There is a great deal of sympathy for the millions of Jews who perished in the Second World War. Taking advantage of this, Zionist/Israeli organizations have been flogging the Holocaust theme endlessly. This is ironic when you consider the fact that Israel has been conducting a mini-Holocaust of its own in Palestine.

Israel is the only openly colonial power left in the world. Very few people are even aware that most Israelis are Europeans who migrated to Palestine after the Second World War. The immigrants first came as refugees. They started colonising Palestine by either squatting or by buying land with money provided by rich Jews living abroad. After the War, the newly formed United Nations divided Palestine into two unequal halves with Jews taking the bigger portion. Using terrorism and conquest, Jews took over all of Palestine.

Part - I

Based on the Old Testament, the Israelite kingdom^# was supposed to have reached its greatest extent under David and Solomon, who are dated at 1004-928 B.C.E. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom was divided into two - Israel in the North and Judah in the south. Archeological evidence and recorded history show that the area where these two regions were supposed to be was occupied by several people including the Assyrians,^* Babylonians,^†, Medes^‡ and Persians^¤ during different periods in time. At one time, it was even occupied by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Romans occupied Judea in 63 B.C.E. Continuous written records kept by the Romans are available from this period.

Jewish homelessness started with the Jewish revolt against the Roman empire in the first century. In the year 39 C.E., the Roman emperor Caligula ordered that his statue be set up inside Solomon's Temple (Beit ha-Midkash) in Jerusalem. Caligula may have made this order to establish his authority in Jewish lands or perhaps even to humiliate the Jews. Biased as they were, Jewish and Christian historians have alleged dementia as the cause. Going by Roman records, it seems that Caligula was indeed a strange and weird character. But treating monarchs on par with gods was a common feature in those times. Caligula was different because he ordered his deification during his lifetime. Apart from this, Romans procurators collected heavy taxes in Jewish areas. All this fuelled the rise of Zealots, a virulent group of anti-Roman rebels. Before he could do any more damage to Jews, Caligula became a victim of an assasination.

In the year 66, the Roman procurator Florus looted the Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. Enraged Jews wrought revenge on a small Roman garrison that was then stationed in Jerusalem. Cestius Gallus, the Roman ruler in neighboring Syria, sent in a larger force of soldiers. Even they were routed by the Jewish insurgents. After these victories, the ranks of Zealots began to grow and the idea of defeating the Romans grew stronger. This was a mistake because the Romans returned with a force of 60,000 and overran the Jewish stronghold of Galilee. Over one lakh Jews were killed or sold into slavery.

In the other Jewish stronghold of Jerusalem, the leadership was aware of the futility of the revolt and did not bother to join Zealots in Galilee. Embittered refugees from Galilee escaped to Jerusalem and were locked in a suicidal civil war. By 68 CE, most moderate Jewish leaders were dead. Meanwhile, Romans had laid seige to the city. In the summer of 70, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem, and initiated an orgy of violence and destruction. It is estimated that one million Jews died in the revolt. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai, who opposed the revolt, arranged for his disciples to carry him outside the city disguised as a corpse. He then surrendered to the Roman general Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who granted him concessions that allowed Jewish communal life to continue. With the exception of this sect, Jews were totally wiped out. The only other Jewish sect to survive the revolt were the Christians.

There would be one more major revolt against the Romans - the The Bar-Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E.) In the words of Roman historian Dio Cassius:

In the beginning, the Romans were not worried about the insurgents. But little by little, the disturbances spread to all of Judea. The Jews rose in rebellion throughout the country, inflicting increasingly heavy losses on the Romans, sometimes resorting to ruse, sometimes to all out war. People from other nations, attracted by the pillage, threatened to join them. The entire world was seething. Finally, Hadrian dispatched his greatest generals to fight them. The most famous was Julius Severus, the governor of Brittany. Initially, the latter did not risk openly attacking the insurgents because of their great numbers and the intensity of their desperation. Instead, he preferred to undertake isolating them, forcing them to withdraw to their strongholds and cutting off their provisions. Thus, he succeeded, slowly but surely, to weaken and destroy them. Few Jews survived. Julius Severus seized about fifty of their best fortresses; 985 of their most important villages were reduced to ruins; 580,000 men died in ambushes and in battles. The numbers of those that died of starvation, that were victims of epidemics or that were burned to death cannot be determined. Almost all of Judea was devastated.

After the revolt, Jews were sold into slavery and many were transported to Egypt. Judean settlements were not rebuilt. Jerusalem was turned into a Roman city called Aelia Capitolina and the Jews were forbidden to live there. Jews then went under the Byzantine empire and Christianity spread. Over time, Jews migrated out of Palestine and Arabs settled in large numbers. Thus, Jews ended up in large numbers all across Europe including Russia.

