“The Link” marks the 50th Anniversary of Americans for Middle East Understanding
The current issue of 'The Link' marks the 50th anniversary of Americans for Middle East Understanding. Its executive director, John F. Mahoney writes: "This is not a celebration … this is a singling out of a few Americans who, over a span of 50 years, had the guts to say "No". "No" to our country's enabling the theft of another people's land. "No" to our tax dollars fueling that injustice."
Americans for Middle East Understanding Inc. [AMEU] is at Room 245, 475 Riverside Drive, NY, NY 10115. All bimonthly issues of "The Link" may be viewed at AMEU@aol.com. An excerpt from the anniversary issue:
“ … On April 2, 1947, Britain ... asked the United Nations to place the question of Palestine on its agenda. In November, the U.N. General Assembly recommended "provisionally" to partition Palestine into an Arab state and a Jewish state; the Jews, now one-third of the population and owning 7% of the land, were allocated 54-55% of the land, with Jerusalem as a corpus separatum …
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Israel now became the new colonial power and, five days following its founding, the first legislative act of its Provisional State Council was to incorporate the Defense Emergency Regulations [of the British Mandate government] into Israeli domestic law. For the next 69 years, and counting, Palestinians would be ground down by those very regulations that Jews [including David Ben-Gurion] had so vehemently decried as ‘Nazi laws.’
The question is why? Why did Jews so readily adopt these Emergency Regulations, the same ones some 400 Jewish lawyers had condemned at their Lawyers Association meeting held on Feb. 7, 1946 in Tel Aviv, when it resolved: ‘The powers given to the ruling authority in the Emergency Regulations deny the inhabitants of Palestine their basic human rights. These regulations undermine the foundation of law and justice and constitute a serious danger to …’ the life and liberty of the individual, establishing a rule of violence without any judicial control. This conference demands the repeal of these laws. …
On May 14, 1948, eight hours before the British Mandate for Palestine was to end, 37 Zionist leaders gathered in Tel Aviv to announce the establishment of the state of Israel … The Emergency Regulations, so hated by the Jewish lawyers, would remain in effect, with the exception of the part dealing with illegal immigration to Palestine. Only now they would be employed, with rare exceptions, against Palestinians …
Still the question remains, why did the new state, which promised equal treatment to all its citizens, need such barbaric regulations?
The answer is the Zionist desire for an ethnic state with as much land as possible and the least number of Palestinians as possible; they called this objective Plan D. This is the operational directive developed in 1947-1948 by the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary organization, at the order of David Ben-Gurion … It called for the destruction of Palestinian towns and villages in order to expand the area allocated to the Jewish state in the proposed plan. Specifically, it
mandated the ‘destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.’ Even as Ben-Gurion was delivering his Declaration of Independence, his brigade commanders were menacing villages and towns with the knowledge and consent of the new prime minister.
When the ethnic cleansing ended - and that's what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls the operation – some 750,000 Palestinians were homeless. And the Jews, who were allocated 54-55 percent of Mandated Palestine by the U.N. now, after the ‘war of independence’ controlled 78 percent. Nineteen years later, the Israeli Defense Force, the successor to the Haganah, would occupy the remaining 22 percent. Ben-Gurion's words, penned in his Diary entry for Feb. 7, 1948, proved perceptive: ‘The war shall give us the land. The concepts of 'ours' and 'not ours' are peace concepts only, and they lose their meaning during war.’
With Plan D, the new state opted to continue to pursue its colonial ambitions. And, taking a page from the departing British, it knew that the first thing required to keep unhappy natives in line was the Crown's own Emergency Defense Regulations.
Which brings us to the final question: How long can one people endure such nightmarish laws? Sixty-nine years following those fateful days in May 1948, Palestinians continue to suffer under Israeli military rule, day and night, generation after generation. Twice, they have tried to shake off their shackles in the intifadas of 1987 and 2000; some would say a third intifada is smoldering. To this day they remain the longest oppressed people in modern history. Why?
For the answer I need only to look in the mirror. As a taxpayer, my tax dollars and those of all U.S. taxpayers have made Israel's oppression possible. Over the years our military assistance has built this small country into the fourth most powerful one on earth. Our veto at the United Nations has been cast 42 times to shield Israel from draft resolutions that condemned, deplored, demanded, affirmed. endorsed, called on and urged it to obey international law.
Yet the colonizers continue their theft of Palestinian lands, and the Israeli military continues its hellish enforcement of the Emergency Defense Regulations, now enhanced by high-tech weaponry, security systems, and methods of pacification …
So, ‘No’. This is far from a 50-year celebration.
This is a reminder that, over the past half-century, a modest non-profit, educational organization, with contributions, small and large, from thousands of supporters, knew the truth, and spoke it. …”
John F. Mahoney
Frank is a member of CPF
Compiled by Frank McGinty
