Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: State of Terror
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://state-of-terror.net/
CITY: London, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
former faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music * http://thomassuarez.com/palestine_cv.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 92010305 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n92010305 |
| HEADING: | Suárez, Thomas |
| 000 | 00341nz a2200133n 450 |
| 001 | 754724 |
| 005 | 19920130124628.7 |
| 008 | 920130n| acannaab |n ana |
| 010 | __ |a n 92010305 |
| 035 | __ |a (DLC)n 92010305 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |c DLC |
| 100 | 10 |a Suárez, Thomas |
| 670 | __ |a His Shedding the veil, 1992: |b cip t.p. (Thomas Suárez) |
| 953 | __ |a bg05 |
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Curator, cartographer, political writer, violinist. Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music, faculty; Federal Reserve Board, Washington, DC, curator; Bristol-Myers Squibb Gallery, Princeton, NJ, curator; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, adviser.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Thomas Suarez writes on a variety of topics, including cartography, politics, and Palestine. He is curator for exhibitions at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, and the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Gallery, and is adviser for the Addison Gallery of American Art. His writings cover ancient mapping of the Old World, New World, the Pacific, and Asia.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia
In 1990, Suarez published Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, which explains the history of mapmaking, exploration, and colonization of Asia from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and regional maps’ influence on Western worldviews. The area of focus ranges from the Ganges River, through Burma, Thailand, Indochina, Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. Writing in Library Journal, Edward K. Werner said that Suarez “has assembled a fascinating corpus of period maps to illustrate the use of cartography by Europeans.” Werner also praised the informative references to notable cartographers and explorers, the readily accessible index, and the chapter devoted entirely to Asian maps of Southeast Asia.
P.J. Mode remarked on the Mercator’s World website: “This book is a double treat. The subject is compelling: For the first time we have a comprehensive and careful volume devoted entirely to the cartographic history of this important and fascinating area. And the presentation is admirable.” On the Bali Advertiser website, a contributor commented: “Thomas Suarez has helped create some of the finest collections of maps, both in private hands and in public institutions.”
Palestine Sixty Years Later
In 2010, Suarez published Palestine Sixty Years Later, part of the “Americans for Middle East Understanding” series. Through 171 photographs and essays, Suarez provides a look at modern-day Palestine. He explains the Zionist expropriation of 1948, partition, how Israel exploited Judaism, and Western political attitudes. He offers a view of occupation, land erosion, property disputes, and continuous threats of death, dispossession, and imprisonment. He also acknowledges the United States’ role in supporting Israel in its attacks and occupation.
“Suarez has taken powerful and revealing photos he accompanies them with a well-written, factual and authoritative text. Suarez observes and records with a sensitive eye and a keen empathy for the lives of Palestinians. … His focus is on people, people [trying] to live a normal life under a brutal occupation,” according to Theresa Wolfwood on the Book Reviews Website. Writing online at Middle East Book Reads, a reviewer commented: “Readers may dispute Suarez’s historic critique of Israel but his photographs of contemporary Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank are incontestable. They offer an unnerving portrait of a people and a land under an inconsolable occupation. Israel’s fixed presence in Gaza was replaced by what Suarez makes clear is a suffocating land, air, and sea blockade. Photos illuminate everyday life.”
State of Terror
Suarez next wrote State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel in 2017. In the book, he chronicles how Jewish leaders supported terrorism against Palestine that was systematic and routine. During the British Mandate in Palestine, terrorist acts against Palestinians were frequent, however, American and British newspapers reported primarily on bombings and massacres against Arabs and British civilians and soldiers. Suarez focuses on the organized violence of Hagana splinter groups Irgun and Lehi beginning in 1939. For the book, Suarez scoured the British National Archives at Kew and inspected declassified British documents covering the British Palestine Mandate of 1920-1948.
A writer in Kirkus Reviews said: “The book becomes a lengthy litany of Zionist terrorist attacks and the employment of ‘confusion and war weariness’ to push for its political objectives.” The writer added that in Suarez’s relentless, hard-hitting polemic, his theme is that statehood was essentially gained by Zionist terrorism. Suarez primarily “recounts episodes of violence rather than offering analysis, but it is nevertheless an impressive display of historical excavation,” remarked a writer in Publishers Weekly.
Some reviewers found the book entirely one-sided, such as Jonathan Hoffman online at Times of Israel. Hoffman wrote: “It is 328 pages of unremitting vilification of Israel.” Despite a brief mention of Palestinian terrorist attacks in the book’s introduction, there is no mention of the Hebron massacre of 1929 and other violence, according to Hoffman. “The book is so biased and contains so many untruths, distorted quotes and unsubstantiated allegations, that one must conclude that it would never have seen the light of day, were it not for the fact that the publisher is Karl Sabbagh’s new company,” said Hoffman.
Aware of the controversy the book has invoked, a writer online at Skyscraper Publications noted that Suarez’s itemizing of terrorist acts in Palestine and Israel perpetrated by Jewish groups against the British, Palestinian Arabs, and Jews who disagreed with Zionism “have triggered a wave of opposition from people and groups who label any criticism of Zionism or Israel as anti-Semitic.” Believing that the established myth is that after a history of antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, the Jews “deserved” Israel, however, Suarez’s book “convincingly refutes the generally accepted history entirely….Suarez has delivered a careful, albeit painful, history,” said Eve Mykytyn on the If American’s Knew website.
According to Counter Currents website reviewer Vacy Vlazna: “Reading page after page of Suarez’ intensive inventory of Jewish terrorism in Palestine, there were times that I could hardly breathe. I felt that I was suffocating on inexorable evil….Apropos the malignancy of evil and racist psychopathy buttressing the zionist foundations of the Jewish state, Suarez tells us nothing new.” Nevertheless, in a review on the Palestine Square Website, Sebastian Bernburg praised Suarez’s research, saying: “With State of Terror Suárez has laid out an impressive archival foundation for other scholars to build on in writing about an immensely important theme that has all too often been forgotten, and that challenges the Zionist grand narrative of Israel’s inception.”
Writing in Arab Studies Quarterly, Elaine C. Hagopian reported: “While Suarez gives great attention to the terrorist methods used to facilitate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, his overall emphasis is on the comprehensiveness of Zionist planning for appropriating Palestine without Palestinians.” Hagopian continued: “He assiduously records how the main Zionist institution in Palestine, the Jewish Agency, orchestrated these efforts during the Mandate period.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Arab Studies Quarterly, spring, 2017, Elaine C. Hagopian, review of State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, p. 861.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2017, review of State of Terror.
Library Journal, April 1, 2000, Edward K. Werner, review of Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, p. 120.
Mercator’s World, March, 2000, P.J. Mode, review of Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, p. 54.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of State of Terror, p. 56.
ONLINE
Bali Advertiser, https://www.baliadvertiser.biz/ (April 25, 2018) review of Early Mapping of Southeast Asia.
Book Reviews, http://bookreviews.bbcf.ca/ (October 14, 2012) Theresa Wolfwood, review of Palestine: Sixty Years Later.
Cosmography, http://www.cosmography.com/ (April 1, 2018), author profile.
Counter Currents, https://countercurrents.org/ (February 6, 2018), Vacy Vlazna, review of State of Terror.
If American’s Knew, https://israelpalestinenews.org/review-thomas-surezs-state-terror/ (June 17, 2017), Eve Mykytyn, review of State of Terror.
Middle East Book Reads, https://www.middleeastreads.com/ (December 30, 2010), review of Palestine: Sixty Years Later.
Palestine Square, https://palestinesquare.com/(March 13, 2018), Sebastian Bernburg, review of State of Terror.
Skyscraper Publications, http://www.skyscraperpublications.com/ (May 19, 2017), review of State of Terror.
Times of Israel Online, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ (November 14, 2016), Jonathan Hoffman, review of State of Terror.
Thomas Suárez’s experience as a researcher began in the 1980s with his work on the history of cartography. His books on that topic include Shedding the Veil [1992], Early Mapping of the Pacific [1999], and Early Mapping of Southeast Asia [2004], this last work considered the standard text on the subject.
His contributions to edited volumes include, "Early Portuguese Mapping of Siam", in 500 Years of Thai-Portuguese Relations [2011], and "Genesis of the American West: The Cortes Map", in Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement 1524-1890 [Rizzoli, 2002].
A professional violinist, Suárez is a former member of major US symphony orchestras and a former faculty member of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music.
A native of New York, Suárez now lives in London.
US edition
UK edition State of Terror - How terrorism created modern Israel (2016)
BOOK HOMEPAGE, with illustrations of key documents (coming), reviews, and errata.
Why has the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ endured for so long, with no resolution in sight? In this meticulously researched book, Thomas Suárez demonstrates that its cause is not the commonly depicted clash between two ethnic groups — Arabs and Jews — but the violent takeover of Palestine by Zionism, a European settler movement hailing from the era of ethnic nationalism.
Tapping a trove of declassified British documents, much of which has never before been published, the book details a shocking campaign of Zionist terrorism in 1940s and 1950s Palestine that targeted anyone who challenged its messianic settler goals, whether the British government, the indigenous Palestinians, or Jews.
Today’s seemingly intractable quagmire is that terror campaign’s unfinished business,
an Israeli state driven by unrequited territorial designs and the dream of ethnic ‘purity’. The role of Zionist terrorism in establishing the Israeli state and perpetuating today’s conflict is laid bare in Suárez’s groundbreaking narrating of the unbroken historical record.
REVIEWS
• Mondoweiss | • Electronic Intifada | • Tribune Magazine
• Kirkus Reviews | • Free Speech on Israel | • Jonathan Cook
• CounterCurrents
ENDORSEMENTS
••• “A tour de force, based on diligent archival research that looks boldly at the impact of Zionism on Palestine and its people in the first part of the 20th century. The book is the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Much of the suffering we witness today can be explained by, and connected to, this formative period covered thoroughly in this book.”
— Ilan Pappé, Historian, Author, and Professor, University of Exeter
••• "I thought I knew a fair bit about the Middle East after all the years I've been involved in its politics but this book came as an eye-opener. I realised how ignorant I was, not of the events since the establishment of Israel but of the terror campaign that led up to it. Everyone who has ever accepted Israel’s own account of its history should read this book... It should change them forever."
— Baroness Jenny Tonge
Palestine Sixty Years Later (2010)
Palestine sixty years later combines 171 photographs and commentary into a vivid glimpse of modern-day Palestine. An Introduction summarizes the origins of partition, discusses methods of Zionist expropriation used in 1948 and in use today, and analyzes how Israel has exploited Judaism and the collective Western subconscious for its political ends.
• "A beautiful, evocative book. Suarez's marvellous photographs capture more eloquently than any words the essence of what it means to live under Israeli occupation. The accompanying text is authoritative and to the point. An aesthetic and educational experience not to be missed."
— Ghada Karmi
• "A moving, fact-filled and insightful portrait of a people under relentless siege."
— Prof. Norman Finkelstein
• Amazon listing
Published articles about Palestine and the "conflict"
most recent at the top • UNRWA ‘aid’ is aid only in the lexicon of Orwellian newspeak
• Balfour Centennial: The Role of Terror in the State-Building Process
(video, Cambridge, USA, Nov 2017)
• Smear campaign is defused as Tom Suarez speaks at UMass
• The Cult of the Zionists - An Historical Enigma
• Amazon pulls blank ‘History of Palestinian People’ — which aims to dehumanize in order to subjugate
• New website sets Zionist myths vs. the historical record
• A Response to the allegations in a complaint filed with the House of Lords and dismissed in HL Paper 142
• Map map on the wall, who’s most existing of them all?
• Israel, naked under the microscope in Cork
• The Palestine Philharmonie — an orchestra is born in Bethlehem
• Terrorism: How the Israeli state was won
• Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the ghost of U.N. past
• Video: A glimpse of Palestinians living under occupation in Hebron
• Video: O little invasion of Bethlehem
• Israel vs the Violin
• Chomsky and BDS
• BBC festival features Palestine Strings and condemnation of apartheid to jubilant applause
• From the back of the bus at Allenby to Jakarta’s symphony hall
• UXOs: Did Israel deliberately arm Hamas?
• The Palestine National Orchestra: a view from the violin section
• Report from Bethlehem: Obama exploits the messenger of peace for a photo-op
• ‘Eroica’ cancelled due to Israeli interference
• Violinist tumbles while climbing separation wall, is unable to perform historic concert
• The (what about) China syndrome
• Google and the eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish people
• Captive Audiences
• Visit Abu Dis- site of the future Palestinian capital?
• "Cockroach" — Erez Crossing, Israel, October 26, 2008
Sample of book talks • Boston (Cambridge), 11 November, 2017
• USA, September, 2017
• Edinburgh, 12 Augsut, 2017 (video)
• Cambridge, 11 May, 2017 (video)
• House of Lords, London, 14 December, 2016 (transcript)
• East Jerusalem, 29 November, 2016 (video)
on the radio • WZBC (Boston), May 28, 2017
videos • Bethlehem, 11 December, 2015
• Hebron, 10 December, 2015
Thomas Suárez
violin
A native of New York, Thomas Suárez is a former member of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, American Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, and several of New York’s chamber ensembles. Over the course of four decades, he held principal positions with the ballet orchestra at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, served as associate concertmaster and principle second violin in the Spoleto Festival in Italy, been artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College, and performed throughout Japan, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Micronesia, Morocco, and Palestine. While still a student at the Juilliard School, he was one of two subjects in a 1972 film from Luciano Berio’s series, C’è Musica e Musica. Suárez studied with Ivan Galamian, Felix Galimir, Josef Gingold, Louise Behrend, and three members of the Budapest String Quartet. Also a composer, he studied with the American composer Hugh Aitken.
While artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence College, Suárez maintained teaching and coaching responsibilities along with regular performances as a member of the College’s resident string quartet. In Hawaii his quartet brought music to underprivileged schools in rural areas of the outer islands as part of the US government’s ‘Head Start’ program. He spent fifteen summers in Japan with an American chamber orchestra whose off-stage activities extended to organizing and training local music students. In Palestine, he was a member of a string trio that gave concerts and ‘hands-on’ workshops with children in West Bank refugee camps. More recently, he held the post of teacher of violin and viola at the Jerusalem branch of Palestine’s Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, coached its student orchestra, and conducted string sectionals. Although Suárez was taught in the ‘old-school’ Western tradition, Shinichi Suzuki, the Japanese mentor whose method revolutionized violin instruction to children on a large scale, selected him as his subject to demonstrate his method on his first trip to the United States in 1966.
Recent Compositions
by Thomas Suárez
Peregrinations for string quartet
(2011)
Fountayne Editions
order sheet music here
for citation, here
Trilogy of Ages
(2015)
(violin and piano)
(more information coming...)
return to main page
Published works on the History of Cartography
by Thomas Suarez
• Early Mapping of Southeast Asia [Charles E. Tuttle, 1999]
• Early Portuguese Mapping of Siam, in 500 Years of Thai-Portuguese Relations [Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2011]
• Early Mapping of the Pacific [Charles E. Tuttle, 2004]
• Shedding the Veil: Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World [World Scientific, 1992]
• Genesis of the American West: The Cortes Map, in Mapping the West: America's Westward Movement 1524-1890, ed. Paul Cohen [Rizzoli, 2002]
• Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World (Exhibit Catalog) Washington, D.C.: Federal Reserve, 1991
• A revised chronology for the mapping of America in the late sixteenth century: Hogenberg, Mazza, Ortelius [co-authored with Richard Casten], in The Map Collector, March 1995 (pp 26-30).
