By Jeremy Salt

Israel is out of control but it has never been in control. The west has allowed that too, and will have to pay the consequences.

This is all about 1948. Not October 7 or 1967 or 1982 or 2008 or any of the other dates on which Israel has been committing hideous atrocities in and around Palestine but 1948. War and the total collapse of all efforts to establish a reasonable peace have pushed Palestine back to this one primal date. The 76 years in between have been a waste of time insofar as ‘peace’ is concerned. All they have done is give Israel eight decades in which to tighten its exclusive hold on Palestine.

This is all about history. Only through history can the struggle for Palestine be understood and the right answers found. The modern history begins with Britain using the Zionists (and being used back) to set up an imperial bridgehead in the Middle East, more or less turning Israel into the central pillar of a bridge connecting Egypt and the Nile to Iraq, its oil and the gulf. There was no right or wrong in its calculations, only self-interest.

Britain had no right to give away part of the land it was occupying – Palestine – to another occupier and the UN had no right to give it away either. The General Assembly partition resolution of 1947 was a US resolution anyway, the numbers fixed by the White House once it became clear that it would fail.

Chaim Weizmann, the senior Zionist figure in London and Washington, asked Truman to intervene. “I am aware of how much abstaining delegations would be swayed by your counsel and the influence of your government,” he told the president. “I refer to China, Honduras, Colombia, Mexico, Liberia, Ethiopia, Greece. I beg and pray for your decisive intervention at this decisive hour.” The Philippines, Cuba, Haiti, and even France were also on the list of countries that needed a push.

“We went for it”, Clark Clifford, Truman’s special counsel, said later. “It was because the White House was for it that it went through. I kept the ramrod up the State Department’s butt.”

Herschel Johnson, the deputy head of the US mission at the UN, cried in frustration while speaking to Loy Henderson, a senior diplomat, head of the State Department’s Office of Near Eastern Affairs and strong opponent of the establishment of a Zionist settler state in Palestine.

“Loy, forgive me for breaking down like this,” Johnson said, “but Dave Niles called us here a couple of days ago and said that the president had instructed him to tell us that, by God, he wanted us to get busy and get all the votes that we possibly could, that there would be hell if the voting went the other way.”

In September UNSCOP (the UN Special Committee on Palestine) had appointed an ad hoc committee to consider its recommendations. The committee was composed of all General Assembly members, with sub-committees assigned to consider the proposals before it. On November 25, the General Assembly, voting as the ad hoc committee, approved partition on a vote of 25 in favor and 13 against, with seventeen abstentions.

As a two-thirds majority would be needed for the partition resolution to pass when it went to the General Assembly plenary session four days later, clearly it was going to fail but after the White House “went for it,” seven of the 17 who had abstained on November 25 voted ‘yes’ on November 29 and Resolution 181 (II) was passed by 33 votes for and 13 against, with 10 abstentions.

Niles, the Zionists’ ‘point man’ at the White House, was later to collaborate with Clark Clifford in sabotaging the State Department’s plan to replace partition with trusteeship for the time being because of the violence threatened in Palestine. Niles was the first of a string of Zionist lobbyists appointed to watch the president from the inside. The presidents did not necessarily like them and may even have disliked them and their constant pressure, but they had to put up with them.

In John Kennedy’s time, Mike (Myer) Feldman was allowed to monitor all State Department and White House cable traffic in the Middle East. There was resistance from inside the White House but Kennedy regarded Feldman “as a necessary evil whose highly visible White House position was a political debt that had to be paid,” according to Seymour Hersh, writing in The Samson Option. Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy (p.98). After Kennedy’s assassination, Feldman was taken on by Lyndon Johnson, who gave Israel everything it wanted in return for nothing.

Handing Palestine over to a recent settler minority violated the most basic principles of the UN, chief amongst them the right to self-determination. Opposition to Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was strong within the US administration but it was the man in the White House, responding to domestic interests (money and votes), who called the shots and has been calling them ever since. Palestine was passed on from British to American hands and onwards to the Zionists.

What the Palestinians wanted was immaterial to the ‘return’ of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland, as Arthur Balfour had sniffed in his languid upper-class way. The fact that Jews could not ‘return’ to a land in which they or their ancestors had never lived was equally immaterial.

A Chapter of Chicanery

What went on behind closed doors to ensure that a colonial-settler state was established in Palestine against the wishes of its people is only one chapter in a long history of chicanery, deception, standing violation of international law and violation of the most basic principles of the UN.

