From the Irish Political Review, November 2002
"The
Rape Of Palestine"
[Some
months ago (August) we published a Zionist view of the Arabs as given by William
B. Ziff in The
Rape Of Palestine, published in 1938. That book was re-issued early in
1948, with the addition of a Foreword dated July 1947. By the Rape of Palestine
Ziff did not mean what was being done to the Arab natives by the Jewish colonisation.
He meant the restrictions on Jewish colonisation imposed by the colonial power,
Britain, in the late 1930s to prevent the alienation of the Arabs from getting
out of hand.
The story
of 1948 as told by Zionist apologists and generally accepted by Western propaganda
is that seven Arab armies attacked Israel, and that Israel defeated them in
defiance of all the odds. There was in fact no attack by the Arab armies on
Israel—on the territory allocated by the United Nations General Assembly
to the Jewish State. The Arab armies only moved into the part of Palestine not
awarded to the Jewish State by the UN. Their purpose was to prevent the Jewish
State from realising its ambition to take the whole of Palestine.
After
1945 the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, tried to row back on the project
of establishing a Jewish State, realising that it was an unjust and catastrophic
scheme. In some of the British propaganda it was argued that a continuing British
presence in Palestine was needed for the protection of the Jews. Ziff dismissed
that argument on the ground that all the Arab States combined could not match
the military power of the Jews:]
The
Rape Of Palestine
Foreword
That
the Arabs themselves are to be feared as a military factor is hardly tenable.
The campaign in Iraq, where a single company of troops under the British flag
defeated the Iraqi army in a week’s campaign, disposed of this fiction
simply enough…
Actually,
it may be assumed that the Palestinian Jews, who contain in their ranks some
of the best technicians in the world, as well as men trained in the finest armies
of Europe, are more than a match for the military possibilities of all Arabs
combined…
In any
case this argument is of little moment since each of the countries composing
the Arab League is occupied by British officials and British armies, with their
deficits underwritten by the British Treasury, and their policies determined
by British ‘advisers;.
The Arab
League itself is an invention of British politics, created largely by the late
Lord Moyne[*], Lord Lloyd and others. It consists of the most heterogeneous
and antagonistic groups, who hate each other vigorously for reasons of family
rivalry, political ambition and religious belief, and whose open conflicts with
each other are kept in check only by superior, overriding British authority…
[* Lord Moyne was assassinated by Zionist terrorists on 6th November 1944.]
[The
following is from an Epilogue, added to take account of the onset of the Cold
War:]
“…it
is clear that for the moment at least, the only reliable friends the Western
world can expect in this section of creation are the Jews, and that a strong
Jewish state will be the greatest possible safeguard to Western interests. Today
the Jewish community, though not large, is the only one in this area capable
of putting a modern army in the field, or of operating an industrial establishment
able to serve such an army.”
[The
“campaign in Iraq” in the first extract
refers to May 1941. Iraq had declared neutrality in the World War. Britain decided
to conquer Iran and for that purpose to pass an army through southern Iraq.
The Iraqi Government agreed on the condition that it should supervise the passage
of the British Army through Basra. But Churchill, insisting of complete freedom
of action, overthrew the Government in Baghdad and installed a puppet government.
The condition
of the Arab world as described by Ziff is accurate. In 1919 Britain and France
had engaged in military action to prevent the establishment of the united Arab
State which Britain in 1916 had undertaken to recognise in exchange for Arab
support against the Turks. Instead, a number of subordinate Arab States were
set up and were set in conflict with each other, and the expansion of the only
authentic Arab State, the Saudi, was prevented by British bombers and machine
guns.
Ziff,
knowing that gratitude has no place in international relations, depicts Britain
as the chief enemy of Zionism, instead of its virtual creator as a political
power in the international arena: “Great Britain
has tended automatically to make her world-wide army of officials the standard-bearers
of anti-Semitism, inheriting in this respect, though unostentatiously, the mantle
of Nazi Germany.”
When the British-officered and -financed Arab Legion in Jordan moved into Palestine in mid-May 1948 in an attempt to hold the Jewish State within the boundaries allocated by the UN General Assembly, this “inheritor of the mantle of Nazi Germany” sabotaged it by cutting off its funding.]
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