people.
Meanwhile, the immigrant Jews are not that! They are civilized white Europeans. "White on the outside, white on the inside." The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé says that the people of Palestine were described in the letters between Balfour, Churchill, and Herbert Samuel using words like Arabs or Mohammedans.
The word "Arab" at the time wasn't like the one we know now. At the time, Arab meant nomadic or primitive. The picture of camels and tents. And Mohammedans didn't mean Muslims. It meant the followers of Mohammed.
Last time I heard "Followers of Mohammed" was in the "Fajr Al Islam" movie. But seriously, these letters reflect a point of view where the white colonizer sees Palestinians as a part of primitive groups, who don't have an identity or privacy.
As if they were primitive tribes that unfortunately happen to be living there. Winston Churchill will later bluntly say: To explain, my friend, since I didn't know what a manger was; this means that a dog being in a farmhouse or a barn doesn't give him the right to own the barn, even if he has been there for a while.
Do you know who he meant by that? He meant the natives of America, Australia, and Palestine. But who has the right to rule these lands according to Churchill? The civilized Europeans! Whether they are British or Jewish.
And according to that, the Jewish immigrations continue until they reach 27% of the population in 1935. From 3% to 27%! And revolutions against them never stopped, revolutions against the unfair British colonization.
And one of the major revolutionists was a Syrian guy from Al-Azhar University who turned from a preacher at the Istiqlal Mosque in Haifa to a leader of an armed movement against the British. His name is Izz al-Din al-Qassam. He was joined by thousands of volunteers who gave him ammunition and weapons.
But the occupation succeeded in killing Izz al-Din al-Qassam in an unfair battle. Al-Qassam's funeral will turn into the heart of the people’s movement in Palestine. This movement turned later into a complete revolt from April to October of 1936. It was the spark of The Great Arab Revolt.
The British were disoriented by the revolt. They probably were surprised that the dog in the manger was resisting. Between 1936 and 1937, the British killed a thousand Palestinians and arrested anyone who took part in the revolution.
And then they would blow up his home and destroy it. In Jaffa only, more than 200 houses were demolished. Britain gave the Jewish settlers everything, my friend. They facilitated their immigration, created areas with tight Jewish communities with organizations and infrastructures, fought Palestinian revolutions, and killed their leaders.
And went on with their oppression to the extent that 10% of Palestinian men in 1940... 10%! were either killed, exiled, or arrested. In addition, Britain planted racist ideas against the natives of the occupied land. The British taught Jews all the bad things.
But there was one thing left! 'They got them into smoking, Abo Hmeed?' The thing that the Jews would learn from the British was the whole colonization thing. "It's nice... Why not?" And indeed, the Zionist colonial ambition rises more.
The other thing that the British helped the Zionists with was developing the necessary military force to achieve that ambition. In 1937, a commission was created called the Peel Commission. They would suggest dividing the land between a million Arabs and 400,000 Jews, one-third for the Jews and two-thirds for the Arabs.
The thing is that Palestinians were literally everywhere. So, they would be a majority even in the Jewish areas. Churchill, in front of that committee, would call Palestinians dogs in a manger. "We can kick them out."
Britain didn't go through with the committee’s suggestion. They wanted to, but they retracted. However, the professor of history at Oxford University, Eugene Rogan, says that the Peel Commission was the first to suggest the idea of expulsion.
You shouldn't just buy lands and create closed communities. You should force the people out of their land and create religiously and ethnically unified places for other people. Do you think it stops here?
The point is that the colonial ambition of the Zionist movement started to develop. Ben Gurion and the Zionist leaders sat down and thought: "To be honest, the expulsion idea was nice, but what if instead of forcing them out of one-third of the Palestinian land, we force them out of Palestine entirely?"
Later on, the director of the Jewish Agency, Josef Weitz, said, and you should listen carefully, "There will be no land for two peoples." The settlers' ambitions grew so far past the British themselves.
The second thing that the Jewish settlers learned from the British was the necessary violent power needed to achieve that ambition. It all took place gradually. From 1937 to 1939, the Jews would—and hear this—they would do exceptional terrorist acts.
'Abo Hmeed, you must mean 'terrorism' metaphorically, right?' I mean it in a literal way, my friend! Like the terrorism we hear about on TV. They sent bombed cars to Haifa and Jerusalem markets that killed more than 70 Palestinians.
