Walid Khalidi - The Nakba (2009)

Raja: The Palestinian Nakba began in 1948 and continues to this day as the Israeli state persists in the efforts to secure what remains of Palestine, the territories occupied in 1967. By and large, the Western world has accepted Israel's canonical narrative of its establishment. That is that it resulted from a struggle for Jewish self-determination against the British colonial power. There is something utterly absurd about this because the British governed Palestine from 1922 to 1948 under a mandate that bid them to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. But by presenting the founding myth in this fashion, Israel attempts to cast itself as a decolonized rather than a colonizing state. Then there was the country's success in casting the three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees it succeeded in forcing out of their homes as a humane problem for which no one could be held accountable or responsible. It is no wonder, then, that those with a Zionist memory, which includes most Israelis, see Israel and the Jews as victims in the conflict and do not tend to support agreements or compromises with the enemy in order to achieve peace. Over the past 60 years, Israeli propagandists have succeeded in bringing the world to accept this official Zionist version of history. The poorly equipped Palestinians have had the enormous task of bringing out the truth. It is precisely to address this challenge that the SOS Palestine Society, Nekbe 60, and the London Middle East Institute, with the CCC as the main sponsor, have convened this conference. They are to be thanked for the superb work they've done. The SOS Palestine Society is amongst the most active and effective university societies that I have come to know of. It has contributed significantly to this country's understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to the advancement of critical thinking about it. By challenging the Zionist memory of the events of 1948, which have been largely adopted by most people around the world, this conference, I believe, would be making a significant contribution to peace. To this end, the conveners have brought together a number of celebrated scholars who have made important contributions to our understanding of the Nakbe. None have contributed more than Professor Walid Khaldi. Over the years, he has made significant and lasting contributions to enhancing our understanding of that crucial historical period through his books, his lectures, and the work of the Institute of Palestine Studies, which he co-founded. For many decades, he has been working tirelessly to analyze, document, and returned to memory not only the events of the Nakbe, but Palestine and Palestinian society of before 1948. He has authored more books and articles than I have time here to enumerate. Suffice it to mention his anthology From Haven to Conquest that brings together a wealth of articles, letters, memoirs that help enrich the understanding of even the most Well read on the subject. Then, there is the hugely important Before the Diaspora, a photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948, and All That Remains, the Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. I will never forget Professor Khalidi's impassioned televised speech just before the immigration to Israel of over a million Russian Jews in 1990. He called the event the most catastrophic after the Nakbe. And so it proved to be. Not only because it enabled Israel to circumvent many of the provisions it had agreed to in the Oslo Accords of 1993, but also because as the latest Israeli elections have shown, it helped move the country further to the right. I invite Professor Khalidi to present his keynote speech.

Walid Khalidi: You've forgotten your glasses. Thank you very much, Raja, for your very moving word of praise for myself. Ladies and gentlemen, I am privileged to be asked to open this conference on this momentous topic. And I salute the zeal and dedication of this wonderfully motivated band of sisters and brothers who made it possible. Yes, it was and is the Nakba. Yes, it has been and continues to be 60 years of disposition and resistance and Palestinian and Lebanese self-defense. But being the dinosaur that I am, please allow me to remind you that 1947, 1948 was only the date of the birth of the Nakba. and that the date of its conception goes back to the first Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, to establish the World Zionist Organization, the biological parent of the Nakba. Yes, it is the Nakba to the millions of Palestinians and tens of millions of anonymous Lebanese and Syrian and Egyptian and Jordanian farmers and townsmen who have directly and repeatedly experienced the widening circles of its devastating repercussions since 1947, 1948. Yes, it is the Nakba farther afield to hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, Shiite and Sunni, and to uncounted numbers of other races and colors, including the tens of thousands of Britons outraged by the recent carnage and pogroms of the Israeli juggernaut in the Gaza Ghetto. But we should also remember to whom it is not the Nakba, other than Sky Television and the BBC. On the 15th of May last year, addressing the Knesset in Jerusalem, George W. Bush described this landmark anniversary as the redemption of an ancient promise given to Abraham and Moses and David, a homeland of the chosen people of God." On the 21st of July last year, Gordon Brown told the Knesset, I am especially pleased as British Prime Minister to congratulate you at this 60th anniversary on the achievement of 1948, the age-long dream realized, the ancient promise redeemed. Both George and Gorton seem to have inside knowledge of the heavenly author of the Nakba. There were already suspicions that Tony was as privileged as George in this regard. But does Gordon also move in such high circles? What is particularly intriguing is that while Gordon's The Ancient Promise Redeemed is somewhat enigmatic, George spells out Who did the redeeming? Presumably as befits the president of a country that tirelessly congratulates itself on separation between church and state. Is this, one wonders, why Washington, or for that matter London, hasn't a clue as to why they hate us? 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 its 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 its 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 windpipes of the United Nations 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 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. Nine 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 eight 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 70 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, the Jewish community in Palestine, it said, go take possession of the 40 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 tenfold 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 Palestine problem. At the same time, the leadership of the Yishuv had no intention of sticking to the partition borders. As explained from the operational orders of Haganah's plan Dalit, the master plan for the military conquest of Palestine launched six weeks before the end of the mandate. Furthermore, while the Zionist 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 Israel. 