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The most brutal massacres of the “Zionist gangs” in Palestine in 1948

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Palestinians leaving their home after massacres of the Zionist gangs in Palestine in 1948

 During the events of the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, the armed Zionist gangs committed tens of massacres that killed thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians in various villages and cities in Palestine, Despite the relentless Israeli attempts to conceal and obliterate the realities of these massacres, historical evidence such as “mass graves” and testimonies of Israeli soldiers who participated in the commission of these crimes remained irrefutable evidence of their occurrence.

Also Read: Israel has made a habit out of violating Palestinian’s rights every Ramadan

 According to a report by the Hebrew newspaper Haaretz in 2019, teams from the Israeli Defense Ministry removed, since the beginning of the last decade, groups of historical documents to hide evidence of the Nakba and the atrocities that accompanied it, as well as trying to hide testimony from generals about killing civilians and demolishing villages, or expelling Bedouins during the first decade from the establishment of the state.

Mass graves are being found

 In 2013, the Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage discovered 6 mass graves containing hundreds of remains and skeletons of martyrs and civilians killed between the years 1936 and 1948 in Palestine;  And that was during the restoration work that the Foundation was carrying out in a cemetery in Jaffa (North).

 On January 21, Haaretz revealed the last of his evidence, which was a mass grave of Palestinians killed during the 1948 war on the beach of Caesarea (north).

 The newspaper pointed out that “mass killings of Arabs occurred after the surrender of the village of al-Tantora” in 1948.

 According to the newspaper, about 200 Palestinians were buried, after their execution, in a mass grave that is currently located under the Dor Beach parking lot.

Also Read: Israel having free season on Palestinian civilians including Children and Journalists

 Palestinians say that armed Jewish groups carried out many massacres in Palestinian villages during the 1948 war to force their residents to leave.

 According to the Al-Zaytouna Center for Studies and Consultations (based in Beirut), the number of massacres committed by Zionist gangs between 1937 and 1948 exceeded 75, killing more than 5,000 Palestinian martyrs, in addition to wounding thousands.

In one of its 2009 editions, the Center said that the peak of those massacres was during the period between 1947 – 1948, the period known as the Nakba.

Also Read: The continuing refugee crisis in Palestine: from Nakba of 1948 to Sheikh Jarrah in 2022

 The Palestinians call the term “the Nakba” the process of their displacement from their lands by “armed Zionist gangs” in 1948, the same year in which the establishment of the State of Israel was declared on the majority of the lands of Palestine.

The most prominent Israeli massacres against the unarmed Palestinians, during the Nakba.

  •  The Semiramis Hotel massacre in Jerusalem on January 5: a Zionist gang demolished the hotel, killing at least 20 Palestinians, and wounding 20 others.
  • The Jaffa Gate massacre in Jerusalem on January 7: A Zionist gang threw a bomb at the Jaffa Gate in Jerusalem, killing 18 Arabs and wounding 41 others.
  •  The “Arab Brigades” massacre in Jaffa on January 8: Zionist gangs detonated a car bomb near a building called the Arab Brigades (which housed the headquarters of the Arab National Committee) in central Jaffa, killing 70 Arabs.
  • The massacre of the second Arab Brigades on January 14: when a Zionist gang detonated a car bomb next to the old palace, killing 30 Westerners.
  •  The Maghribi Building Massacre in Haifa on January 16: A time bomb was detonated near a building called “Al Maghribi,” killing 31 Arabs and wounding more than 60 others.
  •  The massacre of Yazour village, Jaffa district, January 22: A Zionist gang attacked Yazour village at the entrance to Jaffa city, at night, and blew up some buildings, killing about 15 Arabs while they were sleeping.
  • The Abbas Street Massacre in Haifa on January 28: A Zionist gang rolled a barrel filled with explosives into Abbas al-Arabi Street, which led to the demolition of some homes, killing 20 Arabs and wounding 50.
  •  The massacre of the village Haifa district in Palestine, on February 14: A Zionist gang attacked the village, destroying about 20 houses above the heads of its residents, killing 60 civilians;  Most of them are women and children.
  • The “Al-salam Building” massacre in Jerusalem on February 20: A Zionist gang blew up a vehicle filled with explosives, which it had placed in front of the Peace Building in Jerusalem, killing 14 Arabs and wounding 26 others in Palestine.
  •  The Deir Yassin massacre on April 9: Zionist gangs launched an attack on Deir Yassin village, west of Jerusalem, during which houses were blown up on the heads of its residents, and civilians fleeing the massacre were directly targeted.  According to Arab and international sources, the number of people killed in the massacre reached 254, including 25 pregnant women whose stomachs were cut alive with spears.
  • The Al-Dawaima massacre on October 29: resulted in the killing of 500 citizens, most notably the mosque incident called “Al-Zawiya”, where the Israeli soldiers killed about 50 old men who were inside the mosque. It is also mentioned that children were killed during the massacre by smashing their skulls with sticks