• numerous articles and book reviews
About the author :
Thomas Suarez has been a well-known figure in the field of early maps for many years. He has helped create some of the finest collections of maps, both in private hands and in public institutions, and he has acted as curator for exhibitions at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., and the Bristol-Meyers Squibb Gallery, and as advisor for the Addison Gallery of American Art. The author of numerous articles on the subject of early maps, Suarez' previous books include Shedding the Veil, about the early mapping of America, and The Crustacean Codex, a fictional work set against a background of exploration and discovery.
Suarez, Thomas: STATE OF TERROR
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Suarez, Thomas STATE OF TERROR Olive Branch/Interlink (Adult Nonfiction) $20.00 7, 6 ISBN: 978-1-56656-068-9
A chronicle of Zionist sins since the beginning of the "settler project" in the 1920s to the 1956 Suez Crisis.London-based professional violinist and author Suarez (Palestine Sixty Years Later, 2010, etc.) is careful to first define Zionist "terrorism" before he launches into his systematic, chronological account of how it played out in the Jewish settling of Mandatory Palestine. If terrorism means the violent targeting of civilians, then the "ethno-national movement of Zionism," which accomplished the appropriation of non-Jewish land over many decades, even if it meant "making life so miserable for [Palestinians] that they [left] 'of their own accord,' " certainly fit the bill. Moreover--and this is where Suarez is most sharply provocative--the early Zionists also targeted Jews themselves, such as pressuring post-World War II displaced persons to settle in Palestine as well as kidnapping Jewish orphans to keep them from being raised Christian. Not surprisingly, the author blames Europe's Zionist leaders--Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion et al.--for propounding an extraordinary kind of messianism, a biblical Israel that was "not subject to norms applicable to the rest of the world." Suarez concentrates on the highly organized violence of Hagana splinter groups Irgun and Lehi from 1939 through the founding of the state: both were anti-Palestinian and anti-British. Yet these terrorist groups also targeted Jewish "traitors." The author emphasizes the anti-Semitic nature of Zionism in creating "a permanent state of emergency" for which a Jewish state in Palestine was the only answer. Eventually, the book becomes a lengthy litany of Zionist terrorist attacks and the employment of "confusion and war weariness" to push for its political objectives, namely to assume all of Palestine and not just what was granted at Partition in late 1947. The author's theme is that Partition, and thus statehood, was essentially gained by Zionist terrorism. A relentless, hard-hitting, ultimately one-note polemic.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Suarez, Thomas: STATE OF TERROR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491934124/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&
xid=00d7ff37. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A491934124
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State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p56. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel
Thomas Suarez. Olive Branch, $20 (418p) ISBN 978-1-56656-068-9
Suarez (Palestine Sixty Years Later) passionately and meticulously exposes the terrorism committed by Zionist groups in Palestine from the post-WWI era of the British Mandate through the early years of the Israeli state. Though not a historian by trade, Suarez ably presents material from British archives, Zionist documents, and other sources to chronicle the relentless onslaught of kidnappings, shootings, and bombings committed by Zionist terror organizations. Suarez outlines the ideological origins and racialized basis of the Zionist political movement and details how groups such as Irgun and Lehi--"the terror gangs of the Mandate era"--spared few to achieve their political aims, targeting native Palestinians, British authorities, and "uncooperative" Jews in Palestine; even WWII refugees and Jewish victims of Nazi crimes were considered fodder for Zionist political aims. He demonstrates the centrality of coercion and terror to the eventual establishment of the Israeli state and argues that the ongoing "conflict" between Israel and the Palestinians is less an intractable collision between historic enemies than it is "the single story" of political Zionism's "underlying linear violence" and "its determination to expropriate all of Palestine for a 'Jewish' settler nation predicated on blood descent--'race.'" Much of Suarez's work recounts episodes of violence rather than offering analysis, but it is nevertheless an impressive display of historical excavation. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 56. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500749
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ccee8f74. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500749
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Early Mapping of Southeast Asia
Edward K. Werner
Library Journal.
125.6 (Apr. 1, 2000): p120. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Suarez, Thomas. Early Mapping of Southeast Asia. Periplus Editions: Tuttle. 1999. 280p. illus. maps. index. ISBN 962-593-470-7. $65. TRAV
Map expert Suarez (Shedding the Veil), who has served as a curator for map exhibits at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC, has assembled a fascinating corpus of period maps to illustrate the use of cartography by Europeans in their exploration, interpretation, and subsequent colonization of Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 19th centuries. For the purpose of this study, Southeast Asia is defined as mainland areas east of the Ganges River, through Burma, Thailand, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula as well as the insular region from the Nicobar and Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean to Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The authoritative text includes informative references to notable cartographers and explorers readily accessible through the index. Although the emphasis is on European maps, one chapter is entirely devoted to Asian maps of Southeast Asia. This unusual but handsome resource (of the 120 illustrations, 50 are reproduced in full color) is recommended for all public and academic libraries, particularly those with extensive cartographic or Asian history collections.
--Edward K. Werner, St. Lucie Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Pierce, FL
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Werner, Edward K. "Early Mapping of Southeast Asia." Library Journal, 1 Apr. 2000, p. 120. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A61755890
/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c7c04c0c. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A61755890
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State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
36.4 (June-July 2017): p73. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 American Educational Trust http://www.washington-report.org
Full Text:
State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel by Thomas Suarez, Interlink, 2016, paperback, 418 pp. List: $20; MEB: $18. Suarez tracks the use of terror by Israel and its supporters in creating a Jewish state in Palestine. Relying on historical and contemporary sources, he tracks the acts of political and social terrorism often buried in the mainstream media and public consciousness.
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June-July 2017, p. 73. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A497730754/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6881d82f. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A497730754
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State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel
Elaine C. Hagopian
Arab Studies Quarterly.
39.2 (Spring 2017): p861+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Pluto Journals http://arabstudiesquarterly.plutojournals.org/
Full Text:
Suarez, Thomas. State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. Bloxham, Oxon: Skyscraper Publications, 2016. 417 pages. Hardback $15.77 Reviewed by Elaine C. Hagopian
Thomas Suarez has added muscle to the growing revelations of the mendacity of the Zionist project in Palestine. An independent scholar, he spent years mining the British National Archives at Kew. His book is based primarily on declassified British documents covering the British Palestine Mandate (officially 1923-48; de facto 1920-48) through the 1948 war and thereafter.
While Suarez gives great attention to the terrorist methods used to facilitate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, his overall emphasis is on the comprehensiveness of Zionist planning for appropriating Palestine without Palestinians. Circumventing the sympathetic but wary British Mandate authorities, and firmly establishing the "legitimizing" Zionist narrative needed to lay claim to the land and minds of Jews, the plan formed the existential bases of the state to be. He assiduously records how the main Zionist institution in Palestine, the Jewish Agency, orchestrated these efforts during the Mandate period. David Ben Gurion, later to be Israel's first prime minister, served as the chairman of the Agency's Executive Committee.
The Jewish Agency in Palestine, an offshoot of the World Zionist Organization, was founded in 1929 to represent the Yishuv's (Jewish Settlers in Palestine) relations with world Jewry, as well as with the British Mandatory officials and other relevant states and world institutions. It served in essence as the governing body for Jews in Palestine and the representative of the Zionist project abroad. It was charged with resettling Jews in Palestine and educating them ideologically and professionally to serve the needs of an emerging Israel. (1) It also had a "defense" force, the Haganah, and a strike force, the Palmach. The Haganah engaged in anti-British and anti-Palestinian terrorism while other terrorist organizations, the Irgun and Lehi, received much of the notoriety. As Suarez documents, the Jewish Agency protected these terrorist groups whenever the British asked for the Agency's help in controlling their violence. Ben Gurion pretended concern but did nothing to expose or restrain the groups. He tolerated Irgun and Lehi's independent terrorist activities because both groups were committed to achieving the same Zionist goal as that of the Agency, i.e., establishing a Jewish state.
To appreciate the political adeptness of the Jewish Agency and the various terrorist groups, one need only read Suarez's chapters covering the forties. These chapters are an unrelenting litany of infrastructure bombings, letter bombs, mass killings, and massacres of Palestinian villagers presented in great detail. Equally, those chapters expose the systematic acts of terrorism directed against British Mandate officials, facilities, and infrastructure. Although the Zionists had been favored by the British, they had also become leery of their violence. Zionist terrorist acts were further weakening an already war-torn Britain. Suarez alludes to the fact that the Zionists did not have a relationship of conflict with the British. Rather, they wanted to end the Mandate so that they could have an unobstructed go at the indigenous Palestinians. As Suarez points out, fighting the British served the Zionist claim that they were fighting a "war of liberation" against a colonial power, which suited their public relations in the West, especially in the USA. Each of the Zionist terrorist groups also carried out attacks against British facilities and individuals outside of Palestine. Suarez further details the number of non-Zionist Jews killed, some of whom worked for the British in Palestine, because they did not embrace Zionism. Their example to other Jews was unacceptable.
There are a number of new revelations in this book as well as older ones, which are fleshed out. They contradict the manufactured public image of the creation of Israel. Take, for example, Zionist blockage of American and European resettlement rescue efforts of Jewish victims of Nazi Germany to places other than Palestine. Suarez notes:
Rescue, Ben-Gurion preached, was not Zionism's top priority; the top priority was furthering the Zionist state... (82)
An Intelligence Summary from April of 1945 quotes Eliyahu Dobkin, then head of the Jewish Agency's Immigration Department, as saying that terrorist methods would be used to force European Jews to move to Palestine after the war and to prevent Jews in Palestine from leaving. (120)
Suarez concludes:
... the best estimate available is that after the war, only fifteen percent [of Jewish victims] would willingly have gone to Palestine despite years of the Zionists' propaganda efforts. (120)
Suarez details other methods that Zionists strategists employed for the territorial and demographic transformation of Palestine. For example, the Jewish Agency developed Jewish settler "hiking parties" or "walking tours" as early as 1942. Their task was to compile intelligence surveys of Palestinian Arab areas. These would be used, especially in the 1948 war, to guide Zionist forces in their ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and land seizure. Moreover, in their effort to increase Jewish settlers in Palestine, the Zionists developed campaigns to encourage healthy American Jews to make Aliyah (immigration to Israel), a contrast to the needy Jewish survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Nonetheless, the latter category remained their main rationale for a Jewish state. The Zionists also sought to populate Palestine with surviving European Jewish orphans. These children could be easily socialized into the Zionist narrative and provide a ready-made second generation to sustain the transformation of Palestine. Suarez notes:
Thousands of Jewish children were forcibly removed from the adoptive families that had saved them when their parents perished years earlier, the kidnappings sometimes assisted by Jewish Brigade soldiers. (122)
In short, there is an abundance of detailed information in State of Terror, which seals the coffin of the faux Zionist narrative. Nonetheless, two observations must be made. First, some familiarity with the historical period covered in the book is needed in order to follow the events recorded and analyzed by Suarez. Second, the importance of the tenure of the first British High Commissioner of Palestine, Herbert Samuel (1920-25), overlapping with the official implementation of the Mandate, must be recognized for establishing the demographic, political, and economic framework of the Zionist Project. The Jewish Agency built on Samuel's work.
Sahar Huneidi chronicles Herbert Samuel's policies at the very beginning of the British Mandate. (2) Samuel was a committed Zionist well before he became the High Commissioner of Palestine. However, he represented himself as an impartial administrator. Huneidi records how he used his position to lay the foundations for a Jewish State in Palestine. Among his many official enabling actions were the following: promoted a liberal Jewish immigration policy; altered Ottoman "land use" definition of "ownership" of state lands so that when Jews purchased said lands, they could evict the Palestinian "land use" owners and gain territorial and economic entrenchment in Palestine; facilitated contiguous Jewish settlements of the Yishuv; promoted investments and financing to employ Jewish immigrants; enacted import customs policies to secure materials cheaply for developing a Jewish economy; and negotiated Palestine-wide project concessions for Jews, which advanced their future control of Palestinian economic life. Jewish immigrants were also given immediate provisional citizenship, which permitted electoral impact. Samuel consulted regularly with Chaim Weizmann, then head of the World Zionist Organization. He worked closely with the Zionist Commission, later known as the Palestine Zionist Executive, precursor of the Jewish Agency, and with the National Council for Jews in Palestine (Va'ad Leumi), precursor of the Israeli Knesset. He blocked efforts by the majority Palestinians to gain meaningful representation while promoting Zionist power.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
Huneidi provides an excellent context for Suarez's book. However, it is his painstaking research, which documents the unconscionable strategy and terrorist tactics Zionists used to establish the Israeli Settler State. It mutes any belief that Israel would willingly allow any form of Palestinian self-determination or right of return. State of Terror should be added to the essential sources for researchers on this issue, as well as required reading for university courses on the Palestine/Israel Conflict.
Notes
(1.) http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Orgs/jafi.html.
(2.) Sahar Huneidi, A Broken Trust: Herbert Samuel, Zionism and the Palestinians (London and New York: I.B. Tauris), 2001. Elaine C. Hagopian, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Simmons College, Boston.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hagopian, Elaine C. "State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel." Arab Studies Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, 2017, p. 861+. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491408252/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=08f209f7. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A491408252
8 of 9 3/19/18, 11:36 PM
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Early Mapping of Southeast Asia
P.J. Mode
Mercator's World.
5.2 (Mar. 2000): p54. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2000 Advanstar Communications, Inc. http://www.advanstar.com
Full Text:
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia, by Thomas Suarez, 1999. Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., 5 Little Road, #8-01, Singapore 536983. Distributed in the U.S. by Charles E. Tuttle Co., Inc., North Clarendon, VT 05759. Hardcover. 280 pages, 168 color and black-and-white maps and other illustrations. ISBN 962-593-470-7. $65.
This book is a double treat. The subject is compelling: For the first time we have a comprehensive and careful volume devoted entirely to the cartographic history of this important and fascinating area. And the presentation is admirable: Not only is the publication sumptuous, but Tom Suarez brings the subject to life with scholarly care and fine, clear writing.
Suarez begins with two short chapters that set the stage, particularly for Western readers who are not scholars of the area. The first covers the peoples of Southeast Asia and their lives, including the major forces of religion, geography, and colonization. The second focuses on geographic thought, beginning with the influence of Indian views and progressing to cosmological and sacred mapping, an essential predicate to understanding the history of Asian cartography. On this sound foundation, Suarez builds the history of Southeast Asian cartography, from the classical and medieval periods through the nineteenth century.
Along the way the book devotes substantial attention to cartographic myth--a subject very appropriate to this geographic region. There is a full analysis of the fabled island of Waq- Waq, showing how the myth began, how it grew, and how resistant it became to contrary knowledge. In the same vein are discussions of the Philippine island of St. John as well as some of history's most ubiquitous geographic myths, including Paradise, Ophir, and the Seven Cities (which, though normally associated with America or the North Atlantic, Suarez has found in Southeast Asia).
Perhaps of greatest importance is the book's scholarly analysis. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 offer a detailed and careful review of the evolution of Southeast Asian geography, from depictions of the eastern shore of Ptolemy's closed Indian Ocean, through the giant peninsulas that dominated its cartography for over a century, to something like the modern picture. In the course of this review, Suarez offers new guidance on a subject that still confounds students of the history of cartography.
In Chapter 10 Suarez proposes a quite convincing answer to the puzzle of why Oronce Fine's double-cordiform map of 1531, written after knowledge of Magellan's voyage was available, shows a Pacific even smaller than pre-Magellan notions. Because Fine was living in Paris at the time, Suarez suggests, his work was likely based on the first French edition of Pigafetta's Journal (published in 1525), which mistakenly translated the Line of Demarcation (through Brazil, the reference point for the measurement of longitude) as the line of departure (that is, Seville).
