The hijacking of the truth: Film evidence 'destroyed'
Protesters say Israel had an assassination list. Israel says soldiers fired only in self-defense.
From the UK newspaper, The Independent
So what really happened on 31 May? Catrina Stewart reports
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Jamal Elshayyal, a journalist with al-Jazeera, woke with a start to the opening salvos of an Israeli assault that would transform the decks of the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel bound for Gaza, into a bloodbath.
From the ship's position deep in international waters, satellite images of Israeli speedboats and helicopters approaching the vessel were beamed across the globe before communications were abruptly cut off, leaving the events on the Marmara to unfold away from the eyes of the world.
Six days after the bloody assault that left nine foreign protesters, mainly Turks, dead, nobody can recount with any conviction precisely what happened that night. The convoy of ships, whose passengers included writers, politicians and journalists, had been expected for weeks, with organisers loudly broadcasting their plans to run Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip and draw international attention to the situation there.
From the beginning, it was clear that Israeli forces were concentrating in their largest numbers on the Marmara, a ship carrying some 550 peace activists. The remaining five boats were much smaller and easily commandeered. After the Marmara was subdued, the passengers silenced, and their recording equipment confiscated, Israel disseminated a carefully choreographed account of the events that night that would dominate the airwaves for the first 48 hours.
Only as eyewitnesses, traumatized by their experiences, started to return to their home countries, were serious questions raised about the veracity of the Israeli version of events. Israeli commandos initiated the attack on the Marmara with stun grenades, paintballs and rubber-cased steel bullets. They were met with water hoses as the ship's passengers tried to form a defensive cordon to prevent soldiers from reaching the wheelhouse. Next, the helicopters started their approach, hovering overhead as they tried to disgorge commandos.
From the other ships, passengers looked on helplessly: "The worst thing was seeing the helicopter come up because I knew they were going to invade," said Ewa Jasiewicz, a 32-year-old organizer. "You could hear the screams when they started shooting ... We wanted to stop and go back but there wouldn't have been anything we could have done."
From the moment the helicopters arrived, the sequence of events becomes confused. The dizzying number of claims and counter-claims serves only to present an incomplete account of a military operation that went badly, badly wrong. More than 1.7 million viewers have pored over the edited YouTube footage posted by the Israeli navy since Wednesday. In the dramatic clip, commandos rappel down on to the deck from a helicopter, where they are met by angry activists armed with iron bars and sticks.
This is a critical point, for Israel has rallied domestic opinion on the crucial claim that its soldiers dropped into a meticulously planned riot for which they were completely unprepared. Panicked, they acted in self-defence after they landed, shooting only those who threatened them.
The video is problematic, though. The images of angry protesters are striking, but they lack context. What happened before? What happened next? Had the soldiers started shooting when they descended to the deck? The only account offered by the Israelis of what happened next is left to Staff Sergeant S, a commando who claims he shot six of the protesters.
The last of 15 to arrive on the deck, he said he saw that two of his colleagues had gunshot wounds. Pushing others into a protective cordon around the injured soldiers, he shot at the protesters to force them to fall back. It's a neat account, but several eyewitness accounts tell a very different story.
Mr Elshayyal, a reporter for the Arab channel al-Jazeera, was standing to one side of the ship and had a view of the front and back of the vessel when the fighting started. By his account, soldiers fired down on the protesters from the helicopters before an Israeli soldier had even set foot on the ship. A man next to him was shot through the top of his head, dying instantly.
"What I saw were shots being fired from the helicopter above and moments later from below – from the ships," Mr Elshayyal said. "As far as I am concerned, it's a lie to say they only started shooting on deck."
At least two other eyewitnesses saw soldiers firing from above the ships before they landed on the Marmara's deck. It is possible that this is what prompted the fierce resistance to the soldiers when they dropped down. Several passengers recount how organisers urged their peers to stop hitting the soldiers, aware of how it would harm their claim to be peaceful protesters.
Others on the ship claim they raised a white flag, but say that it was ignored. They also used a loudspeaker to reiterate their message of surrender and requested that the injured be taken off the ship to get medical assistance. Again, they were ignored.
At some point early on, the activists dragged three, possibly four, injured soldiers to a lower deck, either to keep as hostages or for their own safety. It was then, several passengers say, that the situation quickly deteriorated. Israel has insisted that the protesters took two of the soldiers' pistols and used them, but others claim the pistols were taken away to prove that Israel planned to use live rounds.
Below, the protesters rummaged through captured soldiers' belongings and claimed to unearth a document that they allege is a list of people Israel intended to assassinate. The booklet, written in Hebrew and in English, contained some photographs of passengers on the Marmara, including the leader of IHH, the Turkish charity that provided two of the ships, an 88-year-old priest and Ra'ad Salah, head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Mr Elshayyal said.
A military spokesman, Lt Col Avital Leibowitz, insisted soldiers acted in self-defence and that she "was not aware" of any list. But one thing is fast becoming clear – many of the dead were shot multiple times at point-blank range. One was a journalist taking photographs. "A man was shot ... between the eyebrows, which indicates that it was not an attack that took place from self-defence," Hassan Ghani, a passenger, said in an account posted on YouTube. "The soldier had time to set up the shot." Mattias Gardell, a Swedish activist, told the TT news bureau: "The Israelis committed premeditated murder ... Two people were killed by shots in the forehead, one was shot in the back of the head and one in the chest."
When Israeli troops had subdued the ship, they rounded up the passengers, bound their wrists, in some cases forcing activists into stress positions, and prevented them from using toilets. Mr Elshayyal said he was given just three sips of water before he was taken off the ship more than 24 hours later.