In 638, Muslim Khalifa Omar ibn al-Khattab brought an end to the Christian Byzantine occupation and occupied Jerusalem. Prior to this, Prophet Muhammad conducted his spiritual journey to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Since Muslims believe Prophet Mohammed had his great vision of ascension to heaven from the third shrine in Islam (al-Aqsa), all Arab and Muslim rulers gave the city a prominence. From 638 onwards, Palestine was ruled by Muslims. Between 1099 and 1187 C.E., the Crusaders occupied Jerusalem and had established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. The Crusaders were attacked and defeated by Saladin in 1187 and the city retained its Muslim facade. In December 12, 1516, the Ottomans entered Jerusalem. Palestine remained under the Muslim Ottoman rule up to the end of WW-I. Many Arab kingdoms had flourished in the region before Christ. Palestine practically had no Jews until 1878. That year, a Jewish settlement was established inside Palestine under the guise of an agricultural community.

# - The Aegeans (who lived in the regions around the Aegean sea, including Crete, the Cyclades, the Greek mainland south from Thessaly, including the Peloponnese, and Macedonia, Thrace, and western Anatolia) flourished between circa 7000-1000 B.C.E. From c. 7000-3000 B.C.E., they were part of the Neolithic Age. From circa 3000-1000 B.C.E., they were part of the Bronze Age. The Philistines, whom the Biblical books say had originally settled in Palestine, were Aegeans. They lived in five cities that together made up Philistia, from which the Greeks derived the name Palestine. The Philistines fought with the Israelites in the 11th century B.C.E. and were defeated by the Israelite king David in the 10th century B.C.E. Philistines and the Isrealites would later come under Assyria, Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Before the Philistines, Palestine is referred as Canaan. Canaanites were invaded by the Philistines who were in turn defeated by the Israelites. The Philistines left no records and much of the information about their supposed existence in Palestine are from the coloured accounts of the Old Testament. The old testament cannot be taken as an historical document, as it is claimed to be inspired by God. JEWISH AUTHORS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT HAD AN INFLATED SENSE OF THEIR OWN ORIGINS AND EMBELLISHED THEIR WORK SO MUCH IT WAS CEASED TO BE OF ANY HISTORICAL VALUE. Archeological and other forms of evidence for Jewish origins in Palestine point to a much later time and it certainly does not compare in scale or glory of other civilizations that actually existed in the area.

* - Assyrians were people from the ancient empire of Assyria. The Assyrian kingdom began in a small region around Ashur (northern Iraq) in 3^rd millenia B.C.E. to span an area stretching from Palestine and Anatolia (Turkey). Assyrians overran Palestine and reached the Mediterranean Sea under Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 BC). The Neo-Assyrian empire (circa 746-609 B.C.E.) occupied much of the Middle East. After the Assyrian conquest of Jewish kingdom of Israel, its population was absorbed by other peoples and the descendants of the people of the Jewish kingdom of Judah were the only ones who were still distinctly Jewish (Judah and Benjamin clans, the two of the original 12 tribes of Israel) and were then came to be known as Israelites. Before the conquest, the ten tribes (the lost tribes of Israel) constituting the Jewish kingdom of Israel was known as Israelites. Thus, most of the descendants of the original Jews are now living as Muslims.

† - Babylonians were from the ancient region set around the Euphrates and Tigris river systems. Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar II (605-562 B.C.E) occupied Palestine. Judah was destroyed by the Babylonian invasion but was revived as the kingdom of Judea. Judea went under firm Roman rule in 37 B.C.E under King Herod, a practicing Jew of Arab descent.

‡ - Medes were from the kingdom of Media (in ancient Iran or Persia), which was formed in 7th century B.C.E.

¤ - The Persian empire is originally dated from 6th century B.C.E.

Part - II

For the sake of an argument, let us suppose Americans, who number around 300 million, decide to go back to their mother country Britain, whose population is 60 million, and decide to form their own country there. Preposterous? Not quite. Jews of Israel have done just that in Palestine. What makes this even more appaling is the fact that ancestors of Americans left Europe only a few centuries ago while Jews had left Palestine nearly 2000 years ago.

Successive emigration of Jews out of the Middle East wiped out the entire population of Jews inside Palestine. After almost 2000 years, Jews decided to claim their ancient homeland and they managed get away with it. Like most people, I was under the impression that Jews have been living in Israel for centuries and that they were being threatened by their Muslim neighbours. Now, I realize that my sympathies were entirely misplaced.

Between 1870 and 1890, the Russian Zionist^† group Hovevei Zion and Bilu set up a series of Jewish settlements inside Palestine. The Zionist movement recruited Jews to emigrate to Palestine as they were facing religious persecution elsewhere.^‡ The movement was financially aided by rich Jews abroad such as the French Baron Edmond James de Rothschild. At that time, the world Jewish population stood at nearly 8 million, most of them scattered around Europe. Uganda, Argentina, Cyprus and the Congo were suggested by Zionist leaders as possible sites for a Jewish state but they were rejected. Palestine was chosen to be the subject of Jewish colonization. Apparently, it did not surpise anyone that Jews "escaping persecution" could emigrate to a foreign country with a stated objective of colonizing it!