Chapter 11 offers a very useful analysis of Gastaldi's three fine sixteenth-century maps of Southeast Asia, "the best and most inspired" cartography of the region of the time.
Those familiar with Suarez' entertaining catalogues and other scholarly publications will not be surprised to find that this new work raises many interesting and provocative questions. Can Macrobian cosmography and philosophy be fairly compared to Buddhism? What should one make of the European Renaissance notion that the discoveries in Southeast Asia were nothing less than a "reclamation" of Europe's spiritual "home"? Is there any evidence that Waldseemuller did in fact use the log of Ludovico di Varthema as the source for his Southeast Asian cartography? Could the mistakes in the mapping of the Moluccas have been more the product of simple error than the result of political manipulation, as is commonly believed? All of these and more will provide fuel for further research and analysis in the years to come.
In its presentation and its scholarship, this book achieves a high standard indeed. And it establishes Tom Suarez -- with Tooley, Nebenzahl, Burden, and others -- as a map dealer/scholar who plays an important role in the history of cartography.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mode, P.J. "Early Mapping of Southeast Asia." Mercator's World, Mar. 2000, p. 54. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A60099882/GPS?u=schlager&
sid=GPS&xid=d3787742. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A60099882
9 of 9 3/19/18, 11:36 PM
State of Terror,’ by Thomas Suárez
Middle East David Gerald Fincham on October 13, 2016 64 Comments
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1946 train bombing, image from Tom Suarez's book State of Terror
A review of State of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel, by Thomas Suárez. Published today in the UK, available for pre-order in the U.S.
To introduce the theme of this book, I can do no better than to quote its endorsement by Prof. Ilan Pappé:
A tour de force, based on diligent archival research that looks boldly at the impact of Zionism on Palestine and its people in the first part of the 20th century. The book is the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, against the people of Palestine.
Thanks to Prof. Pappé and other Israeli ‘new’ historians working from Israeli government archives, we now have a good understanding of the extent of the catastrophe which befell the Palestinian people in the 1947-49 period as the Zionist forces fought through Palestine either driving out the non-Jewish population, or, if they fled, taking over their property and destroying empty villages.
Tom Suarez's new book, State of Terror
Tom Suarez’s new book, State of Terror
The less well-known history of the period before this, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 through the British Mandate of 1922-1948 has now been thoroughly researched in this new book by Thomas Suárez, working largely from British Government archives. He continues the story until the end of the 1956 war in which Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt.
The book is a substantial work of historical scholarship of over 400 pages, including 680 endnotes, some of them long paragraphs quoting several sources. There is also a very comprehensive index, and a few contemporary photographs. Some maps of the territory would have helped the reader follow the story.
The story he tells is of a Zionist elite determined from the beginning to turn all of Palestine into a Jewish state in which the local non-Jewish Arab population would be either subjugated or expelled. The Zionists were quite willing to use violence and terrorism to achieve this aim, and the book traces the resulting unhappy history in detail, to the extent that, in places, it reads like a catalog of Zionist terror attacks. The Zionist policy is made clear in this quote from Menachem Begin, later a Prime Minister of Israel, which appears at the head of the book’s Introduction:
“We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a Greater Jewish State”.
The author does not deny or condone the existence of Palestinian Arab terrorism, but shows how it was then (and remains today) “a reaction to Zionist ethnic subjugation and expropriation of land, resources and labour, with non-violent resistance having proved futile”. Whereas the Palestinian terrorists were loose bands of guerillas operating in the country districts, the Zionist terrorists were organized militias operating from within urban centers under the protection of those communities.
As Palestinian terrorism died down after the brutal suppression of the Arab protests in 1936, Zionist terror escalated, particularly after the 1939 White Paper which placed restrictions on Jewish immigration, “targeting anyone in the way of its political objectives – Palestinian, British or Jewish”. During the second world war, the official Zionist militia, Hagana, toned down its attacks on the British. Both Arab and Jewish Palestinians volunteered to join the Allied forces, though the Jews insisted on their own regiment.
From 1942 onwards, when it was clear that the Allies were going to win the war, the Zionists restarted their campaign of wholesale terrorism (as the British described it) to establish a Zionist state by force: a campaign which eventually forced Britain’s decision to abandon the Mandate, leading to the UN Partition Plan, civil war, ethnic-cleansing of the Arab population, and the unilateral declaration of the State of Israel in 1948.
Tom Suárez in the West Bank. Photo credit Sainatee Suárez
Tom Suárez in the West Bank. Photo credit Sainatee Suárez
The book makes the important point that in the early days most of world Jewry were opposed to Zionism. In Britain, the Jewish cabinet minister Lord Montagu, supported by other Jewish leaders, viewed the Zionists as collaborators with the anti-semites who were delighted with the idea of the Jews expelling themselves from their current homelands. Montagu was instrumental in changing the aim of the Balfour Declaration from “Palestine AS THE Jewish national home” to the vaguer “A Jewish national home IN Palestine”. Orthodox Jews, including the indigenous Arab Jews of Palestine, thought that the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel could not take place until the time of the Messiah, and rejected Zionism as an attempt to replace Jewish religion with a secular, nationalistic ideology. Liberal Jews did not believe that Jews constituted a national group who needed a political home, and were loyal to their existing homeland. In the USA a group of (mainly Reform) rabbis established the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, still active today.
The book also reveals the Zionist willingness to use violence against their Jewish opponents; their conviction that all Jews had an obligation to leave their homelands to go to Palestine; their willingness to stir up anti-semitism to encourage such migration; and their attempts to prevent displaced Jews going anywhere other than Palestine.
Jerusalem from the north, during the Mandate period, an image from Tom Suarez's book State of Terror
Jerusalem from the north, during the Mandate period, an image from Tom Suarez’s book State of Terror
The coverage of historical events in the book is somewhat sketchy, and might confuse the general reader not already familiar with the topic: for example, the 1917 Balfour Declaration is discussed but the text is not provided. It presents the 1947 UN Partition Plan simply as a division of Palestine (excluding Jerusalem) into two states, Jewish and Arab, as if they were to be independent sovereign states. In fact, they were to be joined in a confederation effectively under UN trusteeship, and created by a process in which there was no place for a unilateral declaration of independence. Ben-Gurion’s attempt in Israel’s Declaration of Establishment to justify it through the Partition Plan was a fraud. We are told that the Declaration did not acknowledge any borders for the new state, but not told that the Zionists were forced to make a formal declaration of borders as proposed by the Partition Plan in order to achieve recognition by the USA. This is significant because it makes it clear that Israel was not invaded by 5 Arab armies on 15 May 1948, as Zionists claim: most of the fighting in the subsequent war was outside its borders, and only Syrian and Egyptian troops entered Israeli territory.
This book is true, and it is important. It proves beyond doubt that Israel is not the perpetual victim of Arab violence that it claims to be, but has been the aggressor throughout the history of the conflict.
Thomas Suárez is to be congratulated and thanked for his work. This book is a tremendous achievement by a writer who is also a talented musician and an expert in historic cartography.
Publication Information
UK Edition published by Skyscraper Publications, 13 October 2016, RRP £20.
Format: Hardcover, 417 pages
ISBN: 978-1911072034
Available on amazon.co.uk
US Edition published by Interlink-Olive Branch, November 23, 2016, $20
Format: Paperback, 288 pages
ISBN: 978-1566560689
Available for pre-order on amazon.com.
Electronic edition forthcoming. The book has its own website at state-of-terror.net
About David Gerald Fincham
Dr. David Gerald Fincham is a retired academic scientist from the United Kingdom. He now writes about the relationships between religion, science, and peace. His website is religion-science-peace.org.
Other posts by David Gerald Fincham.
How Zionist terrorism determined Palestine’s fate
Rod Such The Electronic Intifada 15 March 2017
State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Thomas Suárez, Olive Branch Press (2017)
Israel’s propaganda playbook attempts to reframe the Palestinian liberation struggle as a question of terror, not territory. Thanks to a dutiful media, this effort to portray Palestinians as terrorists has had significant traction among some demographics.
But how did terrorism originate in Palestine and what was its outcome, both historically and today?
Thomas Suárez sheds much new light on those questions in State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel. He does this largely by mining previously neglected declassified documents from the British National Archives, covering the period of the British Mandate for Palestine (1920-1948).
Suárez’s principal thesis is that Zionist terrorism “ultimately dictated the course of events during the Mandate, and it is Israeli state terrorism that continues to dictate events today.”
The author cautions that while he unequivocally condemns Palestinian terrorism against civilians, he recognizes that some were driven to extreme measures due to an asymmetry in power and in reaction to attempts to subjugate the Palestinian people and expropriate their resources, land and labor.
Zionist terrorism aimed to prevent Palestinian Arabs from exercising their right to self-determination, Suárez argues, and when an aggressor encounters resistance, it can hardly use self-defense as a justification for its own acts of violence. “Otherwise,” Suárez writes, “all aggression would self-justify.”
Suárez is not a professional historian. However, State of Terror has drawn praise from such figures as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe who – on the book cover – calls it a “tour de force” and “the first comprehensive and structured analysis” of the violence employed by the Zionist movement both before and after Israel’s creation. Indeed, Suárez’s scholarship is impressive and the book includes nearly 700 endnotes consisting mainly of original sources.
Insightful meditation
At its best, State of Terror is an insightful meditation on history. This is apparent especially in the opening chapters that cover the period leading up to the British Mandate and the issuance of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain decreed a “national home” for Jews in Palestine.
Suárez offers a penetrating analysis of the roots of Zionist ideology, showing not only its racist underpinnings and colonialist attitudes toward Arabs but also its attempt to exercise political, religious and cultural hegemony over the Jewish people. In a sense Suárez exposes political Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism and a kind of totalitarianism.
The Zionist mistreatment of Jews is a sub theme that runs throughout Suárez’s narrative. Early Zionist leaders tried to depict Jews as a “race” and “nationality,” rather than a people of faith and ethnic identity. Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion also maintained that Jews were ”obliged to settle in Palestine.”
Suárez cites an early opponent of Zionism, the English Jewish journalist and historian Lucien Wolf who condemned Zionism as “a comprehensive capitulation to the calumnies of the anti-Semites” that would set back the Jewish struggle for equality in their home countries.
In support of this claim, Wolf notes that Arthur James Balfour, who was foreign secretary at the time of the declaration that bears his name, appears to have been motivated to promise a “national home” for Jews by classic anti-Semitism: as prime minister in 1905, Balfour had attempted to block Jewish refugees escaping Czarist Russia’s pogroms from immigrating to Britain, viewing them as an “undoubted evil.”
Suárez makes the dramatic claim that “most victims” of the targeted assassinations carried out by Zionist paramilitaries in Mandate Palestine were Jews, in part because these militias identified British Jewish soldiers and police as traitors. This was the case even during the Second World War when Britain was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Nazi Germany.
Partition plan capitulation
State of Terror asserts that most acts of terrorism were directed at Palestinian Arab civilians. Both the Labor and Revisionist wings of Zionism engaged in terrorism and often colluded with each other in carrying out terrorist attacks, which escalated following the end of the Second World War, culminating famously in the King David Hotel attack in July 1946 that killed 41 Palestinian Arabs, 28 Brits, 17 Jews, 2 Armenians, 1 Russian and 1 Egyptian.
Suárez maintains that the United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 was largely a capitulation to this terrorism. Here his conclusion differs somewhat from that of other historians, including Tom Segev, who argues in One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (1999) that the exhausted and bankrupt British Empire was intent on leaving Palestine regardless of Zionist terrorism.
In Segev’s account the British departure was a foregone conclusion, and the terrorism of both the Labor Zionist and Revisionist-led militias represented a competition between them “for control of the state that would soon be established.”
“The British were not the real enemy,” Segev writes, “the Arabs were.”
The numerous acts of terrorism against Palestinian civilians during the Nakba of 1947-1949, such as the massacre at Deir Yassin, figure prominently in Suárez’s concluding chapters.
With the creation of Israel in 1948 paramilitary terrorism transformed itself into official state terrorism.
Suárez calls out the Orwellian newsspeak that statehood seemingly confers on acts of terrorism by contrasting the reaction of world opinion to Deir Yassin in April 1948 with the bloodier mass murder that occurred in the village of al-Dawayima in October 1948 after Israel had declared statehood.
That massacre, estimated at 145 people by the village mukhtar (chief), was regarded largely “as a military operation” at the time, according to Suárez, although recent scholarship has more accurately described it as an example of state terrorism.
Suárez devotes considerable attention to Zionist efforts to thwart Holocaust survivors from immigrating to countries other than Palestine and the kidnapping of young Jewish survivors from foster homes in Europe and their transfer to Palestine. In this, he relies heavily on Yosef Grodzinsky’s groundbreaking In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II (2004).
Suárez also recounts the false-flag terrorism in Egypt designed to win US support for Israel. Famous at the time, but largely forgotten since, Israel’s Unit 131 carried out terrorist bombings against civilian targets in Alexandria and Cairo, mainly cinemas frequented by US and British citizens, in what a Central Intelligence Agency bulletin, declassified in 2005, described as a bungled false-flag operation.
He also includes the shameful blaming of Holocaust survivors by Israeli and Zionist officials for acts of collective punishment carried out in secret by Israeli military forces, such as the massacre in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953, led by Unit 101 under the command of Ariel Sharon.
State of Terror is a comprehensive guide to Zionist and Israeli state terrorism and one that sheds valuable light on today’s situation.
As Suárez concludes: “Terrorism … is the only means through which an indigenous population can be subjugated, dehumanized and displaced. This, stripped of all baggage, is the reality of today’s Israel-Palestine ‘conflict.’”
Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and is active with the Occupation-Free Portland campaign.
State of Terror Thomas Suárez terrorism Ilan Pappe history Lucien Wolf Arthur James Balfour Tom Segev al-Dawayima
Books: Not fascism, just Zionism
Written By: Mike Parker
Published: December 20, 2016 Last modified: December 20, 2016
State Of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel
by Thomas Suarez
Skyscraper £20
A few weeks ago, a former Israel finance minister interviewed on Newsnight stated that since the state of Israel represented the “soul of the Jewish people”, any criticism of Israel was de facto anti-semitic, and added that only Jews had the right to define anti-semitism. Thus, one must surmise, Israel, in its own eyes, is the only state in the world with carte blanche to behave entirely as it pleases, since to condemn it on any grounds is racist.
We were also admonished a few months ago by the home affairs select committee, in their partisan and cynically politicised report on anti-semitism, for use of the term ‘Zionism’. And now Theresa May has announced – to a meeting of the Conservative Friends Of Israel (during which she said of anti-semitism: “It is disgusting that these twisted views are being found in British politics. Of course, I am talking mainly about the Labour Party and their hard-left allies.”) – that the government would be adopting into law the definition of anti-semitism based on one propounded by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) which has been rejected by almost all other organizations, including the EU.
The definition, while reasonable at first glance, offers considerable scope for stretching it to include practically any criticism of or opposition to Zionism and Israel, especially since many pro-Israel propagandists argue, for instance, that proposing a ‘one-state’ solution (a secular Arab-Jewish state encompassing the whole of Palestine) is anti-semitic, because it is “denying the right of Israel to exist”. And under Theresa May’s proposals, claiming that the State of Israel itself is a “racist endeavour” would be regarded as anti-semitic hate speech.