All that was under the supervision of the British. Again, please go check the sources! I'm not saying all that because I'm an Arab! Or a nationalist! Or for my people! Please check the sources! Because this episode specifically heavily depended on Israeli sources.
Anyway, you know what Britain did while watching all that happen? They increased the number of soldiers in Palestine to 25,000 soldiers. They killed 5,000 Palestinians and arrested another 9,000 in conditions described by Eugene Rogan as concentration camps.
However, despite all that British spoiling, Britain was just like any other empire. It wouldn't be there forever. For the Jews to protect their interests, they had to have an independent army to avoid having their fate linked to Britain forever, especially with a conflict of interest wavering at the horizon.
Because with the beginning of World War II in 1939, Britain—hear this out—would limit the Jewish immigrations to Palestine. Shame on them. And they put the limit of 15,000 immigrants yearly to try and reduce the tension in the Arab region to stay focused on their war with Hitler.
World War II was already in full swing! And real oppression against the Jews was taking place in Europe at its time. You might think that this moment created a conflict between the parties. But with the beginning of the war, 15,000 Jewish soldiers joined the British army and participated in World War II.
I'm telling you this information because that's where they gain great experience. You joined the Champions League! You are training with the British army against the German Army. You have experience now!
Later on, the Jewish militia groups that used to do terrorist acts would slowly turn into organized military structures, like their most famous one, which I mentioned before: Haganah, and other groups like Stern and Irgun.
The Haganah would transform from a gang to an army that owns an air force. According to the historian Ilan Pappé, with the Zionist movement owning an organized military force, it will start to ask themselves why do expulsion when they can annihilate?
"Why expel Arabs? Let's exterminate them!" "Palestinians have proved that they wouldn't stop revolting or fighting back... Even if we managed to expel them, they would always come back! Sorry, but this land is just for us! Just for Jews!"
That's why, while the British army was fighting systematically, the Jewish Zionist gangs were training on a different kind of war. The British General Orde Wingate was the first one to train Jews on the occupation of villages and on something called guerrilla warfare.
According to Ilan Pappé, Orde was the first to implant in Zionists' consciousness the idea of ethnic cleansing. To the point that Moshe Dayan would describe Wingate as the First Master.
At that time, the Zionist gangs would start studying the geography of every Palestinian village and knowing its entrances and exits in preparation for storming it later to be able to purify it. That's what Ilan Pappé calls the "Village File Project."
The European Jewish immigrants grew up, learned things, and had a trained military that can put plans. And there was a feeling that Britain is indeed an ally, but the war was hindering their interests in Palestine.
"Imagine! They limited the number of Jewish immigrants! Shame!" Zionists witnessed some disunion across themselves. An opinion was led by David Ben-Gurion, who saw that he was against limiting the immigrations, but Britain was still an ally to Zionist plans.
Oppositely, an opinion was led by the gangs of Irgun and Stern, that Britain, under the pressure of war and fear of tension in the Arab region, became an obstacle in the way of the Zionist project.
The tension reached its peak when the French Patria ship docked near Haifa port, and it had more than 1,800 Jewish immigrants without Britain’s approval. That's when the Zionist gangs blew up one side of the ship and sacrificed 240 Jewish passengers to force British authorities to let the remaining 1560 Jewish passengers in.
Someone will ask: "So they blew up the ship and murdered some of the people they want to bring in to force Britain to let the rest in?" My dear viewer, let me tell you that a negotiation took place between Stern and the Nazis, who went and met in Lebanon to form an alliance.
Imagine that! The Nazis! The Nazis who made concentration camps, holocausts, and a Jewish eradication in Europe. The Zionist Stern militia was trying to form an alliance with them. And they actually met in Lebanon. Just because they thought it would meet their interests.
Again, these aren't my words. These are Eugene Rogan's words, the history and Middle East professor at Oxford University. The Zionist movement realized that Britain, after World War II, even if they won, would never be a great empire again.
In her book "Western Crime," Viviane Forrester says that all of Europe was in crisis during the war. To the point that each country reduced the number of Jewish refugees displaced to it and created what she called "The Hitler Trap."
