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FROM THE GUARDIAN ‘Aura of credibility’: why Democrats and elites revere Kissinger despite war crimes allegations Julian Borger in Washington Fri, December 1, 2023 Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images One of the very few things that still brings the Republican and Democratic political establishments together is their shared reverence for Henry Kissinger. Kissinger’s death, at the age of 100, has served as a reminder that the frequent, wide-ranging and substantial allegations of war crimes against him never dimmed the admiration he inspired among the powerful in Washington. “Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America’s Ruling Class, Finally Dies,” was the Rolling Stone headline on his obituary, expressing the bewilderment and frustration of many progressives at his enduring popularity among the elite. The Republican tributes were hardly surprising – it was as national security adviser and then secretary of state to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, that Kissinger made his mark on the world. What is more striking is the enduring fealty of Democrats, who otherwise identify as liberals and defenders of human rights on the world stage. The current secretary of state, Antony Blinken, said on Thursday he had sought Kissinger’s counsel as recently as a month ago, and issued a lengthy and fulsome tribute to Kissinger’s “enduring capacity to bring his strategic acumen and intellect to bear on the emerging challenges of each passing decade.” Related: Henry Kissinger dies celebrated, but why? His achievements have long since crumbled | Simon Tisdall The defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, said he had also looked to Kissinger for advice and called him a “rare scholar turned strategist”. Joe Biden was a little more measured, praising the late statesman’s “fierce intellect and profound strategic focus” while adding the two men often strongly disagreed. That note of caution was the only veiled nod by the administration towards Kissinger’s record of ruthless acts, some of which have been widely categorised as war crimes or crimes against humanity. In 1968, he helped sabotage Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s peace talks with the North Vietnamese, helping ensure Nixon’s election and the extension of the Vietnam war by another five years. In 1969, he orchestrated the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country, which resulted in the killing of up to half a million people, without consulting Congress or declaring war. He gave US acquiescence in the 1971 slaughter of 300,000 Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan by the dictator, Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. In 1973, he helped orchestrate a coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, installing a military dictator, Augusto Pinochet. And in 1976 he gave a green light to the military junta that had taken over Argentina to get rid of its leftist opposition, telling it: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” It is a litany that cuts across everything liberal Democratic foreign policy is meant to stand for, and yet one powerful Washington Democrat after another has gone out of their way to fete Kissinger. “I’ve always been genuinely mystified by it myself,” Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said. Rhodes suggested a couple of possible explanations for the Kissinger syndrome, including an inferiority complex Democrats have long felt over foreign and national security policy. “Some Democrats and some liberals have a lack ofconfidence on foreign affairs, and there’s this aura of credibility around Kissinger,” he said, adding that it imparted an air of hard-headed realism that helped contain the risk of being labelled an idealist. “I think some people thought: here I am talking to Henry Kissinger, and that means I’m serious. I think that is entrenched in the American establishment,” he said. Rhodes’ former boss, Obama, was a significant exception to the Democrats’ fandom, noting in 2016 that the Nixon and Kissinger legacy in southeast Asia had been “chaos, slaughter and authoritarian governments”. For others however, Kissinger’s record of pursuing détente with Russia and China, reducing the threat of nuclear conflict, was more important than his involvement in atrocities elsewhere. “I think there are some Democrats and some liberals who are actually pure realists,” Rhodes said. “They might not have liked Vietnam and Chile and Bangladesh but his realpolitik was seen as an alternative to war, and a validation of diplomacy with countries like China and Russia.” Sidney Blumenthal, a former adviser to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, argues there was a more practical reason they were keen to meet Kissinger long after he had left office. “He stayed around for a long time and made himself invaluable as an intermediary and made a tremendous amount of money, particularly as a channel to China,” Blumenthal said. In July, Kissinger secretly flew to China, after he had turned 100, at the invitation of Xi Jinping, as the Chinese president made the first step towards improving relations with Washington. Brett Bruen, the director of global engagement in the Obama White House, argued you could admire Kissinger’s craft without necessarily endorsing his policies. “We need to separate what Kissinger contributed to modern diplomacy from his policies and politics,” Bruen said. “You can admire the ways in which he created concepts like shuttle diplomacy, and how he worked to overcome enormous divides with Beijing, while at the same time detesting some of the things that he did with those diplomatic tactics.” Aaron David Miller, a former senior diplomat under a series of administrations, argued that it was Kissinger’s agility as a statesman, and his ability to get things done in government that was the real secret to an appeal that transcended political differences. Other diplomats simply admired his power. “What is the world’s most compelling ideology?” Miller asked. “It’s not nationalism, it’s not communism, it’s not even capitalism. It’s success.”

