Ladies and Gentlemen the
United Nations general assembly
partition resolution of
the 27th of November 1947
was
the proximate
portal of the Nakba.
It was Britain, of course,
that had dumped the Palestine problem
in the United Nations
to run away from the catastrophic
consequences
of the hubristic Jewish national home
policy
it had launched three decades earlier in
1917
via a human agent named
Arthur James Balfour.
The 1947 partition resolution got Britain
out of it's self inflicted black hole
because this resolution ostensibly
created
two states, a Jewish and an Arab state,
to succeed the mandate in Palestine
thus liquidating Britain's role
there and hopefully it's moral
responsibility
to the policy's principal victim
the Arab population of the country.
It's interesting
that neither George nor Gordon refer
in their 2008 Knesset speeches,
to the 1947 partition resolution
which
George's predecessor Harry Truman
jammed
down the wind pipes of the United
Nation's member states
and Gordon's predecessor Prime Minister
Clement Attlee pretended not to endorse
by abstaining from voting while
seeing to it
that Britain's Commonwealth parties did
vote for it.  The partition resolution is
one of the major foundational myths
of Israel on the grounds
that it was equitable, practicable,
and morally and legally viable
~and that~  and that
the Jews had accepted it
while the Palestinians and Arabs had
rejected it
but the Palestinian Arabs had
rejected it precisely
because it was not equitable
or practicable or morally
or legally viable.  Aggression
and offensive action were
built into the very concept
of the UN Partition and
the mechanics of its resolution.
Mandatory Palestine was divided
into 16 districts
9 of these
districts were allotted to the UN
Jewish state.  Only
one of the nine
had a Jewish majority with the Jewish
population
percentage in the other 8 ranging from 
47%
to 1%.  In none
of these did the Jews own
a majority of the land with percentage
ownership in the range from
39% to 1%
the vast majority of the Jewish
community in Palestine
was concentrated in the three cities
Haifa,
Tel-Aviv, and Jerusalem.  The Jewish
population
outside these three cities was very
thin
on the ground after seventy years of
colonization
Jewish land ownership in Palestine
did not exceed 7%
of the country.  The area designated
for the Jewish state by
the United Nations was
over 50% of the country
so what the United Nations effectively
said to the Yishuv,
Yishuv
the Jewish community in Palestine.
It said
go take possession of
the forty plus percent of Palestine
that you don't own from the people
who do from the people who live
in those areas and derive their
livelihood
from them yet Palestinian resistance to
this
invasion to this forcible
incorporation of their land in the
Jewish state
was and is portrayed as
aggression while the Yishuv's offensive
to expand its territory ten-fold
against the wishes of the native
inhabitants
is portrayed as guess what
self defense.
To this day it is still and
invariably self defense when the
military machine
of the Yishuv's successor Israel is on
the move
Israel derives its legitimacy
in part from the Zionist leadership's
acceptance of the partition plan
the acceptance is hardly surprising
since partition was the official
Zionist solution of the Palestinian problem
at the same time the leadership
of the Yishuv
had no intention of sticking
to the partition borders as is plain
from the
operational orders of 
Haganah's Plan Dalet
the master plan for the military
conquest of Palestine
launched six weeks before the end of the
mandate
furthermore while the Zionist's leadership
verbally
accepted partition the second
and third largest political parties
in the Yishuv were all vociferously
and adamantly against it
demanding a Jewish state in the whole
of Eretz Yisrael the
passage of the UN Partition Plan
launched what has been called the
civil-war phase
of the "First Palestine War" which
lasted until the declaration
of the Israeli state on 15th May
of 1948. During that period
the combined operations of 
Haganah
and the so-called dissident groups the
Irgun
and Stern had already destroyed the
fabric
of Mandatory Palestinian society,
launched the Palestinian
exodus, conquered major Arab towns
and scores of Arab villages
and established Jewish control over the
bulk
of the territory allocated to the Jewish
state
and vast territories well beyond.
