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American Terrorists or American Bullies??? It is still America against the world, war or no warHopes of the growth of a new multilateralism are exaggerated Martin Woollacott Friday November 30, 2001 The Guardian There is in America a sense of distance from other nations, and of difference from them, which has been long remarked and debated. When the rightwing commentator Robert Kagan recently mocked a government official for seeming to suggest that America might consult the international community over the fate of Osama bin Laden, should Bin Laden be captured, he showed this at its most extreme. For some Americans, the phrase "the international community" is an overly complimentary label for a diverse gang of opponents, wreckers, freeloaders, passengers and difficult allies. Even the most liberal will sometimes slip into language which unconsciously puts the US on one side and the rest of the world on the other. The idea that America was becoming more wilful and less ready to consult and compromise was widespread even before Clinton left office. It became commonplace after Bush took over. Some commentators were particularly concerned about what they saw as a growing divide between the US and Europe. Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, wrote that the two were becoming dangerously estranged. On issue after issue, whether it was missile defence, global warming, the international criminal court, biological weapons verification, the comprehensive test-ban treaty, the ban on landmines or money laundering, the US took the position that it either got its way or it went on its way. In the past, that would have halted progress. But, Mathews wrote: "The US has profoundly misjudged the world's new willingness to adopt international agreements - despite US opposition - when those agreements have vigorous backing from the EU." America, Mathews suggested, had simply not picked up on the changes in attitude that followed the end of the cold war, the growth of European integration and, more broadly, the emergence of transnational activities, both good and bad, on a new scale. While noting Europe's blind spots and hypocrisies, she argued that EU countries had a much better idea of the risks and possibilities. The Clinton administration had said it was "multilateral when we can, unilateral when we must". The Bush administration seemed to be ready to reverse that proposition. Professor David Calleo, an authority on Europe and on European-American relations, says that American leadership is "sometimes like a kind of world government but run by us and without much reference to what people think." But: "If you're going to run the world, you have to pay attention to the world." That world, he suggests, is one which contains several great powers, and it is not only Europe's strength to which the US will have to adjust in time but that of China, Russia and India - as well as to the paradoxical strength which arises, among weaker Muslim countries, from their discontent and unhappiness. There is sharp division among students of American policy, coloured to some extent by party feeling, on whether September 11 has changed the Bush administration's unilateralist instincts. Perhaps the unavoidable multilateralism of the project against terrorism, and its ongoing nature, would translate into a readiness by that administration to reconsider its views across the board. That was was certainly the hope in Europe. But the immediate evidence is thin. A former senior official of the National Security Council under Clinton says of the Bush administration: "Look, they see this as a coalition of convenience. There is no sense that this is a two-way commitment, no sense that they are incurring debts. They think people should be grateful to them rather than the reverse." UN dues have been paid, there has been a small shift on biological weapons and the administration has taken measures to postpone a break with Russia on the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which it might not have done without September 11 and the unprecedented cooperation with Russia in central Asia which followed. But it has not moved on any of the other issues. Bush showed characteristic treaty phobia when he evaded Vladimir Putin's proposals for a formal agreement on the strategic weapons cuts outlined at their recent summit. Mort Halperin, one of the leading advocates of multilateralism over the years, notes a similar phobia about the UN, and the avoidance of a security council resolution on Afghanistan. "Britain could have said that we want a resolution on Afghanistan. The council would have said yes. If the UK had insisted the administration would have agreed to it. After all, Bush senior went to the council for a resolution in similar circumstances." Bush's administration cannot bring itself to refer to another UN resolution, ordering all states to surrender Bin Laden, because it dates from the Clinton era. Indeed its refusal generally to touch on any of the achievements of the Clinton period, especially if they involve multilateral efforts or "nation building", is marked. "They can't bring themselves to make a big thing out of what the US and Nato did in Bosnia and Kosovo," a Washington journalist said, "which would be an important asset in persuading Muslims of America's good intentions, because they refuse to acknowledge anything that the previous administration did." The almost perversely unilateralist side of this administration was illustrated for one visiting group of Europeans, a party of British MPs, when they questioned John Bolton, under-secretary of state for arms control and international security, about the recent UN vote on moving forward on the comprehensive test-ban treaty, which stood at 148 to one, the one being the US. Bolton apparently replied that he was very proud of that vote. The other side of the administration, of course, is represented by Colin Powell and by such behind-the-scenes figures as Brent Scowcroft. Jim Mann, of Washington's Centre for Strategic and International Studies, has written that expectations of a sudden shift toward multilateralism were facile. Nevertheless, he believes that the Bush administration may end up working out its own kind of internationalist approach. "It won't be classic multilateralism, but it will be different from what this administration started off with." Another observer of the administration says: "People are overwhelmed. They have been working seven days a week, 20 hours a day. As things calm down and they look at the issues and grasp that nearly all of the threats we face are transnational and need international solutions - terrorism, aids, drugs, global warming, you name it - I think they will change." This argument from exhaustion is not conclusive. The hard evidence so far mainly supports the pessimists. The optimists rest on intuition. The fundamental question of the Bush administration's future international orientation remains open. martin.woollacott@guardian.co.uk Special reports Attack on America War in Afghanistan Britain after September 11 September 11: UK political response Media response to September 11