Hear that? European countries refused to give refuge to the Jews, outright leaving them to the Holocaust! The Zionist movement was aware of that situation and realized if it needed a trustworthy ally, a new ally instead of Britain, then that ally has to be outside of Europe, specifically, the United States of America.
In 1942, Zionists held the Baltimore Conference to gather supporters of Zionism in the US. Among its recommendations was that the New world born after the war would have the Jewish state as a part of it, which had its arms wide open to all the Jews of the world.
That's when the Zionist movement was trying to have a role in the interests of the world's greatest empires. It presented itself as an ideal solution for the surplus of Jews in Europe. It also presented itself as a new ally to the single power that wasn't affected by war.
That's when we ask, while the US was in the midst of the Second World War, why did it accept the role of the new sponsor? Honestly, like I told you before, the US is a country that can understand the Zionist dream the most.
In her diary "Hard Choices," the former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says that the American people are mostly immigrants who fled their countries to a dream in a faraway country. Hillary says: "In Israel’s story, we see our own."
It's true that the Americans won’t be the holy and chosen people, but at least they will be its allies, who will help that people fulfill the dream they once achieved before. That's in addition to America's interests in having an ally like Israel in a region like the Middle East.
So, we can say it's a win-win situation. And indeed, the new alliance was forged between the Zionist movement and the US, who started to fund them generously to the point that the Haganah would have its own armament factories.
Of course, the British saw that and were shocked! They realized that the historic agreement between the British and Zionists was one-sided! It was like a one-sided love. A toxic relationship! Britain kept on giving, giving, and giving...
"Then you dump me for the US? Even when I needed you during World War II and asked you to please limit the Jewish immigrations because the Arabs keep nagging me, what did you do? And what about Stern who met the Nazis? What's going on?"
Britain broke down, my friend! Britain was investing a lot in the Zionist project to have an entity that serves their interests in the region, only to realize later that this wasn't an option in the Zionist plans.
Britain was raising a monster, nurturing it, and making it stronger, thinking that it had the monster's shackles in its hands. But when Britain checked on the chain, it didn't find its monster; the monster of its own creation was leading at the time some of the most violent waves of terrorism against who? The British themselves!
In 1946, the Irgun gang blew up the King David Hotel, the British Administration headquarters. They bombed it with almost 200 KGs of explosives and killed 91 British people. In 1947, the Irgun bombed the British Officers' Club in Jerusalem.
Then a ship named Exodus would arrive in Palestine carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors who wanted to enter Palestine. But the British refused to let them in, saying, "Guys, this exceeds the allowed limit." Then they deported the ship back to France.
This ignited riots resulting in the execution of three of the Irgun members. So, the Irgun kidnapped two British soldiers and hung them dead in groves near Netanya. For that to be a clear message to the British: "Leave! We no longer need you!"
The paradox is that the Irgun leader, who was listed as "wanted" by the British police, who do you think that was? He was Menachem Begin. The irony here is that Menachem Begin, who would later be Israel's Prime Minister and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace, used to be considered a terrorist by Britain.
Just casually like that! Imagine a guy classified by Britain as a terrorist became years later a Nobel laureate for "peace." During the final years of the British mandate, 500 terrorist attacks by the Zionists in Palestine were documented, killing more than 169 British soldiers, targeting banks and infrastructure, and using methods of terrorism that were new to the world.
Like what? Like parcel bombs; putting a bomb in a parcel, sending it to someone, then it blows him up. Terrorism delivery! That's the innovation in terrorism! My dear viewer, these attacks impacted Britain in a form of a retaliatory attack on 300 Jewish facilities in England.
And even more than that, raising the Nazi Swastika that urges the extermination of Jews! We are talking about England only two years post World War II against Nazis! The British raised Nazi flags and slogans! Guys, calm down! You shouldn't do that!
You might think that the paradoxes are over, but no. The British forces of 75,000 soldiers in Palestine at the time won't take any action against the Zionist gangs. They actually arrested over 300 Palestinians on charges of carrying a weapon.
"Guys, are you blind? It wasn't us!" The Israeli historian Avi Shlaim pointed at this paradox and said that the British mandate bears the moral burden of opposing and precluding the establishment of a Palestinian state till the very last minute!