DECEMBER 1, 2023 Mainstream Media Largely Ignore Israel’s Duplicity and Deceit BY MELVIN GOODMAN Over the years, particularly during the wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the Israelis have lied about their military campaigns, and have tried to deceive U.S. administrations about their actions. In 1954, Israeli intelligence operatives bombed a U.S. Information Agency Library in Egypt, and tried to make it appear to have been an Egyptian act of violence. The Israelis were trying to compromise U.S.-Egyptian relations, particularly the efforts of the Eisenhower administration to finance the Aswan Dam. In the 1980s, the Israelis denied that Jonathan Pollard was spying on behalf of Israeli intelligence; they continued to do so throughout Pollard’s thirty-year prison sentence. However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally welcomed Pollard to Israel upon his release from prison in 2020 with the greeting “You’re home.” Israeli duplicity on key national security issues began in their War for Independence, 75 years ago, when they lied about the Nakba (the catastrophe) that involved the forced removal of 700,000 Palestinians from their villages. Israel claimed that the Palestinians made their own decision to leave, when in fact there was an Israeli plan (Plan Dalet) that prescribed the ethnic cleansing of Israeli territory. The plan was developed in 1948 by Zionist political and military leaders, including Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion. It included operational military orders that specified which Palestinian population centers should be targeted and detailed a blueprint for their forcible removal and destruction. The plan is rarely cited, although it was Israeli historians who used archival documents to trace the official policy of displacement. Israeli deceit has been present in all of their subsequent wars. The Israelis have never released sensitive documents that demonstrate their secret dealings with Britain and France to regain control of the Suez Canal and to remove Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956. The secret plan called for an Israeli invasion of Gaza and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in order to justify a British and French invasion along the Suez Canal. Political pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union led to withdrawal of British, French, and Israeli forces. The episode strengthened Nasser; humiliated Britain and France; ended Britain’s role as a global power; and convinced Arab States that Israel was a part of European colonialism in the Middle East. In 1967, Israelis officials at the highest level lied to the White House about the start of the six-day war. The Israeli Ambassador to the United States assured the Johnson administration that the Israelis would not attack first under any circumstances, ruling out even a preemptive attack. Israel then attacked and claimed it was preemptive. I served on the CIA’s Task Force for the war, and there was no evidence of an Egyptian battle plan that would justify preemption. In face, half of the Egyptian army was fighting in a civil war in Yemen. The Israeli attack against the Egyptian air force was extremely successful because Egypt’s fighter jets were parked on airfields wingtip-to-wingtip, another indicator of Egypt’s lack of a plan to attack Israel. Nevertheless, Israeli officials told President Lyndon Johnson that the Egyptians had initiated firing on Israel settlements, and that an Egyptian squadron had been observed heading toward Israel. Neither statement was true. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan had done his best to convince his government not to lie to the United States. In addition to lying about the start of the Six-Day War, the Israelis were even more deceitful three days later when they attributed their malicious attack on the USS Liberty to a random accident. In actual fact, the “accident” was well planned. The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed. It brandished a five-foot-by-eight-foot Stars and Stripes, and resembled no ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s enemies. Yet, the Israelis claimed they believed they were attacking an Egyptian vessel. The Israeli attack took place after six hours of intense, low-level reconnaissance, which was followed by an attack conducted over a two-hour period by unmarked Mirage jets using cannons and rockets. Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, including a Soviet warship, then machine-gunned life rafts that survivors dropped in hopes of abandoning the ship. The National Security Agency’s investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day, fifty-six years later. Israeli duplicity played a significant role in the end game of the October War of 1973. National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger used Israeli disinformation about a possible Soviet intervention in the war to justify the declaration of a DefCon-III nuclear alert, which could have worsened the Arab-Israeli war and provoked a Soviet-American confrontation. Kissinger himself lied to our NATO allies in Europe as well as to China about a Soviet alert to their airborne divisions to prepare for intervention in the Middle East. (The Soviets never introduced their airborne forces into areas that were not contiguous to the Soviet Union.) The Israelis also violated the cease-fire that had been carefully arranged by Kissinger and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin; it took a Kissinger threat to Defense Minister Dayan to put a stop to the Israeli violations. In 1982, the Israelis lied about their role in allowing Lebanese Christian Phalangists to enter the Sabra and Shitila refugee camps, where they committed horrific war crimes against defenseless Palestinians. The Israelis have never conceded that the Phalangist militia were under the political and military control of the State of Israel. Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon maintained that the Israeli Defense Forces “did not know exactly what was taking place” in the refugee camps, although it was Sharon himself who encouraged the Phalangists to attack. This time it is the Israeli Defense Forces that are committing horrific war crimes in Gaza, where more women and children have been killed in one month than the Russians have killed in Ukraine in nearly two years of fighting. Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs in dense civilian areas is unprecedented. Yet, the mainstream media continue to cite Israeli officials who maintain that the “smallest available ordnance” is used to cause the “minimal adverse effect on civilians.” Israelis maintain that the “focus is on Hamas,” but the Israelis have slaughtered more civilians in one month than the the United States and its allies killed in Afghanistan over two decades. There is no question that Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is employing overwhelming military power to terrorize 2.3 million Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the name of defeating Hamas military forces. This would be consistent with an Israeli policy that began in 1948 to use every military engagement with Arab states to displace as many Palestinians civilians as possible from their homes, and to never acknowledge a right of return for Palestinian refugees. No U.S. administration has ever put pressure on Israel to allow the return of Palestinians to their homes in Israel. Meanwhile, mainstream media support Israel’s contention that the Israel-Hamas War began on October 7th, which ignores Israel’s punishment of Palestinian civilians over the past 16 years. Israeli policy has limited the usage of electricity in Gaza, which has created the need to dump sewage into the Mediterranean Sea, making the water undrinkable. Israeli-imposed fuel shortages caused sanitation plants to be shut down. Netanyahu, who once boasted that I “stopped the Oslo accords,” never indicated any interest in lessening these punishments, let alone pursuing a diplomatic or political solution to the Palestinian tragedy. Sadly, U.S. administrations have paid lip service to the idea of a two-state solution, but have never pressed an Israeli government to move toward Palestinian statehood. At the very least, the Biden administration should recognize Palestine as a member state in the United Nations, and press Israel to enter talks with Palestinians regarding borders, Jerusalem, and security from Israeli settlers on the West Bank. Melvin A. Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. and A Whistleblower at the CIA. His most recent books are “American Carnage: The Wars of Donald Trump” (Opus Publishing, 2019) and “Containing the National Security State” (Opus Publishing, 2021). Goodman is the national security columnist for counterpunch.org.

The Global South hasn’t forgotten Kissinger By Eduardo Porter Columnist and editorial board member | December 3, 2023 I did not personally experience the violence that Henry Kissinger helped unleash on Latin America in his day. But I witnessed some of the collateral damage. The children of exiles from Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and beyond crowded into my high school in Mexico City. The grandson of Chilean President Salvador Allende, deposed in a U.S.-backed coup in 1973, was just a couple of years behind me. It is not difficult for me to write that Kissinger was an abomination. And yet, hearing from friends who more directly suffered the military regimes that were enabled, abetted and even directly supported by the United States during his tenure as national security adviser and secretary of state, it dawned on me that Kissinger wasn’t a rogue monster. He embodied a theory of power that underpinned the world order of his time. It was a world in which human rights, democracy and justice were of little relevance; they were subordinate to the overarching goal of bolstering Washington and its allies in a balance of power with the other great coalition, led by Moscow. Kissinger is still feted today for his successes: the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, opening relations with Mao’s China, avoiding a potentially fatal hot war between rival nuclear powers. But as José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean senator and former foreign minister, who fled to Mexico as a young man in 1973 after the bloody coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, told me, “the human cost of Kissinger’s grand design was very high.” It’s an irony that Latin America didn’t matter to Kissinger: The world order was set in Bonn, Moscow and Washington. “Nothing important can come from the South,” he told Chilean foreign minister Gabriel Valdés at a luncheon in June 1969. When Mr. Valdés retorted “you know nothing