The World sees very little difference between the Zionist European American Israeli Jewish aggressors and the American Military bombers!!They look the same!! TEN YEARS OF RESEARCH INTO THE 1947-49 WARThe expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fifty years ago the UN decided to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. The ensuing Arab-Israeli war ended with Israel expanding its share of the land by a third, while what remained to the Arabs was occupied by Egypt and Jordan. Several thousand Palestinians fled their homes, becoming the refugees at the heart of the conflict. Israel has always denied that they were expelled, either forcibly or as a matter of policy. Israel's "new historians" have been re-examining that denial and have put an end to a number of myths. by Dominique Vidal -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Only a few acknowledged that the father's story of return, redemption and liberation was also a story of conquest, displacement, oppression and death." Yaron Ezrachi, "Rubber Bullets" Between the partition plan for Palestine adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 and the 1949 ceasefire that ended the Arab-Israeli war, begun by the invasion of 15 May 1948, several hundred thousand Palestinians abandoned their homes in territory that ended up occupied by Israel (1). Palestinian and Arab historians have always maintained that this was an expulsion. The vast majority of the refugees (estimated at between 700,000 and 900,000) were, they say, forced to leave, first, as a result of clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, and then by the Arab-Israeli war, in which a political-military strategy of expulsion had been marked by several massacres. This position was stated as far back as 1961, by Walid Khalidi, in his essay "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" (2) and has recently been restated by Elias Sanbar in "Palestine 1948. L'Expulsion" (3). Mainstream Israeli historians, on the other hand, have always claimed that the refugees (numbering, in their estimation, 500,000 at most) mostly left voluntarily, responding to calls from their leaders assuring them of a prompt return after victory. They deny that the Jewish Agency (and subsequently the Israeli government) had planned the exodus. Furthermore, they maintain that the few (and regrettable) massacres that occurred - particularly the Deir Yassin massacre of 9 April 1948 - were the work of extremist soldiers associated with Menachem Begin's Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir's Lehi. However, by the 1950s this version was already beginning to be contested by leading Israeli figures associated with the Communist Party and with elements of the Zionist left (notably Mapam). Later, in the mid-1980s, they were joined in their critique by a number of historians who described themselves as revisionist historians: Simha Flapan, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim, Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris. It was Morris's book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", that first prompted public concern (4) . Leaving aside differences of subject, methodology and viewpoint, what unites these historians is that they are bent on unpicking Israel's national myths (5). They have focused particularly on the myths of the first Arab-Israeli war, contributing (albeit partially, as we shall see), to establishing the truth about the Palestinian exodus. And in the process they have incurred the wrath of Israel's orthodox historians (6). This research activity was originally stimulated by two separate sets of events. First, the opening of Israeli archives, both state and private, covering the period in question. Here it is worth noting that the historians appear to have ignored almost entirely both the archives of the Arab countries (not that these are notable for their accessibility) and oral history potential among Palestinians themselves, where considerable work has been done by other historians. As the Palestinian historian, Nur Masalha, rightly says: "History and historiography ought not necessarily be written, exclusively or mainly, by the victors (7)". Second, this delving into Israel's archives would perhaps not have borne such fruit if the following ten years had not been marked by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and by the outbreak of the intifada in 1987. Both these events accentuated the split between the nationalist camp and the peace movement in Israel itself. As it turned out, the "new historians" were uncovering the origins of the Palestinian problem at precisely the moment that the whole question of Palestine was returning to centre stage. In a recent article in the "Revue d'études palestiniennes" (8), Ilan Pappe, one of the pioneers of this "new historiography", has stressed the importance of the dialogue that was unfolding in that period between Israelis and Palestinians. It developed, he says, "basically among academics. Surprising as it may seem, it was thanks to this dialogue that most Israeli researchers who were working on their country's history and who had no links to the radical political organisations, became aware of the version of history held by their Palestinian counterparts. They became aware of the fundamental contradiction between Zionist national ambitions and their enactment at the expense of the local population in Palestine." To this we might add that the manipulation of history for political ends is not an exclusively Israeli domain: most often it goes hand in hand with nationalism. What lessons have the revisionist historians drawn from their diligent working-through of the archives? As regards the broad picture of the balance of power between Jews and Arabs in both 1947 and 1948, their results contradict the generally-held picture of a weak and poorly armed Jewish community in Palestine threatened with extermination by a highly armed and united Arab world - David versus Goliath. Quite the contrary. The revisionists concur in pointing to the many advantages enjoyed by the nascent Jewish state over its enemies: the decomposition of Palestinian society; the divisions in the Arab world and the inferiority of their armed forces (in terms of numbers, training and weaponry, and hence impact); the strategic advantage enjoyed by Israel as a result of its agreement with King Abdullah of Transjordan (in exchange for the West Bank, he undertook not to attack the territory allocated to