Israel: The Hijack State — America's Watchdog in the Middle East

Summary

John Rose, Israel: The Hijack State — America’s Watchdog in the Middle East (Socialist Workers Party pamphlet, July 1986; subsequently a Bookmarks book): a Marxist pamphlet arguing that Israel is the United States’ military watchdog and surrogate in the Middle East, maintained by massive US aid to guard Western control of Middle East oil against Arab nationalism and popular revolt, founded on the terror and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, and developed into a state practising terror on a monumental scale — above all in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the Sabra and Shatila massacre — while arming the world’s most reactionary regimes as an American proxy. The work covers the Acknowledgements, the Introduction, the chapters Oil and Imperialism, The Arming of Israel and The Terrorist State on Lebanon 1982, The Origins of Zionism, The Holocaust: the strongest case for Zionism?, Hijack! on the seizure of Palestine in 1947-49, The struggle to liberate Palestine from the 1936 revolt to Lebanon 1982, Zionism rules OK? — Chomsky’s extracts on life in the occupied West Bank and Gaza — and the concluding Zionism or socialism?, which argues the PLO’s gun-and-olive-branch strategy is in ruins and only an Arab working-class socialist revolution, creating a socialist Palestine with full rights for Jews and all national minorities, can liberate Palestine.

What the file is

The Marxists Internet Archive / Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism Online version of the pamphlet, marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL, published there with the author’s permission and copied from the REDS – Die Roten site. The original as saved is the HTML file; the paired text copy supplied with it is a plain-text rendering of the same web pages, with no page markers, so locators are line numbers in the text copy (1,467 lines as split, 1,468 by newline count). The text copy concatenates the separate web page for each chapter in order; each chapter page repeats the site header and title, and carries that chapter’s Notes at its end, preceded in the text copy by an anomalous chapter-number label. Text quality is good, with occasional printing slips preserved and recorded in the reading notes and under Open questions (for example Phillipines, Honducan, declassifled, and the note locator 364-S). The work’s own contents list (lines 29-55) is: Acknowledgements; Introduction; Oil and Imperialism; The Arming of Israel; The Terrorist State: Lebanon 1982; The Origins of Zionism; The Holocaust: the strongest case for Zionism?; Hijack!; The struggle to liberate Palestine; Zionism rules OK?; Zionism or socialism?

