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 The beginning of the end of the Zionist state of Israel…?
The
Milli Gazette Online
8
September 2006
Alan Hart's speech at International Institute of Strategic Studies, New Civilisation debate, London, on 10 August
2006
I'm going to suggest to you that
what we might now be witnessing is the long beginning of the end of the
Zionist state of Israel. In the next 10 minutes or so I will talk my
way to an explanation of why I think so; and then I'll address the
question of what the most likely consequences would be. I can see two – One
State of Palestine for All and real, lasting peace, or Catastrophe
for All… and by "All" I don't just mean Israeli Jews and
the Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, everywhere.
- I thought I would be the first to give voice in
public to the idea that Israel might be planting in Lebanon the final
seeds of its own destruction, but while I was working on my text for
this evening, I came across an interview given by Zbigniew Brzezinski,
who was President Carter's National Security Adviser. He said: " Eventually,
if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be
expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of
the end for Israel as well."
As Israel's bombardment of Lebanon unfolded, a
great deal of nonsense was written and spoken by pundits and policymakers
throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world about why it
was happening. The main thrust of the nonsense was that Hizbullah
started the war and that Israel was merely defending itself.
I think the truth about Hizbullah's
role in triggering the war can be summarised as follows. By engaging an
IDF border patrol, killing three Israeli soldiers and taking two hostages,
and firing a few rockets to create a diversion for that operation,
Hizbullah gave Israel's generals and those politicians who rubber-stamp
their demands the PRETEXT they wanted and needed to go to war – a
war they had planned for months.
- I was reminded of what was said to me on the
second of the six days of the 1967 war when I was a very young ITN
correspondent reporting from Israel. One of my sources was Major
General Chaim Hertzog . He was one of the founding fathers of
Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence. On the second day of
that war he said to me in private conversation: "If Nasser
had not been stupid enough to give us a PRETEXT for war now, we would
have created one in the coming year to 18 months."
Hizbullah's purpose in taking
Israeli hostages was to have them as bargaining chips - to secure
the return of Lebanese prisoners Israel had refused to release in a
previous prisoner exchange. As former President Carter implied in an
article for The Washington Post on I August, it was not
unreasonable for Hizbullah to assume that an exchange would be possible
because "the assumption was based on a number of such trades in the
past."
But on 12 July 2006 the government
of Israel was not interested in trades. It did not give a single moment to
diplomacy or negotiations of any kind. It did not even consider a local
retaliation to make a point. Israel rushed to war. As Defence
Minister Amir Peretz put it: "We're skipping the stage of threats and
going straight to the action."
What was also different about
Israel's response to the incident of 12 July this year - one of many
since Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, and which more often
than not were provoked by Israeli actions and/or Israeli
violations of agreements - was that, for the first time, Israel
decided to hold the government of Lebanon responsible – EVEN
THOUGH ISRAEL KNEW that this government, in office for only a
year and empowered by Lebanon's first exercise in Western-style democracy,
did not have the capability to rein in Hizbullah. More than that, ISRAEL
ALSO KNEW that the government of Lebanon was in a developing
dialogue with Hizbullah, to enable it, the government in Beirut, to extend
its authority to all of Lebanon. In those circumstances, holding the
fledgling and fragile but good faith government of Lebanon to account for
the incident of 12 July was a cynical ploy, to enable Israel to
claim that it had good cause to launch a major offensive against targets
of its choice throughout Lebanon, not just the south where Hizbullah units
and their rockets were concentrated.
On the subject of Hizbullah's
rockets, (which are hit-and-miss low tech weapons when compared with
Israel's state of the art firepower), it is right to ask – Why,
really, were they there? What, really, explains Hizbullah's
stock-piling and its bunkering down?
The honest answer, which has its
context in the whole history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Zionism's
demonstrated designs on Southern Lebanon in particular, is this: Hizbullah
was strengthening itself militarily for the same reason as Eygpt did
when President Nasser, with great reluctance after America had refused to
supply him, accepted weapons from the Soviet Union. Nasser did NOT
upgrade Eygpt's military capabilities to make war on Israel . HE
WANTED TO BE ABLE TO DEMONSTRATE TO ISRAEL THAT ATTACKING EYPGT TO IMPOSE
ZIONISM'S WILL ON IT WAS NOT A COST-FREE OPTION .
In other words, Hizbullah
had been improving its military capability to deter Israeli incursions
and attacks, which was something the Lebanese army was incapable of
doing. Am I suggesting that Hizbullah would NOT have let lose with its
rockets if Israel had gone for the war option? YES!
The notion that, on 12 July 2006,
Hizbullah was joined in conspiracy with Iran and Syria to
wipe Israel off the face of the earth is nothing but Zionist and neo-con
propaganda nonsense – to justify Israel's latest war of aggression and
also, perhaps, to justify in advance of it happening war on Iran.
- It's true that the rhetoric of Iran's President
gave and gives a degree of apparent credibility to Zionist and neo-con
spin – but ONLY to those who are unaware of, or don't want to
know, the difference between the facts and documented truth of the
real history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Zionism's version
of it.