Israel by the UN); British support for this compromise, together with the joint support of the United States and the Soviet Union; the sympathy of world public opinion and so forth. This all helps to explain the devastating effectiveness of the Jewish offensives of spring 1948. It also sheds new light on the context in which the mass departure of Palestinians took place. The exodus was divided into two broadly equal waves: one before and one after the decisive turning-point of the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 and the intervention of the armies of the neighbouring Arab states on the following day. One can agree that the flight of thousands of well-to-do Palestinians during the first few weeks following the adoption of the UN partition plan - particularly from Haifa and Jaffa - was essentially voluntary. The question is what was the truth of the departures that happened subsequently? In the opening pages of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", Benny Morris offers the outlines of an overall answer: using a map that shows the 369 Arab towns and villages in Israel (within its 1949 borders), he lists, area by area, the reasons for the departure of the local population (9). In 45 cases he admits that he does not know. The inhabitants of the other 228 localities left under attack by Jewish troops, and in 41 cases they were expelled by military force. In 90 other localities, the Palestinians were in a state of panic following the fall of a neighbouring town or village, or for fear of an enemy attack, or because of rumours circulated by the Jewish army - particularly after the 9 April 1948 massacre of 250 inhabitants of Deir Yassin, where the news of the killings swept the country like wildfire. By contrast, he found only six cases of departures at the instigation of local Arab authorities. "There is no evidence to show that the Arab states and the AHC wanted a mass exodus or issued blanket orders or appeals to the Palestinians to flee their homes (though in certain areas the inhabitants of specific villages were ordered by Arab commanders or the AHC to leave, mainly for strategic reasons)." ("The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", p. 129). On the contrary, anyone who fled was actually threatened with "severe punishment". As for the broadcasts by Arab radio stations allegedly calling on people to flee, a detailed listening to recordings of their programmes of that period shows that the claims were invented for pure propaganda. Military operations marked by atrocities In "1948 and After" Benny Morris examines the first phase of the exodus and produces a detailed analysis of a source that he considers basically reliable: a report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June 1948 and entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948". This document sets at 391,000 the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. "At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report's compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases... In short, as Morris puts it, this report "undermines the traditional official Israeli 'explanation' of a mass flight ordered or 'invited' by the Arab leadership". Neither, as he points out, "does [the report] uphold the traditional Arab explanation of the exodus - that the Jews, with premeditation and in a centralised fashion, had systematically waged a campaign aimed at the wholesale expulsion of the native Palestinian population." However, he says that "the circumstances of the second half of the exodus" - which he estimates as having involved between 300,000 and 400,000 people - "are a different story." One example of this second phase was the expulsion of Arabs living in Lydda (present-day Lod) and Ramleh. On 12 July 1948, within the framework of Operation Dani, a skirmish with Jordanian armoured forces served as a pretext for a violent backlash, with 250 killed, some of whom were unarmed prisoners. This was followed by a forced evacuation characterised by summary executions and looting and involving upwards of 70,000 Palestinian civilians - almost 10% of the total exodus of 1947- 49. Similar scenarios were enacted, as Morris shows, in central Galilee, Upper Galilee and the northern Negev, as well as in the post-war expulsion of the Palestinians of Al Majdal (Ashkelon). Most of these operations (with the exception of the latter) were marked by atrocities - a fact which led Aharon Zisling, the minister of agriculture, to tell the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948: "I couldn't sleep all night. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here (...) Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken (10)." The Israeli government of the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling for this since 11 December 1948. Their villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared out between the surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" - which was designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who were "absent" - "legalised" this project of general confiscation as of December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or Judaised, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in 1952, Israel had thus succeeded in expropriating 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and - most important of all - 300,000 hectares of land (11). In "1948 and After" (chapter 4), Benny Morris deals at greater length with the role played by Yosef Weitz, who was at the time director of the Jewish National Fund's Lands Department. This man of noted Zionist convictions confided to his diary on 20 December 1940: "It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (...) the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. (...) There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries(...) Not one village must be left, not one (bedouin) tribe." Seven years later, Weitz found himself in a position to put this radical programme into effect. Already, in January 1948, he was orchestrating the expulsion of Palestinians from various parts of the country. In April he proposed - and obtained - the creation of "a body which would direct the Yishuv's war with the aim of evicting as many Arabs as possible". This body was unofficial at first, but was formalised at the end of August 1948 into the "Transfer Committee" which supervised the destruction of abandoned Arab villages and/or their repopulation with recent Jewish immigrants, in order to make any return of the refugees impossible. Its role was extended, in July, to take in the creation of Jewish settlements in the border areas. Israel's battle to bar the return of Palestinian exiles was also pursued on the diplomatic front. Here, as Henry Laurens noted in a review of the revisionist historians (12), "the opening- up, and