Their ordeal, of course, was not yet over. Accused of entering Israel illegally, the captives were transferred to an Israeli prison, where many were held in cramped cells and denied phone calls. Furious, Turkey sent three planes to transport the activists out of Israel, threatening to sever all diplomatic ties if they were not all released.
Meanwhile, much of the video footage confiscated from Marmara passengers remains undisclosed, and Israel has sought to undermine some eyewitness accounts by alleging some of the passengers were terrorist sympathisers bent on martyrdom.
Questions remain unanswered on both sides. But without a full and transparent airing of all the evidence, the truth of that dreadful night on the Marmara may never come to light.
In the meantime, the organisers say they will seek again and again to breach Israel's defences. Scottish protester Ali El-Awaisi said: "We sent six ships this time. Next time it will be 30 ships."
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Friday, June 4, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
a poem by Ghassan Hage
I don’t write poems but, in any case, poems are not poems
Ghassan Hage
Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine ;
I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians;
They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing.
And when naive old me saw freedom fighters
they patiently showed me that they were not freedom fighters,
and that resistance was not resistance.
And when, stupidly, I noticed arrogance, oppression and humiliation
they benevolently enlightened me so I can see that arrogance was not arrogance,
oppression was not oppression, and humiliation was not humiliation.
I saw misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.
But they told me that they were experts
in misery, racism, inhumanity and concentrations camps
and I have to take their word for it:
this was not misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentrations camp.
Over the years they’ve taught me so many things:
invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation,
colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid…
They opened my simple mind to even more complex truths
that my poor brain could not on its own compute like:
‘having nuclear weapons’ was not ‘having nuclear weapons’,
‘not having weapons of mass destruction’ was ‘having weapons of mass destruction’.
And, democracy (in the Gaza strip) was not democracy.
Having second class citizens (in Israel ) was democracy.
So you’ll excuse me if I am not surprised to learn today
that there were more things that I thought were evident that are not:
peace activists are not peace activists, piracy is not piracy,
the massacre of unarmed people is not the massacre of unarmed people.
I have such a limited brain and my ignorance is unlimited.
And they’re so fucking intelligent. Really.
Ghassan Hage
Long ago, I was made to understand that Palestine was not Palestine ;
I was also informed that Palestinians were not Palestinians;
They also explained to me that ethnic cleansing was not ethnic cleansing.
And when naive old me saw freedom fighters
they patiently showed me that they were not freedom fighters,
and that resistance was not resistance.
And when, stupidly, I noticed arrogance, oppression and humiliation
they benevolently enlightened me so I can see that arrogance was not arrogance,
oppression was not oppression, and humiliation was not humiliation.
I saw misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentration camp.
But they told me that they were experts
in misery, racism, inhumanity and concentrations camps
and I have to take their word for it:
this was not misery, racism, inhumanity and a concentrations camp.
Over the years they’ve taught me so many things:
invasion was not invasion, occupation was not occupation,
colonialism was not colonialism and apartheid was not apartheid…
They opened my simple mind to even more complex truths
that my poor brain could not on its own compute like:
‘having nuclear weapons’ was not ‘having nuclear weapons’,
‘not having weapons of mass destruction’ was ‘having weapons of mass destruction’.
And, democracy (in the Gaza strip) was not democracy.
Having second class citizens (in Israel ) was democracy.
So you’ll excuse me if I am not surprised to learn today
that there were more things that I thought were evident that are not:
peace activists are not peace activists, piracy is not piracy,
the massacre of unarmed people is not the massacre of unarmed people.
I have such a limited brain and my ignorance is unlimited.
And they’re so fucking intelligent. Really.
ISRAEL THE PIRATE NATION
MOVE ASIDE JOHNNY DEPP, HERE COMES NETANYAHU AND OBAMA: PIRATES OF THE MEDITERRANEAN
DOES MURDER AND DESTRUCTION AS A NORMAL EVERYDAY POLICY HAVE THE "RIGHT TO EXIST?"
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939 did the New York Times say "German troops were shocked that the Poles shot at them and reluctantly were forced to kill them all. These Poles are extremists!
If Netanyahu walked through East Jerusalem with a pistol and randomly shot ten Palestinian children,the U.S. news media would find a way to justify it. "These children provoked him! They constituted an existential threat to Israel because they didn't wear T-shirts saying: "Israel has a right to exist, and I don't."
When is an attack not an attack? Just ask the U.S. media and the Obama administration. When Israel attacks a civilian ship in international waters it's an act of love and peace. When those who are attacked fight back against piracy it's terrorism, violence. Enough already!
Civilized nations should shun Israel. Johnny Depp's got nothing on Obama. Obama and Netanyatu are the reigning champion Pirates of the Mediterranean.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
More Documentation on the real story of Israel's creation
from The Information Clearinghouse web site
The Birth of Israel
A Tale of Lies, Deceit, and Terrorism
(Based on classified documents from the Jewish Agency and its affiliated organizations seized by the British Mandate Police, materials that confirm that the Zionist controlled Jewish community intended to remove the Arab inhabitants of Palestine from their land and make the whole of Mandate Palestine a Jewish State, an intent that continues to the present day as the new book, The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction, available at Macmillan.com, demonstrates.)
By William A. Cook
May 12, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because Geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either … There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Moshe Dayan, Address to the Technion, Haifa, as quoted in Haaretz, 4-4-1969)
Thus began in November of 1947 what is euphemistically called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the combined forces of the Jewish armies, the Haganah, the Stern, and the Irgun as they drove more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes leaving them destitute, homeless and abandoned without a country in what is now the largest refugee Diaspora in the world.
More truthfully, the plight of the Palestinians that began so ruthlessly in 1947, and is now called the Nakba, was an intentional, calculated campaign to force the Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine, a systematic genocide of a people as defined by the United Nations in its adoption of Genocide Convention, Article II.