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In Palestine, no peace before the slate is clean

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It seems that peace in Palestine will remain confined to the realm of wishful thinking. For the vast majority of people around the world, the racist apartheid entity known as Israel is probably the most gargantuan crime against humanity ever committed in the history of mankind.

 Israel was conceived in sin, misbegotten in evil when it was established nearly 75 years ago, remains completely evil today, and will always be irremediably evil, no matter how many people sing its praises.

The creation of Israel in Palestine may not be the most heinous genocidal act in history. But it is most certainly the biggest and most obscene theft ever. How else can any honest person describe the arrogation of an entire country by the British empire and surrendering it, as a (National home),  on a silver platter to another people ( Zionist Jews) on the ground that these people were stateless and persecuted, especially following the tragic events of the World War II.

Indelible calamity for Palestinians

Indeed, the very creation of Israel and its malignant growth into a powerful evil entity has inflicted a huge indelible calamity to every Palestinian family.

 Yes, thanks to Zionism’s triumph, thanks to overwhelming, unlimited and sustained backing by racist, anti-Islam Western powers such as UK and US, every Palestinian family had its share of the still ongoing agony,  immense suffering and misery resulting from the establishment of the evil entity, which is nothing less than a protracted, unrelenting and unceasing crime against humanity.

It is probably impossible to find a single Palestinian who has escaped the impact of the Zionist Jewish crimes, still, continues unabated.

Israel: When will the Jews say Mea Culpa?

This writer’s family, for example, was forced to dwell in a cave for 20 years, following the near extermination of my father’s family in 1953. In that fateful year, Jewish terrorists massacred his three paternal uncles, Hussein, Mahmoud and Yousef not far from the village of, al-Burj, about 30 km southwest of the town of Hebron.

The three, along with other relatives, were totally innocent shepherds, grazing their folks of sheep near the armistice line.  In addition to murdering my family, the Zionist murderers stole hundreds of sheep upon which our family depended on for living.

Read Also: Expect a Srebrenica-like massacre anytime by Jewish Settlers in the West Bank

 Interestingly, up to this day, Israel, the so-called only democracy in the  Middle East, has not said “Mea Culpa“! let alone paid compensations for their crimes When will the Zionist Jews say a simple sorry for their unwept victims? Perhaps when kosher pigs fly!

Yes, every single Palestinian has a story to tell about what happened to his or her immediate family, relatives, neighbours and fellow villagers.

The Zionists, notoriously selfish and narcissistic, calculated that old Palestinians who experienced the holocaust-like Nakba first-hand ( the brutal, violent extirpation of an entire people from its ancestral homeland does constitute a form of genocide),  would die and the young would forget.

However, the Zionist calculations proved utterly faulty as the cause has been kept alive and living, strongly and firmly, in the hearts and minds of millions of people around the world, including in Palestine itself where close to eight million Palestinians continue to live as a thorn in the  Zionists’ side despite all their nefarious designs, plots and exploits to consign our just cause to oblivion.