the use, of the archives made it possible to revise a number of previously-held positions. Contrary to the widely held view, the Arab leaders were prepared for compromise." As soon as the war ended, the Arab leadership was trying, within the context of the Lausanne Conference, to arrive at a general settlement based on Arab acceptance of the UN partition plan (Ilan Pappe gives a detailed account of their efforts (13)), in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a right of return for the refugees. Despite international pressure - with the United States to the fore - this enterprise was to founder on the intransigence of the Israeli authorities, particularly once the Jewish state had been admitted to the United Nations. Despite this extraordinary accumulation of evidence, Benny Morris concludes in his first book that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab." ("The Birth...", p. 286) His second book offers a more considered approach, in which he recognises that the Palestinian exodus was "a cumulative process, there were interlocking causes, and there was a main precipitator, a coup de grace, in the form of Haganah, Irgun and IDF assault in each locality". ("1948...", p. 32). This shift of position does not, however, prevent him from continuing to resist any notion of a Jewish expulsion plan, and to exonerate David Ben Gurion, president of the Jewish Agency and subsequently prime minister and defence minister of the newly-created Israeli state. As Norman G. Finkelstein has highlighted, in a textual study that is as brilliant as it is polemical (14), this twin denial by Benny Morris seems at first sight to contradict what Morris says himself. After all, he himself tells us that "the essence of the [Dalet] plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the Jewish State's future borders before, and in anticipation of, the Arab invasion." ("The Birth...", p. 62) And he also recognises that Plan D, while it did not give carte blanche for an expulsion of civilians, was nevertheless "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" for whom it provided "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions" (p. 63). Benny Morris contrives to make two seemingly contradictory statements within two pages of each other, namely that "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine's Arabs" and that "from the beginning of April, there are clear traces of an expulsion policy on both national and local levels". ("The Birth...", pp. 62 and 64) The same is true as regards the responsibility or otherwise of David Ben Gurion. Morris makes clear that the prime minister was the originator of the Dalet Plan. In July 1948 we find Ben Gurion again, giving the order for the operations in Lydda and Ramleh: "Expel them!" he told Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin - a section censored out of Rabin's memoirs, but published thirty years later in the "New York Times" (15). This order, Morris tells us, had not been debated within the Israeli government. In fact, some days previously the Mapam, partner of the ruling Mapai, had obtained from the prime minister an instruction explicitly forbidding the military to carry out expulsion measures... Ben Gurion later attacked the hypocrisy of this Marxist Zionist party for condemning "activities" in which its own militants, Palmah troops and kibbutzniks alike, had also taken part. In Nazareth, General Chaim Laskov decided to take the official instruction literally. One story has Ben Gurion arriving there, discovering the local population still in situ, and declaring angrily "What are they doing here?" (16) Also in July, but this time in Haifa, we have Ben Gurion as the man behind the scenes in the operation for the "de-localisation" of the 3,500 Arabs still remaining in the town, followed by the partial destruction of the former Arab quarter. In short, as Morris himself points out, power at that period of Israel's history resided with Ben Gurion and with him alone. All issues, whether military or civilian, were decided with him, often without the slightest consultation with the government, let alone with the parties that comprised it. In such a situation, the absence from the archives of any formal parliamentary or governmental decision to expel the Palestinians proves nothing. As Morris himself admits, "Ben Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals 'understand' what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the 'great expeller'" ("The Birth...", pp. 292-3). The fact that the founder of the State of Israel took advantage of the impressive extent of his powers and worked towards the maximum enlargement of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the United Nations, and towards reducing its Arab population to a minimum, is a matter of historical fact. Morris devoted an important article (17) to Ben Gurion's long-term support for the transfer project. As he writes in his preface to "1948 and After...", "Already from 1937 we find Ben Gurion (and most of the other Zionist leaders) supporting a 'transfer' solution to the 'Arab problem' (...) Come 1948, and the confusions and deplacement of war, and we see Ben Gurion quickly grasp the opportunity for 'Judaising' the emergent Jewish State" ("1948 and After..., p. 33). Prior to this, he tells us that "the tendency of military commanders to 'nudge' Palestinians' flight increased as the war went on. Jewish atrocities - far more widespread than the old histories have let on (there were massacres of Arabs at Ad Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Safsaf, Majd al Kurum, Hule (in Lebanon), Saliha and Sasa, besides Deir Yassin and Lydda and other places) - also contributed significantly to the exodus" ("1948...", p. 22). The "original sin" Ilan Pappe, a professor at the University of Haifa, devotes two chapters of his book "The Making of the Arab- Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951" to these issues. Eschewing the caution of Morris's position, he concludes that "Plan D can be regarded in many respects as a master plan for expulsion. The plan was not conceived out of the blue - expulsion was considered as one of many means for retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish convoys and settlements; nevertheless, it was also regarded as one of the best means of ensuring the domination of the Jews in the areas captured by the Israeli army" ("The Making...", p. 98). Furthermore, the actual text of Plan D leaves very little doubt as to the intentions of Ben Gurion and his friends. It spoke of "operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris), and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village, conducting a search inside it. In case of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state" ("The Making...", p. 92). For their achievements, and despite