The United Kingdom had mandatory authority from the League of Nations to govern the Palestine area with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922. Prior to the official implementation of the Mandate in 1922, the British Government had enunciated a “declaration” concerning the desirability of His Majesty’s Government in the “establishment of a national home for the Jewish people,” called the Balfour Declaration. Command Paper 1922 from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School underlines this intent: “His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is no part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”
The View from Inside the Mandate
One of the curious ambiguities that surrounds the decade that preceded the declaration by the Jewish leaders in Palestine of the state of Israel is the dearth of information and perspective from the British Mandate forces governing Palestine between 1940 and May 15, 1948, the date of implementation of the partition resolution. Fortunately, Sir Richard C. Catling has left us a file that provides insight into conditions that prevailed in Jerusalem while he was Deputy Head of the Special Branch of the Criminal Investigation Division in Jerusalem in 1944 and a year later Assistant Inspector General. Catling’s “TOP SECRET” file has lain untouched in the Rhodes House archives of the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University until two years ago.
Two documents dominate the file with 62 appendices of evidence totaling close to 500 pages of materials. The first is a dispatch sent to the Secretary of State, dated 16th of October, 1941, by the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, labeled “Most Secret”; the second, a Top Secret “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence,” prepared by the Criminal Investigation Department headquarters, The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, dated July 31st, 1947. [Sir Richard C. Catling, #145, Mss.Med. S20] 1
What should be obvious now, with the materials preserved by Sir Richard C. Catling, is the truth about the creation of the state of Israel: acceptance of UN Resolution 181 by the Jewish Agency Provisional Government as the designated Jewish state was not done with intent to abide by the goal of the UN General Assembly, to provide a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine, but rather to use it as a means to gain eventual control of all the land and cleanse that land of its indigenous people to whatever extent possible. Put bluntly, as the chapters in Macmillan’s new book, The Plight of the Palestinians attests (to be released in June), the current government in Israel continues the practices of past Israeli governments: cleanse the land of its rightful inhabitants to make that land part of the Jewish state. This is what is termed in numerous chapters in this volume, “slow motion genocide.”
Jump Starting the State
Consider the events of April 9-11, 1948, the eradication of the citizens of the town of Deir Yassin, a month before the Agency declared the existence of the Israeli state and the implementation of the UN Resolution to partition. This massacre became then and remains the signature example of the intent of the Zionist Consultancy and its agents to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its non-Jewish inhabitants. 2
During the six months between the adoption of UN Resolution 181 and in subsequent months, the new state of Israel launched a massive military incursion into territory designated by that same Resolution for the Palestinian people, creating in its wake “three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees,” the destruction of “hundreds of entire villages … not only depopulated but obliterated …and houses blown up or bulldozed.” Walid Khalidi’s massive study focuses on 418 villages, once the homes of Palestinians, 292 completely destroyed, 90 others “largely destroyed,” the remainder replaced by Jews called Israeli settlers. 3
Perceiving the Reality
The “despatch” sent by MacMichael to the Secretary of State resulted from an investigation into the funding practices and use of those funds by various Jewish organizations.
The memorandum illustrates … the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it has ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention. 4
Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine. This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e. Palestinians as well as Jews, knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.
To bolster his points, MacMichael offers the following:
… the Jews in Palestine are by no means untrained in the use of arms … large numbers have received training in the Palestine Police… or in His Majesty’s Forces. At the present time, in addition to approximately 10,000 Jews in His Majesty’s Forces, there are 5,800 in various units of the police force and 15,400 special policemen (31,000) … When to those men … are added the illicit ‘defence’ organizations of the Jews (Haganah alone had an estimated 60-70,000 men by 1945, see Mss, Med. S20 Appendix XXI), it will be evident that the Jewish people in arms would numerically and in calibre be a very formidable adversary. 5
This is in 1941before the full deployment of Jewish terrorism against the legitimate Palestine government got under way.
MacMichael and Catling found themselves missing one of Catling’s primary supports for the waging of “irregular warfare” drawn from his image of the 3-legged stool that required the support of the people, the commander and his army and the government, an image, no doubt, from his childhood in Suffolk where his family were butchers and farmers. But the situation only got worse as the end of WWII loomed. The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations, including the kidnapping, killing and booby trapping of soldiers’ bodies, conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda. 6
But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine.
A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota…. The Royal Commission were, in my view, fundamentally at error in describing the Jewish community in Palestine as “intensely democratic”. … The Zionist organization, the whole social structure which it has created in Palestine, has the trappings but none of the essentials of democracy. The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…. The reality of power is in the Agency, with the Haganah, the illegal military organization, always in the background. 7
And so the authorities in Palestine, the legal authorities, have no power to enforce measures that would curtail terrorism against their own police. “The use of force cannot be contemplated at present as any such action would have to be on a very large scale.” MacMichael understands that he can get no help from the Jewish community, even from those who find themselves at odds with the Agency’s methods or morality. The consequences to the individual Jew for disobedience is horrendous as the second document seized from the Zionists in 1947 attests.
Between Two Worlds
Nothing makes more obvious the meaning of the “Zionist Juggernaut” than Catling’s TOP SECRET “Memorandum of the Criminal Investigation Department” of July 31, 1947.