At the start of the 20th century, 25,000 Jews had already immigrated to Palestine. The Jewish National Fund was founded to buy land in Palestine for Zionists. Jews escaping persecution in Europe started pouring into Palestine. The progressive wing in the Zionist movement favored a Palestinian state for Jews and Arabs. The right-wing favored a homeland for Jews only. Terrorism marginalized the progressives.

At that time, Palestine was under the Ottoman Turk empire. The Turks got defeated in the First World War. The Arabs had helped the Allies to defeat the Ottomans because they had been promised that Palestine and other Arab territories under Ottoman occupation would be freed immediately upon the end of the War. But the British refused to let go off Palestine after the War. One reason for this was to help Jewish migration into Palestine. In 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour sent a letter to Baron Rothschild which later became known as The Balfour declaration. He stated that Britain would use its best endeavors to facilitate the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The then population of Palestine was 700,000 of which 574,000 were Muslims, 74,000 were Christian, and 56,000 were Jews. In an interview to the American Jewish Judge Brandeis, Lord Balfour admitted that Britain was aiming for an eventual Jewish majority in Palestine.

In 1920, the San Remo Conference granted Britain a mandate over Palestine and two years later Palestine was effectively under British administration,and Sir Herbert Samuel, a declared Zionist, was sent as Britain's first High Commissioner to Palestine. Britain then submitted the Palestinian problem to the League of Nations.^* In 1922, the League of Nations, which was the precursor of United Nations and was dominated by Britain and France, allowed the establishment for the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine. In Palestine, money from American Jews started pouring in and land was being purchased from Arabs at an alarming rate. Arabs, who lived by subsistence farming, found the cash difficult to resist but discontent for the new usurpers was building. In 1931, the British persuaded the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to step down in favour of Haj Amin (Muhammed Amin al-Husseini). Amin would later travel to Germany to support Nazi moves against Jews and provided the Zionists with a posterchild for the brand-new "Arab prejudice."

With the outbreak of the second World War, British government published a white paper restricting Jewish immigration and offering independence for Palestine within ten years. This charade was enacted to win Arab support for the Allies. However, the limit was way beyond the God-fosaken land could handle. Immigration was set at 10,000 plus a bonus 25,000 refugees. Zionists were outraged. They organized terrorist groups and launched a bloody campaign against the British and the Palestinians. The aim was to drive them both out of Palestine and to pave the way for the establishment of the Zionist state. Meanwhile, American Zionists ensured that the United States closed its borders to battered Jews wanting to leave Europe. The only exit available for Jews living in Axis-occupied countries was Palestine. Interestingly, some top Nazi officials visited Palestine at the invitation of the Zionists.^¤

Hostilities against the war-weary British grew. Terrorists led by future Prime Minister Menachim Begin blew up the hotel where British high command was located. Two British soldiers were picked randomly up and hanged in retaliation of the execution of three Jews who attacked a prison. British mothers and wives had had enough of their men killed by the Axis powers and they were not very interested to spare any for the Palestinians. The fledgling UN, which was vulnerable to the whims of the victorious allies, made the recommendation for a three-way partition of Palestine into a Jewish State, an Arab State and a small internationally administered zone including the religiously significant towns Jerusalem and Bethlehem. The Arab leadership opposed the plan, arguing that it violated the rights of the majority of the people in Palestine, which at the time was 67% non-Jewish (1,237,000) and 33% Jewish (608,000). Jews were offered 55% percent of the land when they owned only 7% of it.

In April 1948, Zionist terrorists attacked the Jerusalem suburb of Deir Yassin and systematically murdered 254 Palestinian men, women and children. A mass exodus began, with more than 750,000 Palestinians fleeing to neighboring countries. On Friday 14th May 1948, British mandate on Palestine ended and Zionist leaders declared the establishment of the State of Israel. It was immediately recognized by the US and Russia. Five Arab armies from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq then attacked Israel. During their mandate, the British accumulated a huge cache of weapons inside Palestine. When they quit, the British left behind the weapons, which the Jews (not the Arabs) gratefully took charge of. Also, rich Jews living abroad had armed Israelis with very sophisticated weapons. It was no wonder that the Jewish "refugees" quickly routed the combined forces of the Arab armies and occupied almost 80 percent of the country. A ceasefire was agreed but Israel, the nation of "refugees who escaped persecution," forced 1 million Palestinians to leave their country. The West Bank was put under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control.

In 1967, the Six-Day War broke out. It ended with Israel occupying the Golan Heights; the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Old City; the Gaza Strip; and the Sinai. Israel also pushed Jordanian forces out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The conflict displaced another 500,000 Palestinians who fled to Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria launched an offensive against Israel on Yom Kippur, the Jewish holy day of atonement, in hopes of regaining territory lost in 1967. The Yom Kippur War lasted 18 days. Soon after the war, Saudi Arabia led a petroleum embargo against states that supported Israel. The embargo caused a steep rise in petrol prices and fuel shortages across the world and lasted till March 1974.

In 1950, Israel granted citizenship to any Jew requesting it. Millions of Jews have emigrated to Israel from far away places including India. Today, the population of Israel is over 6 million. Israel completely occupies about half of the territory originally allocated to the Arab Palestinian state and exercises "considerable control" over the remainder, according to the CIA World Factbook. The Factbook also says there are 187,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, about 20,000 in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and fewer than 177,000 in East Jerusalem.