of the South,” he responded “no, and I don’t care.” What did matter was preventing, at any cost, another Latin American country following Cuba into the Soviet embrace. Whether the government of said Latin American country was democratically elected was beside the point. “We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger said just a few days after Allende was elected president in 1970 on the ticket of the left-wing alliance Unidad Popular. Three years later, Allende was dead. Kissinger “didn’t care what happened to the people of Chile or of Argentina,” Insulza said. Grim as they were, Washington’s crimes in Latin America pale against the atrocities it committed elsewhere in those days. Hundreds of thousands died in Cambodia, carpet bombed on Kissinger’s advice, in service of delaying America’s inevitable defeat in Vietnam. Moscow, for sure, was no more constrained by any sense of morality. Indeed, the Soviet Union contemplated invading Poland as recently as 1980. Accusations of human rights abuses were just another weapon shot over the Iron Curtain from both sides. One would hope that by now the world would have overcome the logic of raw power. The Soviet Union is dead. That Cold War is over. There is a consensus understanding that it is essential to guarantee human rights and democratic governance. An International Criminal Court is in place to adjudicate egregious abuses. Today, Washington could not, with a straight face, green-light an Indonesian invasion of East Timor, as Kissinger did. The global situation is unsettled, though. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (which Kissinger justified on balance-of-power grounds similar to those he calculated at the height of the Cold War) suggests the rules-based world order hasn’t quite taken. China and the United States are casting around for allies to bolster their spheres of influence in what is shaping up to be a new global faceoff. In Gaza, concerns over the human rights of civilians are clearly not front of mind. It would be a disaster, however, if Washington were to reembrace Cold War logic. The United States might have beaten the Soviets. It might even have become an “indispensable nation” for a little bit. But the ruthless Cold War strategy had unintended consequences. It’s not just that the carpet bombing of Cambodia contributed to the emergence of the Khmer Rouge (an oopsie the United States experienced again years later with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State in Iraq). The chasm between Washington’s exalted words about democracy, freedom and the like and its unflinching approach to the Cold War did lasting damage to American credibility. Michael Shifter, a former president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank who now teaches at Georgetown, pointed out that “a half century after the military coup that brought Pinochet to power, the U.S.’s shameful role continues to be felt throughout the region and is still widely invoked.” Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican foreign minister, argued that “Washington’s so-called realist foreign policy was so shameless, cynical and transparent that it generated antibodies around that world that undermined the credibility of future presidents.” This will get in the way of Washington’s efforts to find friends in the Global South, whether to back Ukraine or join its brewing conflict with China. “Kissinger was doubtless very, very smart,” Carlos Ominami, another former exile of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, who returned to become Chilean economy minister after democracy was restored, said. “One would have preferred that his intelligence had been put in the service of a better cause.” Kissinger may have died believing it was all worth it. I disagree. To be sure, World War III hasn’t happened. But China is now shaping up to be the enemy. The U.S.S.R. may be gone, but Russia is not looking friendly. Counterfactuals are make-believe, but what if the United States in the Cold War had acted according to its professed values? There probably would have been less Latin American carnage.

The People Who Didn’t Matter to Henry Kissinger. The Atlantic Lauded for his strategic insights, the former secretary of state is better remembered for his callousness toward the victims of global conflict. By Gary J. Bass Henry kissinger, who died today at the age of 100, was determined to write his own place in history. Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s former secretary of state and national security adviser burnished his own reputation through his memoirs and books, by cultivating the press and foreign-policy elites, and winning the adulation of politicians as varied as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. For his 100th birthday, on May 27, he was celebrated at a closed-door black-tie gala at the New York Public Library attended by the likes of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Director William Burns. Yet for all the praise of Kissinger’s insights into global affairs and his role in establishing relations with Communist China, his policies are noteworthy for his callousness toward the most helpless people in the world. How many of his eulogists will grapple with his full record in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Chile, Argentina, East Timor, Cyprus, and elsewhere? Dismissing the arguments of dovish