Palestine and Zionism: The Whole Truth

The following is the text of a presentation I made last week to audiences in Sardinia on the occasion of the publication of Volume One of the Italian edition of my book ZIONISM: THE RAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS. (It and the German edition are being published by Zambon, a publishing house owned and led by a very brave and courageous German Jewish gentlemen. Giuseppe Zambon). Brainwashed and idiotic Zionists in Sardinia tried and failed to have some of my lectures and debates cancelled by accusing me of being an anti-Semite who is inciting anti-Semitism. They knew nothing about my book and its contents and were reading from Zionism's script. Their efforts resulted in increased sales of my book!

In response to the leading brainwashed Zionist idiot (he was not present) I pointed out that the first picture in Volume One of my book is of Prime Minister Golda Meir inscribed in her own hand "To a good friend, Alan Hart." And I asked if all Zionists who accuse me of anti-Semitism believed she was so stupid that she could not have seen through me if I was anti Jew.

Some and perhaps very many of you have had the pleasure of listening to my very dear friend Ilan Pappe, the "revisionist" (which means honest) Israeli historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. It was Ilan who explained to me why the Zionist lobby puts so much effort into causing my book and discussion of what it reveals to be suppressed to the maximum possible extent throughout the entire Western world. Ilan said to me

“Zionism is more frightened of your book than any other because of its title. Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews is the truth in seven words”

In Italian the title is the truth in six words!

In my presentation to you today I will explain in summary why Zionism and not the Arabs IS the real enemy of the Jews; but first I want to offer you my take on what I regard as Zionism's three biggest propaganda lies.

The first is the assertion that all the Jews of the world have a right to Palestine. That is complete nonsense.

The truth is that very, very few Jews have any biological/ancestral connection the ancient Hebrews. The Jews are peoples (not a people) from many different homelands; and back in time many converted to Judaism long after the relatively brief rule of the ancient Hebrews, the Israelites. What I am saying boils down to this. The notion that there are two peoples with a valid claim to Palestine is rubbish. (There is even a case for believing that more Arabs than Jews may be descendants of the ancient Hebrews).

Zionism's Second biggest propaganda lie is in its assertion that poor little Israel has lived in a danger of annihilation, the "driving into the sea of its Jews". As I document in detail through the three volumes of my book, the truth 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.

In 1948 when elements of five Arab armies crossed into Palestine their intention was not to destroy the unilaterally declared state of Israel, It was to prevent Israel taking the territory that had been assigned to the Palestinians for a state of their own by the Partition Plan.

There are incidentally three things about the Partition Plan that many Westerners are not aware of.

The first is that UN had no right to assign any part of Palestine to incoming alien Jewish immigrants without the consent of the Palestinian people.

The second is that the Partition Plan would never have been approved if Zionism, assisted by 26 American senators and White House insiders, had not bullied and bribed a number of nations to change their "No" votes to "Yes" and/or abstain. When President Truman learned of Zionism's campaign of intimidation and threats to bend the UN to its will, he wrote in a memorandum that it was perfectly clear that "pressure groups will succeed in putting the United Nations out of business if this sort of thing is continued."

The third is that the Partition Plan was vitiated, became invalid, because Truman was not prepared to use force to impose it. When he decided against the use of force he ordered his diplomats to return to the UN and continue discussions about how to solve the Palestine problem. It was while those discussions were continuing in the General Assembly that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence, in defiance of the will of the organized international community as it then was.

As to the actual fighting in 1948 here is the key to complete understanding. Early on there was a month long truce. When the fighting resumed it was 20,000 Arab soldiers, poorly trained and equipped, lacking motivation and badly led, against 80,000 Israeli forces, well trained and equipped, highly motivated and well led. As David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister knew, there was always only going to be one winner on the battlefield.

When Israel closed the Palestine file with its victory in 1948 the Arab regimes secretly shared the same hope as Zionism and all the major powers. It was that the Palestinians would accept their lot as the sacrificial victims on the altar of political expediency and that the Palestine file would remain closed for ever.

To give you a real indication of how little things have changed over the years I'll tell you now about an amazing conversation I had some years ago with a major Saudi royal. In an hour long exchange of views I had with him alone in London I made what I thought he would regard as two very contentious points.