* - The League of Nations was a Britain-France setup. Its main purpose was to legitimize the imperial ambitions of these countries. The League however did not include the United States. It did not really matter because in those days the US was happy playing the stooge for Britain. Today, the situation is somewhat reversed. The main purpose of the UN is to give legitimacy to foreign policy actions of the American government.

† - Zionism was a movement that tried to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. Now, its job is to protect the state.

‡ - Jews do not subscribe to the Christian belief that Jesus Christ was a messiah of God or that he was a "King of Jews." As a result, very few Jews converted to Christianity. Christianity took off mainly among pagans living in the Roman empire thanks to state-sanctioned terrorism and persecution (after Emperor Constanine's alleged conversion and bias against older Roman "pagan" religion) and gradually spread across Europe. And, there was the belief that it was Jews who conspired with Romans to get Jesus killed. Hence, Jews were subject to religious persecution throughout the Middle Ages Their hard work and persistence brought them success but it also brought them unwelcome attention. Jews somehow found a way to flourish. They exploited opportunities where others had found none. Because the Catholic Church had banned usury for Christians, Jews ended up in large numbers as moneylenders. Hence, they were seen as "bloodsuckers" and noted for their "heartlessness." In business, they formed monopolies and cartels to keep outsiders stay out. The reason was that they were difficult to bargain with and only other Jews knew how deal with them. But, very few saw it that way. Jews were regularly threatened with extinction. Being anti-Jewish, in thought and deed, became politically correct. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the campaign against Jews resulted in forced segregation throughout Europe. Jews had to live in ghettos, residential areas set apart from the rest of the society. Ghettos had high walls around them and with gates that were kept locked at night and during Christian festivals. Because horizontal expansion was not possible, ghettos grew vertically and were plagued by living hazards, overcrowding and unsanitary conditions. During riots, Jews were surrounded in all directions. Jews were also prevented from pursuing certain trades. Limits were placed on the population inside a ghetto as also the number of marriages allowed in a year. In the 16th century, Pope Paul IV established the Jewish ghetto in Rome and required all Jews to wear an yellow badge for easy identification. Martin Luther (the founder of the Protestant religion) was also a Jew-baiter. Anti-Jewish themes either smouldered or raged in Europe. It went out of favour only after Hitler brought it to intolerable notoreity around the time of World War II. Evil Jewish stereotypes can be found in such works as Merchant of Venice and Oliver Twist...

¤ - Paul Brenner has put forward a few documents as evidence of Zionist-Nazi collaboration in his book 51 Documents. Among other things, the book mentions that after the anti-Jewish race laws were enacted in 1935, only two flags were permitted to be displayed in all of Nazi Germany. One was the Swaztika. The other was the blue-and-white banner of Zionism. Reason? The author says both the Nazi and Zionists had a common interest - Jewish emigration.

Some historians have expressed doubts about whether the Jewish Holocaust was a result of deliberate killing. Some others have asked for the evidence to be re-examined in a more objective manner. Many of these doubters call themselves as "historical revisionists." Jewish/Zionist organisations considers this as "Holocaust Denial." (In fact, Zionists are extremely intolerant of even using the word "holocaust" for any other purpose. This, in their opinion, demeans the memory of THE Holocaust.) Historical revionists are of the opionion that large numbers of Jews interned in concentration camps died out starvation during the fag end of the war, when Nazis were in retreat on all fronts and German cities were being bombed to dust by the Allies (See Dresden Bombing). While Jewish/Zionist organisations claim that Jews died inside gas chambers, historical revisionists claim that the massive gas chambers were merely used to disinfect the millions of Jews in concentration camps from diseases spread by physical contact. (Gas chambers and fumigation rooms still continue to be used in jails throughout the developed world.)

Part - III

According to Israeli law, anyone who is a Jew enjoys the right of "return" or the right of abode in Israel. Citizens of Israel today are Jews who had migrated mainly from Europe, Africa, and the United States. Even India has sent Jews to Israel. There is a small Jewish enclave in Cochin (Kerala). Most of the Jews have emigrated to Israel. There are some groups in Manipur and Mizoram who claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel and are keen on emigrating to Israel.

According to the Jewish Bible, Moses^¤ led Jews from Egypt to a promised land called Israel. Hence, Jews believe that Israel is their homeland. But Jews emigrated from Palestine to live in in Europe, Africa, and other parts of the world. Jews have been absent from Palestine between 125 C.E. and the end of the 19th century. And, Palestine was never entirely theirs and people belonging to other Semitic groups such as Arabs, Akkadians, and even Ethiopians have lived there. It has been occupied by almost every major power in the Middle East through the ages. Before Jews left, it was occuppied by the Assyrians, Persians, and Romans. After they left, it was under the Romans, Byzantines, Crusaders and the Ottomans. Arabs have been in Palestine longer than Jews.