Yet Israel owes its existence to the Zionist Movement, and Zionism is nothing if not racist. Anyone who has any doubt should read Thomas Suarez’s disturbing account, a book that really does get to the heart of the Zionist soul – a very dark place indeed. State Of Terror is not a polemic but a chronological account of the cynical, often indiscriminate violence that enabled a single ‘race’ to colonise and conquer another people’s land within the space of 60 years, and (though the book does not deal, except in a brief epilogue, with the post-Suez period) to continue its campaign of ethnic cleansing for the next 60 or more, slowly gathering to its bosom more and more of the land the Zionists always claimed was theirs by right. It is based entirely on the historical record, including papers from the Public Records Office at Kew and contemporary press reports, but also diaries letters, and internal documents from the Zionist organisations, ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’, and their Jewish opponents.
We are programmed to regard Arab anti-semitism and terrorism as the root cause of the violence in Palestine, an area where Arabs and a small Jewish population lived side-by-side for centuries until the end of the 19th century. Yet for at least the first 50 years of Zionist colonisation, as the book reveals, there was little Arab violence against Jews – the anti-Jewish riot in Hebron in 1929, during which 67 Jews were killed was a rare, isolated incident – even during the worst period of Zionist violence in the post-war run-up to Partition. And yet as soon as Zionist settlers started arriving in numbers in the early 1900s, attacks on Palestinians began – beatings, shootings, bombings of buses and cafes, destruction of homes and crops. Those who criticize the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) – so often condemned by the current Israeli government and its apologists – should perhaps note that from that very beginning, Jewish settlers were forbidden by Zionist leaders from employing Arab labour or buying their goods; failure to comply could lead to being beaten or shot. The Arabs were to be “starved off the land”.
After the First World War the British Mandate forces and their civilian infrastructure also became targets, and the Zionist war of occupation was fought on both fronts. Name an atrocity that was shocking when carried out by Al Fatah, the PLO, Black September, Hamas, or Iraqi ‘insurgents’ and you will find it in Suarez’s text, committed many years earlier by Zionist terrorists: attacks on hospitals and orphanages; the use of children to deliver bombs; roadside IEDs; kidnappings; bank robberies; drive-by shootings; the murder of political opponents. Arab wells and cisterns were infected with typhoid and dysentery, and Zionist supporters in hospital labratories obstructed and delayed the production of drugs to treat subsequent epidemics. Even a refugee ship, the Patria, was bombed, killing hundreds of Jewish immigrants who were being refused entry to Palestine; the terrorists tried to claim it was a Masada-like act of mass suicide in resistance to being returned to Europe, but it was actually a sabotage attempt gone wrong.
The engine for this campaign of violence was the main Zionist organization, the Jewish Agency, its Hagana militia and the two main Hagana breakaway groups, Irgun and Lehi (the Stern Gang). Hagana has always been portrayed as a plucky band of freedom fighters, disciplined and moral, but in fact it was as guilty of wanton acts of terrorism as he other two. It often joined forces with them, despite its occasional acts of disciplinary violence towards their operatives, who needed to be shown who was boss now and again. After Partition, Hagana absorbed Lehi and Irgun and became the IDF, the “most moral army in the world” (c Mark Regev, former IDF and Israeli government liar-in-chief, now Ambassador to the Court of St James), which continues Hagana’s sterling work to this day.
Three future Israeli Prime Ministers were among Zionism’s most celebrated killers: Moshe Sharett of Hagana, Menachem Begin of Irgun (who masterminded the deaths of 95 people, British, Jew and Arab, in the King George Hotel bombing) and Yitzhak Shamir of Lehi (the murderer of kidnapped servicemen and organiser of the indefensible assassination of UN diplomat Folke Bernadotte). Another, David Ben Gurion, was effectively Commander-in-Chief of Hagana as part of his role at the Jewish Agency, and a fifth, Golda Meir, was the Agency’s travelling apologist for the terrorists. Future ‘statesman’ Yigal Allon led a Hagana attack on a Christian-Muslim Arab village, Khisas, where dozens were killed, for “experience” in preparation for the post-Partition ethnic cleansing operation.
Besides presiding over the terrorist campaign, the Jewish Agency’s task was to entice Jews to emigrate to Palestine, something the majority had little interest in, their preferred destination being the USA. The Agency strong-armed Presidents Roosevelt and then Truman to refuse migrants. As Suarez writes: “Zionism handed anti-semites a way of sending Jews elsewhere while looking progressive.” In 1941, Irgun described attempts to offer Jews safe haven anywhere other than Palestine as “anti-Semitic”.
Ken Livingstone was recently suspended from the Labour Party for his clumsy statements about Hitler encouraging Jews to emigrate to Palestine. He was right however. Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Agency, were frequently in dialogue with the Nazi regime about allowing emigration, but part of the deal was that Jews would only be allowed to travel to Palestine, not to the US or elsewhere. On one occasion, some Jews – the “dregs of Europe” according to their social superiors in Palestine – were actually refused the scarce immigration permits given by the British Mandate authorities to the Jewish Agency in favour of a better class of Jews from the US.
This obstruction was repeated all over Europe in the post war period, when Zionist organizations forced governments to allow Displaced Persons (DPs) in refugee camps to emigrate only to Palestine. Under the threat of facing, in a period of chaos and scarce resources, an increase in the terrorism the Zionists had already unleashed in Europe pre-war, they mostly complied. Those in DP camps who wished either to return to their home countries or escape to the US or elsewhere – that is, most of them – were terrorized into submission by Hagana thugs who infiltrated the camps, or their recruits.
That Zionism was a racist, fascist ideology is demonstrated by its followers’ own words and practices in their efforts to ensure “purity of blood” in Palestine. The JA’s 1929 constitution allowed for race laws, long before those of Nazi Germany (it is still illegal in Israel to perform a marriage between a Jew and non-Jew). And Zionists from the very beginning claimed ownership of all Jews; as its founder, Theodor Herzl, declared, “no true Jew can be an anti-Zionist”. Religious Jews who could not (and to this day can not) recognize a State of Israel were dismissed by Herzl as “a hideous distortion of the human character … unspeakably low and repulsive”. As for the Arabs, one disillusioned Jew, Paul Siegel, who had fought in the International Brigades in Spain, wrote that Zionist settlers’ “chauvinism towards the Arabs is even greater than that of Hitler’s Germany towards the Jews”.
State Of Terror is exhaustive and exhausting in its cataloguing of Zionist terrorism. Israeli authors such as Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris have written in more depth on some areas, such as the land-grab and atrocties in the immediate pre and post-Partition period, but the meticulously referenced detail provided by Suarez is invaluable for anyone interested in the roots of the seemingly insoluble problem of Palestine today.
And let’s be clear: whatever select committees and Theresa May may say – whether out of sincere, but ill-informed, ignorant, ahistorical belief, or cynical political opportunism – Zionism is a racist and fascist ideology, and modern Israel a racist, apartheid state, and to describe it so is not anti-semitism. Zionists do not speak for all Jews, neither in the wider diaspora nor even in Israel itself. The lies propagated about Zionist settlement in Palestine and the birth of the state of Israel are contradicted by the historical facts, recorded and available to study (though Israel keeps much other material under lock and key). It is important to remember how Israel came about, and to fight its continuing oppression and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs, even if we accept the fact of its existence. Anything less is a betrayal of the principles of liberal democracy that we claim to support elsewhere.
About Mike Parker
Mike Parker is Literary Editor and Production Editor of Tribune
Another False Flag
Glyn Secker
A review of State Of Terror, How Terrorism Created Modern Israel by Thomas Suarez, Skyscraper Publications, £20
RESEARCHING THIS SEMINAL WORK, THOMAS SUAREZ found himself at The National Archives at Kew, an untapped library of primary sources from British officials, the British secret services, national journals and Zionist organisations themselves.
The received history of the creation of Israel is that, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and in the pursuit of a safe haven for Jews, attacks were targeted by the incipient Israeli army on the British garrison in Palestine, and in the quest for a state some atrocities were committed by small bands of extremists, the Irgun and Lehi (Stern) gangs.
Suarez’s research led him to an alternative narrative - that these small bands were integral components of the regular Jewish Agency’s Hagana, its elite corps, the Palmach, and Pum, its assassination unit. All were engaged in a programme of terror, where the end, Eretz Israel, justified Revisionist Zionism’s means. Their obstacles were the British, the other key players in the UN Partition plan, and the existing occupants of Palestine.
Violence to the Palestinians, modelled on the 18th century and 19th century pogroms in eastern Europe, commenced before World War I and rose to a crescendo between December 1947 and May 1948 with public bombings and the poisoning of wells with typhoid and dysentery, to provoke a reaction and a premise for full scale attack. Intelligence gatherers posing as hikers devised Plan Dalet - the massacre at Deir Yassin and 19 other villages, and the raising of hundreds more, creating the Nakba of 900,000 refugees. After Deir Yassin, the Irgun, under Menachem Begin, announced, “ We intend to attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and Transjordan in a greater Jewish state. This attack is the first step.”
Contrary to common belief this violence did not cease after 1948. Many pages document hundreds of attacks on the British presence in Palestine, which hit both military and civilian targets. Violence to the regional powers ranged from:
assassination plans, with actual attempts on the lives of Churchill, Eden and Ernest Bevin; » sabotage of British forces during WWII;
plans to explode bombs in London and UK facilities in France, Austria and Italy (most but not all foiled);
false flag operations (the Lavon affair in Egypt, the Baghdad Trials in Iraq) to ‘create’ antisemitic movements to justify Zionist demands;
the sinking of British ships carrying Jewish refugees diverted away from Palestine (causing 276 deaths);
the training and use of child operators;
assassinations of leading Jewish critics, whom they called Kikes (the ’N’ word for Jews) - most assassinations by Irgun and Stern were of anti-Zionist Jews;
sabotaging Jewish anti-Zionist printing presses and institutions supporting a two state solution.
The Revisionists determined to direct Jewish refugees away from asylum offers and to exert pressure to send them to Palestine. Thus they were key in quashing Roosevelt’s 1938 plan to accept 400,000 from Nazi Germany. They maintained this policy even after there was knowledge of the camps from 1941. The litany is shocking. Many quotes from UK, UN, US and international observers compare the Revisionists and their military operators to the Nazis. It must be the author’s meticulous and voluminous referencing which has safeguarded him from legal action.
Corbyn's rise to the leadership of the Labour Party created panic in both the British establishment and the Israeli lobby, whose counter-attack resurrected antisemitism, the historical weapon of political Zionism.
Prior to 1948 the Irgun and Stern gangs numbered 8,500, the Palmach 5,000 and the Hagana army and air force 90,000, with a fully armed call-up potential of 200,000. From within the comparatively small terrorist groups the future leaders of Israel could set the agenda of violence to build the Iron Wall of the father of the Irgun, Jabotinsky. With the British exhausted and desperate to withdraw, and the rule of law disintegrating, these terrorist groups, as small cogs in the gears of the military machine, dictated and drove the strategy to create mayhem across the Mandate to extract their demands. Conceived in a state of terror, terror became the new state’s modus vivendi, a macabre dance which continues today in the Occupied Territories.
Suarez’s book explains why commanders of the Irgun and Stern gangs - Begin, Ben-Gurion, and Shamir - became the new state’s leaders, why Israel has never defined its eastern border and why from 1949 successive peace talks have failed.
His account of the terror, which predated the Holocaust, exposes how political Zionism has deployed humanitarian Zionism to cloak its past. For many Jews Zionism is core to their identity, the solution to millennia of persecution. Suarez reveals it to have been yet another false flag.
Some Jews, however, disavow this Zionist tradition, reasserting Jewish and international values of human rights. While political Zionists wield their weapon of antisemitism, a stubborn minority argue that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism and reclaim the genuine Jewish socialism of the Bund, forged in the period of revolutionary working class organisation at the start of the 20th century.
Glyn Secker
is General Secretary of Jewish Voice for Labour.
Website
What Zionists want suppressed
Tony Greenstein reviews: Thomas Suarez, State of terror - how terrorism created modern Israel, Skyscraper Publications, 2016, pp418, £20
The state of Israel prides itself on being at the forefront of the ‘war against terror’ and the war on Islam and it is this which makes Israel the darling of Europe’s far right. But this book documents how the Israeli state was born in a wave of terror that makes Palestinian guerrilla groups seem like children at play.
Terror was remorselessly directed at the indigenous Palestinians by the three main Zionist militias - the Labour Zionist Haganah and its Palmach shock-troops; the revisionist Irgun, a split-off from Haganah in 1931 (Haganah Bet); and Lehi or the Stern Gang, a breakaway from Irgun in August 1940. The Irgun was commanded by Menachem Begin, who in 1977 was elected prime minister of Israel. Lehi, which parted from Irgun on the question of continuing the war against the British, was initially commanded by Avraham Stern and later a triumvirate, which included future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84, 1986-92). Lehi distinguished itself by making two proposals in 1940 for a military pact with Nazi Germany against the British!
Suarez’s book is based on copious research from the Public Record Office at Kew. A clue to this book’s importance is the fierce campaign waged by the Zionist movement against it and its author. In Cambridge the Zionists managed to get a meeting relating to it cancelled.1 In Portsmouth the Zionists enlisted the aid of the Council’s Prevent officer, Charlie Pericleous, in order to put pressure on venues to cancel such talks. Presumably opposing Zionism makes you an ‘extremist’ and therefore a potential terrorist - a good example of how anti-terror laws are used to attack free speech. A talk at the School of Oriental and African Studies was disrupted by a group of Zionists led by Jonathan Hoffman, a well known activist, former Zionist Federation official and someone who has no problem with working with fascist and anti-Semitic groups, such as the English Defence League.
A talk held at the House of Lords on December 15 2016, hosted by Baroness Tonge, was subject to the same bogus complaints of anti-Semitism (on March 15 2017 an ethics committee of the House of Lords dismissed the allegations as baseless).
The Daily Mail, the paper which waged a campaign against Jewish immigration from Nazi Germany and tsarist Russia, became worked up about ‘anti-Semitism’ in its perennial quest to suppress free speech. It described the Israeli embassy’s “fury after anti-Semitic hate speaker gives talk at a top London university”.2 What did this “anti-Semitic hate” speech consist of? Apparently Suarez described the “creation of Israel as a ‘racist’, ‘fascist’ endeavour”, and linked the “‘cult’ of Zionism to Nazis”. I have no idea whether Suarez did in fact say this (and I note that Wikipedia has banned sourcing anything reported in the Mail because it is so unreliable3). But if Suarez did say that Israel was a racist endeavour then, right or wrong, that is not anti-Semitic. Likewise comparisons of Zionism to Nazism. Clearly Zionism, as an ideology of racial supremacy, had a close relationship to Nazism, especially but not exclusively before 1941. However, facts and the Daily Mail make strange bedfellows.
But what of Suarez’s book itself? The fact that the Zionist movement campaigns against a particular book does not necessarily mean we should be uncritical. However, there is no doubt that it is extremely well documented and sourced. It covers a particular gap in the historical record and it is because the Zionists are unable to attack the message that they are forced to attack the messenger.
Suarez correctly defines Zionism as a settler project, which couched its aims in the language of messianism (p24). This fusion by Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, of the settler project with the Old Testament gave a powerful religious-nationalist rationale to Zionist colonisation and expansion. It is not accidental that Israel, uniquely, does not define its borders. The biblical ‘Land of Israel’, which can extend as far as the Euphrates and the Nile, does not allow for a political decision to confine Israel within the borders of Britain’s Palestine mandate. There is, theoretically, no limit to the Zionist state’s expansionary aims. As we see with Syria, Israel reserves the right to intervene anywhere in the Middle East.
Zionist messianism began with Christian Zionism, which saw a Zionist settler state as the way to safeguard British imperial interests. Not for nothing were the first Zionists Christian evangelical imperialists, such as Lords Palmerstone and Shaftesbury and the author, George Elliot. In 1841 Lord Shaftesbury issued a “Memorandum to Protestant monarchs of Europe for the restoration of the Jews to Palestine”, which was published in the Colonial Times in 1841.4 Although an ardent Zionist, Shaftesbury was opposed to Jewish emancipation in Britain.