White House staffers, he came to endorse a secret U.S. ground invasion of Cambodia, which began in May 1970. In December, after Nixon complained that American aerial bombardment up to that point had been inadequate, Kissinger passed along an order for “a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia.” Ignoring the distinction between civilian and military targets, Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on anything that moves. You got that?” Read: What Joe Biden could learn from Henry Kissinger In November 1975, after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and began its mass exterminations of civilians, Kissinger asked Thailand’s foreign minister to relay a message. “You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them,” he said, referring to senior Khmer Rouge leaders. “They are murderous thugs, but we won’t let that stand in our way.” On another occasion, Kissinger expressed indifference toward the repression of Jews in the Soviet Union, telling Nixon in the Oval Office, “If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.” Perhaps the most revealing chapter opened in 1971, during a series of massacres in what is now Bangladesh, the world’s eighth-most-populous country, but was then the eastern section of Pakistan, an important American client state during the Cold War. Kissinger stood firmly behind Pakistan’s military dictatorship throughout one of the Cold War’s worst atrocities—a record that he subsequently sought to cover up. Some of the most sensitive parts of the White House tapes have for decades been bleeped out under bogus claims of national security. But in my own research on the crisis, I got several batches of tapes declassified over the course of 10 years of wrangling. Pakistan, created by carving Muslim areas out of the former British India, was originally a bifurcated country. East Pakistan was predominantly Bengali, and many of its 75 million people resented the high-handed rule of Punjabi elites and a military dictatorship more than 1,000 miles away in West Pakistan. When Bengali nationalists won a democratic election in 1970, a crisis began. After constitutional negotiations stalled, Pakistan’s military junta launched a bloody crackdown on its Bengali population on the night of March 25, 1971, trying to shoot people into submission. Kissinger’s own White House staff told him it was “a reign of terror” from the start. By that June, the State Department publicly reckoned that at least 200,000 people had died; the CIA secretly came to a similar estimate in September, as the killing raged on. Some 10 million terrified Bengali refugees fled into India, where countless people died of disease in overcrowded camps. While an overwhelmed India sponsored Bengali guerrillas to resist the Pakistani onslaught, Pakistan attacked India, its much larger neighbor, in December 1971. The ensuing war, intense but short, ended with a humiliating drubbing for Pakistan and the creation of an independent Bangladesh—a crushing defeat for the United States in the Cold War. The Nixon administration knew it had significant, although not unlimited, influence over Pakistan, which was fearful of India—an officially nonaligned democracy that was tilting toward the Soviet Union. Yet in the crucial weeks before the killing began, Kissinger, then the national security adviser, chose not to warn the Pakistani generals not to open fire on their own citizenry. He did not press them to accept in some rough form the results of the election, nor urge them to cut a power-sharing deal with Bengali leaders to avoid an unwinnable civil war. He did not impose conditions to deter them from committing atrocities, nor threaten the loss of American support during the atrocities. Read: In defense of Henry Kissinger Despite warnings from his own staff about the potency of Bengali nationalism, Kissinger accepted the claims of Pakistan’s military rulers that the Bengalis were a cowardly people who would be easily subdued. He said to Nixon, “The Bengalis aren’t very good fighters I guess.” Referring to the number of Pakistani troops in East Pakistan, he told Nixon, “The use of power against seeming odds pays off. ’Cause all the experts were saying that 30,000 people can’t get control of 75 million. Well, this may still turn out to be true, but as of this moment it seems to be quiet.” In their attempt to hold on to East Pakistan, the Pakistani forces brutalized the Bengali enclave’s Hindu minority. Kenneth Keating, the U.S. ambassador to India and a former Republican senator from New York, warned Kissinger to his face in June 1971 that “it is almost entirely a matter of genocide killing the Hindus.” Yet on the White House tapes, Kissinger scorned those empathetic Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.” Briefing the White House staff about how Pakistani General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan helped get him into China during his secret July 1971 trip—which was an important reason for his unyielding support for Pakistan—he joked, “The cloak-and-dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating. Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” Throughout the crisis, Kissinger scorned Indians as a people. On June 3, 1971, he said, “Of course they’re stimulating the refugees,” blaming the Indians for the Pakistani military crackdown. Then he castigated Indians as a nation, his voice oozing with contempt: “They are a scavenging people.” On June 17, speaking about the Indians, Kissinger told Nixon, “They are superb flatterers, Mr. President. They are masters at flattery. They are masters at subtle flattery. That’s how they survived 600 years. They suck up—their great skill is to suck up to people in key positions.” Although he concentrated his intolerance against the Indians, Kissinger expressed prejudices about Pakistanis too. On August 10, 1971, he told the president: “The Pakistanis are fine people, but they are primitive in their mental structure.” Although kissinger would later try to hold himself apart from Nixon’s lawbreaking in Watergate, he made his own contribution to the atmosphere of lawlessness in the administration. During the war that began when Pakistan attacked India in December 1971, Kissinger worked hard to rush American weapons to Pakistan, via Iran and Jordan—even though he knew that this violated a congressional arms embargo. As Kissinger secretly told a visiting Chinese delegation, he understood that he was breaking the law: “We are barred by law from giving equipment to Pakistan in this situation. And we also are barred by law from permitting friendly countries which have American equipment to give their equipment to Pakistan.” He brushed aside warnings from White House staffers and lawyers at the State Department and the Pentagon lawyers that it would be illegal to transfer weapons to Pakistan. In front of the attorney general, John Mitchell, Nixon asked Kissinger, “Is it really so much against our law?” Kissinger admitted that it was. Not bothering to concoct a legal theory about executive power, Nixon and Kissinger simply went ahead and did it anyway. Nixon said, “Hell, we’ve done worse.” Rather than reckoning with the human consequences of his deeds, let alone apologizing for breaking the law, Kissinger assiduously tried to cover up his record in the South Asia crisis. As late as 2022, in his book Leadership, he was still trying to promote a sanitized view, in which he tactfully termed former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi “an irritant”—even though during her tenure he repeatedly called her “a bitch,” as well as calling the Indians “bastards” and “sons of bitches.” Read: Henry Kissinger will not apologize Kissinger’s apologists today tend to breeze past such coarse stereotypes about foreign nations, extolling his pursuit of U.S. national interests while overlooking the toll on real human beings. Decades after the South Asia crisis, the bland version of Kissinger that now prevails bears scant relation to the historical record. The uncomfortable question is why much of American polite society was so willing to dote on him, rather than honestly confronting what he did. Gary J. Bass, a Princeton professor, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide and, most recently, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia.

Shlomo Sand. The Invention of the Land of Israel: from holy land to homeland. 2012. Shlomo Sand is a Professor of History at the University of Tel Aviv. Sand’s analysis of the Balfour Declaration is to ask why did Lord Balfour promise the Jews Scotland? The goal of many European Christians was to rid Europe of Jews. “In 1905 . . . anti-immigration legislation meant primarily to prevent Jewish immigrants fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe from entering Britain.” (14-15) Sand further states that this gives the right of Arabs to resettle Spain since they had been forced out of Spain during the Reconquista. That the Puritans would have the right retake England. That Native Americans have the right to retake “Manhatten and to expel its white, black, Asian, and Latino inhabitants?” He gives other historical examples. (15) He has no sympathy for Zionism. He believes it was invented to gain sympathy from Europe. In addition, Jews who migrated to America or Europe did not do so with the intent of creating a Jewishcountry. (15-16) Sand reproduces the letter which became the Balfour Declaration approved by the British cabinet in 1917. (168-169) As other historians have noted, the Balfour Declaration mad eno mention of the Arab population of Palestine which overwhelmed the Jewish population 10 to 1. There were more Jews in Britain than in Palestine! In addition, an agreement with the Arabs and the British for Arab independence was threatened. (169-170) Following Israel’s crushing of the Arab armies during the Six Day War of 1967 the Israelis produced a document stating that “the Land of Israel is now held by the Jewish people. . . . we are loyally obligated to the integrity of our Land, and no government of Israel has the right to concede this integrity.” After that Israelis were encouraged to settle in the West Bank. (242) The Israelis figured that since no one complained about 1948, no one would complain about 1967. (244)