their limitations, we should applaud the courage of Israel's new historians. This is not just any old page of history on which they have worked to shed light. What they have opened to public view is the "original sin" of the state of Israel. Is it acceptable for the survivors of Hitler's genocide to have the right to live in a state of their own, and for this right to exclude the right of the sons and daughters of Palestine to live similarly at peace in their own country? Fifty years after the event, the time is long overdue to bring an end to this logic that has generated so much war, and to find a way for the two peoples to coexist. At the same time, we should not draw a veil over the historical origins of the tragedy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (1) This article was the basis of a contribution to a colloquium on "The History of Contemporary Palestine" held at the Institut du Monde Arabe on 13 June 1997. It is being developed into a book to be published by Editions de l'Atelier in spring 1998. (2) In Middle East Forum, November 1961, reprinted with a new commentary in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Beirut, vol. XVIII, no. 69, 1988. (3) Elias Sanbar, in "Palestine 1948. L'Expulsion", "Revue d'études palestiniennes, Paris, 1984. (4) Their most important publications are: Simha Flapan, "The Birth of Israel, Myth and Realities", Pantheon Books, New York, 1987; Tom Segev, "1949. The First Israelis", Free Press MacMillan, New York and London, 1986; Avi Schlaim, "Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine", Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988; Ilan Pappe, "Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951", MacMillan, New York, 1988 and "The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947- 1951", I.B. Tauris, London, 1992; and Benny Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949", Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, and "1948 and After. Israel and the Palestinians", Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990. (5) The probing is obviously not limited to the first Arab- Israeli war. It also involves the attitude of the Zionist leadership to genocide (see in particular Tom Segev's "The Seventh Million", published in France by Liana Levi, Paris, 1992), and the nature of Jewish settlement during the period of the British mandate. Similarly, Benny Morris has pursued his exploration of the archives in order to shed light on Israeli expansionism during the 1950s (ÒIsrael's Border Wars: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War", Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1993) It also extends into other disciplines apart from historiography, particularly to sociology, and especially concerning the situation of Oriental Jews in Israeli society, from the early days to the present. (6) See particularly Shabtai Teveth, "The Palestinian Refugee Problem and its Origins", Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1990, and Ephraim Karsh, "Fabricating Israeli History: The "New Historians"", Frank Cass, London, 1997. (7) Nur Masalha, "'1948 and After' revisited", Journal of Palestine Studies, no. 96, vol. XXIV, no. 4, summer 1995. (8) Ilan Pappe, "La critique post-sioniste en Israel", La Revue d'études palestiniennes, no. 12, summer 1997. (9) "The Birth..." op. cit., pp. 14-18. A careful comparison of the text of the book with the tables showing village by village the principal reasons for the exodus reveals a clear - and surprising - underestimation in the tables of the extent of actual expulsions. (10) Tom Segev, op. cit., p. 26. (11) Quoted by Simha Flapan, op. cit., p. 107. (12) Henry Laurens, "Travaux récents sur l'histoire du premier conflit israélo-arabe", Maghreb-Machrek, Paris, no. 132, April-June 1991. (13) "The Making...", op. cit., chapters 8-10. See also Jean-Yves Ollier, "1949: la conférence de Lausanne ou les limites du refus arabe", Revue d'études palestiniennes, no. 35, spring 1990. (14) Norman G. Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict", Verso, London and New York, 1995, chapter 3. (15) New York Times, 23 October 1979. (16) This story was told by Ben Gurion's biographer, Michel Bar-Zohar, and was reproduced in the Israeli daily Hadashot, Tel Aviv, 19 October 1986. (17) Benny Morris, "Remarques sur l'historiographie sioniste de l'idée d'un transfert de populations en Palestine dans les années 1937-1944", in "Les nouveaux enjeux de l'historiographie israélienne", ed. Florence Heymann, Information paper, Centre de recherche français de Jérusalem, no. 12, December 1995. On the contradictions of Mapam's position, see the first chapter of "1948 and After". 800,000 Refugees created over a period of twenty months 1947 29 November: The General Assembly of the United Nations adopts, with the required two thirds majority, a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone involving Jerusalem and the Holy Places. 1948 January: Volunteer units organised as the Arab Liberation Army of Assistance (ALA) entered Palestine. End of March: First deliveries of Czechoslovak arms to the Jewish forces. The Dalet Plan is put into operation. 9 April: Deir Yassin massacre. 18 April: The Haganah take Tiberias; four days later they take Haifa. 10 May: Safed is taken, followed by Jaffa two days later. 14 May: End of the British Mandate. Declaration of the State of Israel. De facto recognition of the new state by the United States. The armies of five Arab countries enter Palestine. 17 May: De jure recognition of Israel by the Soviet Union. The Haganah take St Jean d'Acre. The following day Egyptian troops take Beersheba. 28 May: The Jewish quarter of Jerusalem capitulates. 11 June-8 July: First truce. 9-17 July: Israel takes Lydda, Ramleh and Nazareth. 18 July-15 October: Second truce. 17 September: Assassination of the Swedish UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte by an extremist Zionist commando unit. 15 October: The Israeli army breaks the truce, and begins an offensive in the Negev. 11 December: The General Assembly of the United Nations calls for the refugees to have the right of return. 22 December: Renewed fighting between Egypt and Israel. Israel completes its conquest of the Negev. Israel withdraws from northern Sinai on 7 January 1949, but only after a threat of direct British intervention. 1949 24 February: Armistice between Israel and Egypt. 10 March: Israeli troops take Um Rashrash (Eilat). 23 March: Armistice between Israel and Lebanon. 3 April: Armistice between Israel and Transjordan. 11 May: Israel is admitted to the United Nations. 12 May: Israel and the Arab states sign the protocols of the Lausanne Conference. 20 July: Armistice between Israel and Syria. 8 December: Establishment of the United Nations organisation for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA).