Ethnic cleansing
Suarez shows how the Zionist project was, from the start, an apartheid endeavour. He quotes from the Hope-Simpson report of 1930, set up after the 1929 riots, which described the Zionist practice of purchasing land from absentee landlords as “extra-territorialising”. The peasants were expelled and no Arab was able to set foot on that land again, once it was purchased (p30). Contrary to the myths of the ‘socialist’ Zionists, Asher Ginzburg (Ahad Ha’am) described the reality of Zionist colonisation in its earliest phase after a visit to Palestine between February and May 1891. He described the settlers thus: they “behave towards the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly upon their boundaries, beat them shamefully without reason and even brag about it”.5 The Zionist settlers, despite their labourist piety and their propaganda about making the desert bloom, were quite explicit in opposing any self-government for Palestine, whilst the settlers were in a minority. They operated quite consciously as an arm of British imperialism. As Chaim Weizmann, president of the Zionist Organisation observed, “[The democratic principle] does not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental, qualitative difference between Jew and Arab” (p35).
Ernest Bevin, Labour’s rightwing foreign minister, commented after the war: “If [the Zionists] could be brought to see that the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ applied in Palestine to Arabs and Jews alike as much as anywhere else, our difficulties might be solved” (p257). Bevin was called an anti-Semite for suggesting that American enthusiasm for sending Jewish survivors to Palestine had something to do with their opposition to admitting them to the USA.
Suarez shows how, as early as 1919, before the mandate had even taken effect, the Zionists were discussing how the ethnic cleansing of their ‘Jewish home’ might be effected. The American King-Crane report (1919), set up by president Woodrow Wilson, recorded how “The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine” (p44).
We should bear this in mind in the centenary year of the Balfour declaration (November 2 1917), which took the form of a letter from the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Lord Walter Rothschild. The declaration stated that “... nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
The Balfour declaration promised not a Jewish state, but a “national home” for the Jews in Palestine. The British vehemently denied that this meant a Jewish state, as did the Zionists, but this was yet another instance of perfidious Albion. Only two years later, Balfour wrote a memorandum to his successor as foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, in which he made clear the depths of British treachery and deceit:
In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country …. The four great powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land …. In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.6
On September 9 1941, the transcript of a meeting of 20 people in London quoted Weizmann and Ben Gurion to the effect that Arabs would have equal rights, but Jews would have special privileges. Weizmann wanted the transfer of most Arabs from Palestine, apart from “a certain percentage of Arabs and other elements” who were needed as a pool of cheap labour (p72).
After the UN agreed to partition Palestine in November 1947, the ethnic cleansing began in earnest. Yerachmiel Kahanovitch, a machine-gunner in Palmach described how “We cleared one village after another and expelled them - they led to the Sea of Galilee ... Yes, you march up to a village, you expel it, you gather round to have a bite to eat and go on to the next village” (p254).
Just like the Marranos, the Spanish Jews who pretended to be Christians, there were cases of Arabs posing as Jews. When one non-Jewish doctor was caught out, he was castrated and then murdered. The Zionist ‘left’ called this “purity of arms”.7 Rape too was used as a systematic means of instilling terror (p255).
Dissident Jews
The State of terror documents, sometimes in tedious detail, the bloody terrorist beginnings of the Israeli state. By ‘terrorist’ I do not mean the attacks made by the Zionist groups against the British army, but the attacks on Arab civilians. The Irgun made the planting of bombs in market places, the shooting of Arab workers and other acts of terror a routine occurrence from 1937 onwards. Bombings of Palestinian cafes began in April 1937 in Haifa and bombings of Palestinian buses in September 1937 (p52).
From 1939 onwards Irgun and Lehi waged a ceaseless war against individual Arabs. Particular attention was paid to “uncooperative Jews”, such as four Jewish soldiers murdered as “traitors to the Jewish cause”. One of the first targets for assassination by Haganah was the Dutch Jew, Dr Israel de Hahn, who was responsible for organising the ultra-orthodox anti-Zionist group, Agudat Israel. This was part of a pattern of targeting anti-Zionist Jews.
Intolerance to anti-Zionist or indeed non-Zionist Jews included those who did not speak Hebrew. Orient, a German-language weekly, was suppressed by the Zionists and on May 31 1942 a meeting of the German Jewish Anti-Fascist League in Tel Aviv was violently broken up by Zionist thugs with the blessing of the Jewish Agency. Their crime, amongst others, was speaking the German language. Tom Segev in The seventh million describes in more depth the tribulations of the German Jewish immigrants, or Yekkes.
Suarez notes that the description of the situation in Palestine as a “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians is wrong. Talk of a conflict implies that Israel’s actions in, for example, Gaza, is part of a war of equals rather than the application of overwhelming force by a militarised state against a defenceless civilian population. Zionism meant the establishment of a Jewish settler colonial state, under the protection of British bayonets. Zionism aimed either to subjugate or drive out the Palestinians. The narrative that sees the Zionist settlers as the victim of Palestinian violence pertains to this day. The actions of the settlers is always defensive - a reaction to Palestinian violence. Israeli violence is always described as “retaliation” by the BBC, whereas Palestinian violence is always without cause or reason. It is violence for its own sake.
Suarez observes (p8) that Israel is unique, in that it is actually resealing archives it has previously opened. Under the pretext of digitalisation Israel is reclassifying as secret previously released documents in order that its history accords with Zionist mythology.8 This is why Suarez’s research in the British archives, which are beyond the reach of the Israeli censor, is so important and why the Zionist lobby has focussed on Suarez’s book. Following the opening of the Haganah archives in the early 1980s, Zionist historians - in particular Benny Morris - began documenting the actual history of what happened in 1947-489, not in order to rethink the Zionist project so much as to justify what had happened. As Morris explained,
A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.10
Forced to Israel
Suarez’s research is particularly interesting in respect of the ‘displaced persons camps’, which were set up in Europe after the war. Tens of thousands of Jewish refugees lived in these camps. Although some displaced persons (DPs) made their way back to their homes, for most of them there were no homes to go to. They had been confiscated and reallocated to their non-Jewish neighbours: reclaiming them would have been physically and legally impossible.
Suarez documents the Zionist campaign to force the Jewish survivors of the holocaust to go to Palestine and become cannon fodder in the expected war of expansion. Ben Gurion spoke of the “danger” that Jewish survivors would not want to go to Palestine. In Australia the Zionists campaigned against an offer from the Australian government to open its doors to Jewish holocaust survivors (pp153-54). In the United States a bill in April 1947 was introduced to allow 400,000 DPs into America. It was championed by the non-Zionist American Council for Judaism. The Zionist organisations were furious and opposed it (p192).
The Zionist movement embarked on a three-pronged strategy to ‘capture’ Europe’s Jews: the forceful isolation and coercion of the survivors themselves, the sabotage of international safe havens and the kidnapping of Jewish orphans (pp120-25). The New York Times described how the Jewish survivors had been made “helpless hostages, for whom [Israeli] statehood has been made the only ransom”.11
Jewish children who had throughout Europe survived because they had been taken in by non-Jewish families and whose parents had died, were kidnapped in a ruthless campaign led by chief rabbi Yitzhak Herzog of Israel. In Herzog’s and Zionism’s racist eyes, being raised as a Christian was “much worse than physical murder”. At the same time they opposed in Britain the opening of Jewish adoptive homes because they were not in Palestine. A scheme to admit 1,000 Jewish children to Britain was agreed, but after 300 were admitted the Zionist leaders stopped it, forcing the children to remain in Europe until they could be forcibly transferred to Palestine. Throughout Europe the Zionist leaders and Herzog attempted to ‘rescue’ Jewish children, often from Jewish communities. Everywhere, as in the Netherlands, they met resistance from the existing Jewish communities.
It was the desire of most Jews - Suarez quotes 85% - to go to Britain or America. This desire would be repeated 30 years later, when the Zionists did their best to close off all avenues of escape, bar Israel, for the Russian Jews. Menachem Begin even went personally to the United States to lobby president Ronald Reagan about raising immigration barriers. Foreign minister David Levy did likewise when he lobbied the German government. Indeed, when the German government did introduce restrictions on the immigration of Soviet Jews, the Israeli authorities rushed to welcome the proposals, with Michael Jankelowitz of the Jewish Agency for Israel describing them as “positive”!12
The Zionist movement, which had done nothing to save Jews from the holocaust, left no stone unturned in its determination to exploit the survivors for their colonial project in Palestine. For most of the war the Jewish Agency (the Zionist government-in-waiting in Palestine) denied that there was a holocaust. Davar, the paper of the Labour Zionist Histadrut, stated in August 1942, when the Zionist movement received definite confirmation of the holocaust from its agent, Gerhard Riegner, in Geneva, that “it may be that the Nazi denial has a leg to stand on”.13
Suarez describes how Ben Gurion told the Jewish Agency leaders on October 4 1942 that, although Hitler’s persecution of the Jews had made them suffer, at least he had revived “in assimilated Jews the feeling of Jewish nationalism ... [which] we have exploited ... in favour of Zionism” - whereas in the democratic countries Jewish nationalism was “slowly disappearing ... because the democracies, in contrast to the dictator states, recognise the Jews as people having full rights of citizenship ...” (p77). That was why, in contrast to all other sections of the Jewish community, the Zionist reaction in 1933 had been to welcome the rise of the Nazis.
Up to November 1942 and the Battle of El Alamein, despite the threat to Jewish Palestine from the Nazis, the Jewish Agency was opposed to Jews joining the British army. As the war ended, the British agreed, in July 1944, to the formation of a separate Jewish Brigade. The New York Times criticised its establishment as a ploy to claim statehood. After the war, sections of the brigade worked in conjunction with Haganah in Europe to ensure that opposition to going to Palestine in the DP camps was repressed - they did not hesitate to use terror against those holocaust survivors who were opposed to the Zionists.
At the same time the Zionist movement in the United States - via its political accomplices, such as Congressman Sol Bloom (who had tried to delay the setting up of Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board in January 1944, which is credited with saving 200,000 Jews) - fought bitterly against any attempt to lower US immigration barriers. In a 1943 New York Times ad, the Irgun accepted that, although five million Jews were condemned to die, “America is not asked to open her doors to the uprooted Jewish millions”. That was the purpose of Palestine alone. The US intelligence report, ‘Latest aspects of the Palestine Zionist-Arab problem’, concluded on June 4 1943 that more Jews would have been rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe, “had they not complicated the question by always dragging Palestine into the picture” (p83). It also described “Zionism in Palestine” as “a type of nationalism which in any other country would be stigmatised as retrograde Nazism”.
The Zionist definition of anti-Semitism today includes “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”.14 Such a comparison is deemed “offensive”. However, this did not stop the Zionists repeatedly comparing the British occupation of Palestine to that of the Nazis (p12).
One of the myths the book covers is the belief that when Israel declared its independence on May 15 1948, six Arab armies attacked at once. As Suarez shows, not only were these attacks ill-coordinated, but they were a direct response to the expulsion, by that time, of nearly 400,000 Palestinian refugees and the fact that the Zionists had ignored the UN partition lines and occupied much of the area of the proposed Palestinian state. Another Zionist myth that Suarez demolishes is the belief that the Zionists accepted partition, unlike the Arabs. Their ‘acceptance’ was but a tactic. As Ben Gurion wrote to his son, the only question was:
Does the establishment of a Jewish state [in part of Palestine] advance or retard the conversion of this country into a Jewish country? My assumption ... is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end, but the beginning ...’ (p237).
And so it proved.
Perhaps more contentious is Suarez’s statement that in Israel the master race of settler colonials are distinguished by “blood descent, ... not religion, cultural background or birthplace”. I would disagree in respect of the first of these categories: Israel does use religion to distinguish between the oppressed and oppressor. However, the definition of religion is itself based on blood descent: ie, being born of a Jewish mother. For the purposes of the Law of Return, which was amended in 1970 to allow for the influx of Soviet Jews, this definition has widened to include a Jewish grandparent. Even the spouse of a Jew is allowed to immigrate as a Jew, although they will not be recognised as Jewish by the rabbinate that controls all personal matters. In the event of divorce, both spouse and children can and do lose their protection.
Suarez cites Ben Gurion as saying that a Jewish state would be based not on the Jewish religion, but on being a “Jew”: ie, a racial definition. In fact race and religion have metamorphosed into each other, as it is the religious Zionists who form the bulk of the most racist settlers and nationalists (p73). The Jewish religious authorities provide the legitimation for the Jewish state in a way similar to how the Islamic clerics in Saudi Arabia help legitimise the rule of the House of Saud.
Anti-imperialist?
There are those - eg, the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty - who see the Zionist terror groups’ war against the British colonialists as some form of anti-imperialism. This is completely wrong. The war of the Zionist militias was no different from that of the Afrikaners against the British in the Boer War. Their differences with the British was that they wanted control of the state in order to better wage their war against the Palestinians. The British had outlived their usefulness and were now an obstacle to the Zionist plans for the transfer of the Arabs. In what way is that an anti-imperialist struggle?
The primary reason why the Zionist militias were able to wage a successful war against the British was because the British had armed and trained them in the first place. In order to destroy the Arab rebellion and general strike of 1936-39, the British allowed the Zionists to form the British Settlement Police. They turned a blind eye to Zionist stocks of weaponry and allowed committed Zionists to join the British police. The Zionist terror groups were Britain’s Frankenstein monster. When the British agreed to get out, the Zionists’ attention was turned to the Palestinians. Suarez suggests, citing Eisenhower, that the commonly agreed number of Palestinian refugees expelled - three quarters of a million - is an underestimate and that the figure is nearer 900,000 (p278).
Suarez describes what has been well documented by many other historians: namely how Israel was not content with ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, but also sought to do the same to the Jews of the Arab countries. In Iraq Zionist agents threw bombs into Jewish cafes and a synagogue. Zionism was not and never has been a movement of Jewish self-determination. In the case of the Arab Jews, Israel formed an alliance with the corrupt pro-British rulers of these countries such as Nuri e Said of Iraq. They reached an agreement that these rulers could keep the wealth of the Jews in exchange for the Jews themselves. When the Arab Jews came to Israel, they were humiliated and treated with contempt. In Iraq the oldest Jewish community in the world - a highly educated and rich community - was reduced to poverty and a bare existence in tent camps. Arab Jews were treated as little better than non-Jewish Arabs. They had an orientalist outlook and the state had to effectively reprogramme them. As soon as they got off the planes, they were sprayed with the pesticide DDT (pp284-85). Their children and babies were kidnapped for the benefit of white western Ashkenazi Jews and they were placed in development towns on the borders.15
After becoming independent Israel waged a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing of Bedouin and Arab tribes from the Negev. Ben Gurion referred in 1950 to an Israel Defence Force battalion that was prone to raping and murdering Arab girls. Suarez mentions one particular incident, where a young Bedouin girl - estimated at between 10 and 15 - was captured. The man with her was gunned down and for the next three days she was systematically raped by three different squadrons of Israeli soldiers before a shallow grave was dug and she was executed.16
In the 1950s Israel waged a war against “infiltrators”: Palestinian refugees who tried to return to their lands. Suarez describes in depth what can only be called death marches. One such forced march was that of Wadi Araba, when in June 1950 87 half-dead, naked men and boys turned up on the frontier of southern Jordan. They were the survivors of about 120 Arabs who had been pushed into the desert. They were the lucky ones. What Israel had done after its establishment under its labour Zionist rulers was carry out a systematic ethnic cleansing. Philip Toynbee, a supporter of Israel, published an article about this in The Observer at the time.17
In May 1948 a concentration camp was established in Katra, near Rehovot, which was “run on Nazi lines”, as Alexander Kirkbride, Britain’s ambassador to Jordan, described it (p292). A chance witness, a woman from a kibbutz, remarked: “Does this not remind us exactly of the Nazi acts towards the Jews?” Death marches and concentration camps. Zionism had learnt well.
