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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29413 thread views

Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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I was just reading an interesting paper last night about Zionist terrorism in the lead-up to the founding of Israel:

Zionist Terrorism and the Establishment of Israel (pdf warning)

Zionists were only given the territory of Palestine as a nation (rather than a home for a small segment of Jewry) because of the abundance of terrorist attacks that Zionists committed against the British, in some cases slaughtering civil servants and kidnapping politicians, in one case blowing up a boat of 250 Jewish refugees as a false flag (the refugee ship Patria). Once they secured the nation of Israel for themselves, they used brutal terrorism and psychological warfare on the Palestinians to get them to flee. They killed innocents in a village called Deir Yassin, audio recorded their cries for help, and then drove loud “sound trucks” around Palestinian villages which played the cries of women and children while threatening nuclear warfare and poison gas attacks —

The Jews, too, used Deir Yassin's memory effectively, both against the Irgun and Stern Gang and against the Arabs. Jacques de Reznier of the International Red Cross said, "News of Deir Yassin promoted a widespread terror which the Jews always skillfully maintained. "The Jews used Deir Yassin extensively in their psychological warfare campaigns designed to make the Arabs quit their lands. Horror recordings and sound trucks accompanied Jewish attacks. “Shrieks, wails and anguished moans of Arab women, the wails of sirens and the clangs of fire-alarm bells, interrupted by a sepulchral voice calling out in Arabic, 'Remember Deir Yassin' and 'Save your souls, all ye faithful! Flee for your lives! The Jews are using poison gas and atomic weapons! Run for your lives in the name of Allah!"

There's a debate on whether Deir Yassin was really a 'massacre'. both the Jews and Arabs trumpeted up the atrocities, the Jews to encourage other Arabs to flee, the Arabs to encourage other Arabs to stand and fight. the Jews turned out to be correct.

Every group in Palestine had cause for spreading the atrocity narrative. The Irgun and Lehi wished to frighten the Arabs into leaving Palestine; the Arabs wished to provoke an international response; the Haganah wished to tarnish the Irgun and Lehi; and the Arabs wished to malign both the Jews and their cause.

Hazem Nuseibeh, the news editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service at the time of the attack, gave an interview to the BBC in 1998. He spoke about a discussion he had with Hussayn Khalidi, the deputy chairman of the Higher Arab Executive in Jerusalem, shortly after the killings: "I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story. He said, 'We must make the most of this.' So he wrote a press release, stating that at Deir Yassin, children were murdered, pregnant women were raped, all sorts of atrocities."

Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun at the time of the attack, though not present at the village, wrote in 1977: The enemy propaganda was designed to besmirch our name. In the result it helped us. Panic overwhelmed the Arabs of Eretz Israel. Kolonia village, which had previously repulsed every attack of the Haganah, was evacuated overnight and fell without further fighting. Beit-Iksa was also evacuated. These two places overlooked the main road; and their fall, together with the capture of al-Qastal by the Haganah, made it possible to keep open the road to Jerusalem. In the rest of the country, too, the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces. Not what happened at Deir Yassin, but what was invented about Deir Yassin, helped to carve the way to our decisive victories on the battlefield ... The legend was worth half a dozen battalions to the forces of Israel.

In that unsearchable 270 page master’s thesis from the ‘70s, what page is your quote from? Did you just happen to stumble upon this, and read it at your leisure?

It is searchable for me on iOS. Actually it was a top search when I plugged in “Zionist terrorism Israel”, because I wanted to understand how the early Zionists used terrorism and whether it was comparable to Hamas actions. I realized that some American gentile’s military thesis from the 70s is almost certainly less biased than the leading Israeli or Palestinian histories, so why not read it? It’s all cited anyway. My passage is from page 81.

And yes I read most of it, it’s legitimately interesting, would recommend

Very impressive, honestly.

So what is your position re: group responsibility? Are the Israelis of the time, or even today, accountable for the alleged actions of a few?

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