By Dr. M. Reza Behnam, The Palestine Chronicle, 24 Dec. 2024
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bolder and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. US-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with US pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1948, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of the Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well-documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
- “When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Herzl, 1895) (to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”)
- “There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs… We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East… The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel… (Muslims are) yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Jabotinsky, 1939)
- “By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Weizmann, 1919)
- “With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Ben-Gurion, 1937) and “My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part (referring to partition plan) of the land is not the end but the beginning… every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” (Ben-Gurion, 1938)
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region. Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
The Dalet Plan—Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing military plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning. On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities began during and after the 1948 Arab- Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Yinon Plan—’A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s foreign ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies—underwritten by the United States—that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinization of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism. The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states. Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East
has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
‘A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A US-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action on how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless US-Israeli wars and chaos in the region. It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts—beneficial to Israeli strategy—in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the US leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The US-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region. It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the CIA to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling US-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South. Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now-extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The recent (December 21) large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of US Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as US Security Coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip. And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
Conclusion
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same—-remove all traces of Palestinians. And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When President Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on October 7, 2023, to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
– Dr. M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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