Capt Ayhab

THE PALESTINIANS

ISBN: 0704322560
ISBN-13: 9780704322561
Format: Hardcover, 256pp
Publisher: Quartet Books, Limited

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Author: Jonathan Dimbleby is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's flagship program of topical debate Any Questions? and its twin phone-in program Any Answers?. He has presented ITV's flagship weekly political program, Jonathan Dimbleby until the show ended on May 7th 2006. He is also ITV's anchorman on every General election night since 1997.He has written a number of best-selling books: RICHARD DIMBLEBY; THE PALESTINIANS, THE PRINCE OF WALES and THE LAST

Excerpts:

On page 67 it says that

in 1917 there were about 57,000 jews in Palestine (the year of the
Balfour Decleration) whch amounted to 9.7% of the population.
In 1936 there were 384,000 jews in Palestine, amounting to almost 30% of the population - an unprecedented increase in the history of
settlement. To the Palestinians, it seemed evident that, while the
politicians offered them bland words of reassurance, the immigrants
would continue to arrive in ever greater numbers until Palestine was in their hands.

Although the ambiguity which had characterized the public utterances of Zionist spokesmen before the Balfour Declaration persisted, it became steadily easier to read between the lines and detect the purpose: if the Zionists were to be believed, then the Palestinians were right to be fearful. Indeed, as early as 1921 men like Dr. Eder, the acting chairman of the Zionist Commission, had been quite blunt, statinf before a British Commission of Enquiry with a candour which deeply impressed the British that:
There can only be one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish
one, and no equality in the partnership between jews and Arabs, but a Jewish predominance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased.

Arab frustration erupted...................the Palestinians killed
some 200 jews, and suffered in consequence 120 casualties among their own people. Arab atrocity begat jewish revenge. Innocents - women and children among them - were clubbed, stabbed and beaten to death in a frenzy of atavistic bloodletting..........The British Enquiry understood, and offered its conclusion that indeed it was fear and hated of Zionist immigration which was the root cause.

As the rate of immigration increased, so did the fear. It was not
simply a matter of numbers but of purpose. In 1035 the British High
Commissioner for Palestine, recognizing what was happening, wrote to the Colonial Secretary at Westminister of: '....a genuine feeling of fear that the jews will succeed in establishing themselves in such large numbers that in the not too distant future that they will gain economic and political control of the country'.

PAGE 68

There was no place for the Palestinians: the Jews did not need the
Arabs. Not only did the Zionists speak their own language, follow their own separate faith and enjoy a different culture, but they also insulated themselves from the Arab world in every way possible. They formed their own industries, trade unions, banks, schools, hospitals - and from all of these Palestinians were carefully excluded. When the Jewish Agency bought Arab land, the new settlers to whom it was bequeathed expelled the Arab families who had farmed it for generations, thus depriving them of their means of subsistence. The Histradruth ( the Zionist trade union) forbade Arabs to join, and picketed any Jewish employer who took on Arab labor. These employers who persisted were branded as traitors.

The leader of the aggressively exclusive Histradruth was DAVID BEN GURION.

The report of the Peel Commission was published in July 1937 - ''The situation in Palestine has reached dead-lock. We cannot - in Palestine as it is now - both concede the Arab claim to self-government and secure the establishment of the Jewish national home''.

Twenty years on - and twenty years too late - the self-contradiction contained in the Balfour Declaration was at last openly acknowledged. But if the Mandate was unworkable, what was the alternative? To the astonished horror of the Palestinians, the commission made the fateful suggestion that their country be divided. Although the Jewish sector owned only 5% of the land, the Peel Commission proposed that almost half Palestine should be handed over to a Jewish state., from which - if necessary - the Arab population, which would number more than 200,000 people, was to be forcibly transferred into the Arab Palestinian state to be established in the other half of Palestine.

The proposed Jewish state was too small to meet the aspirations of
Zionism, with the consequence that its leaders were ambivalent about the Peel Commission. The Palestinians, on the other hand, facing the dismemberment of their country, re-loaded their rifles and came down from the hills to fight to the end.

On the 10th. April 1948, the head of the International Red Cross
delegation in Palestine drove into a small Arab village outside
Jerasulem. He was met by a detachment of a Jewish organisation called the Irgun.

''All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine-guns, hand-grenades, and also cutlasses in their hands, most of them still blood stained. A beautiful young girl with criminal eyes,showed me hers still dripping with blood; she displayed it like a trophy.'

It is always dangerous to stumble upon an atrocity. Jacques de
Reynier was fortunate to emerge alive with his official Red Cross
report of what happened the previous night in the village of Deir
Yassin.

''I found some bodies cold. Here the 'cleaning up' had been done
with machine-guns, then hand-grenades. It had been finished off with knives, anyone could see that. The same thing in the next room, but as I was about to leave, I heard something like a sigh. I looked everywhere, turned over all the bodies, and eventually found a litle foot, still warm. It was a little girl of ten, mutilated by a hand-grenade, but still alive....everywhere it was the same horrible sight.''

Altogether 250 men, women and children hd been butchered to death.
The survivors, at the point of hysterical collapse from shock and
grief, recorded their hideous experience for the British authorities:

families had been lined up and shot down in a barrage of machine-gun
fire;

young girls raped;

a pregnant mother was first slaughtered and
then had her stomach cut open by her murderer with a butcher's knife;

a girl who tried to remove the unborn child from the woman's womb was shot down Some of the Irgun fighters slashed their victims to pieces with cutlasses.

All of this was meticioiusly recorded by the British
authorities, even to the detail observed by Assistant-General Richard Cutling, the British interrogating officer, that ; 'women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers, and parts of some of the women's ears were severed in order to remove ear-rings.'

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-YT