Until 1947, when Britain decides that this is it; they won't lose another soldier in the conflict. So, they tossed it to the United Nations and said: "You solve this issue; I've had enough!" Eugene Rogan, an English historian, says something very surreal: that the country that says it fights terrorism the most ousted the British using terrorism.
Again, I'm not the one saying that. It's Mr. Eugene!
FIFTH MYTH 'DAVID AND GOLIATH'
The United Nations issued the Partition Resolution 181, dividing it into 6 regions: 3 Arab regions and 3 Jewish ones, with Jerusalem under international supervision. 56% of the land would go to the Jewish country.
Most of the land would go to the Jews, even though the Palestinian population was double that of the Jews. In 1947, the Palestinian population was one million and 200 thousand, and the Jewish population was 600,000.
Palestinians legally owned—and note this—94% of the land and 80% of the agricultural land. So, larger population, more land ownership, yet eventually, 56% of the land was given to the minority after this partition, who—before that partition—only owned 6% of the land.
The partition gave Zionists bigger areas, but it couldn't give them ethnically homogeneous cities. It gave them cities like Jaffa and Haifa, which were mostly populated by Arabs. The historian Ilan Pappé said that: "No one in the world could have imagined that a national liberation movement in Palestine would share the land with its settlers."
However, remember that the main goal of Zionism was for the Jews to not live with others, with others that differ from them. And remember that the Zionist dream grew from a country in a part of Palestine to the entirety of Palestine!
When General D'Arcy was asked about the land situation in Palestine, he said that after Britain's withdrawal, the Jewish Agency controlled all of Palestine. The Haganah was an organized military group of 35,000 soldiers. The Palmach commands were more than 10,000 soldiers.
Irgun and Stern were big and organized military groups with experience. Meanwhile, the Arab front was far from being systematic or organized. The Arab countries had just survived war and an occupation that they hadn't recovered from yet, with exhausted armies and conflicted interests.
The Arab countries opened the doors for volunteering to save Palestine, to have an improvised army of 4,000 volunteers. That army was called the Arab Liberation Army. Despite the loyalty of its members, it still was an unorganized army.
Even in Palestine, Ilan Pappé said that efforts were scattered instead of united, between leaders like Abdul Qader Al-Husseini, Fawzi Al-Qawji, and Hassan Salama, who carried out separate operations that wouldn't have that much of an effect.
All of these were Arab and Palestinian attempts to reject the division. But on the Zionist side, a more dangerous matter was taking place. Remember, the declaration of Israel hasn't been announced yet, neither has the 198 war taken place.
We are currently at the end of 1947, where Haganah meetings were held intensifying their operations. Do you remember "The Villages Project"? The one where they collected information about all Palestinian villages? This project transformed into the famous plan called "Plan Dalet."
A complete ethnic cleansing plan on paper ready to go. However, it needs a real trial, a rehearsal. The rehearsal takes place on February 15th in 1948. When the Palmach leader Yitzhak Rabin, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for peace by the way, led an attack on the village of Caesarea in Haifa district, expelling 1,500 of its inhabitants.
The Zionists attacked 5 villages to ensure the efficiency of their fighters. And to make sure that the remaining British soldiers who haven't left yet won't intervene. The gangs start an organized attack on the villages surrounding Jerusalem.
Someone asks: "Wasn't Jerusalem not a part of the partitioned areas? I just saw that map you showed me!" You know, my friend, David Ben Gurion was once asked about Israel’s borders; he then said the best definition for Israel’s borders is the farthest place that the Israeli soldiers can get to.
Since the beginning, the Zionist movement was one that takes a piece of land and keeps expanding. "I mean, why commit to borders that weren't set when we arrived? We're the ones who set those borders, and those borders are created and changed every day.
We previously had 6%; now we have 55%. And if we move a bit, who knows what's next. Either way, with the right force, the world will accept it as a fact." This ideology controlled the Zionist movement from its birth till this very moment.
In the beginning, the strategy was besieging every village they encounter from 3 sides, leaving only one exit for the villagers to leave and become refugees elsewhere. 'Where would they refuge? It's their problem.'
However, sometimes these gangs would need to show off their power by leaving no exit for escape. Like what happened in Deir Yassin on April 9th, 1948. Deir Yassin was a tranquil village inhabited by 700 residents. It had farmers, merchants, a mosque, two schools, and a sports club.