Section by section

• Acknowledgements (lines 71-79): thanks to Alex Callinicos, Tony Cliff, Pete Green, Chris Harman, Pete Marsden, Phil Marshall, Maryam Poya, Sabby Sagall, Mike Simons and Andy Strouthous. Several authors are exhaustively quoted throughout and are mostly Jewish anti-Zionists: Abram Leon, Nathan Weinstock, Lenni Brenner and Noam Chomsky. Contemporary information from Israel’s Hebrew press is given from selected English translations in the Israeli Mirror, published fortnightly in London.
• Introduction — Why Israel? (lines 101-145; notes lines 147-157): the US bombing of Libya in April 1986, backed wholeheartedly only by Israel, opens the argument. Rose asks whether the US was now free of the “Vietnam Syndrome”. Since Vietnam the US has avoided direct military intervention, relying on CIA covert operations and regional strongmen — the Shah of Iran, Pinochet in Chile — whose record Rose judges a failure: the Somoza regime in Nicaragua was overthrown despite CIA operations, the Contras failed to undermine the Sandinistas, and the Shah, Marcos in the Philippines and Baby Doc in Haiti were overthrown by popular uprisings. The fall of the Shah was particularly devastating; Business Week (March 1979) and Henry Kissinger are quoted on the threat to the vital oil supply and to American management of the global equilibrium. Reagan, elected in 1980 to re-assert American power, invaded Grenada but saw prospects of direct intervention in the Middle East disappear when 250 US marines were killed in Lebanon in 1983; he too depends on surrogates, and the main surrogate in the Middle East is Israel. Israel was ecstatic at the Libya bombing: Ha’aretz (18 April 1986) reported Israel received an up-to-the-minute report on the attack, supplied intelligence data about Libya in exchange, and expected a joint study of its lessons, and that the US would expand purchases from Israel by a further 400 million dollars at Prime Minister Peres’s request. Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz, under the headline Welcome to the Club, argued the USA had now joined Israel in the fight against terrorism: thus, argued the paper, Israel and America together will rid the world of terrorism in a heroic display of superior force, both morally and physically. Rose’s counter-argument: Israel retains Western support because of the Holocaust, and its struggle against terrorism is presented as heroic, but the state was founded on terror — at its foundation Israel expelled three-quarters of a million Palestinians — and its evolution, with American backing for the militarisation of its economy, has made it a ruthless outpost for Western domination of the Middle East; the terrorists Israel and the US want put to death are often the sons and daughters of those dispossessed Palestinians.
• Oil and Imperialism (lines 171-277; notes lines 279-315): imperialism in the Middle East has always meant oil and who controls it. The US holds only 4 per cent of the world’s known oil supply against about 55 per cent in the Middle East (Time, 14 April 1986), and by the year 2000 the US will again depend on the region. The history: the 1914-18 war made oil’s importance plain (Lord Curzon: the allies floated to victory on a wave of oil); before the war Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had the British government take a 51 per cent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP), whose concession covered nearly 500,000 square miles of Persia for £20,000 cash and 16 per cent of the profits — the start of the era of cheap Middle East oil. Britain and France carved up the disintegrating Ottoman Empire; Britain drew Iraq’s boundaries to include the Baghdad and Mosul oil areas, and the US insisted its companies be let in, producing the Iraq Petroleum Company consortium, the model for future operations. The 1928 Red Line Agreement gave that company drilling rights across the old Ottoman Empire (all future oil-producing areas except Iran and Kuwait); the British-controlled Iraqi government received four gold shillings per ton, while Exxon made 52 cents profit per barrel in 1934-1939, more than twice what it paid Iraq, and its $14million1932investmentwasreckonedworth$130 million by 1937. In Saudi Arabia — in a 1945 US State Department phrase, a stupendous source of strategic power — the US solved the problem of Saudi hostility to Israel by leaving ARAMCO deliberately free to be as pro-Arab as it wished while the government backed Israel, and by the Golden Gimmick under which ARAMCO paid tax to the Saudi king rather than to Washington. After the Second World War the US replaced Britain as the dominant imperialist power and became Israel’s primary sponsor. In Iran, Mossadeq nationalised BP’s oilfields in 1951; Britain proposed a boycott, the CIA prepared a coup, and in 1953 Mossadeq was overthrown and replaced with the Shah, the reluctant US oil companies again led to the oil by their government — as in Iraq in 1928 and Saudi Arabia in 1948. By 1956 BP and Shell accounted for more than half of Britain’s receipts from all overseas investments; that year Britain, with France and Israel, bombed Egypt and invaded to seize Suez and Port Said after Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, two-thirds of whose traffic was oil. Over fifty years the Seven Sisters made super-profits: US Department of Commerce estimates for 1970 put the Middle East petroleum industry’s net assets at $1.5billionyielding$1.2 billion profit, a 79 per cent return, against 13.5 per cent for smelting and mining elsewhere in the third world, while the region’s approximately one hundred million Arabs lived in abject poverty and the foreign enclave Israel, which had expelled nearly a million fellow Arabs from Palestine and was maintained by the US as an armed camp, brought war in 1948, 1956 and 1967. In 1973 OPEC demanded a better deal and restraint of Israel and put an oil-boycott into action — the most vocal exponent of the use of the oil-boycott as a strategy being Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi, which Rose says partly explains why he has been made such a hate figure in the West; Gadaffi had triggered the first oil price rise in 1970, playing the independent oil companies off against the Seven Sisters by threatening them in turn with a shutdown of Libyan oil supplies — succeeding only because radical and reactionary producers, including pro-American Saudi Arabia and Iran, temporarily united amid recession, Vietnam and Watergate. Nixon was the oil companies’ candidate (at least $2.7millionofoilcontributionstohis1972campaign),yetatthecrunchNixonandKissingersupportedIsrael,KissingerlatersayingtheUnitedStatessavedIsraelfromcollapseandwantedthemostmassiveArabdefeatpossible,tobreakuptheArabunitedfrontandweakenOPEC.TheWestandtheoilcompanieslivedwiththequadruplingofprices(Exxo{n}^{\prime }s1973profitswereanall-timecorporaterecordof$2.5 billion); afterwards the Saudi king and the Shah bought US arms with their oil-dollars (the Shah spent $4 billion on US military equipment in 1974) and Kissinger’s peace process detached Egypt, preparing the Camp David Accords. When oil prices collapsed early in 1986 the US administration feared instability among oil producers and their dependents; Secretary of State George Schultz, speaking at a luncheon for Shimon Perez (spelled so in this passage), warned of laid-off migrant workers stirring political unrest — history, Rose closes, has taught successive American governments the vital importance of its military watchdog in the Middle East, Israel.
