By Jeremy Salt

Two Albaneses made international news in mid-October. One was the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, whose government withdrew Australia’s recognition of West Jerusalem as the zionist settler state’s capital, declared in 2018 by his predecessor, Scott Morrison, to win a seat in forthcoming elections.

The zionists were furious, of course. The Australian ambassador to Tel Aviv – once again the settler state’s capital in Australia’s eyes – was called in for a dressing-down. Yair Lapid insists that Jerusalem – all of it – is Israel’s capital., now and forever. Of course, it is not.

It is the administrative center of a European colonial settler regime that succeeded in taking over most of Palestine in 1948 and took the rest in 1967. Jerusalem is a Palestinian city, predominantly Muslim but always with Christian and Jewish minorities. Palestinian artisans built the city. The arches, cobbled streets, and stone walls that delight visitors with their charm, were all the work of their hands.

Collectively or individually it was their property, stolen from them in 1948, with the finest houses – many of them magnificent mansions – shared between the East European leaders of this theft of an entire land and the dispersion of 800,000 of its people so the settlers could have everything they owned, hamlets, villages, towns, cities, arable land, water resources and even their household furniture, fittings, carpets, and books. A plague of locusts could not have wasted Palestine more cleanly and yet more than seventy years later we still have to put up with the howls of outrage by these usurpers when one of their false claims is challenged.

So Jerusalem does not belong to the zionists. It is a stolen city, a city held by force and oppression, an occupied city in a land occupied from the sea to the river. West Jerusalem was never allocated to the so-called ‘Jewish state’ in the 1947 partition plan (a ‘Jewish’ state in which Palestinians would have constituted almost half of the population, which is why they had to go).

The city was overrun during the genocidal zionist campaign to seize as much of Palestine as possible before the ‘international community’ intervened. If it did not intervene earlier that was because its key ‘western’ members were committed to a ‘Jewish state,’ irrespective of what international law and morality dictate. Thus a colonial settler state was established in Palestine at the very time colonial settler states everywhere else were being extinguished.

The Australian government’s position is that the status of Jerusalem has to be left to the final stages of negotiations for a two-state solution. Of course, there are no negotiations and the settler state has no interest in a two-state solution. It does not want to share. It is a greedy thief. It came with nothing but now wants the lot. There will be one state, Jewish, with the Palestinians to be squeezed out over time by whatever means are appropriate to the circumstances.

Australian Zionist lobbyists and the opposition foreign affairs spokesmen rose up in real or simulated outrage at the government’s decision, irrespective of the fact that it realigns Australia with international law, the view of the UN and almost all of its members. Jerusalem ’’looks like any other capital city to me, ’’ Australian MP Julian Lesser wrote in a Twitter message but from the news alone anyone would know that Jerusalem is definitely not like any other city.

The zionist effort to impose unity on a divided city has led to one affront to human rights after another. The greater municipality as defined by the zionists is ringed with a concrete wall to keep out the Palestinians who are entitled to be there; virtually every day either in the city or in the arbitrarily separated surrounding terrain Palestinians are being killed and their sacred places invaded by settler thugs.

The last word can be left to one of them, Itamar Ben Gvir, because he, at least, speaks openly about his intentions. Brandishing a gun in East Jerusalem, he encouraged other settlers to kill Palestinians. “We’re the landlord here,’’ he said. “Remember that, I am your landlord.” Dear reader, does any of this look like ‘’any other capital city to you?

The world has allowed this to go on decade after decade.

Western governments, and especially the government in Washington, are accomplices in these gross crimes against humanity and non-stop stamping out of human rights. Australian governments are deeply complicit, so it is a breath of fresh air that after decades of genuflecting on the US and the zionist lobby an Australian government has stood up to this rogue regime on at least one issue.

The other Albanese was Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian territories (i.e. only those occupied in 1967). Her report just tabled at the UN General Assembly concluded that the inalienable rights of the Palestinians could only be realized through the dismantling of zionist settler colonialism and the apartheid regime.

She means the territories occupied in 1967 but there is no moral or legal reason why this should not be applied to all of Palestine and every moral and legal reason why it should be. Why should zionist settler colonialism be purged from post-1967 Palestine and not pre-1967 Palestine, occupied even more viciously at the beginning of the Nakba?

Adding to what we already know, according to the latest secrets dug out of the zionist archives, Palestinian wells were deliberately infected with typhoid and dysentery carriers in April 1948, causing illness and probably many deaths, and designed as well to prevent villagers from ever being able to return to their homes.

The toxins were prepared by a biological warfare unit in the settler regime. The officials who approved of and supervised the operation included the Polish settler, David Grun, who had changed his name, like many others, in his case to David Ben-Gurion, to give himself the facade of historical authenticity he did not have.

More than 70 years later the myth of the ‘grand old man’ of zionist history persists but this war criminal was a liar as well as a thief, claiming publicly no harm to the Palestinians when in private correspondence before 1948 he looked forward to their expulsion and replacement with European settlers. In 1948 he followed through by ordering the genocidal expulsion he had anticipated long before. Such is the reality of the zionist claim to Palestine and the Palestinian city of Jerusalem.

– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.