Despite many trials and tribulations in their new lands, Jews became an affluent minority in whichever country they lived. They were seen as exploiting the natives and accumulating ill-gotten wealth. Mark Twain^† notes:

[A Jewish beggar was an impossibility]... whenever a Jew has real need to beg, his people save him from the necessity of doing it... [The Jew had] a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it... [In Russia] the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on a crop, and sell vodka and other necessaries of life on credit while the crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; and next year or year after he owned the farm...

It became natural that others resented this and religious prejudices came in handy. Pogroms in Europe decimated large populations of jews and many others lived precariously.

But, why did they choose to return to Palestine? The only claim that Israelis have on Palestine is that they are Jews. Going by that logic, even Christians can claim Palestine because Jesus Christ styled himself as the King of Jews. Americans can claim Europe and they left that continent only a few hundred years ago, not the thousands of years that Jews have been away. And is Palestine big enough to accomodate all the Jews in the world? What about the future when there will be even more Jews? Are they all going to be crammed up in that small piece of land?

Of course, not. Over the years, Israel has expanded its boundaries and had built Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian lands. To pave for this, the Israeli military has bulldozed or demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinian houses. Another big problem of Israeli occupation is the fight over water resources. Water demand in Israel is far higher than supply. So, Jews have systematically diverted water from Palestinian lands. Many Jews have squatted on fertile agricultrual lands of the remaining Palestinians. Israel has also banned Palestinians from sinking new wells in the lands whatever land they continue to hold. Jews continue to build and live in luxurious homes and apartments right next to Palestinians who live in miserable conditions. Everyday Palestinians are harrassed at checkpoints. Tank shelling and aerial strafing are daily occurences. While Jews all over the world lose make a big fuss about Holocaust, Israelis have no problem maintaining torture chambers and prison gulags where thousands of Palestians suffer untold indignities to their bodies and minds.

Thus Israel has denied the rights of a nation whose citizens had lived there for centuries. Yet, Jews living in far away places had been given a right to stay. Worse, immigration of Jews from other countries goes on unabated. It was no wonder that in 1975 the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution^* which equated Zionism with racism and racial discrimination. The Non-Aligned Movement declared Zionism as a threat to world peace and security and called upon all countries to oppose this racist and imperalist ideology.

One of the biggest sponsors of Israel's xenophobic policy is the United States. According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:

Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes. Indeed, Israel's GNP is higher than the combined GNP of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza. With a per capita income of about $14,000, Israel ranks as the sixteenth wealthiest country in the world; Israelis enjoy a higher per capita income than oil-rich Saudi Arabia and are only slightly less well-off than most Western European countries.

American aid is necessary because Israel is financially insolvent. Apart from direct and indirect aid to Israel, Israel's neighbours have to be supplied with American aid. Thus, Egypt is the biggest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel. The money goes to put Islamists and democracy down. Jordan is next on the list in aid money. To facilitate this, Israel and its benefactors have built a powerful lobby in the United States. They also prevent any public discussion^‡ or debate about aid to Israel. American taxpayers' money is also used to lobby American politicians and officials. Millions of dollars are spent on members of the U.S. Congress. Even loans given to Israel are usually converted into a grant so that Israel doesn't have to pay anything back. Budget cuts that usually plague spending on American citizens don't seem to affect aid to Israel. It has been calculated that between 1949 and 1998, that every Israeli had cost the American taxpayer approximately $23,240.

USA Today: No One Knows Full Cost of Israel's Settlement Ambitions

14 August 2005: Israel's effort since the 1967 Mideast war to fill the West Bank and Gaza Strip with Jews has grown from the scattered actions of zealous squatters into a network of 142 towns and villages that house nearly 240,000 people. Now that Israel plans to spend some $2 billion to dismantle just 25 of the settlements — for which U.S. aid has been requested — it raises the question of how much money has been poured into populating these biblical lands with Jews, and exactly where it came from.

The official answer: No one knows. Vice Premier Shimon Peres estimates Israel has spent about $50 billion since 1977, when the hard-line Likud government took over from his Labor party. Other former finance ministers and government officials don't discount a price tag — commonly floated but never documented — of $60 billion.

"No one eye in the world saw the whole picture," says Labor Party lawmaker Danny Yatom, a confidant of the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. "Most of it is not camouflaged, but it is not possible to connect A to B to C to D to E to F to G." Calculating an exact figure is impossible because much of the building was financed through winks and nods, an opaque state budget and secret military spending that in some cases violated Israel's laws and undercut international peacemaking efforts, according to official Israeli inquiries as well as Associated Press interviews with past and present officials, settlers and their opponents.

Among the methods used, the interviews show, were government subsidies, shadowy land deals, loopholes in military spending, and an auditing bait-and-switch in which U.S. aid was used to free up billions of dollars for spending on the settlements formally opposed by the United States... Read the full full article.