The first was this. "Nothing is going to change in the Arab world until your bloody regimes are more frightened of their own people than they are of Israel and America."

He replied: "You're right."

My second point was this. "If tomorrow the Israelis exterminated the Palestinians, your bloody regimes would raise a glass of whisky behind closed doors and say 'Thanks'"

He replied: "You're right."

The essence of the truth about the Six Days War of June 1967 can be simply stated. For Israel's leaders it was the unfinished business of 1948. They set a trap (fully explained in my book) for Egypt's President Nasser. He was naive enough to walk right into it and give Israel's leaders the pretext they wanted for war.

As it happened I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis. Just before I left Tel Aviv for the Sinai I had another amazing conversation, this one with then retired Major General Chaim Herzog, one of the founding fathers of Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence who went on to become Israel's ambassador to the UN and eventually its president. During the course of this conversation on day one of the war Herzog said the following.

“If Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext for war we would have invented one in a year to 18 months."

In summary, what happened in June 1967 was a war of Israeli aggression, not as Zionism asserted a war of self-defence. Years later some Israeli leaders acknowledged this truth. In the first chapter of Volume Three of my book which is subtitled Conflict Without End?, I quote a number of them. Here are just four examples.

* In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said this.

“I do not believe Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to launch an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”

* On 14 April 1971, a report in the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar contained the following statement by Mordecai Bentov, a member of Israel's wartime national government.

“The entire story of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”

* On 4 April 1972, General Ezer Weizman, Chief of Operations during the 1967 war, said the following in an article in Ma-ariv.

“There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting.”

* And in an unguarded public moment in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin said this.

“In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

In the light of the mountains of evidence to the contrary, including the on-the-record statements of some of Israel's own former leaders, it is truly astonishing that still today when they make reference to the 1967 war almost all Western politicians and mainstream media people continue to peddle the nonsense that Israel's existence was in danger.

The short, true story of the 1973 war can be simply stated.

It was the consequence of a degree of collusion between Egypt's President Sadat and Henry Kissinger who had just became President Nixon's Secretary of State. Kissinger was frustrated because the Israeli government of Prime Minister Golda Meir would not make even the smallest concession to allow him to push Sadat into making a separate peace with Israel. So he, Kissinger, sent word to Sadat that "a little heating up would be in order."

Sadat's battle plan, of which Kissinger was fully aware, was to cross the Suez Canal and stop. Which is exactly what Egypt's forces did. Sadat had absolutely no intention of advancing further; and he was confident that Syria's forces would stop their attempt to recapture some if not all of the Israeli occupied Golan Heights when Kissinger blew the whistle and convened a session of the Security Council to get a peace process going.

In Kissinger's pre-war vision Sadat would be hailed by his own masses as a conquering hero for taking back the Suez Canal and he, Kissinger, would then give the Israelis a couple days to strike back at Egyptian and Syrian forces before blowing the whistle.

It all went badly wrong for Sadat and Kissinger (and the Syrians) for two main reasons.

One was that Israel's armed forces were not war ready. And that was because Defence Minister Moshe Dayan believed there would never be war unless Israel started it. Because of this lack of war readiness Israel suffered heavy losses, of tanks especially, when Sadat launched his attack to cross the Suez Canal. And that led to a real crisis in Israel's relationship with the Nixon administration and Kissinger in particular.

I became aware of this crisis in a telephone conversation with Prime Minister Golda.

As some of you may know, I enjoyed on the human level a very special relationship with Golda. That was because whenever I went to Israel I always sent her three dozen red roses. From the moment she became prime minister that guaranteed me the first interview with her at moments of crisis. To cut a long story short...

I arrived in Israel on the second day of the 1973 war. I discovered that Golda was holding a war cabinet in the kitchen of her Tel Aviv home and I sent the roses there. Two hours later I had a telephone call from Lou Kiddar, Golda's personal assistant and lifelong best friend. She said, "Golda thanks you for the flowers and will try to call you this evening."