The regular war with the Arab countries
starting 15th of May 1948
would not have occurred  had these
events not preceded.
The outcome of the war was
already sealed
in favor of Israel by the time it
started
the existential threat to the nascent
Jewish state,
supposedly posed by the
Arab armies in 1948,
occupies pride of place in Israeli
and Zionist mythology but like the
ostensibly
equitable and morally viable
partition resolution this threat
is just that, a myth.
At the 1897 Basel Congress
which established the
World Zionist Organization
only 2 of the 199 delegates
were Palestinian born
fifty years later on 
14th of May 1948
only 1 of the 37 signatories
of Israel's Declaration of Independence
was Palestinian born
in many ways this encapsulates
the nature of the Zionist movement
it was not a native phenomenon
it was not of Palestinian provenance
Zionism was undoubtedly a
nationalist movement
but what kind nationalist movement
it was not a movement of liberation
or self-determination against a foreign
imperial or colonial power
like most Afro-Asian movements
it was not a settler rebellion against
the metropolitan
parent like the American Revolution
it was not an intifada against a brutal
and asphyxiating military occupation
it was not a sucession from a multinational
state or Empire as the movements against
the Austro-Hungarian
and Ottoman empires
it was not an assertion of an
indigenous
communal or minoritarian
identity
against neighbors as in the case of the
Kurds
and the Basques and others
it was not a Risorgimento at
the ~regional~,
aimed at the regional
unification of a fragmented nation
the movement had rich
secular utopian
and socialist "Fountainheads"
but it also had powerful
ethno-national impulses
nurtured by centuries of discrimination,
persecution, intimidation,
insults, expulsions in Christian Europe,
and an imperative desire
to escape from an ubiquitous
and humiliating minority status
simultaneously the movement was
en-formed
by powerful religious spiritual
even mystical currents
the result was an admixture
of these with other
secular and national ingredients
that defies easy analysis
the slogan of the religious
Zionist right
the Mizrachi party during the Mandate
was "Eretz Yisrael
for the people of Yisrael according
to the Torah of Yisrael"
but messianic subtexts were
by no means the monopoly of the
religious parties
the secular right under Menachem Begin
called for the restoration
of the whole "Land of Israel" to the God
covenanted, God covenanted
owners.
Chaim Weizmann
the secular atheistic scientist
declared before a British Royal
Commission
that our charter
is a divine promise
while the socialist non-observing
Ben-Gurion announced that
the Bible is our mandate
Ben-Gurion's socialist labor party
is traditionally seen as the founder of the
state
less well-known is the fact that the
ruling Zionist coalition
from 1935 to the end of the mandate
and well beyond was what is known in
Israel
as the historical coalition whose
principal
partners were the labor Mapai party
and the religious Mizrachi party
without the Mizrachi parties active
participation
it is doubtful that Israel would have
been founded
what particularly distinguishes the Zionist
movement
across this secular religious
spectrum
are first the nostalgia
for a specific country Palestine
by Jews in their intercontinental
diaspora
and second the Zionists dogged
determination to return
to it and to re-tie
an ancient historical
umbilical cord.
Even in the pre-Balfour and
pre-World War One
state of political and military
powerlessness
Zionism exhibited a sense,
a sense
of exclusive entitlement and moral
superiority
which did not reflect only
current European attitudes to
non-European peoples
but also seemed rooted in the
conviction of a primordial
and preemptive birthright
pur-blind
to the indigenous Palestinians
of the land.
Analogies to the
Zionist venture
abound, particularly those of
the early settlers
in North America, Australia, and New Zealand
but while the parallels are clear
they seem
to pertain more to the mechanics
of dispossession and colonization then to the
motivational impulses of these settlers
in which the atavistic
irredentist Zionist dimension
is lacking.  The English settlers
did see America as the promised land
but they did not believe that they had
originated
from the prairies.
After decades of reflection on
the subject
the closest analogy I can think of
given the lack of congruence with other
national movements
is the Iberian Reconquista of the
13th to the 16th centuries
under Castile and Aragón with its
alchemy of religious and national
motivation
its compulsion to redeem territory
considered long-lost its insatiable
land hunger its since of prior
ownership of this territory and its
pitiless indifference to the fate
of the inhabitants
seen as usurpers and strangers
and obstacles to its forward march.
The watershed in the fortunes of
the Zionist Movement
was the Balfour Declaration of 1917
which Gordon Brown saw fit
not to mention in the Knesset.
The Balfour Declaration changed Zionism
overnight from a fantasy
to a possibility by providing it
with the endorsement of the paramount
imperial power of the day
with the Balfour Declaration Zionism took
giant strides towards what Mister Brown
called
the achievement of 1948
the hauteur towards
the Palestinians
of Mister Brown's predecessor at
White Hall
is best exemplified by the following
words
of  Balfour himself written in 1919
Zionism
be it right or wrong, good
or bad, is rooted
in age long traditions, in
present needs, in future
hopes of far profounder
import then the desires and prejudices
of the 700,000 Arabs who now
inhabit
that ancient land unquote
in the same memorandum Balfour went on
whatever defference should be paid
to the views of those who live
there i.e. in Palestine, the powers
in their selection of a mandatory do
not
propose as I understand the matter
to consult with them.
The achievement of 1948 lauded by
Mister Brown
has, as we can see from these words, a
pretty long British
pedigree by riding
piggyback on Imperial Mandatory Britain
Zionism launched its Reconquista
against the Palestinians by proxy
with British bayonets
coercion was integral to Britain's
assumption of the Palestine Mandate
without consulting Palestinian wishes
the intrusiveness of Britain's rule
in palestine because of its Jewish
national home policy
was more devastating than that of any
of the other colonialist regimes along the
the Mediterranean littoral,
including Mussolini's Libya
and France's Algérie Française
even though initially very thin on the
ground
in rural areas the Zionists established
early on a brilliant method for
controlling the countryside
in any future showdown with the
Palestinian peasantry
this was the kibbutz system based on
Prussian models for the control
of the Polish peasantry in East
Prussia the kibbutz network
centrally directed and financed occupied
strong points in strategically selected
sites
across Palestine  kibbutzs
proliferated
via the steady influx of pioneers
"Halutzim", who had been specially
trained
in Europe before immigrating to
Palestine the mandate was
essentially a condominium between the
British Administration
and the World Zionist Organization whose
headquarters
was in London throughout the mandate
can you imagine a Nehru,
a Kenyatta, a Saad Zaghloul
operating against Britain from a
headquarters in London.
The Yishuv in Palestine was an
extension
an emanation and
literally the creation of the 
World Zionist Organization
and its financial
institutions overseas.
Membership in the
World Zionist Organization
remained overwhelmingly diaspora based
of a total membership
of ~two million~,  2.16 million,
 2.16 million
at the time of the 1946
World Zionist Conference on the eve
of the creation of the Jewish state
only 300,000 members
were from Palestine.  American members
at 956,000
were more than three times the
Palestinian members
the greater part of
the Yishuv's income was never
self-generated
it always came from overseas
largely from the American Jewish
community as of 1917.
There was a tri-lateral relationship
of power in Palestine
between the British occupier, the
Palestinians,
and the Yishuv.  The fundamental story
of the mandate in the years up to 1948
is the relentless growth
of the Jewish national home under
British
aegis and the resultant cumulative
shift in the balance of power between
the Palestinians
and the Yishuv in favor of the Yishuv
the greater the sense of power of the
Yishuv
the greater the consolidation of its
Reconquista
mood and mold as early as 1920
Ben-Gurion and his labor
colleagues had decided on the need for a
secret underground
army the Haganah on the realistic
assumption
that to convert a country
whose vast majority was Arab into a
Jewish national home
required direct military force
that the British government might not
always be willing
to provide.  The word Haganah
in Hebrew means of 
course self-defense.