* - Moses is more of a religious myth than a real historical person. There is no evidence that he led Jews from Egypt. The books of the Pentateuch (the first four books of the Bible) that he is supposed to have written to him mention him in third person. Moses even describes his own death. He also called himself the humblest person on the earth. A really humble person would not have done that. In any case, the Genesis (part of the Pentatuech) mentions that the world was created in six days and that the world is flat. Such traditions can never be accepted as historical evidence. Interestingly, neither in myth nor in reality, Jews have shown respect for the rights of the original inhabitants. Any land is theirs because they said so.

* - In 1991, the UN General Assembly revoked Resolution 3379, as Israel agreed to negotiate with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization).

† - I had quoted from Mark Twain's Concerning The Jews selectively to make my point. Mark Twain was not anti-Jewish. Please read the entire essay.

‡ - The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have Jewish owners. The main American television networks ABC, CBS and NBC are run by Jews (see Jews In The Media). They are naturally sympathetic to Israeli causes.

The Final Solution

The independence of the state of Israel was proclaimed by its first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, on 14^th May 1948. Palestinians observe the day as Al Nagba or The Catastrophe. After World War II, Britain freed all foreign territories under the Ottoman empire except Palestine. Britain did this to let Jews come to Palestine as immigrants and then colonize it. Had Palestine become an independent state immediately after the war, the state of Israel would never have happened.

The only viable solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict is the dissolution of the state of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place under Arabs. If Jews want to live in Palestine, then they should do so at the pleasure of the Palestinians.

In the 90s, the ageing chief of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Yasser Arafat agreed to let the Jewish state stay in exchange for recognition for his group and the establishment of a piecemeal Palestine state. This agreement was made under the Oslo Accord, which is better known as the Land-For-Peace deal. After spending years in hiding, Arafat had grown tired. When the opportunity came for what he thought was a comfortable retirement, he took it and in effect betrayed his people. And the Israelis, true to their nature, have made sure that this Palestine state remains on paper. Having conned the PLO, they have claimed that the establishment of a Palestine time will take 40 or 50 years. Ariel Sharon, when he was Prime Minister of Israel, publicly toyed with an idea of assassinating Arafat with all-round approval of Western media. (On the American C-SPAN, I saw the Washington Bureau chief of Jerusalem Post, incidentally a woman, wholeheartedly approving and defending the idea. I then understood why Palestian suicide bombers would not mind targeting civilians.)

Israel's supporters often claim a high moral ground for Israel, reasoning that it is a country of laws, a place where everyone has equal rights, and so on. But facts speak otherwise.

... The public, in Israel and outside it, did not know previously that 38.8% of all settlement land is privately owned by Palestinians. Nor did we know that the proportion is actually slightly higher than this in the "settlement blocs" that the current Israeli government hopes to keep permanently as part of Israel. Settlements, the Israeli public presumed, stood on land owned by the state or by Jews.

Yet, the newly revealed figures fit into a known context: Israel rules the West Bank, but what happens there does not follow Israel's own rules. Since Israel's conquest of the territory in 1967, settlement has been a tool in the battle for permanent political control, and both officials and activists have been complicit in putting the cause above the law. The result is injustice to the Palestinian residents and an undermining of Israel's legal institutions.

In the eyes of Israel's legal system, the West Bank — except for annexed East Jerusalem — is under military occupation. Israel's courts have avoided ruling on the broad issue of whether all settlement in occupied territory is illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. But they have acknowledged that the international laws of war codified in the 1907 Hague Convention apply. That includes Article 46, which forbids confiscating private property for use by the occupying power.

So how did settlements, built with government support and often at government initiative, end up on private Palestinian land? In the first years of the occupation, Israel regularly "requisitioned" land, ostensibly to meet provisional military needs. Palestinian residents retained ownership, but not control, of their real estate. On some of that land, the government established settlements.

Under Ariel Sharon, Israelis started squatting even in Palestinian Jerusalem with support from Israel's top court.

Jews settle in Palestinian Jerusalem

The Guardian, 7 April 2003

After more than two years of legal and political wrangling, Mr Sharon's office approved the plan last week and the first Jewish families have moved into new flats in the Ma'aleh Ha'zeitim settlement, beside the densely populated Arab district of Ras al-Amoud.

It is the first time a Jewish settlement has been built in a Palestinian area of Jerusalem since Israel seized control of the entire city in 1967.

The first settlers at the apartment complex, just a few hundred metres from the Wailing Wall, include a millionaire, Irving Moskowitz, and his son-in-law Ariel King, a far-right political activist.

The prime minister's critics say that Ma'aleh Ha'zeitim is a political tactic to block the possibility of dividing Jerusalem as part of a peace deal.

It also undermines plans under the Camp David accords for a corridor to give Palestinians access to Muslim sites in Jerusalem's old city without having to pass through Israeli territory.

Jewish groups argue that they are entitled to live on the land, and to remove the Palestinian "squatters", under the Jews' right of return.

The courts agree, even though no similar right is extended to Palestinians driven from their homes in West Jerusalem. Moreover, the supreme court has ruled that Palestinians cannot buy property in the Jewish quarter of the city, even if they once lived there.