American or Israeli Zionist Jewish soldiers:the same!!Both kill, bombs and assassinate the poor,defenseless,weak Muslim nations and will not attack someone their own size like CHINA,FRANCE,GERMANY ,RUSSIA, or EVEN ENGLAND!! "The European, deep down, don't feel threatened by America's enemies," Thomas Friedman, NY TIMES"He laments that American conservatives, so-called, "have become the loudest and most effusive proponents of the military-industrial state." Joe Luckas report by Joe Sobran "The only thing worse than having Allies is not having them," Winston Churchill quoted Wash.Post--War Making Needs Congress Debate/Vote Washington has hold (block) on billion of Iraqi imports, most for reconstruction of civilian infrastructure, e.g. electricity, communications, etc. Wash. Post 1/16/02 "Moslems don't hate us because we are "good" or "Christian." They hate us because we have been killing them, a million dead in Iraq, and humiliating them," Editors "There is an antipathy towards the United States in Europe, that I haven't seen in decades," Oliver North 3/02 "Throughout the region (Persian Gulf) there is a growing sense that the U.S. should be considered as much a theat to Arab interests as the Israelis, NY Times 4/6/02 2 Lives - The Bomber and Her Victim --NEWSWEEK 4/9/02 "Americans will also have to accept that their triumphalism and disdain for international law are creating enemies everywhere, not just among Muslims," How Islam Lost its Way, WASH. POST 12/30 "We do not agree that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted." --Madeleine Albright from an essay by John Pilger (The Guardian 03/04/2000) This never countermanded by Bush. "Nevertheless, the president continues to divide humanity into the moral equivalent of shirts and skins. "Our responsibility to history," he said, "is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Not only is this a ludicrous principle on which to base a foreign policy but also an equally ludicrous interpretation of the world's major religions. Mr. Bush should pull out his trusty Bible and brush up on what it says about original sin," Arianna 12/6/01 "Robert Conquest suggested that one must consider not only hawks and doves, but also cuckoo birds and ostriches. Surely those who would use the bayonet to remake the world in America's image qualify as the cuckoos. I would agree with George Kennan who wrote back in 1993 that, 'to see ourselves as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world...is unthought through, vainglorious, and undesirable.'" Gen. Alexander Haig, FOREIGN POLICY RESEARCH INSTITUTE, 2/12/01 "Missile defense will protect America's ability to project power around the globe" --NATIONAL REVIEW 8/6 on the real reason---American empire "well-funded, semi-autonomous, unconventional centers of U.S. foreign policy." America's Pro-Consuls "Average annual cost per military service member, including training, pay and benefits is now ,425," NY TIMES 4/19/02 "There are still some 800 Defense Dept. facilities outside the U.S.," Chalmers Johnson (NATION 5/14/01) "Now, in the views of many scholars, Bush has restored the “Imperial Presidency,” a term Arthur Schlesinger Jr. used to describe Richard M. Nixon’s administration in 1973. “The power President Bush is wielding today is truly breathtaking,” said Tim Lynch, director of the Project on Criminal Justice at the libertarian Cato Institute. “A single individual is going to decide whether the war is expanded to Iraq. A single individual is going to decide how much privacy American citizens are going to retain.” Wash. Post 11/22 At the other pole is Donald "Rumsfeld's Pentagon, increasingly seen by some as an asylum where a coterie of vengeful Cold War unilateralist relics plot a return to a forceful, Reaganesque Pax Americana, broadening the war to encompass military action against Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon—essentially fusing Israel's national security agenda with that of the United States. No fans of multilateralism or diplomatic initiatives, this crew—despite its majority's lack of uniform service or time spent in combat zones—is particularly bellicose, and contemptuous of Powell and his belief in conflict limitation," Saddam in the Cross Hairs "In a typical week, an estimated 7,000 U.S. special-forces personnel are operating in 60 to 70 countries as part of Pentagon-sponsored military-to-military activities, according to the U.S. Special Operations Command," Stratfor.com

.. American Interventionism and The Terrorist Threatby Jon Basil Utley Updated 9/12/01 Editors Note: Antiwar.com first published this guest column by Mr. Utley on August 16, 2001. On Tuesday morning, September 11, unknown persons attacked various targets in Manhattan and Washington, DC, in what many are already calling the most deadly terrorist (that is, non-state) attack in world history. We are republishing this piece in the hope that it will influence the national debate about terrorism that is certain to occur. At an American Bar Association's meeting on preparing for the terrorist threat, General Bruce Lawler, head of the Joint Task Force to coordinate military support for state governments, said that the threat was from "foreigners who envy us." I asked him in the question period if our having killed or ruined their families might not give some more reason to hate Americans and make them much more dangerous than others who were just envious. He quickly backed down and said he was only repeating a statement of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Similarly, Washington's prestigious Center for Strategic and International Studies' major report, "Defending America in the 21st Century," described the threat as coming from those "who resent preeminent U.S power and/or disdain the West." There's a reason for this silence about why many foreigners might want to do us harm. The bipartisan Washington establishment – newspapers, reporters, think tankers, soldiers, security forces, intelligence agencies, Congressmen and the military-industrial complex – thrives on war or preparations for war. They don't want Americans to learn and fear that there may be fatal costs to us for our actions abroad. Just as trade and business are the occupation of most of the nation, in Washington, "war is the health of the state," to quote