When Golda did call me it was to say that on this occasion she could not give me the first interview. There was, she said, a compelling reason why she had to give the first interview to the American networks. I asked her what the reason was. She said

“We are in desperate need of a resupply of weapons from America, tanks especially. Kissinger is sitting at Nixon's elbow telling him to delay the re-supply and make us sweat until we are ready to make concessions.”

Golda went on to tell me that she was ready to fly to Washington for one hour with President Nixon to clear the blockage.

As it happened it was Dayan who cleared the blockage and got the re-supply going. He did it by ordering the arming of two nuclear missiles, one targeted on Cairo, the other on Damascus. That was enough to terrify Nixon and he ordered a massive re-supply of weapons to Israel without further delay.

Years later I told the story of Dayan's nuclear blackmail to an audience in America. After my presentation I was approached by a Jewish gentleman who had abandoned Israel and was making a new life in America. He said to me the following.

“Alan, what you said about Dayan's nuclear blackmail is true. I know because I was the officer responsible for overseeing the arming and the targeting of the two nuclear missiles.”

The second main reason why it all went badly wrong for Sadat, Kissinger (and the Syrians) is that Ariel Sharon and other Israeli generals decided that when they were re-supplied they would have to teach Kissinger (as well as Sadat and the Syrians) a lesson. Sharon and other Israeli generals were convinced that in the immediate countdown to the war Kissinger had ordered American intelligence indicating that Sadat was about to attack to be denied to Israel.

When Kissinger realised that Israel's generals were going to pursue the war to the point of totally humiliating Sadat and himself he went to Moscow. The outcome of that visit was a statement that American forces around the world had been placed on a Red (Nuclear) Alert because of the danger that the Soviet Union would become engaged in the war to prevent Sadat being totally defeated and humiliated. Prime Minister Golda Meir then received urgent appeals from Kissinger and Nixon. They told her she had to bring Sharon under control - he was intending to wipe out the trapped Third Egyptian Army - in order to prevent World War III and a nuclear holocaust.

And that was enough to cause her to act.

In her last conversation with me a few months before she died, Golda put it this way.

“Still in my slippers, I climbed into a helicopter. I flew to Egypt - imagine that, Golda Meir in Egypt - and there I confronted Sharon. I stood in front of him and I said, "I am your Prime Minister and I order you not to move against the Third Army."

And that, more or less, was how the 1973 war ended. The trapped Third Egyptian Army was saved and with it Sadat's face. And that left Kissinger with enough, just about enough, to begin the process that would lead to Egypt's separate peace with Israel. Kissinger knew that if Egypt could be taken out of the war equation the Arabs would never be able to confront Israel militarily.

As a verbal footnote I'll add this. In that last conversation with Golda I asked her if she had believed that the threat of Soviet intervention and a superpower confrontation was real. She said that at the time she did believe it was.. "Do you still think so?" I asked. The length of her pause for thought suggested it was not a question she had previously considered. Eventually she said, "I'm not sure." I took that to mean that she was open to the idea that Kissinger and the Soviets had put on a warning show to frighten her into confronting Sharon.

In that same conversation I asked Golda how much she had trusted Kissinger. She gave me two answers.

One was a gesture. She opened the index finger and thumb of her left hand to the widest possible extent, forming a complete right angle. Then, slowly, she lowered the index finger until it was just about touching her thumb. Then she said, "That much!"

Her second answer was this.

“Whenever Kissinger was here in Israel he always called my cabinet ministers by their first names. And they called him Henry. Not me. I always called him Mr. Secretary of State or Dr. Kissinger; and I insisted that he called me Madame Prime Minister or Mrs. Meir. If you're on first name terms with such a man you'll get screwed.”

In summary of what I've said about the wars of 1948, 1967and 1973 I'll repeat that Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force.

I'll add here a comment made to me in 1980 by then retired Major General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of Israel's Directors of Military Intelligence. At the time I was acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres who was hoping to win Israel's next election and deny Begin a second term in office. Gazit was one of two who were advising Peres for this initiative. Over coffee one morning I said to him, "I've come to the conclusion that it's all a myth. Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger." Through a sad smile he replied: "Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we've become the victims of our own propaganda

(Part Two: Tomorrow)

(PHOTOGRAPH: King Hussein, far right, alongside Gamal Abdel Nasser, Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi)