The Zionist Terrorism file
jerusalem.indymedia.org
Wednesday July 30, 2003 at 02:11 PM
The destruction of a country, and forcing human and material losses, and disrupting its growth, is the price that reflects on its growth, it is a price that "Israel" considers to be equal to the death of one occupying soldier.
The Zionist Terrorism file
A British journalist conducted this interview with Dr. Anis Sayegh regarding Zionist terrorism as he was one of its victims. The interview was done on the occasion of the start of the Israeli aggression on Lebanon on the 11th of April 1996. He gave a thorough research in order that the British public opinion have an insight into the subject. The following study deals with Israeli terrorism since 1936 up until "The Grapes of Wrath".
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I should not only draw the attention of the British public opinion to the subject of Zionist terrorism, because it is a subject that should interest the whole human race, specially after the rush of thirty government officials to the meeting of Sharm Al-Shiekh (and what has and will follow in the way of meetings to higher levels) to discuss the protection of "Israel" against Palestinian "terrorism", but there being several minor motivation and one major one. As for the minor motivation, British Governments had in the past, a great deal to do with decisions in deciding the fate of the Arab Palestinian people in reaching their great calamity of being homeless and dispersed , and another being that Britain is the cradle for today’s democracy, and the mother of freedom to the whole world generally and to us Arabs specifically.
And being that the British people who are presently complaining of extreme Irish terrorism should be called upon more than any other to look into the problem of terrorism openly, objectively , fairly and in depth. Another minor motivation is the British media [Press, Radio and television] which helped greatly in the past and still does in publicizing violence.
As for the major and more direct reason is that there is talk that is presently going on in an official level in Britain as to considering (urgently) "Jihad" as being terrorism, therefore the call for Jihad whether it be by the pen or the tongue should be considered as an involvement in terrorism, all this was set off by the Zionist authorities in Palestine and was forced upon the surrendered leadership of the Palestinian people (excuse me if I am using expressions that are no longer common, or even acceptable, during this time that we call evil times. But it has become a thing of the past that the civilized world today wants to forget because he thinks that it contradicts with the festival of peace which is forced upon us to participate in - not forgetting that these expressions are still alive and reflect the true reality while representing clear signs that speak for themselves).
From here I felt for the importance in writing this peaceful tale which I hope the British reader will look into it before he is convinced of the matter of "Arab terrorism". And we shall see that the terrorism is not caused by the Arab. But instead it is Israeli and Zionist from the very start.
And may the reader allow me to try and be brief, as much as a Historian can be, in summarizing a huge file filled with practices of organized political groups for the past sixty years, that being the file of Zionist terrorism: violent practices that was committed by official and semi-official groups against defenseless civilians who were not fighters or military personnel, which is unlawful for government to practice in defending its peace. It is violence that contradicts with treaties that is common among developed countries, which have abided by them at least theoretically, in agreements and treaties between two or more parties or governments and publications and texts that channel into the heading of human rights and specially civilians. And I leave for the British reader, with his conscience of holding on to his deep-rooted values, to judge for himself who really is the terrorist and who is the one who needs protection from terrorism. On the condition that he uses one and the same scale to judge with- for in justice there is only one scale. And not to use different criteria, by seeing a practice correct for one group and wrong for the other.
I choose to start from the 16th of April 1939, exactly 60 years ago, the date these black and bloody record started. That day the Zionist terrorist chose at random by shooting and killing two Arab civilians passing close to Betah Takfe settlement, without them having any military characteristic or military activities. And the terrorist activities continued from that moment nearly without stop until our present day. But we do not mean to specify that particular day in April 1936 that the Zionist did not commit any acts of terrorism on the Arab Palestinian before that date. There are tens of incidents that occurred in the first third of this century. But in all they were separate incidents far apart to draw a chain of events.
The market places, main streets and poor residential areas in cities like Jerusalem, Yafa and Haifa were easy targets for the terrorists specially in the year of 1938. During that year more than a hundred civilians were killed as a result of more than ten incidents using bombs. The terrorists repeated these actions again in the beginning of the forties with their favorite targets being cafes, restaurants, hotels, trading shops, residential homes, offices and Arab schools in most of the cities and villages. Perhaps the most well known incident was the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where most of the Palestinian government’s offices were situated (summer of 1946). As a result of the explosion two hundred civilians were killed, most of them Arab and English. The average of Arab civilians killed in each month of the six months preceding the declaration of the birth of the state of Israel reached a 150 dead.
As well as the above mentioned areas, the Zionist terrorists also concentrated on Banks and public facility centers, mainly in the petroleum facility of Haifa, from storage tanks to refineries, pipelines and factories. Between 1947 and 1948 these facilities were subject to many attacks. And each attack would result in the death of tens of Arab civilians between workers, technicians and administrators. As for the banks, most of them were British, attacks on increased from the beginning of 1946 till the middle of 1948. Not only would these banks be robbed but the Arab employees would be killed also.
As for the main Zionist terrorist target since 1937 and for more than ten years was the means of transportation: small cars, buses, lorries, trains, roads and bridges, rail tracks and stations. The authorities recorded more than 500 civilian killings in the years of 1937 and 1938 only. As for the years of 1947 and 1948 the danger increased (regarding the number of attacks and the victims) to the extent that movement from one place to another became very dangerous for the ordinary Arab civilian, in the villages and cities or around them. So if the Jews of Jerusalem were afraid of riding buses last spring because of the last two bombings, then all the Arabs of Palestine stayed in their homes for twenty months for fear of the Zionist terror.
Least to say that that violence was going on without any pre warning, and without calculating the number of victims and their ages or whether they were involved in any military role. All those violent acts did not just happen by coincidence. But according to a well organized plan of frightening the Arab people and eventually evicting them.
Realistically we can not look at these operations, and specially the one that happened between the years of 1947 and 1948, only in the context of a planed Zionist operation, to empty Palestine from its original Arab inhabitants, and therefore occupying their land and possessions in order to reoccupy it with the migrating Jews from outside Palestine. This plan is the same age as the age of the Zionist movement itself, which will next year celebrate its hundredth year since its official setup. The founder of the movement Theodore Hertzl had stated openly in his memoirs that the Zionist settlers in Palestine should it from its inhabitants. But, truly, he did not say that eviction was the only means of displacement. He suggested evicting them to Iraq (as what is being said today silently, as an international intention to move hundreds and thousands of Palestinians to Iraq is an idea of Hertzl’s a hundred years ago). For Hertzl had suggested another idea of getting rid of the Palestinians: burning them with the rays of the sun of depression or killing them with the snake bites of the Hula lakes, during our usage of them as slaves for the Jewish settlers to work in hard and dangerous jobs not fit for a Jew to risk his life in doing.
In this chapter in the file of the Zionist terrorism, work was concentrated on terrorizing the inhabitants in order to achieve mass displacement, migration and dispersion. It therefore not strange to witness specially in the six months between the decision to divide Palestine and the rise of the state of Israel. And we will notice by following the terrorist operations at the end of 1947 and the first half of 1948 that they mainly targeted areas that the Zionists planned to have as their state - even if what was stated in the resolution of partition by the UN on 29/11/1947 would be their share, or what they themselves had decided to seize as soon as they had established their state knowing that the said resolution had given it to the Arab state.
These operations started in the second half of December 1947, with viciously programmed attacks on civilians in villages within the Haifa sub-district. Then villages in the sub-district of Safad. Then villages in the sub-district of Tabaraya. The number of dead civilians in those sub-districts reached 170 men women and children. Then followed attacks on residents of Al-Tireh, Saasa, Kfar Husseiniya, Sarafand, Kalounya, Beyt Sourik, Aylaboun, Al-Shajara and Nasser Al-Dine, 250 civilians were killed in these villages. But the main slaughter was in the village of Deyr Yassin, on the night of the 19th of April, with 350 victims (out of 400 of the village’s residents).
Since then that slaughter had become one of the symbols the Zionist savagery. ( this brings to mind of another terrorist operation that occurred on the same date 25 years later, on the street of Vardun in Beirut, when the terrorists attacked three Palestinian officials, one of them a famous Arab poet, they were killed along with the wife of one of them). These operations opened way for attacks on the Arabs of all the cities and villages in the second half of April in order to evict them: Tabaraya, Safad, Aka, Haifa and Yafa, then Al-lid and Al-Ramla after less than 3 months. Each attack would claim more than a hundred victims, whereas tens of thousands of the survivals would flee to Arab neighboring countries. And so within less than half a year nearly 750,000. Arab Palestinian sought shelter in Lebanon, Syria and East Jordan in order to escape death, where they are living together with their children and grandchildren, evicted from their homes with their number increased many times.
A similar thing happened just less than twenty years later, towards the end of the 1967 war, when the Israeli forces took hold of what was left of Palestine, or what was known since 1948 as Ghaza and the West Bank. Which increased the number of evicted forcibly to another 300,000. Civilian. The only difference between the two evictions, in the forties and the sixties was that the heroes of the forties were members of the unofficial Zionist organizations (in appearance anyway) such as Shtern, Argon, Hagana with its military arm the Balmach which would get direct orders from Jewish Associations. As for the heroes of 1967, they were called Israeli Defense Forces.
But the Zionist terrorism did not stop after the Israeli army occupied all of the Palestinian land (and with it the Gollan and Sinai), exactly as the terrorism of 1948-49 did not stop in order to establish the State. The terrorism continued all through the fifties and the first half of the sixties, in preparation for the 1967 war. A week would not pass without the Zionist committing a terrorist act. i.e. the attack on the camp of Bureig (Gaza), then the village of Kubeiya in the summer of 1953. In those two aggressions 60 fell dead and 90 wounded among the Arab civilians. This was followed by two more aggressions one in the village of Nahalin and the other on the Eastern coastline of Tabaraya lake, the number of dead was 20. As for the 1956 war hundreds of civilians fell in Gaza, most of them died under the ruble of their homes which were bombarded by the Israeli forces by air, land and sea. Plus the death of 450 civilians mainly workers and farmers who were victims of the massacres of Kfar Kassem and Khan Younus (autumn 1956). The massacres continued later on: 30 dead in a raid on Al-Nakib (spring 1967), 20 dead in the attack on Al-Sumu (autumn 1966).
The Israeli terrorism was not confined only to Palestine. It spread across the borders every once in a while, to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Egypt: a couple of hundred Egyptian civilian from Al-Suise, the port of Tawfik and Al-Ismailiya were killed (Sept. 1967). And more than a 100 were killed in raids on Jordan towards the end of 1967. The raids reached the sub-districts of Arbad and Al-Salat the following year, with the excuse that there exited Palestinian fighters in them. The victims there reached 60 Palestinian and Jordanian civilians. And in the summer of 1968 these terrorist acts killed more than 70 civilian in Al-Suise and Al-Ismailiya. And in 1969 more than 60 civilian were killed in raids on Al-Hama and Meysaloon (Syria) and Bour Said (Egypt). And in one incident more than 70 civilians were killed, mainly factory workers at Abi Zubel in Egypt (Feb. 1970). Within less than two months a massacre was committed: the terrorists killed 50 children in a raid on Baher Al-Bakar school in Egypt.
Then came Lebanon’s turn. A turn that has still not end. We shall not talk about the Israeli occupation of large parts of this peaceful Arab country. But instead we shall mention the terrorist acts practiced on the civilians. Acts which are difficult to compile in the past 18 years. It is enough to mention the massacres of Bint Jubail, Al-Arkoub, Majdal Silim and Hasbaya (1972) were more than 100 peaceful civilian were killed. As well as continuos raids on Palestinian camps were tens of civilians would be killed in each raid. All that occurred before the striking attacks on the South of Lebanon and the Western Bekaa in 1978 and then in 1982 which resulted in the permanent occupation of a large quantity of Lebanese land. And if the civilians of Egypt, Syria and Jordan suffered from great Zionist terrorism then the suffering of the Lebanese people is greater than can be described, and is impossible to list the daily aggressions in detail: rocket and artillery shelling, air raids, naval bombing, road bombs and mines, car bombs, assassinations, destruction of homes, schools and hospitals on top of its inhabitants, blowing up cars with passengers still in it, shelling market places, gatherings and public places, as well as new official pirating: kidnapping and incarcerating civilians, laying siege to the coastline for long periods of time and preventing the entry of goods and medical assistance as well as cutting off electricity and water supplies, bombing the international airport and burning what’s in it along with its civilian planes. The victims of these terrorist acts exceed thousands in number. Yes. Tens of thousands dead, wounded, missing, abducted, incarcerated and disabled civilians, men, women, children, elderly, religious figures and journalists. It is interesting to note that among the weapons used are those which are banned by international treaties. Even new words have entered the dictionary of the resident’s daily life, words such as cluster bomb, vacuum bombs, shrapnel, phosphoric and napalm, as well as booby trapped dolls. For that reason it will be enough to mention a limited amount of massacres committed by the Israelis in the past years with victims exceeding thousands among the Lebanese and Palestinian community, with the British media having great credit in exposing its mask: the slaughter at Saida, Al-Zahrani, Zreyriye, Bir Al-Abed and Amarat Al-Sanayeh etc. … as for the massacres of Sabra and Shatila camps which was commited by Israeli soldiers with the assistance of Lebanese agents trained and armed by Israelis the victims there reached according to various sources: between 1000. and 3000. Palestinian and Lebanese civilian, if we look at the archives of the UN and the reports of their representatives together with UNIFIL’s reports one can find the actual size of that atrocity. A brave photographer caught on film an Israeli tank squashing a civilian car with its five passengers still in it. Perhaps just by looking at this ugly photo would be much more effective than reading tens of articles. We should also not forget to mention the Israel conspiracy on Lebanon during the civil war between 1975-1990 which resulted in over one hundred thousand mainly civilian victims. Israel was had the main role in planting discord in this war by training and arming many to be involved in the civil war.