- Unfortunately the first and still existing
draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed on Zionist mythology.
And that's why informed and honest debate about who must do what and
why for justice and peace in the Middle East has not been possible
throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world. And that, in turn
is why I devoted more than five years of my life to researching and
writing ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS – to show the difference
between real history and Zionist mythology, to make informed and
honest debate possible) .
To those who really want to
understand why the Zionist state of Israel behaves in the way it does, and
is (as described in a recent article courageously carried by The
Independent) "a terrorist state like no other", I say
not only read my book, , but give special
attention to page 485 of Volume One. On it I quote what was said behind
closed doors in May 1955 by Moshe Dayan, Israel's one-eyed warlord and
master of deception. He was in conversation with Israel's ambassadors to
Washington, London and Paris. At the time the Eisenhower administration
was pressing Israel to abandon its policy of reprisal attacks.
- Eisenhower was aware that Nasser did NOT
want war with Israel, and that he would, when he could, MAKE AN
ACCOMODATION WITH IT. Eisenhower also knew that Israel's reprisal
attacks were making it impossible for Nasser to prepare the ground
on his side for peace with Israel.
In conversation with Israel's three
most important ambassadors to the West, Dayan explained why he was totally
opposed - whatever the pressure from the West - to the idea that Israel
should abandon its policy of reprisal attacks. They were, he said, " a
life drug." What he meant, he also explained, was that
reprisal attacks enabled the Israeli government " to maintain a
high degree of tension in the country and the army." What,
really, did that mean?
Israel's standing or full-time army
was (as it still is and must be) relatively small, not more than
about 23,000 souls in all. The other quarter of a million fighting men and
women who could be mobilised in 48 hours were reservists from every walk
of Israel's civil society. The real point? Without Israeli reprisal
attacks and all that they implied – that the Zionist state was in
constant danger of being annihilated - there was a possibility that some
and perhaps many reservists would not be motivated enough to respond to
Zionism's calls to arms.
Put another way, what Dayan really
feared was the TRUTH. He knew, as all of Israel's leaders knew, that
Israel's existence was NOT in danger from any combination of Arab forces. And
that was the truth which had to be kept from the Jews of Israel. Dayan's
fear was that if they became aware of it, they might insist on peace on
terms the Arab regimes could accept but which were not acceptable to
Zionism.
Among those present when Dayan
explained the need for Israeli reprisal attacks as a "life drug"
was the Foreign Ministry's Gideon Rafael. He reported what Dayan
told the ambassadors to Prime Minister Moshe Sharret – in my
view, and with the arguable exception of Yitzhak Rabin, the only
completely rational prime minister Israel has ever had. And we know from
Sharret's diaries what Rafael then said to him: " This is how
fascism began in Italy and Germany!"
Ladies and gentlemen, I think
future historians may say that was how fascism began in the Zionist
state of Israel.
The idea of Israel as a fully
functioning democracy is a seriously flawed one. It's true that Israeli
Jews are free to speak their minds (in a way that most Jews of the
world are frightened to do ), and to that extent it can be said that
Israel has the appearance of a vibrant democracy... But in reality, and
especially since the countdown to the 1967 war, it's Israel's generals who
call most of the policy shots, even when one of them is not prime
minister.
- In June 1967 Israel's prime minister of the
time, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, did NOT want to take his
country to war. It, war, was imposed upon him by the generals, led
by Dayan . As I explain in Volume Two of my book, what really
happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very
close to a military coup in all but name, executed quietly behind
closed doors without a shot being fired.
And that's where we are today –
the generals effectively calling the shots in Israel, to the applause of
the neo-cons.
Why, really, did Israel's generals
want to make war on Lebanon?
There was obviously much more to it
than the collective punishment of a whole people as part and parcel of a
stated objective – the destruction of Hizbullah as a Moslem David which
could hit and hurt the Zionist Goliath.
I think there were two main
reasons.
The first was that Israel's
generals believed they should and could restore the "deterrent
power" of the IDF (Israel's war machine). They believed,
correctly, that it had been seriously damaged by Hizbullah's success in
not only confronting the IDF following Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in
1982, but eventually forcing it to withdraw, effectively defeated
and humiliated… I think it is more than reasonable to presume that for
most if not all of the past six years, Israel's generals were itching to
make war on Lebanon to repair that damage – to restore the IDF's
deterrent power. Put another way, it was time, Israel's generals believed,
to give the Arabs ( all Arabs, not just Hizbullah) another lesson
in who the master was.
The second main reason for
the insistence of Israel's generals on 12 July this year that war was the
only option… ?
I think it's also more than
reasonable to presume that they saw the opportunity to ethnically cleanse
Lebanon up to the Litani River, with a view, eventually, to occupying and
then annexing the ethnically cleansed territory.