• The Arming of Israel (lines 329-469; notes lines 471-531): in 1982 Israel boasted it was the third most powerful military force in the world, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies ranked it fourth, beneath only the USA, the USSR and China; arms exports long ago replaced oranges and grapes as Israel’s main export earner. Its capability only makes sense as an extension of the United States’ military capability: in 1982 US aid was publicly worth $1,000perIsraelicitizen(areporttoCongresssuggested60percenthigher);between1978and1982Israelreceived48percentofallUSmilitaryaidworldwideand35percentofallUSeconomicaid;for1983Reagansuggested$2.5 billion of an $8.1billiontotalaidbill.SincetheLebanoninvasiontheaidbudgettripled(a\ast JerusalemPost\ast tablegivestotalgrantsrisingfrom$1,425 million in 1981 to $3,915millionin1985,andnetgrantfrom$740 million to $2,705million).Reaganin1980explainedthatIsraelwascombat-readyandofbenefittotheUS.WithoutUSaid,Roseargues,theIsraelistatewouldnotsurvive:areportbytheinternationalbanksrankedonly22of114countriesmoreunstableandaid-dependentthanIsrael.Thehistoryofthecombination:postwarUSstrategycentredondefeatingtheGreekleft(TrumanDoctrine,March1947;a1948CIAreportwarnedofthepossiblelossofMiddleEastpetroleumresources,40percentofworldreserves);Israeloffereditselfforaregionalmilitaryalliance,\ast H{a}^{\prime }aretz\ast spellingoutthewatchdogofferon30September1951(thepassageusedasthewor{k}^{\prime }sepigraph);a1958USNationalSecurityCouncilmemorandumcalledsupportforIsraelthelogicalcorollaryofoppositiontoradicalArabnationalism;andinthemid-1950sIsraelconcludedtheperipherypactwithEthiopia,TurkeyandtheSha{h}^{\prime }sIran,encouragedbyJohnFosterDulles.In1956IsraelinvadedSinaiandtheGazaStripasBritainandFrancebombedEgypt,andtheAmericansrestrainedit.The1967war—whosemainaimRosegivesasbringingArabnationalismtoheel,humiliatingNasse{r}^{\prime }sEgyptandseizingterritoryincludingtheWestBank—convincedtheUSAIsraelwasutterlydependable;aStateDepartmentmemorandumisquotedtothateffect,andGeneralMosheDayan,freshfromtouringVietnamasaUSguest,isquotedontheidenticalUSandIsraelireprisalformula.Inthefouryearsafter1967Israelreceived$1.5 billion of US arms, ten times the previous twenty years’ total. The US also used Israel as a test-bed for untried weaponry (the Hawkeye E2C in Lebanon; F15 and F16 aircraft first used in strikes in the 1981 raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor; Begin boasted of a secret weapon that knocked out 23 Syrian Sam-6 and Sam-8 batteries without losing an aircraft). Israel in turn arms dictatorships America is embarrassed to equip: South Africa (Vorster’s 1976 visit, Gabriel missiles, evasion of the 1978 UN mandatory embargo, 35 per cent of Israel’s arms exports going to South Africa by 1980, and a claimed Israeli-South African nuclear shell tested in the South Atlantic in 1979); Rhodesia (American-made helicopters and spare parts despite the embargo); Honduras, as an American proxy against Sandinista Nicaragua, with economic co-ordination minister Ya’acov Meridor confirming Israel was ready to be Washington’s surrogate; Guatemala, where Rios Montt boasted his soldiers were trained by the Israelis while 5,000 Indians were slaughtered in summer 1982; the juntas of Pinochet in Chile and Galtieri in Argentina, the latter regime itself antisemitic and accused in Haolam Haze of having murdered about 1,000 Jews in Argentina. The periphery pact with the Shah is documented through SAVAK–MOSSAD cooperation since the 1950s and Israeli training of Iranian officers. Finally, Israel’s backing for the Christian Phalange in Lebanon: Pierre Gemayel founded the Phalange in the 1930s, self-consciously modelled on the fascists after his 1936 Berlin visit and meeting with Hitler; his son Bashir dominated the Christian forces by murdering his opponents, was welcomed in Haifa in 1976 by the Israeli Labour government, was armed by Israel, and was elected Lebanon’s president in August 1982 as Israeli guns and tanks stood by.
• The Terrorist State: Lebanon 1982 (lines 547-644; notes lines 645-695): the chapter opens with Dr Shlomo Shmelzman’s letter announcing his hunger strike at the height of the bombing of West Beirut in August 1982, a Holocaust survivor’s protest that too many things in Israel reminded him of his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto, the labour camps and Buchenwald. Rose roots the bombing of civilians in Ben-Gurion’s Independence War Diary entry of 1 January 1948 prescribing cruel and strong reactions, striking families, women and children included, without distinguishing guilty and innocent. In summer 1982 that reaction reached new heights: a full-scale invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of West Beirut, and the climax of the systematic murder of unarmed Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, in professed response to the attempted assassination of ambassador Shlomo Argov. Ha’aretz had anticipated the invasion in March 1982 as a strategic view requiring the physical annihilation of the PLO in Beirut and the amputation of its hold on the West Bank. The US backed Israel to the hilt: Sharon informed Defence Secretary Casper Weinberger in Washington before the invasion, Pentagon figures show a surge of US military supplies in the first three months of 1982 almost 50 per cent greater than the preceding year, and smart bombs were used in Beirut, one destroying an entire building and killing 100 people in an apparent effort to kill Yasser Arafat; meanwhile Israeli military industries advertised its bombs internationally. The first target, Rashidiyeh camp south of Tyre, was largely rubble by the second day; its nine thousand people fled or were herded to the beach, and all teenage and adult males were blindfolded, bound and taken to internment camps — a pattern repeated across Southern Lebanon, camps demolished or bulldozed, men imprisoned, reporters barred; an Israeli officer told David Shipler of the New York Times the houses were knocked down because the inhabitants were all terrorists. Tom Segev’s mid-June tour is quoted on refugees, decomposing bodies and mounds of ruins. Lebanese government figures — 19,000 dead and over 30,000 wounded, from police counts in hospitals, clinics and civil defence centres, excluding mass graves — underestimate the bloodletting. Hospitals were repeatedly hit: a children’s hospital in Sabra camp and the Gaza Hospital in June, the Acre Hospital and the Islamic Home for Invalids on 24 June, by mid-August only 15 of 200 staff remaining at the Islamic Home — most of this, Rose remarks, was before the bombing escalated in August — by 4 August eight of nine Homes of Orphans destroyed by cluster and phosphorous bombs, and 800 patients released into the streets when the Beirut mental hospital was hit. Canadian surgeon Chris Giannou’s testimony to the US Congress is quoted at length — prisoners beaten to death, indiscriminate destruction of camps, hospitals shelled, staff taken into custody, savage beatings, a Palestinian doctor hung by his hands from a tree, prisoners rehearsed to shout Long Live Begin — confirmed by a Norwegian doctor and social worker who had seen at least ten people beaten to death. The eleven-hour bombing of Beirut on 12 August evoked worldwide condemnation, even from the US, and halted the direct attack; Charles Powers in the Los Angeles Times is quoted on the siege as gratuitous brutality and the carpet-bombing of Borj el Brajne. Begin’s popularity soared (a mid-August poll: 80 per cent of Israelis supported the invasion, 64 per cent approved going beyond the 25-mile zone); the pro-government demonstration’s sign, One people, one Army, one Government, is noted for its similarity to the Nazi slogan; Labour voted with Likud to support the invasion, with just two exceptions, matching 91 per cent support among Labour supporters, and Peace Now’s later 400,000-strong demonstration was a one-off. Then the Sabra and Shatila massacre: on Thursday 16 September Phalange and Haddad troops, armed by the Israelis, entered the camps the IDF had sealed off under direct observation; Chomsky’s account is quoted — Israeli flares lighting the camps through Thursday night, the massacre continuing until Saturday under Israeli observation a few hundred yards away, bulldozers scooping up bodies, and on Friday Chief of Staff Eitan congratulating the Phalangist command, offering a bulldozer with IDF markers removed and authorising another 12 hours in the camps, the slaughter ending at 5 a.m. Saturday after 36 hours. Journalists reported it as it happened (a Haddad militiaman told James Pringle of Newsweek cheerfully that they were slaughtering them; Loren Jenkins of the Washington Post described Israelis watching from their observation post). The Israeli army said 700 to 800 were killed; the Lebanese government said 762 bodies were recovered and 1,200 more buried privately by relatives; most of the Palestinians killed, at least a quarter of them Lebanese Shiite Moslems, had come as refugees from Upper Galilee and Jaffa in 1948. On US complicity: the US stood alone with Israel at the United Nations in refusing to condemn the massacre; its peacekeeping force, committed by agreement to guarantees of safety for law-abiding Palestinian non-combatants left in Beirut, withdrew after the PLO fighters left, two weeks before its mandate ran out, and shortly after the IDF moved into Beirut and the massacre began; Amos Elon is quoted likening the man responsible to a man who puts a snake into a child’s bed.