The purpose of this memorandum is to furnish documentary evidence of the extent to which the supreme Jewish national institutions in Palestine and their principal officials have been parties to acts of sedition, violence, incitement and other offences against the laws of Palestine….The bulk of the memorandum concerns the war and post war years… the memorandum will therefore concern itself solely with an attempt to establish the links between the supreme Jewish bodies and illegal activity... 8
Catling’s memorandum begins with an understanding of the “intricate Jewish political, social and economic structure in Palestine.” A series of appendices chart these structures marking in passing that “…the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 understood ‘The Agency is obviously not a ‘governing body’; it can only advise and cooperate in a certain wide field.’ But allied as it is with the Vaad Leumi, and commanding the allegiance of the great majority of Jews in Palestine, it unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government” [emphasis mine]. Catling’s frustration with the actual control of the Jews over British policy in Palestine glares through this document. “This powerful and efficient organization amounts, in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government…” (2-3) [emphasis mine]. 9
What Catling doesn’t state in that sentence, but what he demonstrates in the memorandum, is that the Jewish Agency and its affiliated organizations are at war with the UN authority in Palestine, the British Mandate Palestine Government. The appendices include detailed information on the personnel in interlocking Jewish organizations and the function of each. The memorandum goes further. It notes that the activities of the Jewish Agency through its controlled organizations send emissaries and instructors abroad “to stir up Zionist sentiments among the Jewish communities and displaced persons, to bring pressure to bear upon the Palestine problem, to organize illegal immigration and engage in espionage.” As a result of its investigations, the Department itemizes six areas of subversive activities undertaken by the Jewish Agency against the British Mandate Government:
1. Maintenance of a secret army and espionage system;
2. Smuggling, theft and manufacture of arms;
3. Illegal immigration;
4. Violence and civil disobedience;
5. Seditious and hostile propaganda;
6. Encroachment upon the civil rights of Jewish citizens. 10
In short, the Zionist controlled Jewish Agency, the Yishuv, actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine even as it operated to undermine support for that government in Britain, placing UK forces in harms way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine. It also demonstrates the determination of the Agency’s leadership in undermining the very nation that gave it a means of establishing a “homeland” in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. Needless to say, Catling and his CID forces recognized the impossible position this defiance placed them in and understood the deception and violent means used by the Zionists to ensure that their will and theirs alone would be fulfilled at any cost.
However, the real power behind their efforts, what effectively held together the multiple strands of the web, was the use of extortion on all the Jewish people in Palestine, “…the extortion of money for unauthorized funds and self imposed taxes to further the illicit political ends of the national institutions” (42). Catling’s Memorandum provides evidence of how effective this consolidation of the web’s network operated including the systematic compilation of all wage earners, measures to be adopted in event of refusal to pay, publishing of names of those who failed to contribute, deductions from salary, sanctions on businesses, compulsory assessment, withholding of immigrants certificates, and Jewish Agency officials assessments.
There follows the measures to be taken against shirkers including actions to be taken against anyone aiding a shirker. There is no need to go into the details of these imposed actions; the consequences amount to total ostracism of an individual from his/her community to kidnapping and disappearance.
For those entering the military forces of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, there is the Hagana Oath (XVI A 157).
I hereby declare that of my own free will and in free recognition I enter the Jewish defence organization of the Land of Israel, (Irgun Haganana Haivri Be’Eretz Israel).
I hearby swear to remain loyal all the days of my life to the defense organization, its laws and its tasks as defined in its basic regulations by the High Command.
I hearby swear to remain at the disposal of the defense organization all my life, to accept its discipline unconditionally and without limit, and at its call to enlist for active service at any time and in any place, to obey all its orders and to fulfill all its instructions.
I hearby swear to devote all my strength, and even to sacrifice my life, to defense and battle for my people and my Homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion. 11
In one sense, these two methodologies of control, one imposed by fear, the second by moral obligation, make comprehensible the complete control the Zionists were able to achieve over a protracted period of time toward their distant goals. The fear imposed by extortion rests on its use in providing access to jobs, the protection offered by the “gangs” and Haganah forces, and the enforcement of the rules and regulations as itemized above.
The Haganah Oath goes deeper than fear. In effect, it declares that an individual has turned his/her conscience over to the High Command thus accepting what is right and what is wrong as determined by that authority regardless of local, state or international law, indeed, regardless of the morals, values and traditions of Judaism. This commitment is forever, to death. It is bolstered by a document issued to the Commander and Troops of the Haganah labeled “Security Instructions” that notes at the outset, “Remember, you are a member of an illegal military organization according to the Laws of the government, its existence, activity and membership of it is forbidden” The remainder of the document obligates the recruit to unconditional obedience, absolute silence, and the pragmatic and utilitarian virtues of deceit and lying. 12
Selling the Soul
From the moment an individual takes the oath, they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one.
William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His works include Psalms for the 21st Century, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, a novella, and coming in June from Macmillan, The Plight of the Palestinians. Articles by Cook appear in Counterpunch, the Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Pacific Free Press, Atlantic Free Press, Dissident Voice and Countercurrents among others. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu and www.drwilliamacook.com.
Notes
1- Catling, Sir Richard C. Personal Classified “Top Secret” files. Rhodes House Library Archives. #145. Mss. Medit. S 20 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Appendices circa 475 pages of seized documents. Oxford: Bodleian Libraries.
2- Morris, Benny. (1999). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Knopf. 208.
3- Khalidi, Walid. (1992). All That Remains. Institute for Palestinian Studies: Washington, D.C. xv.
4- MacMichael, Harold. (1947). “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, 7-31-1947 in Catling file.
5- MacMichael. “dispatch.” 1.
6- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
7- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
8- Catling. “Memorandum.” 1-2.
9- Ibid., “Memorandum.” 2-3.
10- Ibid. “Memorandum.” 5.
11- Ibid., Appendix, XVIA, 157.