old libertarian, Randolph Bourne. Every war, be it a World War or a War on Drugs or on Poverty, spreads money and power in Washington. The other reason for silence is that American foreign policy is based almost entirely upon domestic political concerns, with little thought or concern for long run consequences. NATO expansion was promised by Clinton during the last election just to gain Midwestern votes from Americans of Central European ancestry. When Madeleine Albright ordered the bombing of Serbia, neither she nor Clinton thought about how Russia would react. In fact knowledgeable Russian experts believe that NATO expansion and the bombing of Serbia were the turning point, after which Russia started arming China with its latest weaponry, helping Iran and Iraq, and moving back to nationalist policies. Russia's military budget has now nearly doubled (to billion) from what it was before the attack. Similarly, with intervention in Colombia, there is no thought of the new, possibly deadly, combination of Arab terrorists willing to do suicide missions, and Colombian drug smugglers who know how to bribe or blackmail their way into smuggling any weapons of mass destruction (WMD) into the U.S. The drug war in Colombia is, again, being fought to satisfy another domestic constituency, with no thought about possible wider consequences. Equally, in fighting wars, Washington gives little thought to overall strategy. For example, when former Secretary of Defense Cheney was asked during the Gulf War, 11 years ago, about Washington's plans for Iraq after the war, he replied (honest man that he is): "Well, I don't know, we haven't thought much about that." So now we spend tens of billions of dollars maintaining a massive military presence in the area and are making new enemies by the millions. In short, one almost never hears in Washington from either Party that foreigners might have legitimate grievances against us. Half a million dead children in Iraq, Palestinian teenagers raging against American-supplied tanks, Serbs without electricity and running water or diseased or ruined and jobless from our bombing, assorted Moslems who blame America for their dictatorships and misery, Colombians with relatives killed by those aided by America. The list of potential enemies grows and grows. Even Basque terrorists now look at America as their enemy after President Bush, during his recent visit, casually promised to aid Spain's government with electronic surveillance. They all now have reason to do us harm, they all want America out of their countries, "out of their faces," in street language. It’s not rocket science. Right now, we have training missions in 60 to 70 nations, usually teaching counterinsurgency. Even Albanian guerrillas have now been trained by U.S. Special Forces. The military likes training missions because they build relationships with foreign junior officers all over the world. The Pentagon seems to have a clear field to determine which nations it wants to work with. But many nations also have those who are resisting local governments' tyranny, who then see American forces as their enemies. American ambassadors, I was told in Peru last March, don't have authority over assorted semiautonomous agencies – mainly military, FBI and drug war personnel – and often don't even know what those agencies are doing in the nations where they are stationed. But you'll rarely read this in the Washington press. Nor much about the human misery in Iraq, caused by Washington's blockade of supplies needed to rebuild electric, sanitation and agricultural irrigation stations bombed by America. Chlorine, needed to disinfect Iraq's water supply, and even pencils for school children are banned. Nor was there much reporting, after our bombing of the Danube River bridges, about the devastation of South Eastern Europe and Black Sea nations' barge trade, their major means of shipments to Western Europe. Most Americans would not have approved of these actions – had they known about them. As a New Republic writer put it, "The American Monster is more like an elephant – bumbling rather than bloodthirsty, oblivious rather than fierce." CIVIL DEFENSE This missing element, not wanting Americans to think that there may be consequences to our killing foreigners, seriously affects civil defense. CATO published a long and excellent report, (No. 387, 11/27/00) "Are We Prepared for Terrorism using Weapons of Mass Destruction?" It warns that: "Average citizens are left ignorant of the fundamentals of preparedness.... The lack of any credible public education program in matters of awareness and response violate many entrenched principles of emergency management to minimize the phenomenon of 'crying wolf,' citizens must receive some realistic instruction on recognizing the difference between real 'suspected threats' and everyday oddball occurrences. It means that any attack may be misunderstood by the public, resulting in panic or far more death and destruction than if it was managed properly. At a minimum a simple protective mask and filter will block radioactive dust and fatal particles in aerosol. Closed windows and simple plastic raincoats and rubber rain boots will protect the skin against most chemicals. Household agents such as bleach, lye (in the form of drain cleaners), industrial strength detergents and even HTH (a swimming pool bleach that is a version of an old military agent) are readily available and useful in educated hands." Still, the government is now spending billion yearly on civil defense, most of it going to protect government personnel and installations. But very little, only some 2%, is going for civilian medical preparations. There is almost no surge capacity in hospitals nowadays which call for supplies and personnel on a just-in-time basis, according to Tara O'Toole, deputy director of Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Bio-defense Studies. She added, speaking at the American Bar Association meeting, that hospital administrators have no training or preparation for triage decisions, that is treating those who can most likely be saved. Such would be contrary to law and open the hospitals to devastating lawsuits, even years later. For details on legal and medical preparedness, please see our handout, "Preparing for the Terrorist Threat,"published