• The Origins of Zionism (lines 709-734, opening only; chapter continues in part 2): Zionism is introduced as a partly religious and partly historical idea that the world’s Jewish population has a claim on part of the Middle East territory occupied by Palestinian Arabs for well over a thousand years, an idea of no significance whatsoever until sustained outbreaks of antisemitism in late nineteenth-century Europe. Its religious origin is rooted in Biblical myths of the chosen people, temporary dispersal and the Messiah’s regrouping of the Jews in Palestine; yet over the centuries the Jews showed no inclination to uproot themselves and return. By the 1880s and 1890s, when Zionism took shape as a modern movement of Jewish political conquest of Palestine, 90 per cent of the world’s Jews lived in Europe and Russia, distinctly European communities. Their persecution was at bottom economic: a trading community cast as middlemen and moneylenders, excluded from agriculture, guilds and professions in medieval Europe and made scapegoats by rulers — in Poland richer Jews managing estates for absentee landlords, poorer Jews tinkers and petty traders, both exposed to the wrath of an oppressed peasantry. Emancipation came with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, but in Poland and Russia feudal backwardness clung on, the Tsars making the pogrom the standard mechanism for diverting hostility from themselves. The resulting exodus went traditionally to America: by the late 1920s more than three million Jews had quit Eastern Europe and Russia for America over 40 years and nearly half a million fled to Western Europe, against 120,000 who had arrived in Palestine by 1930. In Germany, France and Britain the immigrants met the imperialist mentality, which divided the world into races — against Marx’s world divided into social classes — and used race and nation to divide the workers’ movements, making Jewish foreigners particularly useful scapegoats at home. The chapter continues past line 734.
• The Origins of Zionism (lines 709-816, completed in part 2; notes lines 817-855): Herzl, who covered the Dreyfus trial in 1895, concluded antisemitism was inevitable, wrote that he began to understand and pardon it and recognised the futility of combating it, considered Argentina before Palestine, and deliberately linked Zionism to European imperialism as a colonial idea — writing to Cecil Rhodes for help and arguing England should be most interested because the shortest route to India is by way of Palestine, the only guarantee being “assured supremacy” with imperialist backing. In Russia the 1903 Kishenev pogrom, arranged by Interior Minister Von Plehve (whose police stood by, as, Rose notes in parenthesis, the authorities did at Sabra and Shatila in 1982), was preceded by a ban on all Yiddish publications except a blessed Zionist paper portraying Jews as aliens; Lenin is quoted that the Tsarist police organised pogroms to divert workers’ and peasants’ hatred, and Weizmann reported almost the entire Jewish student body stood behind the revolutionary camp. A month later Herzl met Von Plehve, not demanding condemnation of the pogrom but pleading Tsarist intervention with the Sultan over Palestine in return for cutting attacks on the Tsar at the Zionist Congress. Weizmann in 1914 offered Jewish settlement as a very effective guard for the Suez Canal; the 1917 Balfour Declaration followed, Churchill glossing a Jewish state under the British Crown of three or four million Jews as in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire, while Balfour himself had campaigned for the 1905 Aliens Act to stem Jewish immigration into Britain. Palestinian leaders at Haifa in December 1920 set three constant demands — end British support for Zionism, end Jewish immigration, a representative national government — against 56,000 Jews and about a million Palestinians at the war’s end. Balfour’s confidential 1919 memorandum: in Palestine the Four Powers do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the present inhabitants. Golda Meir in 1921: it is not the Arabs the English will pick to colonise Palestine, it is we. Labour Zionism’s exclusively Jewish Histadrut (1920), under Jewish Land, Jewish Labour, Jewish Produce, leased land only to Jews, hired only Jews, boycotted Arab produce, picketed orchards and destroyed Arab goods in markets, while the Jewish National Fund bought land and evicted Arab peasants; the Histadrut became the infrastructure of the future state, and each kibbutz was also a small military base of the Haganah, founded in 1923 as printed.
• The Holocaust: the strongest case for Zionism? (lines 857-945; notes lines 947-982): the postwar double image — Auschwitz wrecks and Glorious Israel, saviour of the Jews — made any challenge suspect as antisemitic, and the world after 1945 appeared to confirm Herzl, since no-one really wanted the Jews. But at the outbreak of war in 1939 the majority of the world’s Jews were non-Zionist and the standard emigration had been westwards. The US, refusing Jewish refugees since the 1924 Quota Act, refused despite pleas to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz (Britain the same view) and in 1943 allowed in just 4,705 Jews. Despite the Jewish Agency’s demand for 100,000 certificates for Palestine and Bricha’s campaigning in the DP camps, Chaplain Klausner reported to the American Jewish Congress that most refugees wanted to go to the United States, concluding: “I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine.” Ben-Gurion opposed the 1938 scheme to bring German Jewish children to Britain, saying he would opt to save only half of them to Eretz Yisrael over all of them to England, because the history of the people of Israel must be weighed, and Rabbi Stephen Wise took the same line for the USA in 1939. Weizmann in Berlin in 1912 said Germany already had too many Jews. The Zionist Federation of Germany’s 1933 memorandum to Hitler is quoted at length: it offered collaboration with a government fundamentally hostile to Jews, endorsed the race principle and the purity of the Jewish group, opposed mixed marriage, and called anti-Nazi boycott propaganda in essence un-Zionist. Against this Rose sets the courage of Jewish resistance — the Warsaw Ghetto fighters of 1943, who fought, as printed, for six months — Uri Avinery’s charge that throughout the war nothing much was done by the Zionist leadership to help the Jews, and Itzhak Greenbaum, head of the Jewish Rescue Committee, refusing United Jewish Appeal money for rescue in 1943: “No, and again no.”