In only one day, 250 people were murdered, almost a third of the village. Each person would see his family die in front of his eyes, knowing that he's next. Despite the fact that the British Police Office was only 3 KM away, none of them did anything.
A terrorist demonstration! This demonstration would forcibly push 75,000 Palestinians to leave their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem and run away. The ethnic cleansing doesn't stop at expulsion and eradication, but also—as we have seen in the first story—means erasing any memory of that place; as if those victims were never here.
One kilometer away from Deir Yassin, the Yad Vashem was built. For the paradox of it, what did that turn out to be? It's a Holocaust museum. Proving the famous words by Emile Habibi: "Your Holocaust... Our catastrophe."
While gangs were seizing villages by force and terrorism, the British Mandate handed over the ports to the Jews as it left. They also handed them over around 2,700 government buildings, 50 train stations, 3,000 KMs of roads, and 37 camps equipped with weapons and their spare parts.
The British literally built the Zionists a country and left. According to the Zionist narrative, the crisis of the Palestinian refugees was caused by Arab armies calling citizens to move in preparation for armies to enter.
However, the historian Ilan Pappé says that half the Palestinian refugees were expelled from homes before the war started. They were expelled before May 1948, before the Arab armies even set foot. Among the 530 villages destroyed in the Nakba, half of them were ethnically cleansed.
Again, all that was before May 1948. The historian Avi Shlaim confirms that the refugee crisis commenced during the first half of 1948, but was not caused by the war itself.
On May 14th, 1948, the establishment of the State of Israel was announced. As part of the narrative, it announced itself as a young David in front of a giant Goliath, in a time when all the giants of the world, its Great Powers, recognized it very quickly.
So much that for a country like America, President Harry Truman recognized Israel after only 11 minutes. The very next day, on May 15th, 1948, Arab armies would announce going to war, and the New York Times published a headline of: "Jews in Grave Danger in All Muslim Lands."
If you reflected on that title, it takes advantage of the Holocaust. It was a rising state with a ready-to-go propaganda. One day after it was announced, one of the biggest newspapers published such a title.
And while the headline implies a Jewish minority facing a huge tide of Muslims, if we look a bit closer, we would find that the entire seven Arab armies were very small in number. They had only around 25,000 soldiers.
Let me remind you that these armies weren't as regular as we think. These were armies of countries that some of them were still under occupation. On the other side, the Jewish army started the war with 35,000 soldiers. By the end of the war, they became 100,000 soldiers.
Anyone who hasn't watched the episode might think that the Arab countries were regular armies that lost in front of a group of gangs. However, after watching this entire episode, now you know that these weren't just some gangs.
These groups were trained by the British, participated in World War II, have been in operations, have funding, have been fighting for years, and were handed fully weaponized military camps by the Western countries.
In addition to that, Arab armies still had the idea these were just gangs and didn't consider all the other factors. That's why Arabs were shocked by defeat. How was a group of regular armies defeated by a bunch of gangs!?
But like we have said! They weren't just gangs. They were armed forces who committed massacres during the war, like bombing Lyd and Ramla, and the Tantura massacre that we talked about.
According to Ilan Pappé, massacres were no longer committed when there was "a need," or even as a part of a certain strategy. They took place simply for the sake of them happening, or as Pappé described: "Zionists can no longer see that they are killing humans."
In August 1948, after the defeat of the Arab armies and the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to surrounding countries, Count Bernadotte, the UN ambassador, visited Palestine and refugee camps in Jordan.
He was terrified by what he saw; he said: "It would be an insult to the principles of justice to deprive these innocent victims of the right to return to their homes." 'Yes, finally the UN talks, the international law!'
Unfortunately, a plot twist: the Count will die. 'A car accident, Abo Hmeed?' No, an assassination. The Stern gang assassinated him with the participation of Yitzhak Shamir, who will become—as usual—the Prime Minister of Israel.
It's like a requirement for the position. By December 1948, the Jews will occupy 85% of Jerusalem outside the old city in front of the eyes of the UN. The Israeli historian, Hillel Cohen, said that thousands of refugees from Sepphoris and the surrounding villages took shelter in the Christian city of Nazareth; which Ben-Gurion feared destroying, knowing its importance in the Christian world.