The so-called ‘Palestine problem’ never was the ‘Palestine problem’ but a western problem, a Zionist problem, a combustible long-term mixture of the two that right now is blowing up and is still being blamed by the perpetrators on their victims.

There would be no doubt about how we got here, to the edge of the precipice, as people are saying, had western governments and the media ever held Israel to account instead of protecting it, supporting it and justifying even crimes of the greatest magnitude behind the cry of Israel’s ‘right’ to defend itself.

To suggest that the thief has any kind of ‘right’ to ‘defend’ stolen property is ludicrous. The right belongs to the person fighting for its return, as the Palestinians have been doing every day since 1948. Beyond the 5-6 percent the Zionist land purchasing agencies actually bought before 1948, the Israelis are living on and in stolen property. They will defend it but they have no ‘right’ to defend what by any legal, moral, historical or cultural measure belongs to someone else.

This has never been a ‘conflict of rights’ as ‘liberal’ Zionists have asserted because a right is a right and cannot be in conflict with another right. The real rights here are clear or would be if they were not continually smothered by western governments and a media protecting Israel whatever it does.

The 1947 partition resolution did not include a ‘transfer’ of the Palestinian population but a Jewish state could not have been created without it. Without the expulsion of the indigenous people there would have been as many Palestinian Muslims and Christians as Jews in the ‘Jewish state.’

War was the only way of getting rid of them; brute force accomplished what Theodor Herzl had envisaged when he spoke of “spiriting” the “penniless population” out of their land. Once it was done Weizmann was rapturous about this “miraculous simplification of our task.”

What followed after 1948 were massacres in Gaza and Jordan, massacres in Lebanon and war and assassination across the region and beyond. The ethnic cleansing of 1948 was followed by a second round in 1967 and now a third and fourth in Gaza and southern Lebanon, where town dwellers and villagers in the south are currently being butchered and terrorized into flight.

Along with this is the slow-motion, incremental illegal/pseudo-legal destruction of Palestinian life and rights in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, all underwritten by western governments and the media.

It is extraordinary how the media can never stop talking about October 7 but never talks about any of this critical history. Of course, as an accomplice to one of the great crimes of the 20^th century, planned in detail and carried our bloodily, to talk about it honestly would be to implicate itself, so it continues to talk about something else – Hamas terrorism, October 7, anything to divert attention from Israel’s monstrous crimes. This distortion of the narrative has been going on since the PLO and the popular fronts of the 1960s were turned into terrorists and Israel the plucky little state only defending itself.

The Poles and the French and others across Europe resisted Nazi occupation. There is no trouble in understanding this but when it comes to the Palestinians, resistance to occupation is turned into terrorism and state terrorism into ‘self-defense’.

This inversion of truth has been taken a shameless stage further following the pager/walkie-talkie terrorist crimes committed by Israel in Lebanon. Western governments and their allied media cohorts have justified and even celebrated them.

The Palestinians showed themselves willing long ago to move beyond 1948, to make great sacrifices for peace – 22 percent of the land in return for giving away 78 percent – if Israel would deal honestly with the rights of the 1948 generation but it dismissed them out of hand, sneered at them.

The Palestinians were also prepared to share Jerusalem but Israel was not prepared to do that either. It had always wanted all of Palestine. That was the reality masked by the 1990s ‘peace process’ and previous plans put forward by various actors on the diplomatic carousel but now the Netanyahu government sees no need for the mask. It is declaring out loud, irrespective of what anyone thinks, including its erstwhile friends and allies, what it wants, which is what the Zionist movement wanted at the beginning, all of Palestine, preferably without any Palestinians.

With Israel unwilling to relinquish any part of Palestine, the lines between pre and post-1967 have been dissolved. There are no green lines between what is occupied and what is not, only the red ones which Israel crosses every day. Refused even a small portion of their homeland, Palestinians and their allies are left with nothing but resistance and the determination to retrieve all of 1948 Palestine and not just the fraction they once would have accepted.

If Israel lives permanently outside international law, that is because western governments allow it and indeed encourage it with their arms supplies and financial support. If Israel occupies, massacres and assassinates, that is because western governments allow it and effectively encourage it. If Israel commits genocide that is because western governments allow it and effectively encourage it.

If Israel is condemning itself to perpetual war with the people whose rights it has violated at the most basic level for the past 76 years, that is because western governments are allowing it.

They have allowed Israel to push the world to the brink of regional and perhaps global war. Israel is out of control but it has never been in control. The west has allowed that too, and will have to pay the consequences.