The Birth of Israel
A Tale of Lies, Deceit, and Terrorism
(Based on classified documents from the Jewish Agency and its affiliated organizations seized by the British Mandate Police, materials that confirm that the Zionist controlled Jewish community intended to remove the Arab inhabitants of Palestine from their land and make the whole of Mandate Palestine a Jewish State, an intent that continues to the present day as the new book, The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction, available at Macmillan.com, demonstrates.)
By William A. Cook
May 12, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because Geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either … There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Moshe Dayan, Address to the Technion, Haifa, as quoted in Haaretz, 4-4-1969)
Thus began in November of 1947 what is euphemistically called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the combined forces of the Jewish armies, the Haganah, the Stern, and the Irgun as they drove more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes leaving them destitute, homeless and abandoned without a country in what is now the largest refugee Diaspora in the world.
More truthfully, the plight of the Palestinians that began so ruthlessly in 1947, and is now called the Nakba, was an intentional, calculated campaign to force the Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine, a systematic genocide of a people as defined by the United Nations in its adoption of Genocide Convention, Article II.
The United Kingdom had mandatory authority from the League of Nations to govern the Palestine area with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922. Prior to the official implementation of the Mandate in 1922, the British Government had enunciated a “declaration” concerning the desirability of His Majesty’s Government in the “establishment of a national home for the Jewish people,” called the Balfour Declaration. Command Paper 1922 from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School underlines this intent: “His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is no part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”
The View from Inside the Mandate
One of the curious ambiguities that surrounds the decade that preceded the declaration by the Jewish leaders in Palestine of the state of Israel is the dearth of information and perspective from the British Mandate forces governing Palestine between 1940 and May 15, 1948, the date of implementation of the partition resolution. Fortunately, Sir Richard C. Catling has left us a file that provides insight into conditions that prevailed in Jerusalem while he was Deputy Head of the Special Branch of the Criminal Investigation Division in Jerusalem in 1944 and a year later Assistant Inspector General. Catling’s “TOP SECRET” file has lain untouched in the Rhodes House archives of the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University until two years ago.
Two documents dominate the file with 62 appendices of evidence totaling close to 500 pages of materials. The first is a dispatch sent to the Secretary of State, dated 16th of October, 1941, by the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, labeled “Most Secret”; the second, a Top Secret “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence,” prepared by the Criminal Investigation Department headquarters, The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, dated July 31st, 1947. [Sir Richard C. Catling, #145, Mss.Med. S20] 1
What should be obvious now, with the materials preserved by Sir Richard C. Catling, is the truth about the creation of the state of Israel: acceptance of UN Resolution 181 by the Jewish Agency Provisional Government as the designated Jewish state was not done with intent to abide by the goal of the UN General Assembly, to provide a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine, but rather to use it as a means to gain eventual control of all the land and cleanse that land of its indigenous people to whatever extent possible. Put bluntly, as the chapters in Macmillan’s new book, The Plight of the Palestinians attests (to be released in June), the current government in Israel continues the practices of past Israeli governments: cleanse the land of its rightful inhabitants to make that land part of the Jewish state. This is what is termed in numerous chapters in this volume, “slow motion genocide.”
Jump Starting the State
Consider the events of April 9-11, 1948, the eradication of the citizens of the town of Deir Yassin, a month before the Agency declared the existence of the Israeli state and the implementation of the UN Resolution to partition. This massacre became then and remains the signature example of the intent of the Zionist Consultancy and its agents to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its non-Jewish inhabitants. 2
During the six months between the adoption of UN Resolution 181 and in subsequent months, the new state of Israel launched a massive military incursion into territory designated by that same Resolution for the Palestinian people, creating in its wake “three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees,” the destruction of “hundreds of entire villages … not only depopulated but obliterated …and houses blown up or bulldozed.” Walid Khalidi’s massive study focuses on 418 villages, once the homes of Palestinians, 292 completely destroyed, 90 others “largely destroyed,” the remainder replaced by Jews called Israeli settlers. 3
Perceiving the Reality
The “despatch” sent by MacMichael to the Secretary of State resulted from an investigation into the funding practices and use of those funds by various Jewish organizations.
The memorandum illustrates … the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it has ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention. 4
Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine. This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e. Palestinians as well as Jews, knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.
To bolster his points, MacMichael offers the following:
… the Jews in Palestine are by no means untrained in the use of arms … large numbers have received training in the Palestine Police… or in His Majesty’s Forces. At the present time, in addition to approximately 10,000 Jews in His Majesty’s Forces, there are 5,800 in various units of the police force and 15,400 special policemen (31,000) … When to those men … are added the illicit ‘defence’ organizations of the Jews (Haganah alone had an estimated 60-70,000 men by 1945, see Mss, Med. S20 Appendix XXI), it will be evident that the Jewish people in arms would numerically and in calibre be a very formidable adversary. 5
This is in 1941before the full deployment of Jewish terrorism against the legitimate Palestine government got under way.
MacMichael and Catling found themselves missing one of Catling’s primary supports for the waging of “irregular warfare” drawn from his image of the 3-legged stool that required the support of the people, the commander and his army and the government, an image, no doubt, from his childhood in Suffolk where his family were butchers and farmers. But the situation only got worse as the end of WWII loomed. The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations, including the kidnapping, killing and booby trapping of soldiers’ bodies, conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda. 6
But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine.
A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota…. The Royal Commission were, in my view, fundamentally at error in describing the Jewish community in Palestine as “intensely democratic”. … The Zionist organization, the whole social structure which it has created in Palestine, has the trappings but none of the essentials of democracy. The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…. The reality of power is in the Agency, with the Haganah, the illegal military organization, always in the background. 7
And so the authorities in Palestine, the legal authorities, have no power to enforce measures that would curtail terrorism against their own police. “The use of force cannot be contemplated at present as any such action would have to be on a very large scale.” MacMichael understands that he can get no help from the Jewish community, even from those who find themselves at odds with the Agency’s methods or morality. The consequences to the individual Jew for disobedience is horrendous as the second document seized from the Zionists in 1947 attests.
