No Law, No Peace
In my view governments will never use the leverage they have to call and hold Israel to account unless and until they are pushedto do so by informed public opinion – by manifestations of real democracy in action. The problem throughout the Western world, and America most of all, is that most citizens, the voters, are too uninformed to do the pushing; and that’s because they’ve been conditioned by the corporate-controlled mainstream media to believe a version of history, Zionism’s version, which is simply not true. It follows, or so it seems to me, that the name of the game is, must be, empowering the citizens of nations to make what passes for democracy work for justice for the Palestinians and peace for all. (In verbal parenthesis I’ll add that I believe it’s wrong to say – as many Arabs and other Muslims do say – that “the Jews control the media”. It might like as though they do, but they don’t. The problem in the mainstream media, generally speaking, is one of self-censorship, which is born of the fear of offending Zionism too much or at all).
The core assertion of Zionist mythology, upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed, can be simply stated. Poor little Israel has lived in danger of annihilation – the “driving into the sea” of its Jews.
The truth of history, which flows fully documented through both volumes of my book as published in the UK (it’s going to be three volumes with possibly a fourth in America) is that Israel’s existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most – in America and Western Europe – with having its aggression perceived as self-defence and presenting itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is the oppressor.
I write and speak as an eye-witness to the Six Days war of June 1967. For ITN I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis; and because of the quality of my contacts – they included one of the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence – I was privy to some of the plotting behind closed doors on the Israeli side in the countdown to war.
Four decades on, almost all Jews everywhere and most other people still believe that Israel went to war eitherbecause the Arabs attacked(that was Israel’s first claim), or because the Arabs were intending to attack(thus requiring Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike). The truth about that war only begins with the statement that the Arabs did not attackand were not intending to attack. The complete truth includes the following facts:
Israel’s prime minister of the time, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. And nor did his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. They wanted only very limited military action, an operation far, far short of war, to put pressure on the international community to cause Egypt’s President Nasser to re-open the Straits of Tiran. (Nasser was, in fact, looking forward to that pressure to help him save face).
Israel went to war because its military and political hawks insisted that the Arabs wereabout to attack. They, Israel’s hawks, knew that was nonsense – years latter some of them admitted that much, but at the time they promoted it to undermine Eshkol by portraying him to the country as weak. The climax to the campaign to rubbish Eshkol was a demand by the hawks that he surrender the defence portfolio and give it to Moshe Dayan, Zionism’s one-eyed warlord and master of deception. Four days after Dayan got the portfolio he wanted, and the hawks had secured the green light from the Johnson administration to smash Egypt’s air and ground forces, Israel went to war.
What actually happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup, executed quietly behind closed doors without a shot being fired. For Israel’s hawks the war of 1967 was the unfinished business of 1948/49 – to create Greater Israel with all of Jerusalem its capital. (In reality Israel’s hawks set a trap for Nasser and, for reasons of face, he was daft enough to walk into it).
Now to my main point for this evening.
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