Zionism was always a ruthless nationalist movement which sought exactly the same as the anti-Semites - the removal of Jews from the lands they lived. In the wake of the murder of four Jewish people in a kosher supermarket in 2015 prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu came to France in order to advocate the very thing that French anti-Semites dream about - the exodus of France’s Jews to Israel.18
Suarez has documented, in extremely copious detail, the war of terror that the Zionists waged, both against the Arabs and British from the late 1930s up to the Suez War. How it used and exploited Jews in the diaspora as so much human material. It is not at all surprising that the Zionists have gone to such efforts to suppress this book.
Notes
1. http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/thomas-suarez-event-cancelled.
2. www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3918000/Zionism-racist-fascist-cult-Israeli-embassy-s-fury-anti-Semitic-hate-speaker-gives-talk-London-university.html.
3. www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia-bans-daily-mail-as-unreliable-source-for-website.
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism_in_the_United_Kingdom.
5. ‘Truth from Eretz Yisrael’ Hamelitz (St Petersburg) June 19-30 1891 (Hebrew).
6. D Ingram Palestine papers 1917-1922 London 1972, p73.
7. See ‘Purity of arms’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms.
8. See http://azvsas.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/rewriting-history-first-holocaust-now.html.
9. B Morris The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949 Cambridge 1988; and The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisitedCambridge 2004.
10. www.haaretz.com/survival-of-the-fittest-1.61345.
11. New York Times October 27 1946.
12. http://forward.com/news/4029/germany-is-moving-to-end-mass-immigration-of-jews.
13. N Giladi Ben Gurion’s scandals New York 2006, p56.
14. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition: http://freespeechonisrael.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/IHRA-definition.pdf.
15. See, for example, ‘Time for Israel to admit: the Yemenite children were systematically kidnapped Ha’aretz July 31 2016: www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-.734537.
16. www.haaretz.com/i-saw-fit-to-remove-her-from-the-world-1.104034.
17. ‘A tragic change of role’ The Observer June 11 1950.
18. www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/16/leaders-criticise-netanyahu-calls-jewish-mass-migration-israel.
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Israel and its History Under Siege
avatar by Jerold Auerbach
Thomas Suárez. Photo: CAA.
Of the publishing of anti-Israel books there is no end. According to London-based writer and musician Thomas Suárez, Israel is “a racially predicated state” based on “blood descent” that is “consistent with the Nazi definition of a Jew.” His State of Terror (2017) is a vitriolic diatribe against Zionism and Israel for its “expropriation of land and labor” and “brutal ethnic cleansing,” a “continuing injustice” aligning it with “all settler-colonial projects” that share “the need to dehumanize those it seeks to displace or subordinate.”
Ever since the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in Suárez’s fanciful concoction of history, Zionism made “ethnic cleansing of non-Jewish Palestinians . . . integral to their plans.” Palestine became an “overt settler project” under the League of Nations mandate, which encouraged the fusion of “archaeology, divine right, the collective Western subconscious, and genetics” into what eventually became the “settler state” of Israel. “Like fascist-era Germany,” Suárez continues, “Israel defined Jews as a race (blood descent).” He exonerates Palestinian terrorism as “a reaction to Zionist ethnic subjugation and expropriation of land, resources and labor.”
Relying primarily on an array of hostile British government sources to bolster his indictment, Suárez provides a tedious recounting of every Irgun and Lehi attack during and after the World War II years. It seems never to occur to him that his primary source base might have had an anti-Zionist bias. British government officials in London were hardly neutral as they confronted the imminent loss, no less to Jews, of an important Middle East base. For reasons that he does not explore, 100,000 British troops in Palestine were “impotent against Zionist terror.”
Suárez finds American counterparts to strengthen his anti-Zionist diatribe. The American Council for Judaism, a tiny group of wealthy Reform Jews frightened lest Zionism provoke accusations of dual loyalty, was appalled lest “a racial-nationalist Jewish State in Palestine” create a “self-imposed ghetto.” The New York Times, the journalistic pillar of Reform anti-Zionism under publishers Adolph S. Ochs and his son-in-law Arthur Hays Sulzberger, embraced the council’s slander that “the whole Zionist community is allied in spirit with the [Jewish] terrorists.”
March 19, 2018 3:16 pm
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Reborn Israel Has Settled the ‘Jewish Question’
The “Jewish Question” was an intense debate during the 19th and 20th centuries -- dealing with the status and treatment of Jews...
For Suárez the Zionist goal was nothing less than “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.” Israel “exploited the Holocaust to shield the state against criticism of its own racial-nationalist policies and expansionism.” Its crimes against the indigenous Palestinian population were “Jewry’s crimes, thus ‘justifying’ and perpetually regenerating the very anti-Semitism that Zionism depends upon.” In his telling, the UN partition vote for a two-state solution in 1947 was “capitulation to Zionist terrorism.”
In Suárez’s perversion of history, Zionists “echoed Nazi behavior,” coercing and indoctrinating Jewish survivors and kidnapping Jewish orphans as they “coopted” the Holocaust “to commingle safe haven for Jews with a settler ethnocracy in Palestine.” Relying on “psychological terror” (and rape) to encourage the “ethnic cleansing” of “nearly a million Palestinians” — a grossly exaggerated number of refugees — Israel became the “ethnically predicated settler state in Palestine.” It “owes its very existence to its wholesale theft of the Palestinians’ worldly possessions.” Nor, according to Suárez, did Israeli culpability stop there. Its “uprooting of Middle Eastern and North African Jews from their homelands” mirrored its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
Suárez’s indictment ends with the 1956 Sinai conflict. By then, he claims, Israel “had fully established its techniques of expansion and racial cleansing that continue to serve it today.” Among its enduring sins: “expropriation and squandering of the moral weight of historic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust”; “dehumanization of the Palestinians”; and “seduction of its Jewish population with the perks of blood privilege.” Sixty years later, he writes, “the psyche and inertia of a settler movement determined to ‘regain’ a ‘racially pure’ land to which it claims messianic entitlement” remains “ever-constant.” Consequently, he concludes, “ever-present, untenable injustice remains” the distinguishing characteristic of “a settler state based on claims of genetic entitlement.”
Appropriately, Suárez’s book conspicuously displays a laudatory blurb from Ilan Pappé, the renegade Israeli historian in British exile who advocated Israel’s elimination and replacement by a single Jewish-Arab state. They are partners in the relentless delegitimization of Israel, now a century after British Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur James Balfour reported cabinet approval for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” State of Terror reveals a state of mind that cannot comprehend the return of Jews to their biblical homeland to build what remains the solitary democratic state in the Middle East.
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Review: State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel
in Book Review — by Dr Vacy Vlazna — February 6, 2018
“A Nazi is a Nazi he be a Jew or otherwise, and it is a false sentiment of the Jewish people to condemn Nazism and condone Jewish fascism.” Hashomer Hatzair, 13th March, 1946
Thomas Suárez‘ State of Terror: How terrorism created modern Israel, in my opinion, belongs in the top 5 most invaluable books on the history of modern Palestine.
I have been waiting for this book which fills many gaps. Notwithstanding extensive reading, my grasp of the zionist exploits during the British Mandate was minimal. I’d heard of the Jewish terrorist gangs – Irgun, Haganah Lehi and Stern, the blowing up the King David Hotel, Plan Dalet and the ethnic cleansing of 670 Palestinian villages, the massacre at Deir Yassin and the assassination of UN mediator Count Folk Bernadotte.
However Suárez,
“Tapping a trove of declassified British documents, much of which has never before been published, the book details a shocking campaign of Zionist terrorism in 1940s and 1950s Palestine that targeted anyone who challenged its messianic settler goals, whether the British government, the indigenous Palestinians, or Jews”
took a blow torch to my ignorance.
Reading page after page of Suárez’ intensive inventory of Jewish terrorism in Palestine, there were times that I could hardly breathe. I felt that I was suffocating on inexorable evil.
This book is Palestine’s Yad Vashem.
Targeting Palestinians
Almost daily from 1937, at the same time that Nazi thugs were terrorising European Jews, the zionist gangs of Jewish foreigners executed ‘calculated campaigns of terror’ on the indigenous Palestinians.
Palestinians were mercilessly slaughtered, maimed and terrorised by repeated bombings or attacks with machine guns and grenades on Palestinian cafés, on ‘casual pedestrians’, on Palestinian vehicles and buses, passenger trains, orphanages, schools, shops, Arab markets and quarters. Jewish gangs raided Arab villages, planted landmines, in Nazi-style cold-bloodedly executed rounded up villagers, and the Irgun Zvai Leumi, à la Saudi extremism, ramped up the terror by threatening ‘to cut off Arab hands raised against the Jewish cause’.
The bloodbath over 3 days described here is the gruesome norm,
“26.6.39 at 5.30 a.m. an Arab carriage was fired at by our men in the vicinity of Beit Shearim. Four Arabs were killed and one wounded and died later. On the same day, a short time after this, our men fired at four Arabs on the way of Ness Ziona to Rishon le Zion. Three Arabs were killed and one wounded. At 8.20 an Arab was killed by our men at Mea Shearim quarter, Jerusalem. 27.6.39 at 7:00 a bomb thrown by our people exploded near the Shneller School in Jerusalem. 6 Arabs were wounded. 28.6.39 at 5 a.m. an Arab was wounded on the Nebi-Samuel Road. At noon a bomb was exploded in a lane opposite the Anglo-Palestine Bank, Haifa. At 2:30 p.m. an Arab was killed in Jurianno Square, Haifa. At 7:20 p.m. a bomb exploded in a house in Wadi Salib Quarter, Haifa. 29.6.39 a few minutes part past 5 a.m. our men opened fire on 2 Arabs on the Petah-Tikva – Rosh-Ha-Ayin Road. 2 killed and the third badly wounded. At the same time 2 Arabs were shot at km 78 on the Haifa-Jaffa rd. One killed and the other badly wounded. At 5:30 a.m. an Arab was shot and killed on the Jaffa – Tel Aviv Road. At 5:30 a.m. shots were fired at an Arab cart near Sha’araim. 4 Arabs killed and one badly wounded—died later. At 6:15 a.m. two mines exploded under a train between Acre and Haifa. Railway tracks were demolished. A locomotive and three coaches derailed. There were no Jews on this train. At 6:30 a.m. an Arab was killed near the Sheik-Munis orange grove. [Added at the end of the casualty tally for the day:] One of the wounded died.”
In 1943, the Jewish Agency set up ‘hiker parties [that] were systematically preparing for the emergence of the Jewish state (with designs to also take over Transjordan and Lebanon) through the predetermined expulsion of Palestinians who, according to Weizmann, “need to “be told firmly” that they will never have a state” yet intending to allow for a small percentage to stay on as cheap labour;
“Information collected included topographic location of each village, its access roads, quality of land, springs, main sources of income, socio-political composition, religious affiliations, names of the village leaders, ages of individual men, and an index of its hostility toward the Zionist project—everything needed to determine “how best to attack” the villages, in the words of one such ‘hiker’. Details were expanded to encompass husbandry, cultivation, the number of trees, quality of fruit groves, average land holding per family, number of cars, names of shop owners, members of work-shops, and the names of the artisans and their skills. When 1948 came, the Zionist armies already had photographs, maps, plans, and meticulous statistics about the villages and villagers they would erase.”
Targeting non-zionist Jews
While the holocaust firestorm raged, in Palestine zionism’s dogs of war perpetrated their own anti-semitic acts of violence against “the enemies of Jewry”: the foremost enemy was non-Zionist Jews”.
“Much of the terror in 1940 targeted ‘uncooperative’ Jews” – that is, Jews who criticised zionism ( also labelled then, like now, as antisemites), Jews who refused payment to the Jewish National Fund, Jews who resisted the Jewish Agency’s special tax and Jewish police and soldiers serving the British Mandate. BTW, not a peep about Jewish anti-Jew atrocities was articulated by zionism’s popular propagandist, Leon Uris who warped the minds of two generations of baby-boomer readers with fake Jewish heroism including the Exodus debacle.
Shockingly, over and over, Jews were callously sacrificed on the altar of zionism,
“Not even Kristallnacht changed his priorities: Speaking in December 1938, the month after that terrible night heralded the beginning of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion assailed the idea of saving Germany’s Jewish children by sending them to safety in England, a movement then in progress with the Kindertransport. Rather than see all the children escape safely to England, he argued that it was better to let half of them be slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis in order to get the surviving half to be settlers in his colonial project*.”
“In late 1941, when Jews were being carted off to death camps by the trainload, the Irgun dismissed as “anti-Semitic” attempts to offer them safe haven outside of Palestine, and published warnings directed to dissenting Jews not to interfere with Zionists’ “God-given right” to rule Palestine and Transjordan.”
State of Terror discloses how an effective international boycott of Germany was broken in August, 1933, when the World Zionist Congress approved the Haavara Transfer Agreement with Hitler’s Germany that allowed wealthy German Jews evacuating to Palestine “to recover some of their assets by using those assets to purchase German manufactured goods, which they could then resell” and thereon boost the settlement effort. Zionist ties to the Nazis carried on into 1937 when Eichmann visited Palestine accompanied by Haganah official, Feivel Polkes.
Targeting the British Mandate
Suárez brings to our attention that while Britain and the Allies were struggling to defend their own against the Nazi military juggernaut, zionist terrorism was hammering nails into the British Imperial coffin.
Jewish terrorists were assiduously blowing up the civilian and military infrastructure of the British Mandate; bridges, train lines, post offices, cinemas, police stations, banks, train stations, telephone kiosks, telegraph lines, the British freighter SS Ocean Vigour, Acre Prison, an Officers Club, military camps, RAF airfields as well as the terrorist bombing of the British administration headquarters in the King David Hotel.
Young British police and soldiers were murdered in their hundreds in terror attacks and lawless revenge killings by Jewish terrorists who also conducted high profile assassinations outside Palestine, such as Lord Moyne, the British Minister of State in the Middle East in Cairo. Letter bombs were sent to Harold MacMichael, the retired High Commissioner, Ernest Bevin, future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, Arthur Greenwood MP, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fraser, the Postmaster General and even President Truman.
What’s more, during WWII, the zionist gangs worked concertedly to undermine the British war effort,
“In late 1940 Stern sought a Nazi-Lehi alliance, and when the Nazis failed to respond he sent his friend and fellow ex-Irgun member Nathan Yellin-Mor to try again. Yellin-Mor, a future Knesset member, advocated striking the British in Palestine while Britain was weakened battling the Nazis—obviously weakening that battle as well.”
“The Italian fascists were also wooed by Lehi and, briefly, by Weizmann, who met with Benito Mussolini with the idea that a relationship with the fascists might serve as a bargaining chip against the British.”
“Lehi, however, pursued a formal agreement with the fascists during the war, and was allegedly providing the Italian Commission in Syria with military information.”
“The Jewish Agency maintained its opposition to Jews joining the Allied struggle against the Nazis even though the present month—November of 1942—brought hard news of the death camps”
Suárez cites prominent Jewish journalist Robert Weltsch, who stated,
“They do not want to fight against Hitler because his fascist methods are also theirs … They do not want our young men to join the [Allied] Forces … day after day they are sabotaging the English War Effort.”
