Learn about the history of the Palestinian struggle for freedom, equality and justice by exploring major events in the history of their oppression on this day of the year.
9 March
EINSTEIN AND BRITISH INTELLIGENCE: "ZIONIST GROUP LIKE NAZIS"
On this day in 1992, Menachem Begin died. In pre-war Poland he joined the fascist-inspired Betar Zionist youth movement and rose through the ranks. He led his Irgun militia in the massacre of over 100 Palestinian men, women and children in Deir Yasin in April 1948. Albert Einstein denounced his Herut Party as “closely akin to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”. Begin became Israeli Prime Minister in 1977 and invaded Lebanon in 1982, during which Ariel Sharon authorised the massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees.
اكدت المخابرات البريطانية وأينشتاين: "المجموعة الصهيونية مثل
"النازيين
9 مارس
في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1992 توفي مناحيم بيغن. انضم في بولندا قبل الحرب إلى حركة الشباب الصهيونية بيتار المستوحاة من الفاشية وارتقى في الرتب. قاد ميليشيا الإرغون التابعة له في مذبحة راح ضحيتها أكثر من 100 رجل وامرأة وطفل فلسطينيين في دير ياسين في نيسان / أبريل 1948. ندد ألبرت أينشتاين بحزب حيروت باعتباره "قريبًا جدًا من الحزب النازي والفاشي". تولى رئاسة الوزراء الإسرائيلي عام 1977 وغزا لبنان عام 1982 ، حيث سمح لارييل شارون بقتل آلاف اللاجئين الفلسطينيين.
A British intelligence document (see image top right) saw many parallels between Begin's militia - Betar - and the Hitler Youth. It reported
"The BETAR Organisation
Origins
BETAR is the name selected by the followers of the late Jewish extremist VLADIMIR (ZEEV) JABOTINSKY to designate a militant Jewish Youth Movement which, as will be shown from the following notes, bears a striking resemblance both in general structure and character to the Hitler Youth-movement."The organisation is named after one Joseph Trumpeldor, who died in an Arab attack on the Palestine village of Tel Hal in 1920 and has since been built up by BETAR into a Jewish Horst Wessel."
We have every right to draw comparisons between states founded on ethnic cleansing - e.g. Israel since 1948 and Germany from 1933 to 1940. Such comparisons can be useful. A better template, though, against which to compare Israel's behaviour, however, is the exterminatory record of European colonialism and settler colonialism.
According to Scientific American, Europeans carried out the worst genocide in human history.
"It started after 1492. The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least seven parts per million in atmospheric concentrations of the most prominent greenhouse gas and start a little ice age."
The history of Zionism – largely suppressed – is sordid.
Mussolini set up squadrons of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, Betar, in black shirts in emulation of his own Fascist bands. When Menachem Begin became chief of Betar, he preferred the brown shirts of the Hitler gangs, a uniform Begin and Betar members wore to all meetings and rallies – at which they greeted each other and opened and closed meetings with the fascist salute.
Simon Petilura was a Ukrainian fascist who personally directed pogroms which killed 28,000 Jews in 897 separate pogroms. Jabotinsky [the Revisionist Zionist Leader] negotiated an alliance with Petliura, proposing a Jewish police force to accompany Petilura’s forces in their counter-revolutionary fight against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution – a process involving the murder of peasant, worker and intellectual supporters of the revolution.
Betar, was one of the most popular Zionist youth movements in interwar Europe. It was also one of the most controversial Jewish political organizations of its time. The youth movement’s militaristic ethos, vehement opposition to socialism, and authoritarian leadership cult for the founder of right-wing Zionism, Vladimir (Zeʾev) Jabotinsky, led many of their opponents—and some of their supporters—to describe its members as “Jewish fascists.”
Begin's and Netanyahu's inspiration, Jabotinsky, is known as the founder of “Revisionist Zionism”, the Zionist current which had little patience with the liberal and socialist facade employed by the “labor” Zionists. In 1923 Jabotinsky wrote The Iron Wall, which could be called a benchmark essay for the entire Zionist movement. He set forth bluntly the essential premises of Zionism which had, indeed, been laid out before, if not as eloquently, by Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann and others. Jabotinsky’s reasoning has been cited and reflected in subsequent Zionist advocacy – from nominal “left” to so-called “right”. He wrote:
"There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred."
The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people."
15-minute video: Lowkey on Israeli colonialism and more.