Between Two Worlds
Nothing makes more obvious the meaning of the “Zionist Juggernaut” than Catling’s TOP SECRET “Memorandum of the Criminal Investigation Department” of July 31, 1947.
The purpose of this memorandum is to furnish documentary evidence of the extent to which the supreme Jewish national institutions in Palestine and their principal officials have been parties to acts of sedition, violence, incitement and other offences against the laws of Palestine….The bulk of the memorandum concerns the war and post war years… the memorandum will therefore concern itself solely with an attempt to establish the links between the supreme Jewish bodies and illegal activity... 8
Catling’s memorandum begins with an understanding of the “intricate Jewish political, social and economic structure in Palestine.” A series of appendices chart these structures marking in passing that “…the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 understood ‘The Agency is obviously not a ‘governing body’; it can only advise and cooperate in a certain wide field.’ But allied as it is with the Vaad Leumi, and commanding the allegiance of the great majority of Jews in Palestine, it unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government” [emphasis mine]. Catling’s frustration with the actual control of the Jews over British policy in Palestine glares through this document. “This powerful and efficient organization amounts, in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government…” (2-3) [emphasis mine]. 9
What Catling doesn’t state in that sentence, but what he demonstrates in the memorandum, is that the Jewish Agency and its affiliated organizations are at war with the UN authority in Palestine, the British Mandate Palestine Government. The appendices include detailed information on the personnel in interlocking Jewish organizations and the function of each. The memorandum goes further. It notes that the activities of the Jewish Agency through its controlled organizations send emissaries and instructors abroad “to stir up Zionist sentiments among the Jewish communities and displaced persons, to bring pressure to bear upon the Palestine problem, to organize illegal immigration and engage in espionage.” As a result of its investigations, the Department itemizes six areas of subversive activities undertaken by the Jewish Agency against the British Mandate Government:
1. Maintenance of a secret army and espionage system;
2. Smuggling, theft and manufacture of arms;
3. Illegal immigration;
4. Violence and civil disobedience;
5. Seditious and hostile propaganda;
6. Encroachment upon the civil rights of Jewish citizens. 10
In short, the Zionist controlled Jewish Agency, the Yishuv, actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine even as it operated to undermine support for that government in Britain, placing UK forces in harms way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine. It also demonstrates the determination of the Agency’s leadership in undermining the very nation that gave it a means of establishing a “homeland” in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. Needless to say, Catling and his CID forces recognized the impossible position this defiance placed them in and understood the deception and violent means used by the Zionists to ensure that their will and theirs alone would be fulfilled at any cost.
However, the real power behind their efforts, what effectively held together the multiple strands of the web, was the use of extortion on all the Jewish people in Palestine, “…the extortion of money for unauthorized funds and self imposed taxes to further the illicit political ends of the national institutions” (42). Catling’s Memorandum provides evidence of how effective this consolidation of the web’s network operated including the systematic compilation of all wage earners, measures to be adopted in event of refusal to pay, publishing of names of those who failed to contribute, deductions from salary, sanctions on businesses, compulsory assessment, withholding of immigrants certificates, and Jewish Agency officials assessments.
There follows the measures to be taken against shirkers including actions to be taken against anyone aiding a shirker. There is no need to go into the details of these imposed actions; the consequences amount to total ostracism of an individual from his/her community to kidnapping and disappearance.
For those entering the military forces of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, there is the Hagana Oath (XVI A 157).
I hereby declare that of my own free will and in free recognition I enter the Jewish defence organization of the Land of Israel, (Irgun Haganana Haivri Be’Eretz Israel).
I hearby swear to remain loyal all the days of my life to the defense organization, its laws and its tasks as defined in its basic regulations by the High Command.
I hearby swear to remain at the disposal of the defense organization all my life, to accept its discipline unconditionally and without limit, and at its call to enlist for active service at any time and in any place, to obey all its orders and to fulfill all its instructions.
I hearby swear to devote all my strength, and even to sacrifice my life, to defense and battle for my people and my Homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion. 11
In one sense, these two methodologies of control, one imposed by fear, the second by moral obligation, make comprehensible the complete control the Zionists were able to achieve over a protracted period of time toward their distant goals. The fear imposed by extortion rests on its use in providing access to jobs, the protection offered by the “gangs” and Haganah forces, and the enforcement of the rules and regulations as itemized above.
The Haganah Oath goes deeper than fear. In effect, it declares that an individual has turned his/her conscience over to the High Command thus accepting what is right and what is wrong as determined by that authority regardless of local, state or international law, indeed, regardless of the morals, values and traditions of Judaism. This commitment is forever, to death. It is bolstered by a document issued to the Commander and Troops of the Haganah labeled “Security Instructions” that notes at the outset, “Remember, you are a member of an illegal military organization according to the Laws of the government, its existence, activity and membership of it is forbidden” The remainder of the document obligates the recruit to unconditional obedience, absolute silence, and the pragmatic and utilitarian virtues of deceit and lying. 12
Selling the Soul
From the moment an individual takes the oath, they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one.
William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His works include Psalms for the 21st Century, Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, a novella, and coming in June from Macmillan, The Plight of the Palestinians. Articles by Cook appear in Counterpunch, the Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Pacific Free Press, Atlantic Free Press, Dissident Voice and Countercurrents among others. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu and www.drwilliamacook.com.
Notes
1- Catling, Sir Richard C. Personal Classified “Top Secret” files. Rhodes House Library Archives. #145. Mss. Medit. S 20 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Appendices circa 475 pages of seized documents. Oxford: Bodleian Libraries.