There are several reasons for this exemplary resilience and steadfastness on the part of the Palestinian people, including the following:

1-The colossal Nakba, was by no means a one-time event lasting for a  few weeks or a few months, followed by peace or an end of hostility. The Palestinians actually never encountered circumstances or conditions conducive to making them or their descendants forget or overcome their pains. Indeed, ever since 1948, the collective Palestinian experience has been a sequence of atrocities, pogroms, repressive measures, mass internment and imprisonment, home -demolitions, land-grabbing, sporadic massacres,  and similar acts of persecution and oppression. This would draw a conclusion that peace in Palestine belongs to the realm of fantasy.

The main purpose of these evil measures has always been to force the Palestinians, or significant numbers of them, to leave their homeland for good. Indeed, in many instances, the Zionist authorities offered attractive sums of money to “encourage” Palestinians to emigrate to countries such as Australia and Canada. However, very few Palestinians would swallow the Zionist bait.

The unrelenting suffering and the protracted oppression and savagery kept alight the torch of resistance even to this day as most Palestinians came to realize that they were facing two main alternatives: continued resistance even at a high price, or going into oblivion and repeating the experiment of the  “American Indians” of the Middle East.

2-The second reason which enabled the Palestinians to keep their struggle alive is their strong Islamic faith. Islam encourages its followers to resist oppression and not succumb or give in to oppressors. True, Palestinian nationalism played and continues to play an important role in sustaining the resistance. However, it is amply clear that Islam is more able to provide an inexhaustible source of motivations for the increasingly religious showdown with Israel. More to the point, Palestinians feel they have a paramount religious duty to protect, defend, and liberate al-Aqsa Mosque from the claws of Zionism. Indeed, most Palestinians realize there can be no Palestine without Jerusalem and no Jerusalem without the Aqsa Mosque. Hence, their resolve to sacrifice body and soul for the liberation of  Islam’s third holiest sanctuary.

No Peace without Justice, but Justice is more than impossible

Since there can be no lasting peace in Palestine without true justice that leaves the slate thoroughly clean, it would be safe to argue that reaching a genuine peace between Muslims and Zionist Jews would be as unlikely as Satan the devil entering the Garden of Eden in the company of prophets, saints, martyrs and righteous people on the Day of Judgment.

But since Satan will go to hell rather than paradise, peace in Palestine will remain confined to the realm of wishful thinking.

And even if Zionist Jews were to reach the conclusion that enough was enough, they still would have to agree to a system of redress for the egregious injustices inflicted on their victims from the very inception of the gargantuan crime against humanity.

For justice, even a semblance of justice to materialize, the Jews of the world would have to pay the Palestinians adequate and prompt reparations for the purpose of promoting justice and redressing the horrible and still ongoing crimes against the victims and their descendants up to the 10th generation. I cannot determine the exact amount of reparations and indemnification which Jews would have to pay for the victims. But an initial amount of 30-50 trillion dollars would probably suffice for a final rapprochement. Am I undergoing day-dreaming. Definitely. That is why even invoking the possibility of a real durable peace between Palestine and Israel belongs to the realm of fantasy and wishful thinking. (end)

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Israel is Hiding Crucial Demographic Facts About Palestinians

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demographic facts about the Palestinians and Palestinian demographic data

For decades, Israel has been hiding crucial demographic facts about the Palestinians West of the River Jordan (Israel proper, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip). During this period, Successive Israeli governments consistently sought to inflate the number of Jews while deliberately belittling the number of Palestinians.  The purpose of this manifestly racist and still-ongoing policy is to portray the Palestinians as an insignificant and shrinking minority.

Palestinian demographic facts:“The Palestinian womb is overwhelming Israel”

Demographic facts and data are considered Israel’s best-guarded state secrets.

However, from time to time, Israeli officials make racist statements reflecting Israeli anxiety toward the growing Palestinian population and Palestinian demographic data and facts.

