Scottish Friends of Palestine أصدقاء فلسطين الأسكتلنديين

Press Release 15 April 2009

Scottish Friends of Palestine will hold its annual commemoration for the victims of the massacre at the village of Deir Yassin on 9th April 1948.

This will take place at the Deir Yassin Memorial Plaque (to the rear of Kelvingrove Art Galleries) on Sunday 19th April 2009 at 2.30pm

As always, this remembrance ceremony encompasses all those who have suffered, over the decades, at the hands of Israeli violence. However, on this occasion we will also remember the victims of Israel’s recent onslaught on the Gaza Strip. For the Palestinian people, the suffering is seamless. The suffering in 1948 is the same as the suffering today. The causes are the same. As with all actions carried out against the Palestinian people by the state of Israel, the message to the Palestinian people is the same. We want your land, you must go. You must forget your land, your past and your heritage.

This commemoration is one small reminder that violence against a people will not succeed.

All are welcome.

Ben Gurion and the massacre at Deir Yassin

By Iqbal Jassat

The minutes of a meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive on 12 June 1938 records a chilling statement made by David Ben-Gurion:

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it”.

Ben-Gurion, an ardent Zionist was a migrant from Poland where he was born in 1886. Since his arrival in Palestine as a 20-year old, Ben-Gurion was destined to be heralded as not only the founder of the State of Israel and its first prime minister, but also as the mastermind of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In his Diary, an entry on 12 July 1937, Ben-Gurion records writing to his son that the only course of action open to Zionism was: “The Arabs will have to go”. What was needed was an opportune moment for making it happen, as Israeli historian and senior academic Ilan Pappe observes in his awesome study The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.

Pappe describes Ben-Gurion as short of stature, with a large shock of white hair swept backwards and invariably dressed in khaki uniform.

In order to make sense of the current politics of Israel, which under the right-wing leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu remains adamant in denying Palestinian rights, its significant to grasp the malicious intent on the part of his predecessors. Zionist leaders such as Ben-Gurion developed and implemented concrete actions to empty Palestine of its natives. Its equally useful to recollect that in the period between 1919 to 1933 after 35,000 more Zionists immigrated to Palestine, Jewish hold of the land constituted less than 3% while their population stood at 12%.

It means that at the time the League of Nations approved Britain’s Mandate for Palestine in 1922, population figures reflected on a British census of Palestine reveals: 78% Muslim, 11% Jewish, 9.6% Christian, total population 757,182.

Historical facts, which chronicle the injustice committed against indigenous Palestinians by Jewish migrants, have unfortunately been relegated to mere footnotes.

Yet these footnotes reveal much despite efforts by Israel and its supporters to banish them from memory.

A further chilling message is the one attributed to Zionist leader Jabotinsky who wrote in 1939 that “…… the Arabs must make room for the Jews in Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs”. So the drive for an exclusivist Jewish State that resulted in the Nakba or catastrophe was entrenched in Zionist ideology decades ago.

Thus the massacre of Deir Yassin resulted from a blueprint for ethnic cleansing known as Plan Dalet. Pappe’s study of the terrible tragedy of April 9, 1948 when Jewish forces occupied and killed inhabitants of this pastoral village shows a pattern of calculated moves to cleanse the area.

“As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed”.

According to Plan Dalet the Jewish army was to forcibly evict Palestinians from their homes and land using various prescribed strategies: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and finally planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning.

In addition to Ben-Gurion’s urging the Zionist Congress of 1937 that ‘transfer’ or ethnic cleansing will be a prerequisite to make “a comprehensive [Jewish] settlement plan” possible, Jonathan Cook in Disappearing Palestine writes that three years later Yosef Weitz, a leader of the Jewish National Fund, wrote in his diary:

“It should be clear to us that there is no room in Palestine for these two peoples. No ‘development’ will bring us to our goal of independent nationhood in this small country. Without the Arabs, the land will become wide and spacious for us; with the Arabs, the land will remain sparse and cramped”.

It is instructive to learn that Jewish military commanders understood their operations against Palestinians clearly from the following descriptions: tihur [‘purifying’], biur [‘rooting out’] and nikkuy [‘cleansing’].

Cook claims that they did not wait for Britain’s departure before advancing the ethnic cleansing programme. By the time of the British exit on 15 May 1948, Jewish forces has expelled or forced into flight a quarter of a million Palestinians and occupied 200 of their villages.

The massacre of Deir Yassin added to the mass exodus and as the campaign of expulsion intensified, BenGurion saw the advantages of widening the war to the main area of the Galilee, where some 100,000 Palestinians, as well as tens of thousands of refugees from the fighting, were living on land that had been assigned to the Palestinian state under the Partition Plan, observes Cook.

“Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke,” announced Ben-Gurion.

It is futile for Zionists and Israeli apologists to deny this sordid history of dismemberment, imprisonment and impoverishment of the Palestinian people in what many historians and commentators have described as a relentless effort to destroy Palestine as a nation.

– Iqbal Jassat is chairperson of the Media Review Network (MRN), an advocacy group based in Pretoria, South Africa. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.mediareviewnet.com.

Scottish Friends of Palestine is a firm advocate of the total boycott of all Israeli institutions, academic and cultural bodies and Israeli products – until as such times that the Israeli state ceases to boycott the rights of the Palestinian people, and international law as it pertains to the Palestinian people.

Visit www.easi-piesi.org to find out what you can do.

Hugh Humphries

Sec

Scottish Friends of Palestine

Scottish Friends of Palestine was formed in 1982 in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent attacks on the Palestinian refugee communities. It is an independent organisation with no political or religious affiliations. SFoP supports the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, national independence and sovereignty and the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. These rights have all been acknowledged by the United Nations.

SFoP campaigns for immediate and unconditional Israeli withdrawal from all territories illegally occupied, including East Jerusalem. We work for educational, social and cultural links between the Scottish and Palestinian peoples.

End of Press Release