2- Morris, Benny. (1999). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Knopf. 208.
3- Khalidi, Walid. (1992). All That Remains. Institute for Palestinian Studies: Washington, D.C. xv.
4- MacMichael, Harold. (1947). “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, 7-31-1947 in Catling file.
5- MacMichael. “dispatch.” 1.
6- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
7- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
8- Catling. “Memorandum.” 1-2.
9- Ibid., “Memorandum.” 2-3.
10- Ibid. “Memorandum.” 5.
11- Ibid., Appendix, XVIA, 157.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Robert Hicks, 81, Founding member of Deacons for Defense
REFLECTIONS UPON AN OBITUARY IN THE NYT...Deacons for Defense, ML King, Malcolm X, Bhagat Singh, Ghandhi & Armed Peasant Rebellion in India
Rick Congress
Robert Hicks, one of the few surviving members of the Deacons for Defense, died April 13 in Bogalusa, LA. A black paper mill worker, his home was threatened with attack by the KKK in February of 1965 because he was providing housing for two white civil rights workers. This was just six months after the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
After moving his wife and child out of the house he called upon neighbors for help and soon they came armed with rifles and shotguns. The Klan didn't show up. Hicks was visited by members of the newly organized black armed self-defense group, that had begun in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and agreed to start a chapter in Bogalusa. The Deacons grew to have chapters in more than two dozen communities in the deep south. Hicks was a leader of the Deacons and also was know for his activism demanding and litigating that the voting rights act of 1964 be put into effect by local officials.
Martin Luther King was not comfortable with the Deacons for Defense's stand on the right of armed self-defense and publicly criticized them. James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) defended the Deacons as a "partnership of brothers" who did not "lynch people or burn down houses" like the KKK.
I was active in the civil rights movement during that time (I still have my 1961 NAACP membership card autographed by John Coltrane, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner). I participated in starting a CORE chapter in Indianapolis in 1964 and avidly followed what was happening in the movement around the country.
While seeing the importance of Dr. King and the SCLC in inspiring masses into action: marches, sit-ins picket lines, boycotts of businesses that practiced segregation, and so on, I and others in the movement joined in these actions, but also looked favorably upon the more radical Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Malcolm X as pointing the way towards a deeper social change in the USA.
At that time, King cautiously avoided making an issue out of the growing US war in Vietnam. In fact most of the civil rights establishment were "patriotic" and supported the war and other imperial polices of the White House (against Cuba, for example). When King came out against the war in his famous Riverside Church speech in 1967, he was reviled by the media and the pro-Vietnam war civil right establishment. When he was killed in Memphis he was helping a strike by black sanitation workers.
One vivid memory of those times I can relate: In 1965 I was involved in organizing the first anti-Vietnam rally at Indiana University in Bloomington. We started the event after there had been an earlier march in support of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama where they had been set upon by dogs and beaten by the police. When I got up to speak and mentioned that James Farmer, the leader of CORE and a well-known major leader of the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam war, I was booed by some of the campus civil rights marchers who had come to the rally. One professor shouted "how dare you use James Farmer's name to speak against the War!"
While King was marching in the South, Malcolm X spoke for the differently situated blacks of the Northern ghettos. His spellbinding orations related their plight to the anti-colonial struggles of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the FLN of Algeria.
In the days of Selma, the Watts ghetto rebellion (and Detroit and Newark, etc) I looked on non-violence as a tactic (as I do now). It was obvious that a mass movement to eliminate the Jim Crow system in the South and racial discrimination should be peaceful. But what to do about violent attacks? Were the Deacons for Defense wrong? Their methods were successful...at the time and in their specific context.
Their actions for self-defense against violent KKK attacks were right and deserve to be respected as part of the whole, broad 1960s civil rights movement. The Deacons were the best known black armed self-defense force, but there were others around the South.
Were the violent and sometimes armed (gunfire from blacks citizens actually stopped the initial National Guard incursion into the Detroit ghetto in the summer of 1967) rebellions "wrong?" They were social uprisings caused by intolerable conditions, racism and everyday police harassment. Often a gross act of police brutality detonated a social explosion.
When looking at social gains or the social legislation of the 60s and early 70s, you have to keep in mind that violent social unrest played its part.
Ideological pacifists don't seem to take into account the role the ruling classes fear of violent revolution plays in their willingness to make concessions to mass peaceful movements. They are not being moral or changing their ways, they are picking the lesser of two evils and biding their time until they have an advantage and can strike back.
And strike back they have. Much has been rolled back from the 60s. Reagan's proclaiming "the South will rise again" at a campaign speech in Meridian, Mississippi (near the murder site of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney) in 1980 illustrated the consolidation of the Republican's "Southern Strategy." The roll backs of the '80s and '90s skipped past the 60s and included rolling back constraints upon rampant capitalism instituted in the 1930s, including the right of workers to have union representation.
The passive resistance movement of Ghandi, from today's vantage point, can arguably be said to be a failure. Independence was achieved, but what else? One million died in the transfer of populations in 1948 between the newly partitioned Pakistan and India. India boasts a new affluent class and rising high tech industries, but India and Pakistan are now aiming nuclear weapons at each other and sporadically at war over Kashmir. Most Indians are still impoverished village dwellers. There is more than one vigorous armed peasant rebellions in India today. It has been the only recourse for desperately oppressed poor farmers who face displacement and starvation (see Arundati Roy's article "with the comrades").