• Hijack! (lines 983-1075; notes lines 1077-1110): after the Second World War the USA, needing Middle East oil, found a Jewish state completely dependent on American patronage attractive to Truman’s administration. The June 1946 King David Hotel bombing (more than 80 killed) exposed British bankruptcy and the question passed to the UN, where the US-backed partition plan granted 55 per cent of Palestine to Jews who were 30 per cent of the population and owned 6 per cent of the land, with nearly 400,000 Arabs assigned to the Jewish state against 10,000 Jews and 725,000 Arabs in the Arab state’s 45 per cent; no Arab state agreed. Partition in November 1947 was the legal figleaf triggering the hijack. At its heart was terror on a monumental scale: at Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948 the Irgun under Begin murdered between two and three hundred villagers (Jacques de Reynier of the Red Cross quoted at length; Begin quoted on the panic flight that followed), and the same psychological blitz — barrel bombs and Haganah loudspeaker horror recordings in Haifa on 21 April, then Jaffa — emptied town after town. The official Zionist claim that Arab countries called on Palestinians to leave is answered by the secret Israeli intelligence report of June 1948 published by Benny Morris in early 1986, quoted at length: 391,000 refugees by 1 June, hostile Haganah/IDF operations without doubt the main cause, Deir Yassin a decisive accelerating factor. The Arab League’s war was unreal — Abdullah negotiated with Golda Meir and Dayan and grabbed the West Bank, Musa Alami found a Syrian president boasting of a locally made atomic bomb and an Iraqi prime minister needing only a few brooms — and the forces were 15,000 Arab League troops with 22 light tanks against over 100,000 Zionist regulars, second-line troops, settlement police, homeguard and Irgun; General D’Arcy had said the Haganah could take and hold all Palestine against the entire Arab world. UN mediator Folke Bernadotte, who witnessed the stealing of 80 per cent of the land, 50 per cent of the citrus groves, 90 per cent of the olive groves and ten thousand shops, was assassinated on 17 September by the Stern Gang; by the January 1949 ceasefire Israel occupied 80 per cent of Palestine, and the expulsion of more than three-quarters of a million Palestinians formed the basis of the state. Weizmann on the exodus: “a miraculous simplification of our tasks.”
• The struggle to liberate Palestine (lines 1111-1248; notes lines 1249-1290): Palestine was not desert — Jaffa’s orange groves, entirely in Arab hands in 1880, held 765,000 trees harvesting thirty million oranges — and Palestinian resentment was of the Zionist interloper imposed by Britain, not of a Jewish presence. The 1936 General Strike, a six-month revolt for independence involving the entire nation, was met by martial law, more than 20,000 British troops, RAF strafing, Zionist night squads and the dynamiting of houses in Jaffa; the British approach to Abdullah and Faisal worked, despite demonstration against the kings’ interference, and the feudal Palestinian leadership called the strike off — Abu Salma’s poem (poetry) shaming such kings: “We are the ones who will protect our homeland and heal its wounds.” The 1937-39 rebellion that followed saw 5,000 houses dynamited in four months, 148 executed in Acre prison alone, one-third of the British Empire’s troops needed, and by 1939 20,000 Palestinians killed or wounded. After the war the Palestinians were left isolated and their sad exodus began — in Kanafani’s story The Land of Sad Oranges (a short story; fiction), the narrator recalls his family’s flight from Jaffa and arrival in Sidon homeless. The destruction and expulsion became the “refugee problem” in the eyes of the West, and stories of the refugees starving finally hit the headlines of the Western press; the needs of the three-quarters of a million displaced people — distributed, as printed, 460,000 in Jordan, 200,000 in Gaza, 100,000 in Lebanon, 85,000 in Syria — were staggering, the Arab countries desperately poor with cities already swollen with people looking for work, and, in Rose’s view, despite Zionist propaganda it was hardly the responsibility of the Arab countries to absorb “the refugees”. The refugees were kept alive by UNRWA from 1949 at roughly 37 dollars a year, preparing only to return: 25,000 hunger-struck against UNRWA rather than settle outside Palestine, and a Palestinian tailor killed Abdullah in 1951. Nasser’s Egypt symbolised Arab nationalism, but his 1956 defeat set its limits and his war calls sounded hollow; self-reliance produced Fatah and its magazine Falasteen (15 April 1963: armed struggle the one and only means, no Arab government representation, and as soon as he can tear away the fetters the Arab governments bound him with he shall return to being what he was, a fedayeen), the PLO formed at the 1964 summit to control the guerrillas, Fatah’s first attack on 1 January 1965, and, after Golda Meir’s 1969 denial that Palestinians existed and the 1967 seizure of land three times Israel’s pre-1967 size, the fedayeen takeover of the PLO and Karameh in March 1968. Hussein, whose grandfather had annexed the West Bank, smashed the guerrillas in Black September 1970 with US-manufactured napalm (thousands killed), spawning the Black September organisation; Arafat’s 1974 gun-and-olive-branch UN debut brought recognition but no concessions, and Camp David weakened the Palestinians further. In Lebanon, Assad’s Syria intervened in June 1976 against the Lebanese left and Palestinians, besieging Tal al Zaatar for 53 days with the Christian Right (Black June), and in 1982 no Arab government gave the PLO sustained military help against Israel.
• Zionism rules OK? (lines 1291-1341; note line 1343-1358): the chapter is extracts from Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, pp.123-32, on life in the West Bank and Gaza under nearly twenty years of occupation: religious settlers, protected by army and investigators, creating a pogrom-like atmosphere (shooting at windows, beating stone-throwing boys, a settler journal citing the Talmud and Maimonides that conquered peoples must serve degraded and that a divinely-commanded war must destroy men, women and children), investigation of settler arms offences transferred from police to military, Arab police and courts never daring to act against settlements, a March 1982 village incident (a boy shot in the arm, another kidnapped, beaten and locked in a car trunk all day), children lined up in Hebron for five hours on a cold night, the beating of the elderly Mrs Mayalleh by Yeshiva zealots in the Old City while police charged only riotous behaviour, and the suppression in the US of torture evidence — the London Sunday Times Insight study finding systematic torture, offered to and rejected by the New York Times and Washington Post, the Swiss League study of June 1977, and Ha’aretz’s dismissal of Amnesty’s 1979 report as a tool of Arab propaganda.
• Zionism or socialism? (lines 1359-1443; notes lines 1445-1468): Israel’s leadership, Labour or Likud, will not concede even a supervised West Bank state. Rodinson is quoted that a recognised Israel admitting refugees and abandoning conquests would have been the end of Zionism, which throve on a bellicose atmosphere. The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to any Jew and excludes all non-Jews, especially the former Palestinian inhabitants, though most of the world’s Jews have not taken it up. Meron Benvenisti (spelled Menon Benvenisti in the text) shows half the West Bank outside Jerusalem already taken for settlements, Abba Eban’s Heritage map shows it integrated as Israel Today, and surveys show more than half of Israelis welcoming settlement and only 1 per cent favouring withdrawal to pre-1967 borders — a colon mentality like Rhodesia, French Algeria and South Africa. Yoel Marcus in Ha’aretz: a majority is not troubled by the Sabra and Shatila massacre itself. Yoran Peri in Davar (1 October 1982), From Co-existence to Hegemony, argued Lebanon was about asserting Zionist hegemony. The PLO’s gun-and-olive-branch strategy is in ruins: armed struggle by Palestinians or all Arab states together cannot defeat Israel, and the Arab regimes block the revolution until they too are overthrown. The alternative is armed revolution by the mass of Arab workers and peasants against Zionism and their own regimes, made plausible by the regional economic crisis — Phil Marshall’s Egypt account (June 1986): oil earnings down at least 50 per cent, tourism and Suez receipts collapsing, remittances possibly down 75 per cent, three to four million Egyptians abroad, workers regaining confidence since 1977. The book closes with Abram Leon, gassed at Auschwitz, whose The Jewish Question anticipated Jews transformed into Zionists and then brokers for British and American imperialism, and with the programme: socialist revolution led by the Arab working class, a socialist republic — a socialist Palestine — with full rights for Jews and all national minorities, welcoming the older Jewish tradition of universality, internationalism and sensitivity to all oppressed peoples.