For Zionism this would be the
fulfilment of the vision of modern Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion
- a Zionist state within "natural" borders, those
borders being the Jordan River in the East and the Litani River
of Lebanon in the north. Israel gained control of the Jordan
River border in its 1967 war of expansion, but prior to its rush to war on
12 July, all of its attempts to establish the Litani border had failed.
Since 1982 because of Hizbullah's ability to cause the occupying IDF
forces more casualties than Israeli public opinion was prepared to
tolerate.
War on Lebanon was, of course, the
main show; but with the watching world distracted by it, Israel's generals
continued and escalated their attempt to destroy Hamas. But on this front,
too, there's much more to what's happening than seems obvious. It's long
been my view that Israel's real game plan for the Gaza Strip and the
occupied West Bank is to make life as miserable as possible for the
Palestinians in the hope that, out of poverty and sheer despair, they will
eventually accept crumbs from Zionism's table or abandon their homeland
for a life worth living elsewhere.
According to those currently
calling the policy shots - Israel's generals and politicians, the neo-cons
in and around the Bush administration and their associate in Downing
Street - the name of the game is creating a "new Middle East".
- Incidentally, I don't think Blair is Bush's
"poodle". I think Prime Minister Blair is as self-righteous
and deluded as any American neo-con, any Christian fundamentalist and
any gut-Zionist. And I sometimes wonder if Mr. Blair is losing his
marbles in the same way that Anthony Eden lost his when he was
conspiring with France and Israel to topple Eygpt's President Nasser.
( But perhaps you have to be mad to want the job!)
It IS happening. A new
Middle East is being created. But what kind of new Middle East
will it actually be?
In my analysis it will be one in
which the Zionist state of Israel, having rejected a number of
opportunities to make peace with the Palestinians and all the Arab states,
will become increasingly vulnerable and, at a point, actually for
the first time ever in its shortish history, could face the possibility
of defeat.
In my view the seeds of that
possible defeat have just been sewn in Lebanon. The fact is that Israel's
latest military adventure has been totally counter-productive in
that has caused Hizbullah to be admired by the angry and humiliated masses
of the Arab and wider Moslem world. That being so, would it really be
surprising if, in growing numbers, Arabs and Moslems everywhere begin to
entertain – if they are not already entertaining – something like the
following thought: " If 3,000 Hizbullah guerrillas can stand up
to mighty Israel for weeks and give it a seriously bloody nose, what would
happen if we all joined the fight?" (Do I hear the
sound of pro-Western Arab regimes being toppled? Yes, I think so).
I imagine that even the thought of
Israel being defeated one day will bring joy to almost all Arabs and other
Moslems. But there ought to be no place for joy because there's no mystery
about what would happen in the event of Israel actually being on the brink
of defeat. I want to quote to you now from one of my Panorama
interviews with Golda Meir. (It can be found, this quote, on the second
page Volume One of my book, in the Prologue which is titled Waiting
for the Apocalypse).
At a point I interrupted her to
say: "Prime Minister I want to be sure I understand what you're
saying… You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being
defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region
and the whole world down with it?"
Without the shortest of pauses for
reflection, Golda replied: "Yes, that's exactly what I'm
saying."
In those days Panorama went
on-air at 8 o'clock on Monday evenings. Shortly after the transmission of
that interview The Times had a new lead editorial. It quoted what
Golda had said to me and added its view that " We had better
believe her."
How, actually, would the Zionist
state of Israel take at least the region down with it? It would arm its
nuclear missiles, target Arab capitals, then fire the missiles.
Such an End-Game to the
Arab-Israeli conflict, if it happened, and which I would describe as a self-fulfilled
Zionist prophesy of doom, would probably take many years to play out.
But the countdown to such a catastrophe would be speeded up if, as
Brzezinski put it, "neo-con policies continue to be pursued." If
they are, and if Iran is attacked, I think that a Clash of
Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic, would become unstoppable.
Is there no way to stop the madness
and create a "new Middle East" worth having? Yes, of course,
there is, but it requires the agenda of the neo-cons and their associates
to be thrown into the dustbin of history, in order for there to be a
resolution of the Palestine problem, which I describe as the cancer at
the heart of international affairs.
Unfortunately, and because of the
facts Zionism has been allowed to create on the ground in
Israel/Palestine, it's already much too late for a genuine two-state
solution, one which would see Israel back behind more or less its
pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two
states.
The conclusion which I think is
invited is this: If the countdown to catastrophe for all is to be
stopped, the only possible solution to the Palestine problem is One
State for All. That would, of course, be the end of Zionism's colonial
enterprise and of Zionism itself. But in my view that's what has to happen
if there's to be a "new Middle East" in which there can be
security and peace for all, Arabs and Jews. .
Ladies and gentlemen: I'm not a
politician or, any more, a working journalist and broadcaster who must
write and speak in way that doesn't offend very powerful vested interests.
I am a reasonably well informed human being who cares and who is free to
say what he really thinks. ( Which probably makes me a member of a very
small club!) And in summary of all that I've said this evening, what I
really think comes down to this: The equation is a very simple one: No
justice for the Palestinians = no peace for any of us.
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