Moni Mordecai, director of the pressure group Peace Now, accused the government of using the war in Iraq as a cover for the decision.

z

In 2005, Israel surprisingly removed squatters from West Bank. (The Israeli miltiary however continued to lay seige/occupy/shell/straf the area.)

Settlers or Squatters

Nicholas von Hoffman (The Huffington Post, 19 August 2005)

They call them settlers. Those persons being dragged out of their Gaza homes and on to our TV screens. Settlers is a name with a heroic cast. It evokes the word pioneer. Noble ground breaking. Community building. That kind of stuff.

But what if the same people were called squatters? Not so noble.

Squatters hints of persons being where they ought not to be, of occupying a place which doesn't belong to them. If the settlers were called squatters, their tearful ejection might be seen in a different light.

The settler-squatters believe the land they have been thrown off of is theirs. God gave it to them. They have got an ancient book which gives them title, so when they moved in some thirty years ago, or as they might say, took it back, they did so by an act of divine eminent domain. Who can argue with that?

The evictees are given hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation [Subhash: funded by American taxpayers]; they are lodged free and helped to replant themselves in dozens of ways. When Palestinians are evicted they are not carefully removed from their homes by unarmed, remorseful police. They are evicted with bulldozers and if the family happens to be in the building at the time, well, tough tiddy.

Why were the settler-squatters evicted in defiance of God's plan? As a step toward a peaceful accord? Or because protecting the squatter villages was, from a military point of view, a pain in the neck?

Whichever answer is correct, the Gaza Palestinians still cannot leave their sandbox without Israeli permission. Entrance and exit by air, sea and land is controlled by their masters.

That's OK. Yes, the Palestinians are locked up on their arid piece of real estate. Yes, they have no economy. Yes, they have no water. No weapons except a few home made pop guns, but they can fight. They can procreate. There are already 1.3 million and counting. With them it isn't make love, not war. It's make war by making love.

After the peace deal, civil services and other government employees were recruited from Fatah's party and paid salaries with Western aid. Suffocated as it was by Israel, Palestinian economy remained dormant and the Palestinian Authority became entirely dependent on aid money, which could be turned off at Israel's behest. As expected, aid was turned off in 2006 when Hamas - an armed group that is also the de facto ruler of Palestinian areas - won elections and came to power. Despite millions of dollars spent by U.S. diplomats to prop up the chances of Fatah candidates and Israeli efforts to create divisions in Palestinian ranks, Hamas managed to win thanks to its strict adherence to the one state solution - that of Palestinians. Khalid Mish'al, head of the political bureau of Hamas, writing in The Guardian had this to say:

Our message to the Palestinians is this: our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home. We promise you that nothing in the world will deter us from pursuing our goal of liberation and return. We shall spare no effort to work with all factions and institutions in order to put our Palestinian house in order. Having won the parliamentary elections, our medium-term objective is to reform the PLO in order to revive its role as a true representative of all the Palestinian people, without exception or discrimination.

Our message to the Israelis is this: we do not fight you because you belong to a certain faith or culture. Jews have lived in the Muslim world for 13 centuries in peace and harmony; they are in our religion "the people of the book" who have a covenant from God and His Messenger Muhammad (peace be upon him) to be respected and protected. Our conflict with you is not religious but political. We have no problem with Jews who have not attacked us — our problem is with those who came to our land, imposed themselves on us by force, destroyed our society, and banished our people.

We shall never recognise the right of any power to rob us of our land and deny us our national rights. We shall never recognise the legitimacy of a Zionist state created on our soil in order to atone for somebody else's sins or solve somebody else's problem. But if you are willing to accept the principle of a long-term truce, we are prepared to negotiate the terms. Hamas is extending a hand of peace to those who are truly interested in a peace based on justice.

For obvious reasons, Hamas' victory seemed to have created more shockwaves Washington than in Israel. Israel was not willing to show that it was mortified by the outcome. The U.S. then got European countries to use the aid cutoff threat to force Hamas into accepting the "right of Israel to exist." Although Hamas remained true to to its founding charter, there were multiple reports in Western media that Hamas agreed to recognise Israel. Western countries cut off aid. Israel then started its bombings, shellings, arrests and assassinations. Israel simultaneously started shelling and bombarding civilian areas in Lebanon to ensure that Hezbollah will be blamed for it.

BEKAA VALLEY - Four weeks into the war in Lebanon, the country's civilians are still trying to adapt their lives to deal with the constant rain of death that falls unremittingly from the skies. The total casualties in Lebanon and Israel are estimated at close to a thousand, with the majority being civilians in Lebanon...

In our experience of the past few days, the media do come to the Bekaa Valley, but only when the Israelis hit a target. They seldom stay any longer than they have to, as the valley is under the constant observation of Israeli drones and air attacks are frequent throughout the day and night...

Meanwhile, the Muqdad family apologized that they would not be able to chat for long as they were preparing their sleeping bags to take to a farm, where they slept every night under trees. "At least trees can provide a good hiding place and shelter, and being in the open gives us a chance to run if we have to. If the Israelis pounded our houses, we would be trapped inside the concrete structures," one member said. Such a scenario was all to easy to imagine.