Shabtai Teveth
the leading authority on Ben-Gurion
believes
that thanks to the British protected
Jewish mass immigration from Europe
Ben-Gurion by 1936
felt that the Yishuv was so strong
that it could discontinue,
discontinue
all political dialogue
with the Palestinians.  Ben-Eliezer
the brilliant Israeli sociologist has
described in great detail
the growth of militarism at the Yishuv
grassroots level from the mid
nineteen-thirties onwards.
Arab anxiety
and fear of the growing Jewish national
home
attested to by successive British royal
commissions
of inquiry finally erupted
in the Palestinian rebellion of
1936--1939
the brutal crushing of the rebbellion
by the British Army
the killing and hanging and collective
punishment
the dismantling of Palestinian
political organizations
the arrests and exile of Palestinian
leaders
and the systematic disarmament of the
Palestinian
villagers massively and
irreversibly shifted the balance of
power in favor of the Yishuv
by 1939 Britain had created
a Jewish auxiliary colonial army
twenty thousand-strong which it armed,
trained, and officered.  Tthis force was given
the innocuous
name of the "Jewish Settlement Police" but
in fact
it was a British territorial army
modeled
on the British Territorial Army in this
country this new
official, official Jewish army when added
to the
underground Haganah the unofficial
army
of 30,000 made the Yishuv
with its population of less than half a
million
one of the most militarized 
~states~
societies in the world.
In 1937 a royal commission headed by
Lord Peel
recommended for the first time the
partition of Palestine
into a Jewish and an Arab state
like the true mother
of the child facing Solomon
the Palestinians where outraged by the
notion
of their vivisection
equally outrageous was the Commission's
recommendation
of the compulsory transfer of the
Palestinians
from the proposed Jewish state to
make room
for Jewish immigrants from abroad
in revulsion at these recommendations
the Palestinian rebellion against
Britain reached its zenith
in 1938-39 but Peel's
compulsory transfer proposal was music
to the ears of the Zionist leadership
wetting its appetite
and fueling its coercieve disposition
in fact the concept of transfer a
euphemism for expulsion
of the Palestinians had been buzzing
in Zionist's bonnets
long before the peel Commission as has
been documented by Nur Masalha
there is evidence that both transfer and
partition
had been discussed by the Royal
Commission
with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann
before
the publication of the
~peel~, Lord Peel's report
the concept of transfer continued to
occupy
a prominent niche in 
the ~stratii~
strategic thinking of the Yishuv's
military and political
elite as it does
to this day with many Israelis.
In the 1948 fighting the idea of transfer
as shown in the work of Ilan Pappé
unquestionably en-formed
the implementation of plan Dalyet
once the United Nations
Partition resolution
of November 1947 provided the
tendentious alibi of self-defense
a hallmark of British policy in Palestine
had been the suspension
of democracy this was not
merely the usual feature of colonial
policies
everywhere but was absolutely integral
to the very formation and development
of the Jewish national home
this is because to dismiss the desires
and prejudices
of the Arabs is to dismiss the desires and
prejudices of the vast
majority of the country
thus the country that is tirelessly
hailed in western capitals today
as the sole democracy in the Middle East
came into existence
in Palestine only through
the burial of democracy
pending the building up of an artificial
majority
through forcible mass Jewish immigration
from overseas.  In 1935
the mother of parliaments in London
overwhelmingly voted
against a legislative assembly in
palestine
that provided the merest semblance
of representative government out of
concern
that it might prejudice the growth of
the Jewish national home
having brutally crushed the
resurgent Palestineian rebellion against
partition
and compulsory transfer Britain began
reassessment of
its entire Palestine policy
with the
war clouds of "World War 2" gathering
the adverse effects of pro-Zionism on
Britain's relations with the Arab
and Muslim worlds where increasingly
felt
accordingly in 1939 Britain called for a
conference in London
to be attended by representatives of the
Arab countries as well
as by Palestinian and Zionist leaders
a policy paper issued by the conference
the "White Paper of 1939" put a
cap on Jewish mass immigration and on
the alienation
of Palestinian lands into Zionist
hands
it also left the door open to a unitary
i.e. non-partitioned Palestine.