Key passages

• “Israel is to become the watchdog.” (Ha’aretz, 30 September 1951, as epigraph, lines 25-27; quoted in full again at lines 385-391)
• “floated to victory on a wave of oil” (Lord Curzon, on the allies in 1914-18, line 197)
• “a force in the Middle East that is actually of benefit to us” (Ronald Reagan, on Israel at his 1980 post-election press conference, lines 377-379)
• “What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions.” (David Ben-Gurion, Independence War Diary, 1 January 1948, line 563)
• “It was like shooting sparrows with cannon.” (a United Nations peacekeeping officer, on the attack on Rashidiyeh camp, line 583)
• “I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine.” (Chaplain Klausner, Zionist organiser, reporting to the American Jewish Congress on DP-camp refugees, line 897)
• “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them to Eretz Yisrael [“Israel”], then I would opt for the second alternative.” (David Ben-Gurion, opposing the 1938 scheme for German Jewish children to enter Britain, line 903)
• “We are fighting an advance guard of America.” (a Palestinian leader, on the partition plan, line 1007)
• “a miraculous simplification of our tasks” (Chaim Weizmann, on the Palestinian exodus, line 1071)
• “There were no such things as Palestinians.” (Golda Meir, to The Times, 15 June 1969, line 1207)
• “Using the Jews as a counterweight to the Arab threat” (Abram Leon, The Jewish Question, line 1431)

Evidence the work relies on

• The Israeli Hebrew press in English translation, above all Ha’aretz (the 30 September 1951 watchdog passage; 18 April 1986 on the Libya bombing; 26 March 1982 on the coming Lebanon war), the Jerusalem Post (the total aid table, 19 April 1986; April 1986 on strategic assets) and Davar, as selected in the Israeli Mirror.

• Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (London 1983), cited throughout the chapters read here for the aid figures, the Truman Doctrine and CIA documents, the 1958 National Security Council memorandum, the periphery pact, the South Africa, Honduras, Guatemala, Argentina and Iran material, and in detail for the Lebanon chapter, whose note 5 states that the chapter draws heavily on Chomsky’s book.

• Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters (London 1975), the source for most of the oil chapter’s history and figures, including the Curzon, Churchill, Red Line Agreement, Exxon and OPEC passages.

• Contemporary Western press reporting quoted or cited: Time (14 April 1986), the Financial Times, Business Week (March 1979), the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and The Economist.

• Official and documentary material as presented in the work: the 1945 US State Department analysis of Saudi Arabia, declassified State Department documents on ARAMCO, Kissinger’s memorandum interview with US Jewish leaders (the Klutznik Group, in MERIP Report, May 1981), the 1967 State Department memorandum on Israel’s services to the US, Pentagon delivery figures for early 1982, the Lebanon–United States agreement’s guarantees of safety for Palestinian non-combatants, and Ben-Gurion’s Independence War Diary.

• Testimony: Dr Shlomo Shmelzman’s hunger-strike letter, Chris Giannou’s testimony to the United States Congress, and the accounts of Tom Segev, David Shipler, Loren Jenkins and James Pringle from Lebanon.

• Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983), the source for the Holocaust chapter’s central documents: Ben-Gurion on the German Jewish children (p.149), Weizmann’s 1912 Berlin speech (p.34) and the Zionist Federation of Germany’s 1933 memorandum to Hitler (pp.48-9).

• Our Roots are Still Alive (cited as Our Roots), the source for most of the Origins, Hijack and Struggle chapters’ quotations and figures, including Herzl, Balfour’s 1919 memorandum, the 1936-39 revolt and Karameh.

• David Hurst, The Gun and the Olive Branch (1977), for de Reynier’s Deir Yassin account, Begin on the panic flight, the Musa Alami tour and General D’Arcy.

• The secret Israeli army Intelligence Branch report of June 1948, as published and analysed by Benny Morris in Middle Eastern Studies, 21:1, January 1986, quoted at length in Hijack!

• Maxime Rodinson, Israel and the Arabs, for the Jaffa orange figures (p.338) and, in the final chapter, the argument that a normalised Israel would have been the end of Zionism (p.62).

• Abram Leon, The Jewish Question (New York 1970), the basis of the Origins chapter’s economic account of antisemitism (its note 1) and the closing authority (p.251).

• For Zionism rules OK?, Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle, pp.123-32, reproduced as extracts, including the London Sunday Times Insight torture study and the Swiss League for the Rights of Man study of June 1977 as Chomsky presents them.

Analysis

The work is a polemical Marxist pamphlet, not a scholarly monograph. Its method is to build the watchdog thesis from the words of its subjects — Israeli leaders and newspapers, US presidents, secretaries of state and official memoranda, and the oil companies’ own historian, Sampson — and from documented accounts by others, above all Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle (the Lebanon chapter and the whole of Zionism rules OK?), Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (the Holocaust chapter), Our Roots (the historical chapters) and Leon’s The Jewish Question (the theory of antisemitism and the closing programme); the Acknowledgements state plainly that several authors are exhaustively quoted throughout. Its strongest evidence is direct quotation with locators: the 1951 Ha’aretz offer, the 1967 State Department memorandum, Balfour’s 1919 memorandum, the Zionist Federation of Germany’s 1933 memorandum, and the June 1948 Israeli intelligence report in Morris’s analysis. Its limits: figures from interested sources are sometimes used without the underlying document (the bank instability ranking comes through an advisor’s article in Davar cited in Chomsky); motives are asserted for whole governments from single quotations; the historical chapters rest heavily on a single secondary source, Our Roots, whose own evidence is not examined; several figures and dates as printed conflict internally or with other ingested sources and are recorded under Open questions rather than resolved; and the counter-case — any Israeli or US argument that aid, the Lebanon invasion or the Zionist project served the purposes publicly claimed for them — is answered by framing, not examined. The programme of the final chapter (Arab working-class socialist revolution) is asserted from the Egyptian economic account and Leon, not argued against alternatives the work itself raises, such as the PLO’s diplomacy.

People, organizations, places and events

John Rose, Noam Chomsky, Lenni Brenner, David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin, Arik Sharon, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, Gamal Abd al-Nasser, Shlomo Shmelzman, Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Golda Meir, Abram Leon, Benny Morris, Folke Bernadotte, Ghassan Kanafani, Maxime Rodinson, Palestine Liberation Organization, OPEC, Seven Sisters, Phalange, Peace Now, Histadrut, Haganah, Irgun, Stern Group, Fateh, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, UNRWA, Balfour Declaration, Deir Yassin, Law of Return, Meron Benvenisti, Abba Eban, Israel, United States, Lebanon invasion 1982, Sabra and Shatila massacre

Concepts

Watchdog state, Imperialism, Zionism, State Terrorism, Periphery pact, Antisemitism, Jewish Labour Only, Nakba, Right of Return, Socialism

How it relates to other sources

• The watchdog thesis and its founding document are the same as in the Awad & bean collection’s Chapter 2: both quote the Ha’aretz passage of 30 September 1951, Israel is to become the watchdog, and both treat the 1967 war as cementing the role and Israel’s arms supplies to Latin American dictatorships and apartheid South Africa as its proofs (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction). Rose (1986) is the earlier statement of the argument, and is written as a single-author pamphlet rather than an edited collection.

• Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace (1961) had already built its Chapter 5 on the same Ha’aretz formulation, testing it against the reprisal actions of the 1950s; Rose extends the same thesis through 1967, 1973 and Lebanon 1982 and grounds it in the oil history the earlier book treats more briefly (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace).

• On Lebanon 1982 and Sabra and Shatila, Rose’s account is drawn heavily from Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle (1983), which is not itself an ingested source; the readings of the massacre here — IDF sealing and observation, Eitan’s Friday meeting, the US evacuation guarantees and early withdrawal — are Chomsky’s evidence in Rose’s summary.

• Rose’s founding-expulsion figure in the Introduction, three-quarters of a million Palestinians expelled at Israel’s foundation, sits beside Said’s approximately 780,000 dispossessed in 1948 and the nearly a million of Rose’s own oil chapter; see Open questions.

• On Deir Yassin and 1948 flight, Rose’s Morris-quoted intelligence report (391,000 refugees by 1 June 1948, IDF operations the main cause) converges with Pappe’s and Manna’s accounts against the official Zionist version Rose names; the tolls differ by source — Rose gives between two and three hundred at Deir Yassin, Said 250 and 350 in different passages, Pappe a revised ninety-three massacred — and each is kept as its source gives it (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Nakba and Survival, The Question of Palestine).

• Rose’s Holocaust chapter draws its central documents (Ben-Gurion on the children, the 1933 Federation memorandum, Weizmann in 1912) from Brenner’s Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, itself an ingested source, where the same documents appear with Brenner’s own framing (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators: A Reappraisal).

• Rose’s programme — a socialist Palestine with full rights for Jews and minorities, reached by Arab working-class revolution rather than a negotiated partition — is the 1986 single-author counterpart to the programme argued across the Awad & bean collection (2020), whose Chapter 1 likewise treats Herzl’s imperial patronage and the von Plehve meeting (Palestine: A Socialist Introduction).

Open questions

• The Introduction says Israel at its foundation expelled three-quarters of a million Palestinians (line 139), while the oil chapter says Israel had expelled nearly a million fellow Arabs from their native land of Palestine (line 245). Both figures are recorded as printed.
• The prime minister’s name is spelled Peres in the Introduction — “Prime Minister Peres” (line 127), in the Ha’aretz passage on the 400 million dollars of US purchases — and Perez once, as “Shimon Perez” (line 269), in the closing Schultz passage of the oil chapter. Lines 1-734 contain “Perez” only once, not twice. The prime minister meant is Shimon Peres, who has a page as Shimon Peres.
• The Lebanon chapter’s note 18 gives its Chomsky locator as pages 364-S, as printed; the S is unexplained in the text copy.
• The bank ranking of Israel’s instability in The Arming of Israel is credited in note 6 to an article by Yoran Pen, former advisor to Premier Rabin, in the Labour Party journal Davar, cited in Chomsky, p.463; the spelling Yoran Pen is as printed.
• Several printing slips are preserved in the text copy: Phillipines for the Philippines, declassifled for declassified, Honducan for Honduran, and topped for toppled (Gadaffi and King Idris).
• The camp carpet-bombed in the last hours of the last air attack on Beirut is named in the text only as Borj el Brajne (a Palestinian refugee camp) (line 599); no other spelling of the name is given in the part read.
• The Origins of Zionism chapter is unfinished at line 734; its note 1 and the rest of the work’s historical and programmatic argument fall in part 2 (lines 735-1468).
• The Hijack! chapter says the Deir Yassin scenes “would be repeated at Shatila and Sabra in Beirut 24 years later”, as printed; 1948 to 1982 is 34 years.
• The refugee distribution in The struggle to liberate Palestine — 460,000 in Jordan, 200,000 in Gaza, 100,000 in Lebanon, 85,000 in Syria — sums to 845,000 (computed from the figures as printed), against the three-quarters of a million displaced given in the same passage.
• UNRWA is named in the text the “United Nations Relief and Works Administration” (line 1173), as printed.
• The final chapter names the West Bank authority “Menon Benvenisti”; the page for him is Meron Benvenisti. It also gives the Rabin adviser’s name as Yoran Peri (Davar, 1 October 1982, From Co-existence to Hegemony), where the Arming chapter’s note 6, through Chomsky, gave Yoran Pen for an advisor to Premier Rabin writing in Davar; both spellings are recorded as printed.
• The final chapter prints “only I per cent” for the share favouring withdrawal to pre-1967 borders, read as 1 per cent.
• In the Chomsky extracts in Zionism rules OK?, the Sunday Times finding is quoted as torture “sanctioned at some level as deliberate police”, as printed, for policy.
• The Warsaw Ghetto fighters are said to have fought for six months, as printed (line 933).
• The Haganah is said to have been founded in 1923, as printed (line 813).
• The Origins chapter’s note 7 cites the Lenin pogrom quotation to Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, p.94, as printed.
• The Struggle chapter’s body uses note number 8 twice — for the eager students “like ones possessed” and for the Life Magazine 1951 report — as printed.
• Nasser is said to have suffered defeat “by Israel in the 1956 war”, as printed, in the passage on the limits of his radical nationalism.
• The Origins of Zionism chapter is now complete; no part of the work remains unread.

Coverage

lines 1-1468 of 1468, read in full in parts 1-2: front matter and contents, Acknowledgements, Introduction, Oil and Imperialism, The Arming of Israel, The Terrorist State (Lebanon 1982), The Origins of Zionism, The Holocaust, Hijack!, The struggle to liberate Palestine, Zionism rules OK?, and Zionism or socialism?, with all chapters’ Notes.