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 15 May 1948. During that period, the combined operations of Haganah and the so-called dissident groups, the Irgun and Shtern, 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 two of the 199 delegates were Palestinian born. 50 years later, on 14th of May 1948, only one of the 37 signatories of Israel 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 of 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 a metropolitan parent, like the American Revolution. It was not an intifada against a brutal and asphyxiating military occupation. It was not a secession 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 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 informed 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 Mizrahi party, during the mandate was Eretz Israel, for the people of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel. 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 owners. Chaim Wiseman, 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 Labour 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 Labour Mapai Party and the religious Misrahi Party. Without the Mizrahi party's 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 retie an ancient historical umbilical cord. Even in the pre-Balfour and pre-World War I state of political and military powerlessness, Zionism exhibited 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 pre-emptive birthright, purblind 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 disposition and colonization than 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 Aragon, with its alchemy of religious and national motivation, its compulsion to redeem territory considered long lost, its insatiable land hunger, its sense 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 Mr. Brown called the achievement of 1948. The hauteur towards the Palestinians of Mr. Brown's predecessor at Whitehall 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 than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." In the same memorandum, Balfour went on, whatever deference 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 Mr. 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 Mediterranean littoral, including Mussolini's Libya and France's Algerie Francaise. 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. Kibbutzis proliferated via the steady influx of pioneers, 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 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 trilateral 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 mode. 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. Shabbatai 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 all political dialogue with the Palestinians. Ben Elisa, the brilliant Israeli sociologist, has described in great detail the growth of militarism at the Yishuv grassroots level from the mid-1930s 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 rebellion by the British army, the killing and hanging and collective punishment, the dismantling of Palestinian political organizations, the arrest and exile of Palestinian leaders, and the systematic disarmament of the Palestinian villages massively and irreversibly shifted the balance of power in favor of the issue By 1939, Britain had created a Jewish auxiliary colonial army, 20,000 strong, which it armed, trained, and officered. This 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 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 were 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 coercive disposition. In fact, the concept of transfer, a euphemism for expulsion of the Palestinians, had been buzzing in Zionist 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 Lord Peel's report. The concept of transfer continued to occupy a prominent niche in the 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 Pape, unquestionably informed the implementation of Plan Dalit 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 Palestinian rebellion against partition and compulsory transfer, Britain began a reassessment of its entire Palestine policy. With the war clouds of World War II gathering, the adverse effects of pro-Zionism on Britain's relations with the Arab and Muslim worlds were 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 land 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, MacDonald 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 than the desert. What Ben-Gurion had in mind was, of course, the Jewish communities overseas, particularly in the United States. And sure enough, the issue of 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 to post-war Jewish mass immigration to the United States itself for fear of arousing the latent anti-Semitism of Gentile America. The Biltmore Conference took place in May 1942, 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 issue of labor rights led 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 Bitar. 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 kerosene 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 II, the time had come for the establishment of the Jewish state with maximal possible borders. Britain had to be removed. but not by the direct military action of the Haganah itself. Hungarian's grand strategy to remove Britain involved the following. First, mobilizing the American Jewish community to put sustained pressure on Washington, to put sustained pressure on London. 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. Third, a worldwide propaganda campaign to denounce Britain for pitilessly preventing Jewish DPs from reaching the shores of Palestine, depicted as the only place in this wide world able to absolve them. 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, Mr John Strachey, Minister of Food, Mr Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary, Mr. Anthony Eden, former foreign secretary, and Mr. 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 booby-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 Libermans congratulated in the Knesset by George W. Bush and Gordon Brown. The British Army in Palestine in the last years of the mandate was 100,000 strong. one World War II 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 Britons to Jewish terrorists killed was four to one, 170 Britons to 44 Jewish terrorists, and unheard of. ratio in the annals of colonial warfare, as we know only too well from recent events. Ladies and gentlemen, 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, a la Aragon 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 Dalit and Jehovah's design according to Bush and Brown. Ladies and gentlemen, the irony, the grandmother of ironies, is that Ben-Gurion spent 1916 researching the history of Palestine in, of all places, 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.