Martin Gilbert. Israel: a history. 1998. “Since the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in AD 70, the Jews, who were dispersed all over the Roman Empire, had prayed for a return to Zion. Next year in Jerusalem was - and remains - the hope expressed at the end of every Passover meal commemorating the ancient exodus from Egypt. (3) “For two thousand years the revival of the Jewish state in Palestine had been the passion.” (186) About “25,000 Jews reached Palestine between 1882 and 1903. . . . many of them lived by tilling the soil and by recourse to the financial support of the Rothschild family, which had for several years encouraged the work of Jews on the land and in the vineyards which the Rothschilds owned.” (5) “In 1883 a Jewish immigrant from Russia, Rueben Lehrer, built a house in a Arab village, Wadi Henin, in the coastal plain. Several other Jews, among them a fellow immigrant from Russia, Avraham Yalofsky, soon joined him. Until the War of Independence in 1948, Jews and Arabs lived peacefully side by side in the village. . . . [They] planted citrus groves and engaged in bee-keeping. . . .[Nevertheless] Arabs - not from the village - ambushed Yalofsky and killed him.” (7) Other European Jewish villages were attacked as well. (9) Most Zionists concentrated on “agriculture” so that “they “could redeem the land.” (8) While the end of the nineteenth century saw “considerable Jewish activity in Palestine.” This was not universally known among European Jews. They looked at Palestinian Jews as medieval. (9) Interestingly, the chosen architect and founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl knew nothing of this. (9) For Herzl the deciding issue for the Jews in Europe was the Dreyfuss trial in France where a Jewish officer was falsely accused of treason. Many believed the trial an act of anti-semitism. (10) Many considered Herzl insane for his vehement advocacy of a return to Palestine by the Jews. (10) Herzl never traveled to Palestine. He wanted massive migration, mainly for Russia, to Palestine. (10) In the late 1930s’ as hostilities between the Arabs and the Zionists grew many in Britain believed “biblical prophecies about the return of the Jews to their land as something, to be welcomed.” Haganah soldiers also believed that they were fulfilling God’s and Jewish will in fighting against the Arabs. (93) “On October 21 [1948] the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs. Regulations promulgated for these areas established security zones and prohibited permanent residents from leaving them without a permit. Entry into the zones was also not allowed to those who were not permanent residents unless they were in possession of a permit. . . . this led in the summer of 1949 to the expulsion of the Arab residents of three villages . . . who were not subsequently permitted to return.” (234) In 1963 the Arab position in the Negev Desert was precarious. Following the Israeli War of Independence Israeli policy was “to move them [the Arabs] out of most of the areas in which they lived and to concentrate them in the north-eastern part of the negate and to the north of Beersheba.” (359) Prior to the Six Day War the Israeli public panicked over the actions and threats from Egyptian President Nasser. They demanded the return of General Moshe Dayan to lead the armed forces. (380) “Israel’s military position was, on paper, precarious. On the Egyptian front at least 100,000 troops and 900 tanks in Sinai. On the Golan Heights Syria had more than 75,000 men and 400 tanks ready for action. The Jordanians had 32,000 men under arms, and almost 300 tanks. This made a total force of 207,000 soldiers and at least 1600 tanks. A further 150 tanks were moving into Jordan from Iraq, which was determined to join what was being called in the Arab world the final battle. Should it become necessary Egypt was able to send from the west of Sinai a further 140,000 troops and 300 tanks into that battle. Against this substantial Arab force, Israel had, with full mobilization of the civilian reserves, 264,000 soldiers and 800 tanks. An estimated 700 Arab combat aircraft were also ready for action. Israel had only 300.” (381) Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban told his government that the “frenzy in the Arab streets belonged to the tradition of hot fanaticism which, in earlier periods of history, had sent the Moslem armies flowing murderously across three continents.” Also, Egyptian generals appeared to oppose Nasser’s wait to be attack view and want they wanted to attack Israel. (382) After Israel’s victory in the Six Day War “a few people urged with urgency that the West Bank and Gaza Strip ought to be given back as quickly as possible, that even a temporary occupation would hold grave disadvantages to the occupying power. (396) Dayan vehemently opposed forced removal of West Bank residents. (397) He did not want to infer in daily life or become like the British under the mandate. “It will be bad for us.” (398) Many Israelis “felt an affinity” to the West Bank. “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were buried in it . . . David had ruled from Bethlehem, two Jewish kingdoms had been established over it, in Judea and Samaria.” (397) The Balfour Declaration was a letter to British Lord Rothschild on November 2, 1917. After the First World War excited Jews throughout the world migrated to Palestine. (34) David Ben-Gurion cautioned that the Jews would have to make it their land and “bring about their national redemption.” (35)