Along side what we already mentioned, there were various terrorist operations that we should mention in brief: the shooting down of the Libyan civil aircraft over Sinai and killing all its 106 civilian passengers (1973). The raid on the Tamuz nuclear plant in Iraq which resulted in its complete destruction over the heads of the workers, technicians and experts that were in it (1981). Not to mention that the Zionist terrorist a few years earlier had sent letter bombs to a number of Egyptian scientists as well as foreign ones. A number of them died while the rest were either maimed or disabled. Then came the raid on Tunis which resulted in the death of tens of civilians, Tunisian and Palestinian, families of the Fidaen (1985). Last but not least, the slaughter of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil (1994) were 50 Arab Muslims were killed while praying. Places of worship were always loved as target by the Zionist terrorist during the past 50 years, in Palestine, Lebanon and Sinai.
We should mention before turning over the page of the bloody Zionist file, the official violence that the Israeli army practices on the Intifada of the Palestinian and the Resistance of the Lebanese against the occupation within the past few years. Even when the Palestinian Intifada is known to use stone as its weapon since its rise in 1987, the answer would be with bullets, bombs and all kinds of violence: the killing of children, torturing inmates, expelling active citizens, arresting tens of thousands of suspected citizens, blowing up the homes of the families of the Fidain and confiscating their belongings, closing down schools, universities and delaying educational programs, announcing curfews for long periods of time, blocking off roads between cities and villages, laying sieges to drive people to hunger. All that would go on legally with official resolutions from high ranking offices of the government. Laws have been passed recently regarding the way in which the Intifada should be dealt with that have not been witnessed anywhere in the world or during our era, like giving the police or interrogators the right to break the bones of the inmates, and firing live bullets on unarmed peaceful demonstrators. And many of these steps are practiced by the Israelis in the south of Lebanon since the rise of the Islamic Resistance which is practicing its right, since the mid-eighties against the Israeli occupation. To the extent that the Israeli detention centers could not take in more on top of the thousands it already has
and was forced to build new ones, where it practices in them the ugliest kinds of torture that is internationally banned. And the Israelis still practice the means of eviction on residents with the use of arms. And if the number displaced Palestinians reaches thousands then the number of displaced Lebanese reaches hundreds of thousands from their homes in the south of Lebanon and the west Bekaa region, not forgetting to point out what such displacement causes in the way of personal, political, economical educational and social problems and suffering, confusion for the government, threatening of public disorder, halting the road to self recovery.
Britain was the friend of Zionism, now, she is the victim of Zionism, specially between 1942 and 1948. And that was because the Zionist movements accused the British authorities for not doing enough in converting Palestine to Judaism, and for not allowing hundreds of Jews emigrating from Europe to enter Palestine. This accusation was paid for with a large number of British soldiers, officers, policemen, judges, employees and administrators inside and outside Palestine, the whole of Britain paid a high price of indignity and abuses- when at the same time the British were fighting the German Nazis for many various reasons one of which was the ill treatment the Jews suffered by the Nazis, also while the British 8th regiment fought to death to prevent Rumel’s forces which reached close to Alexandria from reaching Palestine and exterminating the Jews that had emigrated there. The Zionists used their well known tactics (assassinations, car bombs, mines, bombs, hostage taking, raids), they also used tactics to disrepute the British name, such as hangings on tree trunks and electrical poles, crucifixions, whipping hostages and blowing up their bodies, some of the kidnapped bodies would be blown up using sticks of dynamite which would be inserted in a barbaric manner inside the victims bodies.
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