 Moreover, the toxically racist Israeli media normally resort to “Statistical manipulation” to ensure the pathologically insecure Jewish citizens that Jews are still a large and growing the majority of the population.

This week, a senior doctor at the Soroka hospital in Beir Sheva in Southern Palestine was quoted as saying that  “the Arab womb is overwhelming the Jewish public” in the country.

The doctor,  Gideon Saar, a cardiac surgeon, was recorded on video, saying the remarks during an election gathering to promote the notoriously racist former Justice minister Ayelet Shaked.

Crucial Palestinian demographic facts: Short is the robe of lying!

As we all know, mendacity has always been and continues to be Israel’s modus operandi and ultimate lifeline. Israel lies about almost everything, from how it came into being to its possession of nuclear weapons. So, we shouldn’t be surprised a bit to discover Israeli efforts to cover up crucial demographic facts in occupied Palestine.

Indeed, lying rather obscenely is simply an integral part of being Zionist.

Read Also: Is anti-Semitism essential for the survival and growth of Zionism and Jewish peoplehood?

Honesty and being Zionist are eternal oxymorons and shouldn’t be used in the same line. Israel lies as often as Israelis breathe.

Rare admission:

In 2014,  the Head of the Military Administration in the West Bank, euphemistically called the Civil Administration, made a rare admission when he pointed out that the number of Palestinians between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean exceeded the number of Jews. 

The admission has since been confirmed by many Israeli scholars, including Sergio Della Pergola, an Italian-Israeli demographer and statistician.

Some irate right-wing officials dismissed the shocking revelations demographic facts about Palestinians as “spurious and distorted.” But Della Pergola, a Hebrew University Professor, dismissed these right-wingers as “delusional.”

Three out of four Russian immigrants are “non-Jewish”

According to the Israeli media, it has been revealed by official Israeli circles that hundreds of thousands of “Jewish” immigrants from the former Soviet Union are actually “nom-Jewish” according to the so-called “Law of return.” The Ynet English website on 17 November 2002, reported that in 2020, three out of every four Russian immigrants were actually non-Jewish.

The “shocking” report came after leaders of the religious and fascist Jewish parties, which won the recent elections in Israel, expressed intention to amend the Law of Return and reopen the sensitive question of who counts as Jewish according to Jewish law or Halacha.  According to the Jerusalem Post, only 28% of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union were actually Jewish. The same source reported that between 1990-2020, the percentage of truly Jewish immigrants didn’t exceed 36%. 

 

Palestinians have a clear majority

Today,  data shows that the existence of a Palestinian demographic majority west of the River Jordan (Israel and the occupied Territories) is a clarion fact that only the willfully blind refuses to see. In fact, if we deduct around 500,00-600,00 non-Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union from the projected Jewish population, the Palestinian majority becomes an axiomatic fact that even the most dishonest Israeli politicians wouldn’t deny.

According to Palestinian and Israeli experts, the crucial Palestinian demographic facts today exceeds the Jewish population by at least 300,000 people.

However, some hot-tempered Israeli leaders and pro-settler circles keep indulging in prevarication, statistical sophistry and outright lies to produce an otherwise rosy outlook.

Palestinian demographic facts: Apartheid to make “them” out of sight and out mind”!   

Israel, especially the so-called  “deep state,”e.g.,  the hawkish security establishment, has been using a variety of criminal tactics to neutralize the problem. These tactics include the following:

1- Denial and concealing crucial Palestinian demographic facts, classified as “top secret”  from the general public, while making the classified data available to top politicians, like the Prime Minister, the President, and Mossad Chief. Moreover, military censorship has been barring the normally-liberal Israeli media from discussing the matter or making “harmful” Revelations.

2- Maximizing systematic persecution, repression and state sponsored-terrorism against the Palestinians for the purpose of coercing them to emigrate as the Zionist gangs did in 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were forced to leave following the perpetration by Jewish terrorists of genocidal massacres like Dir Yasin, Tantura, Dawaymeh, etc. Indeed, for decades, Israel claimed the refugees were not expelled but left voluntarily.

Read Also: Rectifying Nuclear Imbalance with Israel should be a strategic priority for Egypt, SA and Turkey

3- Confining as many Palestinians as possible to the smallest possible territory.

4. Refusing to grant non-Jews building licenses to construct a home in (Area C) of the West Bank, which constitutes more than 65% of the occupied territory.

5- Demolishing Palestinian homes in the contiguity of Jewish colonies or in areas coveted or slated for settlement expansion. It is estimated that Israel demolished more than 50,000 Palestinian homes in Gaza and the West Bank since 1967.

6-  Applying two sets of laws, one lenient, another harsh and draconian, to  Jews and Arabs living in the same area, even the same neighbourhood.

Yet Zionist Jews bark furiously and uncontrollably like rabid shipyard dogs whenever someone calls the racist entity apartheid? Do they want the world to celebrate with them their “exemplary egalitarianism” and the kosher savagery meted out to the helpless and virtually abandoned Palestinians whose only “crime” is their being goyem and therefore un-kosher? Is this the way Jews are supposed to pay back for Muslim protection for many centuries in the Middle East, North Africa, Turkey and many other places?

I advise doubting Jews to read “the Jew and the Cross” to realize the huge difference in the treatment Jews received under Islam and Christendom. (see The Jew and the Cross – Dagobert David Runes).

Exercising some honesty and rectitude is always beneficial and rewarding.

7- Israel has been manipulating statistical data and crucial demographic facts to give the impression that the Palestinians are not actually a nation, but a cacophonic set of sects and tribes with very little common bonds.

Thus, Israeli statisticians divided Palestinians into Muslims, Christians, Bedouins, Jerusalemites, Israeli Arab citizens, and Circassians. Samarians, etc.

This sort of statistical mutilation is not met with a reciprocal sub-categorization when dealing with the Jewish community which has far more ethnic and religious heterogeneity. For example, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate doesn’t consider a majority of American Jews (Reform and Conservative Jews) to be bona fide Jews. Orthodox Jews, who are in control in Israel, routinely quarrel and scuffle with Reform and Conservative Jews at the Western Wall esplanade, shouting obscenities at them and calling them abusive epithets like “Goyem” (non-Jews) and “Notsrim” (Christians).   

Demographic holocaust

One might wonder how Israel would deal with its demographic dilemma in the medium and distant future. Some Israeli leaders, especially within the jingoistic religious messianic circles don’t hesitate to use far-fetched explosive terms like “demographic holocaust” to describe the Palestinian demographic advantage.

The scandalously corrupt analogy between one of the greatest tragedies in the history of mankind on the one hand,  and the survival and growth of the Palestinian people in its own ancestral homeland on the other, cheapens the holocaust and seriously corrodes international efforts to combat true, virulent anti-Semitism. It also exposes the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mindset.

Unfortunately, we Palestinians have learnt that nothing can be dismissed as unthinkable as far as the depraved Zionist mentality is concerned. Indeed, a state that shamelessly argues that Jews have an inherent right to be racist “because they are a special people” can do anything, however ghoulish and nightmarish or diabolic it may be.

That is why, the Rabbis of Gush Emunim, who represent religious Zionism, declare openly that the solution for the Palestinian problem is a combination of three measures: Transfer or collective deportation; a tight, humiliating apartheid regime; and\or a war of extermination. Frankly, I prefer to believe these evil rabbis rather than notorious pathological liars like Netanyahu, Lapid, and Biden.

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The 1967 Arab-Israeli War revisited

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لإhe 1967 Arab-Israeli War

I was ten years old after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War when Israel occupied the West Bank in June 1967. Then, I didn’t fully grasp what was happening to us. Arab radio stations transmitting from Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad had been galvanizing us into believing that Israel’s days were numbered and that Arab nationalism, which nearly replaced Islam as our de facto religion, would soon tear up the Zionist entity to smithereens.

We virtually worshipped Gamal Abdul Nasser, the legendary Egyptian president, who became a god-like figure among most Arabs from Bahrain to Casablanca.

It was far more abominable to curse the ultimate leader of Arab nationalism than to curse the Almighty. Under such circumstances, achieving victory over Israel,  the darling of the West, was tantamount to indulging in day-dreaming.

I remember I once asked Professor Hamed Algar, Professor of Ottoman History at the University of California at Berkeley, for his opinion of Nasser.

He described him as “the second major disaster to hit the Muslim world after Mustafa Kemal Attaturk“.

Read Also: The 1967 War was a Defeat of Arabism, Nasserism, Baathism and anti-Islam Doctrines.

So you can imagine the gigantic shock and disappointment we suffered when all of our dreams were crushed when all these charismatic leaders proved to be mere contemptible little men who excelled in rhetoric and in repressing their peoples but failed utterly in the confrontation with Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

A Narrative Story pre-the 1967 Arab-Israeli War

 Four years before I was born, a great calamity had befallen my family.
The Israeli army murdered three of my four paternal uncles, Hussein (28), Mahmoud (25), and Yousuf (23). The three, all simple and impoverished shepherds, were grazing their flock of sheep and goats near the village of Al-Burj along the so-called armistice line, 22 kilometers south-west of the West Bank town of Hebron. Together with my three uncles, a number of other relatives, including a woman, were also shot dead. In fact, the Israelis not only nearly wiped out my entire family, but also seized our sheep herd, upon which our total livelihood depended to a large extent.

This calamity condemned us to a life of misery and abject poverty for many years to come. The Red Cross and the Red Crescent didn’t run active services in our region at that time, so we were left to endure our fate alone. I remember my late father telling me that the Jordanian government gave us two goats free of charge, as compensation for the tragedy. My family viewed this as a kind of insult added to injury.

Thus, my family had to live in a cave for 21 years. The misery, the suffering, the poverty and the harshness of daily living were conspicuous aspects of our life. Interestingly, to this day, the Israeli government has neither apologized for the crime nor compensated us for our stolen property.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Would zionist jews say “mea culpa”?

Imagine, just imagine,  how rabid and vitriolic Jews would be if they were in my shoes. None the less, these self-absorbed and self-worshiping Zionists still have the Chutzpah to accuse their victims of being ” terrorists and anti-Semites.” Isn’t this discourse tantamount to fornicating with truth and history? Well, in the final analysis, shamelessness has always been and will always be the main feature of being a Zionist Jew!

I don’t know when these Jews will say mea culpa to their Palestinian and other victims. Perhaps when kosher pigs fly!!

Well, I do realize that it is too premature, probably naïve, to even evoke such a question. After all, Israel is still murdering Palestinian children nearly on a daily basis.

Many stories to tell!

Of course, our tragedy didn’t stop at losing three men and a number of other relatives murdered and hundreds of sheep stolen by the Israeli government. Much more had been seized from us six years earlier, in 1948, including our farming land in al-Za’ak, in what is now Israel. We were not even allowed to retrieve our belongings, such as bed coverings, household utensils and probably some money that had been left prior to the expulsion at the hands of armed Jewish gangs.

Anybody who might have tried would have been shot on the spot. I heard of several people who had ventured to reach their former homes just across the border, only to be shot dead after having dug their graves.

The take-no-prisoners policy was consistent with the Israeli strategy of ‘cleansing the indigenous Palestinian inhabitants who constituted the vast majority of the population in mandatory Palestine.

To implement this Nazi-like policy, various Israeli gangs, which came later to form the so-called Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), committed numerous wanton massacres against the Palestinians. Some of the most outrageous massacres included Deir Yassin, Dawaymeh, Tantura, Lud and Qastal, but there were many others. The atrocities, carried out knowingly and deliberately by the Jewish leadership, were aimed at terrorizing the Palestinians into leaving. The message was as clear as it was gruesome. “If you want to stay alive, you’ve got to leave.”

Israeli propaganda during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War would tell the world later that the ‘Arab refugees’ left their homes willingly and were not forced into leaving by the Jude-Nazi gangs. I say Judeo-Nazi because when Jews think, behave and act like Nazis they become Nazis.

Interestingly, the Zionists continue to shamelessly generate such big lies to deceive and mislead world public opinion. I strongly believe that Zionist Jews are God’s lying people.

 They lie as often as they breathe; dishonesty seems to be a built-in Zionist character. You can not be Zionist and honest at the same time.

Moreover, you can’t support Israel unless you are either completely ignorant or irredeemably unconscionable or both.

Israel itself wouldn’t be able to survive five minutes in an environment ruled by truth, honesty and justice.

Zionist Jews would never admit that Israel and Jews ever did any wrongdoing or committed any crime.

A Zionist would even tell God Almighty “you’re a liar.” Didn’t Jews carry signs in the US reading “Allah is on my ass”? ( I got this quote from Alfred Lilienthal’s famous book The Zionist Connection).

Zionist Jews may not be the most murderous people under the sun. However, they are certainly the most dishonest and mendacious.

Moreover, there is no doubt whatsoever that Zionist Jews are the most racist people under the sun. For these Jews, the life of a single Jew is far more important than the lives of a  million non-Jews. For them, non-Jewish life has no sanctity.

The 1967 Arab-Israeli War: Jordanian era

Under Jordanian rule (1951-67), i.e. pre the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the most important concern for the Jordanian authorities was loyalty to King Hussein and his family. The King was nearly ‘a demi god’ and the entire country, including the media, the security forces and the people revolved around his figure. Hence, the claim often made that Jordan was a king with a country, rather than a country with a king, had a substantial degree of veracity.

Connections to the King and his Mukhabarat (intelligence apparatus) and immediate coterie would automatically put one in a preferential position.

Shouting “Ya’ish Jalalat al Malik al-Muaazam” (Long Live The King), would give one an automatic certificate of good conduct. No wonder, it was a despotic regime based on sycophancy, favouritism, and nepotism.

King Hussein never really made genuine efforts to push back recurrent Israeli incursions, forays and raids on Palestinian population centres in the West Bank pre the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, let alone liberate occupied Palestine. Indeed, the Commander-in-Chief of the Jordanian army in the late 1940s, when Israel was created, and up until March 1, 1956, was a British officer by the name of John Baggot Glubb who came to be known among Palestinians and Jordanians as Glubb Pasha, an honorary title. So, who in his right mind would have expected a British officer to fight the Jews on behalf of the Arabs?

As far as Palestinians were concerned, the most immediate priority for the Jordanian regime i.e. King Hussein was to make sure that they and other Jordanians didn’t pose a threat to the survival, security and stability of the Hashemite monarchy. A Palestinian would get a six-month prison term if an empty bullet cartridge was found in his possession.

And as the Israelis would do later, the Jordanians enlisted the ‘Makhatir’ (clan notables) to inform on every gesture of opposition to the Hashemite rule within their respective clans and areas. This in turn created a kind of police-state atmosphere all over the country.

Free-minded Palestinians who insisted on voicing their conscience were persecuted and dumped into the notorious El-Jafr prison in eastern Jordan where they were often tortured savagely, even to death. I know of a person from my town (Dura) who was tortured to death for his affiliation with the Communist Party.

Torture is still practiced in Jordan with the knowledge, blessing and encouragement of the United States and Britain. Some of the so-called ‘terror suspects’ held by the CIA were secretly flown to Jordan in order to be ‘softened up’ by Jordanian interrogators.

In the mid1950s, the Jordanian security forces on several occasions shot and killed demonstrators who were protesting the pro-Western policies of the government and the regime’s failure and inability to stop recurrent Israeli attacks. Some of these demonstrators were affiliated with or instigated by the Ba’ath party and the Communists who openly called for overthrowing the monarchy.

As a counterbalance to the leftists, who were quite active, especially in the West Bank, King Hussein allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to operate relatively freely. So it was a kind of divide-and-rule policy.

The leftists would accuse the Brotherhood of being British agents and the Brotherhood would retort by accentuating the atheism and enmity to Islam of the Communists and Ba’athists. Hussein’s relations with the Brotherhood remained relatively stable until the final years of his life when he introduced the one-man-one-vote law, aimed primarily at reducing to the minimum the number of parliament seats the well-organized Islamists could win.

Notwithstanding, the Muslim Brotherhood, or the Islamic Action Front, remains Jordan’s largest opposition party, despite government harassment and constant persecution.

The Muslim Brothers were not British agents or agents of any power. They only wanted to create an Islamic state in accordance with the Sharia. In other words, their strategy and goals were diametrically incompatible with those of the Communists and the Ba’athists. Hence, the mutual sullen hostility.

However, to be honest, the Jordanian regime, especially with regard to how the state treated its citizens, was not as bad and harsh  as other Arab regimes, e. g., Syria, Iraq and Egypt. In non-political and non-security matters, the rule of law was generally observed and applied. In general, an individual’s dignity was upheld as long as he or she didn’t criticize the regime or undermine the ‘security of the kingdom.’

More to the point, King Hussein was truly an astute leader. Far from behaving with vindictiveness and vengefulness toward his political opponents, even those who sought to assassinate him and overthrow his regime. The King nearly always pardoned them, showing magnanimity and gallantry unmatched in modern Arab history.

Despite its authoritarianism and despotism, the Jordanian regime never persecuted us in any way even remotely comparable to what the Nazi-like Israelis have been doing to us since 1967. The Jordanians never demolished a home, bulldozed a  farm or arrested people for years without charge or trial as Israel has been doing to us.

Yes, ‘wrongdoers’ were arrested and tried and often tortured, but their families wouldn’t be detained, their homes wouldn’t be bulldozed and their farms, orchards and olive groves wouldn’t be decimated as the Israelis routinely do. Jordan actually granted us full citizenship until the late King Hussein severed legal and administrative ties with the West Bank in 1988.

An outstanding exception occurred in 1970, during the so-called Black September events when the Jordanian army battled with PLO guerrillas who The King claimed were planning to take over Jordan and end the monarchy. Some atrocities were committed during these confrontations and many people, Palestinians and Jordanians, were killed. Nonetheless, the ‘September events’ should be considered a kind of anomaly in The King’s relations with the Palestinians.

In general, one can safely contend that there is no comparison between the Nazi-like Israeli occupation rule and the Jordanian era. The Jordanians were not really occupiers, they never behaved as occupiers. In many ways, The King was our king and the Kingdom was our kingdom. Yes, the regime was authoritarian and generally repressive, but, in all honesty, it cannot be compared to the Israelis whose barbarianism, brutal oppression, racism and  savagery transcend reality.

Nonetheless, Jordan was (and still is) a weak and poor kingdom, economically, politically and especially militarily. The Israeli army routinely carried out cross-border incursions into the West Bank prior to 1967, murdering innocent villagers, and the Jordanian army was generally too weak and too unequipped to repulse the Israeli aggressors.

King Hussein must have calculated that maintaining a peaceable or even quasi-friendly modus vivendi with Israel was the best insurance policy for retaining his kingdom and the rule of his Hashemite dynasty. I think he was wrong in thinking this way. His non-hostility towards Israel didn’t prevent the Jewish state from pursuing its aggressive policies, which culminated in the occupation of the West Bank in 1967.

King Hussein did make a lot of contacts with Israel even before the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. For example, on September 24, 1963, the director-general of the Israeli prime minister’s office, Yaacov Herzog, met the King in the London clinic of the King’s Jewish physician, Dr. Emmanuel Herbert.

Another meeting took place in Paris in 1965 and Israel was represented by Golda Meir, who was accompanied by Herzog.

It is also believed that Hussein had lots of contacts with the Israeli state through the alumni offices of Boston University.

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