This was Britain's belated attempt at
even-handedness
but even-handedness then as now
is not Zionism's favorite brand of tea
the white paper was the beginning of
the parting of the ways
between London and the Yishuv.
A distinctive feature of
Zionism as a national movement is its
dependence
on imperial sponsors and the facility
with which it could shed one sponsor
for another
soon after the white paper Ben-Gurion
met the British Colonial Secretary,
Malcolm MacDonald
in the heated exchanges that ensued
McDonald asked Ben-Gurion
how long he thought Britain could afford
to protect the Yishuv
with British bayonets?
Ben-Gurion answered
that the Yishuv no longer needed British
bayonets when McDonald suggested
that an Iraqi army
could invade from the east
Ben-Gurion replied
the sea is easier to cross
then the desert.  What Ben-Gurion had in
mind
was of course the Jewish communities
overseas
particularly in the United States and
sure enough
the Yishuv's shift to the United States as
patron
was presently formalized in
the 1942 Biltmore program.
The Biltmore program is so called
because
it was declared at the Biltmore
hotel in
New York at a general meeting
~organized by Ben-Gurion~
at Ben-Gurion's request
of all
leading American Jewish leaders.
The program
demanded in effect unrestricted
post-war Jewish mass immigration into
Palestine
under the sole control of 
the World Zionist Organization
and the declaration
of the whole of Palestine
as a Jewish Commonwealth, a code word
for state.  This was open
political war against Britain and
all out war against the Palestinians
the Biltmore program was the strategic
master stroke of a genius
on Ben-Gurion's part it committed
the American Jewish establishment and
its resources
to a collision
course with Britain and the Palestinians
while at the same time harnessing
this establishment's aversion,
aversion
to post-war Jewish
mass immigration to the United States
itself for fear of  ~arouse~,
arousing
the latent anti-semitism
of gentile America.  The Biltmore
Conference took place in May 1942 ~before~
before the horrific details of the
"Holocaust"
emerged in November of that year
once these details did emerge
they were seized upon by
Ben-Gurion's domestic
foes in Palestine the revisionist
right and particularly its extensions
the Irgun and Stern terrorist
groups
to escalate against Britain so as to
embarrass
and outbid the Yishuv labor rights
lead by Ben-Gurion.  By 1944
the Irgun had acquired a new leader
Menachem Begin
a Pole from Brest-Litovsk.
Begin had been commander in Warsaw
of the revisionist paramilitary
organization Betar.
Fleeing his command
at the approach of the German army he
was arrested
and presently released by the Russians.
Begin set foot in Palestine
for the first time in 1942
he assumed command of the Irgun
in Palestine to start operations
against the British at the
request of American Jewish representatives
this he did in February 1944
while British troops were battling
Nazi panzer divisions across North
Africa
and Italy and preparing for the
Normandy invasion.
Jewish terrorist operations against the
British continued in intensifying
spirals without let up until the very end
of the mandate
in May 1948
before 1944 Jewish terrorism
had been particularly directed
and exclusively directed at
Palestinian civilians
particularly in the period 1937--1939
it was during that period that Jewish
terrorism
introduced for the first time in the
Middle East
the diabolical tactic of placing
in bus stops, vegetable markets,
and cafes, delayed action
electrically detonated mines
hidden in kerosine containers, milk
cans, and fruit baskets.
From 1944 onwards these terrorist
tactics
with more sophisticated and more
shocking variations
and effects were deployed against the
British
army by both the Irgun and Stern
there is no time to go in detail into
the sequence of events leading to
Britain's shameless abandonment of
her "Ship of State"
in palestine but the central figure
in these events was Ben-Gurion.