It's the city of Jesus. 'Thanks, I guess?' These thousands of refugees made a nucleus for the 1948-Arabs; the Palestinians inside the new state to be established.
The Jewish Zionist gangs tried to attract the Christians of villages like Al-Bassa to return but without the Muslims. Why? To establish the existence of safe Christian villages and affirm that they were in a defensive war with the Muslim Arabs.
But the Palestinian Christians of Al-Bassa refused to return without the Palestinian Muslims. On December 11th, the UN issued Resolution 194 guaranteeing the right of return for every refugee who was expelled.
'How many refugees were they, Abo Hmeed? How many were expelled in the Nakba?' 750,000 refugees! And that was in 1948! 75 years later, the refugees' number went up to 5 million refugees.
The Argentinian researcher Pedro Brieger, during his visit to refugee camps decades after the Nakba, found that all children introduce themselves with names of the villages that their ancestors were expelled from.
This child knows nothing about the village except its name; he never visited nor saw it, yet still calls himself after its name. He still has the key of his grandparents' house that they were kicked from. Generations would still pass on these keys, one to another.
The right of return that the UN granted the Palestinians in 1949, as you know, was never implemented. But on the other hand, in 1950, Israel announced the legendary right of return that any Jew has the right to return to Israel.
Israel that represents the extension of the Jewish state after the Roman invasion in 70 B.C., 2000 years ago! It's actually ironic: Why would someone who never lived on this land have the right to return to it? While someone who actually lived on the land doesn't have the right to return?
The only condition for Israel's return law is to have a Jewish mother. Imagine a Jewish Russian; his grandparents for 20 generations lived, died, and got buried in Russia. He would get the right to "return," go to Israel, get the citizenship, a passport, and all his rights once he steps off that plane.
On the other hand, at the West Bank, there's the Jordan River, that has Palestine to its left and Jordan to its right. There's a Palestinian refugee in Jordan standing on the side of the river looking at Palestine's land on the other side; his and his grandparents' land but can't cross the river to it.
The law of return of the Jews is a culmination of a Herzl-originated idea; freeing the Jews from all their diaspora and creating a pure-race society, a society just for them. They create its boundaries and cancel the others, whether by avoidance, expulsion, or... genocide.
By the time of the Peace Treaty in July 1949, the Zionist forces didn’t just take over 55% of the land according to the Partition Resolution; no, they took 78% of the land. The UN acknowledged these new borders and called them the "Green Line."
The Israeli historian, Theodore Katz, whom we spoke of early on, the one with the Masters' and Tantura, said that the morality of the IDF lives on an eternal fallacy because they didn't come to a land without people but to a land with 1.3 million Palestinians there, but they weren't humans in the eyes of the Israeli army.
This is probably the way that new generations in Israel will inherit the fictional legend. A group of psychological defense mechanisms, denial, and justification to help them sleep at night and forget that buried in this land just a meter down, all the possible evidence on the killing, genocide, and ethnic cleansing.
What happened in Tantura happened in all Palestinian land.
LAST MYTH 'THE ONLY DEMOCRACY IN THE MIDDLE EAST'
In 1948, Ben Gurion, the immigrant who spent his youth in Poland, said that not only did he achieve the dream, but he's also its founder, or how the Jews named him, the state's main founder.
A dream described as a 100% Jewish country without Arabs, a completely pure society for Jews only. And if any Palestinian tried to disturb the dream, he would face the fate of Jerusalem and Haifa, destroyed villages, ports bombed off, streets filled with thousands of Palestinian corpses.
Those who were lucky were expelled and lived as refugees all their lives. The slogan raised by the Zionist movement, "A land without a people for a people without a land," for the entirety of our tale was an absolute slogan that doesn’t accept bargaining or any presence of the other.
'It's either us or them.' A slogan that the Zionists adhered to even when Arabs represented 70% of the population and 90% of the land! 75 years after Ben-Gurion’s declaring the achievement of the dream, the Jewish community still maintains its purity equation no matter the consequence.
The community includes Israeli Jews who have the privileges and Palestinians who suffer from discrimination on all levels. A society summed up by its current leader, Benjamin Netanyahu: "Israel is not a state of all its citizens… but rather the nation-state of the Jewish people—and only it."