Just a few hours earlier I had been to the farmhouse of the Jamaluddin family, where several members had been killed in an Israeli air attack last week. The seven family members had been sleeping when Israeli drones scored a direct hit with an MK bomb. A few ran out nervously to hide near the house, which belonged to the local mayor. The drone followed the fleeing members and they were killed, their blood spattered all over the place. The family's Volkswagen station wagon was also hit.

With U.S. help, it had ensured the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Israel and the election of pro-West politicians. Lebanon is predominantly Muslim. However, Muslims are marginalised by more influential minorities. Apart from these people, Lebanon has tens of thousands of expatariate French and American nationals, not including tens of thousands of labourers from South and South East Asian countries. When the Israeli attacks began, these were the first ones to leave. The U.S. refused to call for a ceasefire and debated on a U.N. resolution to buy time for Israel to achieve its objective of permanently destroying Hizbollah. However, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah has managed to rally diverse ethnicities in Lebanon including Christians and Druzes behind him in his heroic fight against Israel's high-tech military. Apart from the Hezbollah, there are many other things about Lebanon which irks Israel.

Lebanon is a democracy, despite having a sizeable Muslim majority. This denies Israel the high moral ground in Middle East. Although its economy was systematically destroyed by Isreal, Lebanon had somehow managed to bounce back. Its cosmopolitan cities, historical sites, scenic beaches, and resort locations hold far more attraction to Western tourists and expatriates than anything Israel has to offer. More than anything, Lebanon has a longer history of human settlement and has ample archeological evidence to back it all up.

Meanwhile, as every day passes, Israel expands Jewish settlements in occupied areas. To prevent criticism, Israel makes sure that everyone is told that new settlements have the approval of the United States. And why not? No US president or politician will risk his career by criticizing Israel. Whenever international criticism gets too hot, Israel gets United States involved. Despite being an avowed ally of Israel, United States is also involved in the Palestinian conflict as a peacemaker. The only reason for this is to prevent the United Nations or a third country from performing a neutral role. The U.S. covers all the flanks of Israel and actively prevents any other country from muzzling the Israeli position.

There are many reasons why United States goes out of its way to protect Israel. One is that Israel has a lot of influence in American media and politics^*. Another reason is that United States itself is a nation of squatters. When Europeans came to America, they found the land overrun by Indians. Large numbers of Indians were then killed, cheated, converted to Christianity or sent to live in reservations. Just as Jews stole Arabs lands in Palestine, Europeans stole lands that belonged to Indians (native Americans). When United States gained Independence from Britain, it had only 13 states. Washington took advantage the anarchy that was prevailing in its southern neighbour Mexico and annexed the Mexican states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Utah. Mexicans living in these areas were driven out and Caucasians (i.e., minus Hispanics. Apparently, they see a big difference.) were settled in their place. Thus, it is unlikely that the U.S. will challenge Jews who have colonized Palestine.

* - Zionists have an alphabet soup of organizations to fight for their interests - ADL (Anti-Defamation League), AJC (American Jewish Committee), AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), UJA (United Jewish Appeal), etc. Officials of these pro-Israeli lobbies have penetrated almost every level of America's leading political, economic and social institutions. Almost 50% of the Democratic party's money comes from Jewish contributers. With Republicans, it is 20%. (Explains why the current U.S President stretches himself so smuch to accommodate Israel's Ariel Sharon.) One-fourth of editors in major American news magazines are Jewish. The New York Times does not hide the fact that it is pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. The Jewish lobby usually handles such criticism with great tact. The following story is one of the many disarming ways that Jews employ.

A Jewish man who was riding on the subway reading an Arab newspaper. A friend of his, who happened to be riding in the same subway car, noticed this strange phenomenon. Very upset, he approached the newspaper reader, Moshe, have you lost your mind? Why are you reading an Arab newspaper?

Moshe replied, I used to read the Jewish newspaper, but what did I find? Jews being persecuted; Israel being attacked; Jews disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage; Jews living in poverty. So I switched to the Arab newspaper. Now what do I find? Jews own all the banks; Jews control the media; Jews are all rich and powerful; Jews rule the world. The news is so much better!

Sometimes, Jewish organizations do reveal their teeth. For example, the career of U.S. Senator William Fulbright, once the chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was cut short after he repeated alleged in 1973 that Israel controls the (US) Senate. Any criticism of Israel or its influence is treated as anti-semitism. Critics are immediately branded as Nazis. When Ralph Nader, the third presidential candidate in the U.S. election, criticised the influence of pro-Israeli groups in Washington and the restricted freedom in America for discussing the Middle-East conflict, the The Washington Post bellowed in an editorial:

This is poisonous stuff. And if Mr. Nader doesn't understand what such words actually mean, the less savory elements of American society certainly know how to read such code. But Mr. Nader, as always, is not backing down.

Perhaps, it would have helped if Mr. Fulbright and Mr. Nader used Matt Giwer's tongue-in-cheek manual for Answering Zionist Propaganda.