Ben-Gurion was
without doubt the most capable leader
operating in the Middle East in the
1940s and 1950s
he had his priorities right
he did not follow the Irgun
and Stern in their
attacks against the British because he
intuited
that the real enemy was not Britain but
the Palestinians and the Arabs
with the American Jewish Committee
committed to the Biltmore program
Britain had become as far as
Ben-Gurion was concerned
superfluous, a broken
reed, an obstacle.
Meanwhile the Yishuv had gained immensely
in military strength
since 1939 some 25,000 Jews from Palestine
had acquired military training in the
British Army
in North Africa, thus in 1945
at the end of "World War 2" the time
had come for the establishment
of the Jewish state with maximum
possible borders Britain had to be
removed but not by the direct
military action of the Haganah
itself
Ben-Gurion's grand strategy to
remove
Britain involved the following
#1 first mobilizing the American Jewish
community to put
sustained pressure on Washington, to put
sustained pressure on London
#2 two, massive illegal Jewish immigration
from Europe
with American Jewish funding to
undermine
the white paper restrictions,
flood the
coast-guard facilities of the British
Mandatory Administration,
wear down the war exhausted
Royal Navy
#3 third, a world wide propaganda campaign
to denounce Britain for piteously
preventing
Jewish DPs from reaching the shores of
Palestine
depicted as the only place in this wide
world able to absorb them
#4 fourth. formulating a partition
plan based on the Biltmore program
to win the support of the new
unelected American president Harry Truman
who had moved into the White
House after
Roosevelt's death and who
was facing presidential
elections in November 1948
and finally looking the other way
while the Irgun and Stern groups
escalated their
vicious terrorist campaign against
Britain
to nudge it further towards the exit.
The strategy succeeded brilliantly
Britain was ignominiously driven
out of Palestine by its own
adopted child and protege
the terrorist innovations used against
the British Army
and government to achieve
this end included; the postal bomb,
the booby-trapped vehicle,
the booby-trapped suitcase,
and the letter bomb.
According to the "Times of London",
letter bombs
all intercepted by Scotland Yard were
sent
to London in 1947
to Sir Stafford Cripps Minister
of the Board of Trade, Mister John Stretchy
Minister of Food,  Mister Ernest Bevin
Foreign Secretary,  Mister Antony Eden
former foreign secretary and Mister
Arthur
Greenwood Minister without portfolio
still other Jewish terrorist innovations
were taking British officers hostage
in Palestine and whipping them
a first in the entire history of the
British Army
kidnapping British NCOs
and hanging them
and bobby trapping the hanging bodies
another first
the masterminds behind these
operations
were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir
later Prime Ministers of Israel
mentors and role models
for the Tzipis and the Bibis and 
the Liebermans
congratulated in the Knesset by
George W. Bush
and Gordon Brown
the British Army in Palestine in the
last years of the mandate
was one hundred thousand strong
one WW2 veteran
for every three adults in the Yishuv
this army could have smashed the
Irgun and Stern
overnight but its hands were tied
by George Bush's predecessor
at the White House, between 1945
and the partition resolution 1947
the ratio of Britains to Jewish
terrorists
killed was 4-to-1
170 Britains to 44 Jewish terrorists
an unheard of ratio
in the annals of colonial warfare as we
know only too well from
recent events.
Ladies and Gentleman
the "Green Light" for the Reconquista
came
with the partition resolution on the
29th of November
1947.  What followed
could not be called military operations
by one army against another
there was no
Palestinian Army
and on the Jewish side there was
not so much
an army as a nation
on the march Ala Aragón
and Castile, bent on redeeming
what it saw as its ancestral lands
from Palestinian strangers and
squatters
according to the operational orders of
Haganah's
plan Dalet and Jehovah's design
according to Bush and Brown.
Ladies and Gentleman the irony,
the grandmother of ironies
is that Ben-Gurion spent 1916
researching the history of Palestine
in of all places the New York Public
Library
one of the conclusions of his research
was that the Palestinian peasantry
were the true descendants of the ancient
Hebrews, thank you very much.