Actually there was an armed resistance to the British occupation that went on parallel to Ghandi's movement. Bhagat Singh was a martyr to millions of Indians.In the 1920s He was hanged by the British for the killing of a hated British official who had troops fire on demonstrators. Indian students in my ESL class at the Technical Institute where I teach taught me about Bhagat Singh and brought videos about Singh and his influence (for educational purposes only, of course) to class. One is "Rang De Bisanti" another is "The Legend of Bhagat Singh."
Anyway, I don't want to push a point too far. But seeing the obituary of Robert Hicks brought back some memories and made me reflect upon what has happened over the last few decades.
Rick Congress
Robert Hicks, one of the few surviving members of the Deacons for Defense, died April 13 in Bogalusa, LA. A black paper mill worker, his home was threatened with attack by the KKK in February of 1965 because he was providing housing for two white civil rights workers. This was just six months after the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi.
After moving his wife and child out of the house he called upon neighbors for help and soon they came armed with rifles and shotguns. The Klan didn't show up. Hicks was visited by members of the newly organized black armed self-defense group, that had begun in Jonesboro, Louisiana, and agreed to start a chapter in Bogalusa. The Deacons grew to have chapters in more than two dozen communities in the deep south. Hicks was a leader of the Deacons and also was know for his activism demanding and litigating that the voting rights act of 1964 be put into effect by local officials.
Martin Luther King was not comfortable with the Deacons for Defense's stand on the right of armed self-defense and publicly criticized them. James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) defended the Deacons as a "partnership of brothers" who did not "lynch people or burn down houses" like the KKK.
I was active in the civil rights movement during that time (I still have my 1961 NAACP membership card autographed by John Coltrane, Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner). I participated in starting a CORE chapter in Indianapolis in 1964 and avidly followed what was happening in the movement around the country.
While seeing the importance of Dr. King and the SCLC in inspiring masses into action: marches, sit-ins picket lines, boycotts of businesses that practiced segregation, and so on, I and others in the movement joined in these actions, but also looked favorably upon the more radical Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and Malcolm X as pointing the way towards a deeper social change in the USA.
At that time, King cautiously avoided making an issue out of the growing US war in Vietnam. In fact most of the civil rights establishment were "patriotic" and supported the war and other imperial polices of the White House (against Cuba, for example). When King came out against the war in his famous Riverside Church speech in 1967, he was reviled by the media and the pro-Vietnam war civil right establishment. When he was killed in Memphis he was helping a strike by black sanitation workers.
One vivid memory of those times I can relate: In 1965 I was involved in organizing the first anti-Vietnam rally at Indiana University in Bloomington. We started the event after there had been an earlier march in support of the civil rights movement in Selma, Alabama where they had been set upon by dogs and beaten by the police. When I got up to speak and mentioned that James Farmer, the leader of CORE and a well-known major leader of the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam war, I was booed by some of the campus civil rights marchers who had come to the rally. One professor shouted "how dare you use James Farmer's name to speak against the War!"
While King was marching in the South, Malcolm X spoke for the differently situated blacks of the Northern ghettos. His spellbinding orations related their plight to the anti-colonial struggles of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and the FLN of Algeria.
In the days of Selma, the Watts ghetto rebellion (and Detroit and Newark, etc) I looked on non-violence as a tactic (as I do now). It was obvious that a mass movement to eliminate the Jim Crow system in the South and racial discrimination should be peaceful. But what to do about violent attacks? Were the Deacons for Defense wrong? Their methods were successful...at the time and in their specific context.
Their actions for self-defense against violent KKK attacks were right and deserve to be respected as part of the whole, broad 1960s civil rights movement. The Deacons were the best known black armed self-defense force, but there were others around the South.
Were the violent and sometimes armed (gunfire from blacks citizens actually stopped the initial National Guard incursion into the Detroit ghetto in the summer of 1967) rebellions "wrong?" They were social uprisings caused by intolerable conditions, racism and everyday police harassment. Often a gross act of police brutality detonated a social explosion.
When looking at social gains or the social legislation of the 60s and early 70s, you have to keep in mind that violent social unrest played its part.
Ideological pacifists don't seem to take into account the role the ruling classes fear of violent revolution plays in their willingness to make concessions to mass peaceful movements. They are not being moral or changing their ways, they are picking the lesser of two evils and biding their time until they have an advantage and can strike back.
And strike back they have. Much has been rolled back from the 60s. Reagan's proclaiming "the South will rise again" at a campaign speech in Meridian, Mississippi (near the murder site of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney) in 1980 illustrated the consolidation of the Republican's "Southern Strategy." The roll backs of the '80s and '90s skipped past the 60s and included rolling back constraints upon rampant capitalism instituted in the 1930s, including the right of workers to have union representation.
The passive resistance movement of Ghandi, from today's vantage point, can arguably be said to be a failure. Independence was achieved, but what else? One million died in the transfer of populations in 1948 between the newly partitioned Pakistan and India. India boasts a new affluent class and rising high tech industries, but India and Pakistan are now aiming nuclear weapons at each other and sporadically at war over Kashmir. Most Indians are still impoverished village dwellers. There is more than one vigorous armed peasant rebellions in India today. It has been the only recourse for desperately oppressed poor farmers who face displacement and starvation (see Arundati Roy's article "with the comrades").
Actually there was an armed resistance to the British occupation that went on parallel to Ghandi's movement. Bhagat Singh was a martyr to millions of Indians.In the 1920s He was hanged by the British for the killing of a hated British official who had troops fire on demonstrators. Indian students in my ESL class at the Technical Institute where I teach taught me about Bhagat Singh and brought videos about Singh and his influence (for educational purposes only, of course) to class. One is "Rang De Bisanti" another is "The Legend of Bhagat Singh."
Anyway, I don't want to push a point too far. But seeing the obituary of Robert Hicks brought back some memories and made me reflect upon what has happened over the last few decades.
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