If you are an Arab living on the historical land of Palestine, your life will be determined early on by where you are, which is partitioned into 3 categories: The 48-Palestinians, West Bank Palestinians, and Palestinians of Gaza.
The 48-Palestinians are 2 million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship; they alone constitute 20% of the country, but they are second-class citizens. 1948-Palestinians get fewer years of education than their fellow Israeli citizens because the Arabic spoken by those 2 million Palestinians is not officially recognized.
No matter how high of a rank they get at work, their monthly income stays less than the average Israeli citizen. If they decided, "It doesn't matter, I'll focus only on my life and my family," unfortunately, they aren't allowed to request citizenship for their families living outside Israel.
Even if they decided to forget all about their origin and become Jewish, according to the Israeli law, they're not allowed to do that, or at least they'll face many obstacles to make sure it's nearly impossible. A hard life, huh?
Let me tell you that this is considered a luckier life than Palestinians in the West Bank. There are 2.7 million Palestinians living in the West Bank under the direct Israeli occupation. But they live in a prison-like structure, with sectors of locked gates, and moving from a sector or a prison to another requires passing through numerous military checkpoints.
On the one street you live in, there could be tens of checkpoints, turning a 5-minute walk into an hours-long inspection. With all that, you're surrounded by more than 130 settlements, illegal of course. These settlements are housed by 500,000 settlers.
Between 2017 and 2021, the Israeli army gave "33" permits for the Palestinians to build houses, while on the other hand, the Israeli army demolished over 1,150 homes and gave the illegal settlers 1,100 building permits.
The Palestinian whose home is demolished with nowhere to go can't even put up a tent without getting a permit from the Israeli army that he certainly doesn't get. -'Where do we go?' -'We don't know; figure it out.' "They really tightened the tap on them."
The truth is they didn’t just tighten it metaphorically; they did it literally. Water, which is a basic right for any human, gets delivered to the settler with a capacity of 300 liters per day, while the Palestinian waits for water to fill his tank every 15 days from the Israeli government and companies, and his daily capacity doesn’t exceed 80 liters per day, which is less than the 100 liters specified by the WHO.
That's not a water shortage, but an intended discrimination in distribution between the Palestinian and Israeli. If you live in Gaza, your response would be, "Wait, you guys have water?" In Gaza, 2 million people live on an area of 360 KM².
No barriers, no gates, as the entire strip is fully besieged. It is not connected to the world by a port, an airport, or even a train. Nothing can get in or out without permission from the Israeli army. Some sources say that the Israeli army controls the amount of calories that enter to the citizens inside the strip.
They calculate the amount of food entering to the number of people for the calories intake. Most of the strip's land is not suitable for farming; its groundwater is polluted; 90% of it is not suitable for human consumption or even to grow food.
80% of the population’s food depends on international aid. There's not even constant electricity to help you see the wretched conditions. Gaza's need for electricity is 560 megawatts, and it only receives no more than 200 megawatts.
In an environment like this, the unemployment rate stands at 50%. Although children make up the majority of the population in Gaza, most of the strip's schools were destroyed. Even though Israel doesn't militarily occupy Gaza, it turned it into a large open-air prison, whose key is only in the hands of Israel.
The International Committee of the Red Cross considers the situation to be a complete violation of the Geneva Conventions. According to the Israeli academic Oren Yiftachel, Israel is an ethnocracy. A country that only serves Jews.
"A system that works for the Jewish majority with a goal to harm the Arab minority." A system to confirm its purity and identity; this won't happen without inflicting severe damage to others living with it. Israel is an Apartheid state.
These aren't my words, but those of Noam Chomsky, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli Minister of Education himself: Israel is an Apartheid state. All that I said throughout the episode since Zionism was just an idea until this moment here and now says that Apartheid is the expected development of the original idea.
That identity will determine people's rights, and that because of the Palestinians' identity, they'd be robbed of their rights. A world that we wish ends soon, and that Palestinians would get their rights as humans and Palestinians.
We tried together to understand the roots of this reality and understand how the story originated, developed, and got complexed. Maybe when we understand this dreadful reality, we'd have the imagination to paint a picture of a better reality; that's what makes us human at the end.