Benny Morris. 1948: a history of the first Arab-Israeli War. 2008. “The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries, between 1200BCE and the second century CE.” (1) “The War of 1948 was the almost inevitable result of more than half a century of Arab-Jewish friction and conflict that began with he arrival in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), or Palestine, of the first Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early 1880s. These Zionists (Zion, on of the Jerusalem’s hills, was, by extension, a biblical name for Jerusalem and, by further extension, a name for the Land of Israel) were driven both by the age-old messianic dream, embedded in Judaism’s daily prayers, of reestablish a Jewish state in the ancient homeland and by European anti-Semitism, which erupted in a wave of pogroms in the czarist empire.” Nationalism had spread throughout Europe and the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires and this influenced the formation of Zionism. (1) The Jews had either occupied and or ruled Palestine from 1200BCE to 200CE. After Jewish resistance to Roman rule the Romans forced Jews to leave. This is commonly known as the Diaspora. (1) Zionism developed in the late nineteenth century. At that time Muslim Arabs made up the vast majority of the population. (2) Thirty thousand Zionists arrived in Palestine between 1882 and 1903. Their goal was to grow so that they could establish a Jewish majority and therefore a Jewish state. The Ottoman Empire which ruled the area resisted. (2-3) The idea that Palestine was a “land without a people for a people without a land” was fallacious as the Zionists quickly learned upon arriving in Palestine. Palestine had a majority Arab and majority Muslim population and was quite populous. The plan, unabashedly, was to take the land from them. (3) To do this the Zionists would buy land. Nevertheless, most Jews were not Zionists. (3) “Like most European colonists in the third world, the settlers saw the locals as devious and untrustworthy and, at the same time, as simple, dirty, and lazy. Most did not bother to learn Arabic, and some mistreated their Arab workers . . . The natives, in turn, regarded the foreign influx as inexplicable and the settlers as strange, foolish, infidel, and vaguely minatory.” (4) Theodore Herzl came late to Zionism although he can be looked upon as its savior. However, he did not know Hebrew or Yiddish and “had no contact with the poor masses of Eastern Europe.” (4) European leaders wanted to rid their countries of Jews but did not want to provoke the Ottoman Empire. Wealthy Jews thought Zionism a pipe dream. (5)

The October 7 attacks by Hamas against Israel was long time coming. The suffering of the Palestinians, ignored by the world, which allowed bombing of Gaza to go on since at least 2006. I created the CATEGORY PALESTINE as a result. I have read and will continue to read books and listen to enlightening video in order to inform readers of issues in the decades long conflict between the Palestinians and the Zionist.

Tom Segev. A State at Any Cost: the life of David Ben-Gurion. 2019. Ben-Gurion believed the deaths from the establishment of the State of Israel would be compensation for the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion conducted Bible study classes “and promoted two concepts to characterize the State of Israel’s moral character and its destiny and duty to itself and the world: the first was chosen people, a term coming from the convenient between God and the people of Israel (Exodus 19:5-6).” (12) There were conflicts within the Zionist movement. Martin Buber and Menachem Ussishkin opposed excluding the majority Arabs from any rights in the new State of Israel. Ben-Gurion reacted by saying that they should act like Jews, as if all Jews agreed with the Zionist program. He also told them that their ideas of reaching an “agreement with the Arabs, you will be in Hitler’s camp.” As the title of the book says, Ben-Gurion wanted a state at any cost. (309-310) As the United Nations panned the partition of Palestine, Ben-Gurion believed that Israel should include the southern Negev Desert. Although this would mean “we will have to change inverse in the Bible.” (404-405) Ben-Gurion intensely hated the Arabs. He opposed putting on trial the killers of the villagers at Dier Yasin and said nothing when the famed philosopher Martine Buber protested building “a Jewish neighborhood over the village’s ruins.” (420) Ben-Gurion “believed he was acting in the name of the yearnings of generations of Jews; that was his lifelong belief.” Following the Israeli conquest of Lod Yitzhak Rabin and Yigal Allon “asked Ben-Gurion what to do with Lod’s Arab inhabitants, and that Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a manner that Rabin interpreted as a directive to expel them.” (438) Ben-Gurion “was entirely at peace with the fact that the Arabs had been displaced - between 500,000 and 600,000 of them at his estimate, according to others about 750,000. That was the price of Jewish independence in the Land of Israel, a captured land, as he put it. War is war . . . One [of his colleagues] termed the exit of the Arabs a divine miracle, a second remarked that the country’s landscape was much finer without them . . . The transfer of the Arabs out of the country is in my eyes once of the most just, moral, and correct things that needs to be done.” After the war the feeling was that the 100,000 Arabs who remained in the country were too many. (452) Nevertheless, “Ben-Gurion always denied that the Arabs had been forced to flee.” In addition, he claimed that those Arabs who did flee were “enemies.” He remained obsessed with ridding Israel of Arabs. (452)

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/requiem-american-empire/