By contrast Palestinians rose to the occasion.
“British pamphlets fell from the sky over Haifa on the first day of November (1942), urging people to enlist in His Majesty’s Forces against the Axis powers. By the end of the year, about 9,000 Palestinian Arabs had enlisted with the Allied forces, notwithstanding reluctance to join a battle that would not bring them their own freedom.”
Eventually Jewish recruits joined Britain in the war motivated by their zionist agenda to build and train “a segregated ‘Jewish’ army that would further its territorial claims to Palestine.”
To this day, Palestinian dignity and resistance lives on, but the Mighty Brits shamelessly crawled out of Palestine on their bellies. And, despite the zionist betrayal in WWII, despite the murder of hundreds of British Mandate soldiers, police, civilians, the UK government maintains its prostration under the zionist boot. Go figure.
Suárez’ masterful research goes on to provide a thorough account of the inhuman, inhumane atrocities that the ‘most moral army’ in the Middle East perpetrated during its unilateral rape and carnage of Palestine towards the end of and post British Mandate.
I salute Thomas Suárez for pulling the pin on a massive truth grenade blowing sky high the Jewish state’s whole arsenal of ‘righteous’ lies and holocaust abuse wielded to justify the unjustifiable. The rabid hysteria of israeli witch-hunts and crazy accusations of ‘antisemitism’ against those, like UK Labor member Ken Livingstone, who dare expose the fact of zionist collaboration with the Nazis and against any criticism of Israel’s crimes, now makes perfect sense.
Apropos the malignancy of evil and racist psychopathy buttressing the zionist foundations of the Jewish state, Suárez tells us nothing new – I urge you to read Palestinian Centre for Human Rights weekly reports and you too will suffocate and rage against the decades of relentless suffering, pain, grief, trauma inflicted remorselessly by the Jews of israel every single day on innocent Palestinian families who have never ceded their land and dignity.
Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters and editor of a volume of Palestinian poetry, I remember my name. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was convenor of Australia East Timor Association and coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001.
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Suarez, Thomas. PALESTINE: SIXTY YEARS LATER. 2010. Americans for Middle East Understanding. New York, USA.
by Theresa Wolfwood. Director, The Barnard-Boecker Centre Foundation | 14 October 2012 · 19:46
“Palestine today is a wasteland of powerful nations´ hypocrisy…Palestine is also a land of people determined to hold on to their humanity, a people who refuse to be erased or pummelled into the role of victimhood.”
Palestine by Thomas Suarez: A Book Review by Theresa Wolfwood
Subtitled: Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, photographs & observations.
Suarez has taken powerful and revealing photos he accompanies them with a well-written, factual and authoritative text. Suarez observes and records with a sensitive eye and a keen empathy for the lives of Palestinians. If Azoulay´s book, From Palestine to Israel, is a record of the cataclysmic formation of the state of Israel, Suarez´s book is the record of everything that has happened since and is still happening. His focus is on people, people daily to live a normal life under a brutal occupation.
The invasion and continuing blockading of Gaza is an international crime against humanity. Suarez has captured the horror of life in what some call an “outdoor concentration camp”.
Jerusalem was an internationally divided city, a holy place to many. Now it is a city under siege as the Israeli destroy homes, build more walls and homes for Israelis, and drive Palestinians out – the ultimate goal.
In the West Bank, the story is of daily erosion of land and property, of occupation and threats, a continuous life of the fear of death, injury, dispossession and imprisonment. The Wall is the wound that divides many families and communities, the Israeli–only highways, always under construction, scrape the landscape to provide access to the ever growing Israeli colonies on Palestinian lands.
Suarez writes about the role of his own country, the USA, in supporting Israel and its occupations and attacks. He has presented a vivid record, easy for anyone to understand, with photos and text of people and their struggles that makes clear the injustice of this occupation and the complicity of powerful governments in supporting it (including Canada).
In his closing essay, “Palestine at the Precipice”, the author poses the questions: What would be a just solution? And how can the complicit nations be persuaded to cooperate?
He answers the first question by stating that “the means to a just resolution, negotiated in accordance with international law, have been available for six decades. That is not the problem.”
In answer to the second question Suarez says, “Israel is a Western client-state, a European colony, a neo–colonial foothold in the Middle East.” He calls on us – citizens of those complicit states to use boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against “the expropriation and subjugation of a people denied the ability to defend themselves or to negotiate as equals. Refusing to patronize Israeli interests, whether commercial, cultural, or academic, will isolate the regime… This book is one person´s glimpse of Palestine at the precipice, offered in the conviction that people can act against injustice and prevail– but for Palestine, we must act together, in solidarity, and now.”
Filed under Book Reviews, Thomas Suarez
Tagged as Thomas Suarez
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Palestine: Sixty Years Later: Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank 2008-2009 by Thomas Suarez (Americans for Middle East Understanding, 2010) 112 pages plus photos.
Written by admin on December 30th, 2010
Individuals insisting that the Palestinians reject peace with Israel found affirmation in a report analyzing Palestinian political opinion expressed in social media. P@lestinian Pulse: What Policymakers Can Learn From Palestinian Social Media, examined an array of West Bank and Gaza-based internet resources to conclude that Hamas exhibited “little desire for a negotiated peace with Israel,” “most Fatah supporters embraced the notion that Israel was an enemy, rather than a peace partner,” and half its members seek “armed conflict and terrorism against Israel.” And if that was not sufficient argument for the Obama Administration to discard the Palestinians, the study warned that Hamas was aligned with “Salafists such as al-Qaeda” and that Iran’s influence in the territories goes unchallenged.
P@lestinian Pulse comports with the views of its sponsoring entity: the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a self-described “policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism” whose policy recommendations echo Likud party viewpoints. The report may be exaggerated hyperbola but there is no dispute that the Palestinians deeply hate their 60 years of Israeli military occupation. An overwhelming majority of Palestinians believe that Israel aspires to annex Palestinian lands, while denying them political rights or expelling them from the West Bank. That P@lestinian Pulse chose not to ask why such hostility toward Israel exists is characteristic of rhetoric that dismisses Palestinians as worthwhile political actors and deeply affects public opinion.
Palestine: Sixty Years Later provides a forceful explanation for Palestinian anger against Israel. It’s a full bore assault against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, rejecting assumptions of symmetry between Israel and Palestine or presumptions that Israel acts in self-defense. Thomas Suarez thesis is straight-forward: the Zionist movement since its earliest days has sought to cleanse the land of non-Jews. Zionist acceptance of 1948 U.N. partition plan was only a tactical concession and the subsequent 20 years of conflict was geared toward conquering all of Palestine. Israel’s military provokes Arab attacks in order elicit a whole slough of attacks in the name of self-defense. By cloaking every offensive action as a defensive one, Israel successfully reversed the identity of the victim and aggressor. That is why, Suarez explains, statistics demonstrating vastly greater Palestinian casualties and suffering have no meaning in the West. The “peace process,” says Suarez, has always been a distraction from the reality of on-going Israeli aggression, whether it be attacks on Gaza or the settlement construction in the West Bank.
That last claim resonates today as Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu chose settlement construction over continued talks with Palestine Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. Likewise, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s endorsement of an emasculated Palestinian state, the official platform of the ruling Likud Party of which he is chairman, “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river” and affirms that Jewish settlement of “Judea and Samaria” “is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.” That the mainstream media considers Likud’s policy statements insufficiently newsworthy to report underscores Suarez’s complaint about a compliant and uncritical media.
Readers may dispute Suarez’s historic critique of Israel but his photographs of contemporary Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank are incontestable. They offer an unnerving portrait of a people and a land under an inconsolable occupation. Israel’s fixed presence in Gaza was replaced by what Suarez makes clear is a suffocating land, air, and sea blockade. Photos illuminate everyday life, depicting children dressed in traditional as well as contemporary dress, at school, playing on the streets, or at home with family. Images of vendors at the seashore and merchants hauling produce on mule-drawn carts adds to the sense of normality. But as the photos shift to scenes of collapsed buildings destroyed during “Caste Lead,” Israel’s 2008 attack on Gaza, a child standing on the rubble of his home, or a family standing next to a UNICEF supplied tent they now call home, it become evident that Gaza is anything but normal. Most unnerving was a photo of a bomb crater so deep that it dwarfed the people standing atop its lip. It suggested the depth of terror the people of Gaza suffered under Caste Lead. Photos of the tunnels that Gazians rely on for goods and products smuggled from Egypt underscored their everyday hardships.
Separate chapters on East Jerusalem and the West Bank provide similar images telling a similar story: Palestinians at work, at home, and at play but always enveloped in Israel’s intruding occupation. The value of this photo essay lay in its capability to remind its readers that Palestinians are people like themselves, wishing the best for their families, but living under extremely harsh conditions. The photos counter publications such as P@lestinian Pulse that propagates accounts of senseless Palestinian violence. Suarez’s narrative accompanying the photos provides a powerful indictment against Israel’s practices and ultimate goal of erasing the Palestinian presence. Critics rightfully will complain that he is partisan. But images of the military checkpoints, soldiers enforcing Jewish-only neighborhoods in Hebron, and the wall cutting through West Bank communities make clear why Palestinians resist Israel’s occupation.
Posted in Israel/Palestine Conflict, Occupied Territories |
Book Review | State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, by Thomas Suárez
March 13, 2018 Sebastian Bernburg Book Reviews
Aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing by Jewish terrorists on July 22, 1946.
The dominant narrative of Western and Israeli media tends to portray Palestinians as the aggressors or instigators of terrorism, and not as the victims of state violence. So when Thomas Suárez titles his book State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (Interlink, 2017) it might come as a surprise to some that he is referring to a vast array of Zionist terrorism carried out in the years leading to the establishment of Israel in 1948. By digging deep into the National Archives of the United Kingdom, Suárez details the history of the Zionist terror that affected Palestinian civilians, British officials and anti-Zionist Jews throughout Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. These hundreds of acts of violence not only bullied the British government into complying with Zionist demands, but also built up a significant war chest of funds and arms that prepared the Yishuv to take more land by force than that stipulated in the 1947 UN partition resolution 181. Many of those responsible for the killing of thousands of civilians came to serve as prime ministers and in other high official positions in the Israeli government after 1948.
The first two chapters of State of Terror chronicle the history of the Zionist project from its inception in the late 19th century to the intensification of Zionist terrorism after the issuance of the 1939 White Paper, which sought to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. These two chapters, covering a period well documented by scholars of history, serve to contextualize Zionist terrorism from 1939 to 1957, Suárez’s primary focus. As Suárez exhibits, the Zionist project never limited itself spatially to a part of Palestine, but sought all of Palestine and beyond. The British Mandate was thus a transitional period during which the Jewish Agency could prepare to displace the Palestinian population by violence and massively increased Jewish emigration.
Suárez’s thesis is that “It was Zionist terrorism (…) that ultimately dictated the course of events during the mandate, and it is Israeli state terrorism that continues to dictate events today.” (11) Through a Herculean effort working with British archival material, he is able to substantiate this claim rigorously. What becomes evident from Suárez’s research is that the three major Zionist militias: Irgun, Lehi and the Hagana, utilized a vast number of different tactics to terrorize the Palestinian population, British officials and the Jewish population in the Middle East and around Europe that did not ascribe to the Zionist ideology. The number of tactics listed in Suárez’s work is substantial and includes assassinations of high ranking British officials, attacks on police and post offices, bombings of civilian targets such as markets and hotels, chemical warfare, attacks on Jewish refugees throughout Europe and indiscriminate killings of the civilian Palestinian and Jewish population in Palestine, to give a few examples. As Suárez demonstrates, these three Zionist terror organizations, the Hagana being the armed wing of the Jewish Agency, coordinated and worked together on major attacks, with the leaders of the Jewish Agency signing off on numerous bombings, like that of the King David Hotel in 1946. Just before the establishment of Israel in 1948, what had been a successful campaign of terror as part of an uneven confrontation between Arabs and Zionists, became the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
While State of Terror undoubtedly is a great contribution to the history of the British Mandate of Palestine, it unfortunately lacks structure and a flowing narrative, which, in turn, obfuscates the import of some of the incidents of violence it recounts. Suárez points out at the end of his introduction that “Some paragraphs in the period 1944-1947 are essentially recitations of attacks without further commentary.” (16) However, this characterization applies not only to the period he specifies, but to the majority of the work following the first 55 pages. Thus, the book would have benefited from more analysis of the events Suárez has covered, and subchapters with an introduction and conclusion. Many important findings and events are hidden in sections of the book that are “essentially recitations,” which as Suárez explains “some readers may find them tedious and may prefer merely to skim some paragraphs, without loss to the larger meaning.” (16). While the recitations of events does support his broader thesis, the lack of analysis obscures their individual significance and how they relate to one another. This is especially the case given the absence of a strong concluding chapter that summarizes Suárez’s findings and explicitly states how they connect to his thesis.
Nonetheless, with State of Terror Suárez has laid out an impressive archival foundation for other scholars to build on in writing about an immensely important theme that has all too often been forgotten, and that challenges the Zionist grand narrative of Israel’s inception.
'State of Terror' author Thomas Suarez defended in House of Lords report
May 19, 2017
Thomas Suàrez’s book State of Terror and its meticulous itemising of acts of terror in Palestine and Israel, carried out by Jewish groups against the British, Palestinian Arabs and even Jews who disagreed with Zionism, have triggered a wave of opposition from people and groups who label any criticism of Zionism or Israel as anti-Semitic. Two recent documents demonstrate this. One is the report of the House of Lords Privileges Committee, which spent several months and a lot of money investigating accusations of anti-Semitism against speakers at meetings in the Houses of Parliament, including Thomas Suàrez, and found that none of the accusations of anti-Semitism had any substance at all. It makes interesting reading, not least because the Committee publishes in full the complaints, revealing the intemperate, abusive and mendacious nature of those who try to suppress free speech about Israel and Zionism. Read the House of Lords report here
A second link worth exploring is Suàrez’s own rebuttal of the complaints by one particular blogger, Jonathan Hoffman, whose long, rambling and repetitive tirade against State of Terror, submitted the the House of Lords, is demolished by quoting chapter and verse from the book and from National Archive documents. Read it here
Review of Thomas Suarez’s “State of Terror”
contact@ifamericansknew.org June 17, 2017 suarez, zionism
Review of Thomas Suarez’s “State of Terror”
By Eve Mykytyn
Thomas Suarez’s “State of Terror” is a meticulously documented history of Zionism from its early stages in Israel until 1956. It is the story of how a number of secular Jews successfully installed a religious state located on the land of another nation. The established myth is that after centuries of antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, the Jews ‘deserved’ Israel, the ‘land without a people for people without a land.’ Historical accounts often deepen and are refined with time and study. Suarez’s book (along with a few others such as Alison Weir’s “Against Our Better Judgment”) convincingly refutes the generally accepted history entirely.
Suarez points out that in 1897 an early Zionist cabled the news to his co-conspirators that Palestine was already densely populated. What followed was a terrorist conspiracy to take that land that is shocking in its scope and violence.
Starting around 1918, in what is now Israel, the Irgun, the Lehi (Stern Gang) the Haganah and the Jewish Agency operated at various times as competing and cooperating gangs of thugs. They raised money by robbery and extortion, extracting ‘tributes’ from local businesses, bombing those who failed to pay. The Zionist gangs assassinated Palestinians, police, the British, and Jews whose opinions diverged from theirs.