in Insight Magazine last January 15th. POSSIBLE TARGETS Little is written about potential targets in America, but it's interesting to speculate. Hopefully, foreign terrorists would understand that mass killing of Americans would be very counterproductive and that we would retaliate massively. Rather, they could have much more effect for their causes by just making life inconvenient for us. For example, during the bombing of Serbia I used to joke that all they needed for defense would be to have some old Yugo jalopies breaking down or crashing on Washington's very congested Beltway during rush hour for a few days. Just that would paralyze Washington and cause public demands to ground our bombers. My joke often met with angry reactions from War Party advocates, as if I was giving away military secrets. In a serious vein, I think that military bases and government organizations are the most likely targets. In spite of Washington's accusations about "cowardly terrorists," Bin Laden's targets have mainly been against the U.S. Military (and two Embassies). The Pentagon and CIA are surely the most juicy targets for any terrorist, but American bases overseas are easier – and more likely – targets now. An attack upon one would have the added possible consequence of foreigners demanding the removal of all American bases. The fear of this result seems already to be in Bush Administration thinking about building more long-range bombers instead of the short range F-22, which would depend upon foreign bases. Individual Americans overseas are also vulnerable. Already the Navy has cut back on shore leave over much of the world because of fear of terrorist attack upon our sailors. They now have steel beach parties, confined to their ships. (This news was not reported in the interventionist press; it obviously might reinforce opposition to American interventions in so many nations.) However, as Jude Wanniski has written, no one controls mad fanatics. Very possibly any major American city could be targeted by those consumed with hate against us. A dirty bomb could contaminate much of a major city. A small tactical nuke (of which many are reportedly missing from Russian bases) would take out 4 or 5 city blocks; new breakthroughs in biology may develop truly horrendous agents of selective death. Or just plain suicide truck bombers with dynamite in a tunnel could wreak havoc upon us. In truth, we are immensely vulnerable to terrorists who would give up their lives for a mission. Still, we also have great advantages. Only the most hardened and embittered remain so after some time in our nation, where most Americans have no idea of the killing overseas being done in their name. In the 1970s and '80s when Washington allowed many Marxist and leftist refugees from Chile and then Central America to immigrate here, they didn't commit acts of terrorism. America is so all-encompassing and welcoming and has so much opportunity that they lost their Marxist fervor. They got jobs, settled down and built their communities. In any case, the best defense is "to give foreigners less offense," in the words of Ivan Eland at CATO. Already under President Bush we seem much less ready to go about bombing other nations as Clinton did. Except for Palestine and Iraq, no blood is being shed by American bombs. American conservatives did all they could to undermine the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks when Clinton was supporting them. Hopefully, they (other than the Dispensationalists who almost want chaos over there) will now support peace negotiations, for we are hated much in the Arab world. Still, Bush is vulnerable to Washington's sophisticated and entrenched War Party, which wants empire and is now pushing for conflict with China, or any other nation that dares to challenge our might. WHAT YOU CAN DO Be informed – check regularly the anti-intervention websites: AntiWar.com, AgainstBombing.com, and CATO.org. Print out pertinent articles and distribute copies to your friends. Go to meetings. At most major Washington think tanks, hardly anyone challenges the prevailing War Party views. Talk radio – call in and explain. Our points are simple and true, they are easy to get across and people respond once they are heard. Write and call editors of the interventionist media, asking them to publish such information as in this article. Go to your Congressman's town hall meetings and ask him the embarrassing questions about our interventions overseas and ask for civil defense. Start a movement asking that our military send guards to protect key bridges and reservoirs and electric stations. The real threats are here, not overseas. Prepare yourself and for your family. Obtain a stock of antibiotics (tetracycline easily cures Anthrax if used early on), gas masks and other items, as above. Thank you for coming and for your interest. Spreading the kind of information I've described above can only help us to prevent the catastrophic event which many pundits consider inevitable. Terrorism here is not inevitable, but we have work to do in making people aware of the reasons for the threat. This article is a slightly-edited version of a speech by Mr. Utley to the Convention of the Libertarian Party of Washington, D.C., Summer, 2001. Mr. Utley is Robert A. Taft Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Formerly, he was a businessman and then foreign correspondent in South America for Knight Ridder newspapers. He has written on Latin American nationalism for Harvard Business Review and on terrorism for Insight Magazine. He has been a commentator for the Voice of America and has written widely on 3rd World issues.

.. STRATFOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE UPDATEForeign policy and the U.S. military What are dangers of playing 'cops of the world' role? Editor's note: In partnership with Stratfor, the global intelligence company, WorldNetDaily publishes daily updates on international affairs provided by the respected private research and analysis firm. Look for fresh updates each afternoon, Monday through Friday. In addition, WorldNetDaily invites you to consider STRATFOR membership, entitling you to a wealth of international intelligence reports usually available only to top executives, scholars, academic institutions and press agencies. © 2001 WorldN