The war did not temper their violence. When the British consolidated three boats of refugees onto the ship Patria in Haifa with the intention of taking them to a displaced persons camp in Mauritus, the Haganah bombed the ship of refugees. Over 267 people died, among them 200 Jews. Zionists spun the story as a reenactment of the biblical story of Masada, claiming that the passengers of the Patria heroically committed mass suicide by bombing their own ship when they failed to reach Israel.
During and after World War II, the Zionists demanded with remarkable if not complete success that Jews be segregated from other soldiers and then segregated within displaced persons camps. Suarez cites pro-Zionist Churchill’s discomfort with such segregation: Churchill wrote that nearly every race in Europe had been shipped to concentration camps and “there appears to be very little difference in the amount of torture they endured.” (page 120). Jews who wanted to stay in their home lands or who successfully negotiated the resettlement of European Jews anywhere but Israel were denounced and thwarted.
How did the Zionists succeed in insisting that they spoke for all Jews when it is clear that they did not? What gave them the right, as murderers of Jewish refugees, to speak for displaced Jews after the war?
Zionists consistently claimed to speak for all Jews. No wonder the Zionists insisted on the use of Hebrew (a number of early German and Yiddish language newspapers were bombed). Suarez points out that the settlers spoke the language of the biblical era because they claimed to be its people (page 25). Ben Gurion claimed that the “Bible is our mandate.”
Israeli’s official birth in 1948 purged a million Palestinians and destroyed 400 of their villages. The UN had established Israel’s borders, but Israel already stretched beyond the borders and claimed sovereignty over all the land it held. Both England and the United States knew that Israel would not give back any land. Reuven Shiloah, the first director of the Mossad, not only told them so but declared Israel’s right to take more land as necessary (page 277).
Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and assets was not simply a result of claiming land Israel was granted by the UN. Suarez makes the point that: “economic analysis…illustrates that the Israeli state owes its very existence to its wholesale theft of Palestinians’ worldly possessions…Despite the massive infusion of foreign capital into Israel and its claims of modern efficiency, it was the end of the Palestinians’ [assets] that saved the Israeli state from stillbirth” (page 288).
Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian benefactors after 1948 was atrocious. It is painful to read through Suarez’s partial listing of atrocities: rape, torture, murder and robbery. Arab villages, Christian and Muslim, friendly and not, were destroyed. In one instance, Arab villagers were murdered by being forced to stay in their homes as they were bombed. (page 309).
At the time, Israel itself was the site of “alarming proportions” of murder, rape and robbery within its own citizenship. One Israeli speculated that this arose from a “general and contemptuous disregard for law” (page 298). A British report stated: “intolerance explodes into violence with appalling ease in Israel.”
Israel reached into Iraq (with false flag operations against Iraqi Jews to prompt immigration) and into North Africa to obtain citizens for its new settler state. The Iraqi and North African Jews were kept in miserable conditions until they were deployed as place holders to live on newly acquired land.
In 1954 Israelis planted bombs in Egypt in a false flag operation intended to convey that Egypt was unstable. When the plan was exposed in 1955, the United States and the United Kingdom considered military action against Israel to stop its murderous seizure of land. In a cold war series of events detailed by Suarez, France and England ended up siding with Israel against Egypt in the Suez Crisis, ending any chance that England and the United States would conduct any action against Israel.
So far in his book Suarez has delivered a careful, albeit painful, history. And then Suarez delivers his indictment, “with the conclusion of Suez,…Israel had fully established its techniques of expansion and racial cleansing that continue to serve it today: its maintenance of an existential threat, both as a natural consequence of its aggression and of provocation for the purpose; its expropriation and squandering of the moral weight of historic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; its dehumanization of the Palestinians; its presence as the prophet-state of the Jews; and its seduction of its Jewish population with the perks of blood privilege.”
The book which lies and distorts
November 14, 2016, 3:11 pm 3
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A new book by Thomas Suarez (‘State of Terror – How terrorism created modern Israel’) was presented and discussed at SOAS Palestine Society on 3 November.
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After the meeting Campaign Against Antisemitism filed a complaint with SOAS and Yiftah Curiel, the Embassy spokesman, accused SOAS of letting ‘racist conspiracy theories’ go unchallenged.
I have now read the book. It is 328 pages of unremitting vilification of Israel, covering the period from early in the 20th century up to the Suez Crisis in 1956, with a final chapter covering selective subsequent events. There is a brief mention of Arab terror attacks in the Introduction (‘Palestinians also committed terror attacks, and this book’s focus on Zionist terror must never be misinterpreted as excusing Palestinian violence against civilians’). But that is all we get about Arab terror. No mention of the Hebron massacre of 1929 which left 67 Jews dead; no mention of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s meetings with Hitler to try to persuade him to extend his anti-Jewish campaign into Arab lands.
The book is so biased and contains so many untruths, distorted quotes and unsubstantiated allegations, that one must conclude that it would never have seen the light of day, were it not for the fact that the publisher is Karl Sabbagh’s new company. (Sabbagh thinks Israel is responsible for global anti-Semitism. He spoke at the meeting last month in Parliament hosted by Tonge (as a result of which she quit the Lib Dems (before she could be expelled))).
The publisher’s website says: “This book has been turned down by a number of publishers because of the sensitivity of its subject matter”. The innuendo being: ‘Zionists in the publishing industry tried to suppress the book’. The truth – surely – is that no mainstream publisher wanted to risk publishing such a shoddy and biased distortion of the truth.
Another clue to the true nature of the book is provided by the bibliography and the names mentioned in the endnotes (680 of them). The anti-Israel industry has a number of names who inevitably feature and most of them appear in this book: Amira Hass, Joseph Massad, Chris McGreal, Lenny Brenner, Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Uri Davis, David Hirst, Ghada Karmi, Ilan Pappe, John Rose, Shlomo Sand and Avi Shlaim. (In an incestuous mockery of scholarship, these anti-Israel authors quote and feed off each other incessantly).
What are the most egregious falsehoods and distortions in the book? I list these in the order in which they appear.
First, the description of Deir Yassin. Suarez fails to mention that residents and foreign troops opened fire on the attackers. Dr. Uri Milstein has written that Deir Yassin was hardly a peaceful village. Arab attacks against Jewish transportation in western Jerusalem emanated from Deir Yassin in 1948 and it was therefore necessary to take measures to take over the village.
Page 10: Endnote #8 suggests that Weizmann said ‘Arabs are inferior people and do not deserve a vote’. No source is given.
Page 13: Suarez writes ‘UN Resolution 181 can fairly be described as a scam’. No evidence is offered for this statement – simply an assertion that ‘no Israeli leader had any intention of honouring Partition’.
Pages 15/16: Suarez states that ‘Gazan fishermen are killed for fishing in their own waters and Gazan farmers blown up for farming their own soils.’ No evidence is provided – because it isn’t true.
Page 25: Suarez writes that ‘Israel wields ‘the Jewish state’ as a talisman fending off censure: critics hesitate to fire accusatory words at such a state for fear of hitting this three-word human shield, alleged to be the embodiment of Jews and Judaism, that the state holds out in front.’ This is patently not true. The accusation that critics of Israel are deterred by the possibility of being accused of being antisemitic is a time-worn device beloved of antisemites. None of them can ever give an example of a supporter of Israel misusing the charge of antisemitism in this way.
Page 27: Suarez suggests that the World Zionist Organisation refused to participate in the 1938 Evian conference for resettling refugees, because it was not predicated on a Zionist State in Palestine. That is not true. The WZO was not invited – the conference was for states only.
Page 28: Suarez says that Ben Gurion argued that rather than seeing all the Jewish children in Germany escape to England, it was better that half of them should be slaughtered by the Nazis if that meant that the other half could go to Palestine. Endnote #24 has the precise quote. It is a hugely offensive canard, as camera.org has explained – deriving from taking a single quote out of context and ignoring other comments made by Ben Gurion that directly contradict this interpretation.
Page 28: Suarez claims that ‘Jewish orphans …. became targets of a formal kidnapping campaign launched to snatch them from their adoptive European homes to ship them to Palestine as demographic facts-on-the-ground.’ There is no evidence for this blatantly antisemitic assertion. Similarly for the claim (same page) that ‘When in 1944 President Roosevelt provisionally secured safe haven for a half million Displaced Persons, outraged Zionist leaders sabotaged it.’ And for the similar claim on page 48: “rescue for its own sake was never part of Jewish Agency policy”.
Page 68: Suarez recounts the story of the Patria. The Patria was a ship that was ordered by the British in 1940 to take back Jews fleeing Europe. The Haganah wanted to damage the ship so that it could not sail. Unfortunately the operation went wrong and 267 people died and 172 were injured. But Suarez simply suggests that Jewish terrorists blew up the ship, without relating the context. And then he suggests that there was a ’cover-up’by the Israeli government which suggested that the passengers committed suicide, rather than being taken back to Europe. Again – no evidence.
Page 78: Suarez writes ‘The Jewish Agency maintained its opposition to Jews joining the Allied struggle against the Nazis’. There is no evidence for this.
Page 79: Suarez quotes Henry Hunloke, Defence Security Officer in Palestine, who reported ‘mutilated bodies are found with labels tied to them saying ‘This is what happens to an informer’.’ Hunloke also reportedly said that the Jewish Agency stirred up antisemitism, in order to force Jews … to come to Palestine. Both statements are accepted without question even though there is no evidence of either from any other source.
Page 120: Suarez asserts that to address the (supposed) ‘problem’ of the displaced Jews not wanting to go to Palestine, ‘a triple campaign was waged: the forceful isolation and coercion of the survivors themselves, the sabotage of international safe havens for them and the kidnapping of Jewish orphans.’ His assertion about the coercion of Displaced Persons relies on a book by Yosef Grodzinsky (‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust’). But many Displaced Persons have challenged the assertions in that book, see Elhanan Yakira (‘Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust’). Grodzinsky is also the source for the lie proposed by Suarez, that Chief Rabbi Herzog ‘kidnapped’ Jewish orphans in Europe after the War.
Page 211: Suarez asserts that the State of Israel systematically stole German reparation money intended for survivors who continued to live in poverty. The source for this is Norman Finkelstein (‘The Holocaust Industry’) – a book which has no credibility whatsoever.
Page 257: It is stated that the Jewish Agency opposed the Marshall Plan because it would have made the lives of Jews in Europe more comfortable. This is unsubstantiated nonsense.
Page 276: Suarez quotes from Israel Archives, saying that the Israeli Foreign Ministry said the fleeing of Arabs would reduce the refugees to “a human heap, the scum of the earth”. But Suarez does not tell us who said it. It is perfectly possible that the Foreign Ministry kept a record of a statement made by someone not connected with government.
Page 282: Suarez suggests that Israel destroyed the Iraqi Jewish community and blocked other countries from helping Jews who wanted to leave Iraq. Neither is true. Iraq destroyed the Iraqi Jewish Community, in the Farhud in 1941.
Page 286: Suarez says that ‘Israel kidnapped Mizrahi newborns, giving the babies to Ashkenazi couples and telling the children’s parents that the child had died. This practice persisted at least through Israel’s first decade. The final cynical irony of Israel’s uprooting of Middle Eastern and North African Jews from their homelands is that the state now uses it as a racial ‘settling of scores’ for its own ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.’ There was never a conspiracy to kidnap Mizrahi babies. This trope is sourced by Suarez from Jonathan Cook – who of course has a history of anti-Israel falsehoods and bigotry.
Page 286: Suarez suggest that UN Resolution 194 gave unqualified right to Arab refugees to return home. That is plain wrong.
Page 291: Suarez cites Chris McGreal in support of a story about the rape of a Palestinian woman. Chris McGreal again has a history of false reports that traduce Israel. He achieved the rare distinction of being singled out by the CST (the British charity that protects the Jewish community) in their 2011 report on antisemitic discourse.
The back cover of the book has two endorsements.
Ilan Pappe: ‘A tour de force, based on diligent archival research that looks boldly at the impact of Zionism in Palestine and its people in the first part of the 20th century. The book is the first comprehensive and structured analysis of the violence and terror employed by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel against the people of Palestine. Much of the suffering we witness today can be explained by, and connected to, this formative period covered thoroughly in this book.’
Baroness Jenny Tonge: ‘I thought I knew a fair bit about the Middle East after all the years I’ve been involved in its politics but this book came as an eye-opener. I realised how ignorant I was, not of the events leading up to the establishment of Israel but of the terror campaign that led up to it. Everyone who has ever accepted Israel’s account of its own history should read this book and hear the truth. It should change them forever.’
Such uncritical sycophancy is really a disgrace. Tonge and Pappe should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Of course they are not – and that is a massive part of the problem. In particular the fact that Pappe is entrusted to teach students is positively chilling.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia by Thomas Suarez
Toko Buku2003
Southeast Asia has always occupied a special place in the imaginations of East and West. For the Chinese, the islands of Southeast Asia lay in the “southern ocean” while in India they were thought of as the “lands below the wind.” In the West, Southeast Asia was identified with Paradise and the Garden of Eden. It was also the supposed location of King Solomon’s Ophir and Ptolemy’s “Golden Chersonese” – a place of stupendous riches and strange marvels, where spices grew and unicorns roamed ancient forests.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia documents the idea of Southeast Asia as a geographical and cosmological construct, from the earliest of times up until the dawn of the modern era. Using maps, itineraries, sailing instructions, traveler’s tales, religious texts and other contemporary sources, the book examines the representation of Southeast Asia, both from the historical perspective of Western exploration, and also through the eyes of Asian neighbors.
From the time of Herodotus and Alexander the Great to the medieval cosmologies of the Christian Fathers, Southeast Asia was as much a place of myth and legend in Western thought as it was a geographical reality. Later, with the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia and the ground-breaking journeys of Marco Polo and others like him, a more definite image of Southeast Asia began to inscribe itself in the contemporary cartographic record and paved the way for the great voyages of discovery in the 15th and early 16th centuries – Columbus and Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco de Gama and Magellan.
This treasure of a book was written by an expert on the subject of early mapping, a well-known figure in the field for many years. Thomas Suarez has helped create some of the finest collections of maps, both in private hands and in public institutions. He has acted as curator for exhibitions at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., the Bristol-Myers Squibb Gallery, and as an advisor for the Addison Gallery of American Art.
A student of the Julliard school of Music in the 1960s, Suarez’ special interest in Southeast Asia was awakened when he visited the region during concert tours as a classical violinist. He is the author of numerous articles on the subject of early maps, and his previous books include Shedding the Veil which tells the story of the mapping of America, and The Crustacean Codex, a fictional work set against a background of exploration and discovery.
The author sympathetically relates the difficult task faced by the earliest mapmakers who had to fight against conflicting sources and their own prejudices to represent Southeast Asia on the map. He explains, for example, the peculiar continental peninsulas which suddenly appeared in the early 16th century, and why some parts of Southeast Asia subsequently washed up on the shores of Terra Australis.
Suarez goes on to describe the growing popularity of printed maps in 17th century Europe and the rise of the East India Company which ultimately led to the colonization of many parts of Southeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Early Mapping follows the story through to the very end, closing with the exploration of the interior of the region as the final chapter in this fascinating account of Southeast Asian geography and mapmaking.
In a word, this handsome large format highly readable text recounts the fascinating story of how Southeast Asia was, quite literally, put on the map, both in cartographic terms and as a literary and imaginative concept.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia by Thomas Suarez, Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., 1999, ISBN 962-593-470-7, 280 pages.
Available for Rp295,000 at Periplus Bookshops in the Bali Galleria and in the Matahari in Kuta, Warung Made in Seminyak, Ngurah Rai Airport (both international and domestic terminals), Keris Gallery in Nusa Dua and in Gramedia bookstores.
For comments and suggestions, please write : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2003 PakBill
You can read all past articles of Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz