Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 (45 page)

Abu Dayieh was concerned, all the more so because Abdul Khader was nowhere to he found. The assumption was that he had anticipated the arrival of Jewish reinforcements and had slipped away to Jerusalem to raise more men and ammunition. Best to check. Abu Dayieh sent messengers to Jerusalem to establish the whereabouts and intentions of Abdul Khader. But he was not in the Holy City and the rumour that he was missing spread. What happened next was as described by Collins and Lapierre.

The news leaped from village to village with that special alacrity linked to bad tidings. From Hebron to Ramallah men set out for Kastel to join the search for their leader. In Jerusalem the souks emptied. Everyone who could get a rifle, it seemed, rushed from the city. The price of ammunition shot up to a shilling a bullet. The National Bus Company cancelled its services and devoted its vehicles to hauling volunteers to Kastel. Taxi cab drivers, truckers, the owners of private cars offered their services to get men to the battle site.
³⁸

By late morning the Jews in occupation of Kastel were under fire from all sides. “What shall we do?” Narciss asked Gazit. “I suggest we get out of here” was the reply. And they did. Kastel was back in Arab hands.

At the summit of their success the Arabs celebrated. The Palestinian flag was raised from the roof of the
mukhtar’s
house. The chants of “
Allahu akbar”
(“God is Great”) were deafening. But rising above them, and silencing them in an instant, there was a scream of agony. Nadi Dai’es, a coffee boy, had stumbled upon a body.

It was the body Gazit had seen falling to the ground in the moonlight when Karmiol opened up with his Sten gun.

It was the body of Abdul Khader.

The significance of Abdul Khader’s death was best reflected in the thoughts of two men.

One was the schoolteacher, Abu Gharbieh. “Abdul Khader was our chief. Our only chief. We can never replace him.”
³⁹

In Damascus, Emile Ghory, a senior aide to Haj Amin Husseini kept his thoughts to himself. If he had spoken them aloud at the time he would have been accused of being a defeatist and worse. “T
his is the end of the Palestine resistance movement.
There is something in our blood that ascribes such importance to the man, such hero worship to the leader, that when he dies, everything collapses.”
⁴⁰

And that was more or less what happened, The prospect of the Palestinians remaining in control of their own destiny died with Abdul Khader. After that the Arabs of Palestine were at the mercy of the Arab League. It was working, against popular sentiment throughout the Arab world, to the script written for it by Britain. And the script required the Arab League as the umbrella institution of the Arab states to prevent the Palestinian resistance movement becoming a serious factor in a very dangerous equation.

The reason the British gave for their insistence that the Arab League should not arm Palestine’s own resistance movement was to do with Haj Amin Husseini’s wartime relationship with Hitler and, more generally, the fact that his cousin Abdul Khader, and some of his lieutenants, had had military training in Nazi Germany; and then, in Cairo after the war, had enjoyed a continuing association, for tuition purposes, with a Nazi explosives expert. Behind closed doors the British argument to the Arab League came down to this: In the wake of the Nazi holocaust, and given the support Zionism was enjoying because of it, in America especially, there would little sympathy for the cause of the Arabs of Palestine so long as they were led by “Hitler’s collaborators”.

What the British meant—how explicitly their diplomats said so was not documented—was that if the Arab states armed those fighting under Haji Amin’s banner, Zionism would proclaim to the world that the Palestinian resistance movement was a creature of defeated Nazi Germany and would, if it triumphed, continue Hitler’s policy of exterminating the Jews. It did not matter that such a characterisation of the Palestinian struggle would be a grotesque and wicked propaganda lie. It was the propaganda card Zionism would play, (despite its own then secret collaboration with the Nazis); and in the circumstances of the time it was the card that would trump all others. If that happened it might well be politically impossible for Britain to continue supporting the Arab states, and to continue exercising whatever influence it had at the United Nations to try to see that the Arabs of Palestine did not lose everything.

It was an argument the Arab League accepted, mainly because the Arab states were in desperate need of Britain’s goodwill and assistance.

As we have seen, the Arabs would have preferred America to be their Big Brother until they could stand on their own feet, but that was not possible because of Zionism’s growing ability to influence U.S. policy. Because the Arabs were, generally speaking, fiercely anti-communist for reasons of culture (their values and traditions), they had no choice. If they could not get what they needed from Britain, on more or less Britain’s terms, they would be all the way up the famous creek.

If the Arab regimes had said to Stalin, “Help us to defeat Zionism and the Middle East shall be your sphere of influence”, the history of the region and the world might have been very different. The Truman administration might have been so frightened by even the prospect of the Arabs playing such a card that it would not have surrendered to Zionism. There is no doubt in my mind that if the boot had been on the other foot—if the Zionists had been the Arabs—they would have played the Soviet card; either for real or as a means of putting pressure on the U.S. to abandon its support for Zionism right or wrong.

There was one significant Arab state, Saudi Arabia, that had favoured arming the Palestinians. King Ibn Saud had been impressed by the steadfastness they had shown in their revolt against the British. His personal view was that the indigenous Arabs of Palestine knew their country better than the incoming alien Jews. By definition that would give a home-grown guerrilla movement a big tactical advantage in the struggle with Zionism. Because they stood to lose everything, the Palestinians were also better motivated than outside Arabs ever could be. It followed, the Saudi monarch had believed, that if the Palestinians were suitably armed and well led, they would acquit themselves better than outside Arabs and, probably, better than alien Jews. The Saudi monarch and his advisers also feared that the direct military involvement of the Arab states in the struggle for the Holy Land would lead to the internationalisation of the conflict, and thus a scenario in which Arab interests would always take second place to the vested interests of the rival big powers. (Which is exactly what did happen).

It was, however, the collective view of Arab leaders as represented by the Arab League that prevailed.

Ben-Gurion was later to write that the Arab League had been established “under the guidance of the British Foreign Office;” and that its purpose was “to combat Zionism.”

In the sense that Britain hoped the Arab League would be the vehicle for co-ordinating Arab efforts to limit Zionism’s territorial ambitions, Ben-Gurion was right. But in practice the Arab League became, at Britain’s insistence, the vehicle for preventing the Palestinians from exercising with any prospect of success their right to struggle to prevent a Zionist takeover of their homeland. That was the truth Abdul Khader discovered shortly before his untimely death. And that was why he said to Abu Gharbieh, “We have been betrayed.”

The whole truth about Britain’s calculations at the time remains a matter for speculation. Mine is that British policymaking mandarins and their political masters asked themselves this question: Who is likely to be the most dangerous loser in the struggle for Palestine—the Arabs of that land or Zionism?

If such a question was asked, the answer would have been Zionism.

If the Palestinians lost more than they won, their sense of injustice and the rage it provoked could be managed by the Arab states—provided, under British influence, the Arab League was prepared to pursue a containment policy, a policy with the objective of preventing a resurgence of Palestinian nationalism.

But what if Zionism, by its own yardstick, was the loser?

The probability was that Zionism, if it did not get what it wanted, would create unmanageable problems for all concerned—in the Middle East, America and elsewhere.

The mandarin conclusion? If the worst happened, if the organised international community through the UN was incapable of preventing the doing of an injustice to the Palestinians, they would be required to accept their role as the sacrificial lamb on the alter of political expediency.

Though Zionists were the first to turn to terrorism, they were not without some competition. It was organised by Fawzi el Kutub, one of the Palestinians sent by Haj Amin Husseini to Nazi Germany for military training. He was Abdul Khader’s bomb-making expert.

Initially Abdul Khader had rejected (as the Arab League had done) the Mufti’s ideas for a bombing campaign against civilian Jewish targets. Abdul Khader had believed it was important that only the Zionists be seen and labelled as terrorists. He had wanted his Palestinians to be seen to be engaged in a conventional and cleanish fight to defend their homeland and their rights. It was only after a wave of successful Zionist terror bombings had threatened to shatter Arab morale that Abdul Khader ordered Kutub to reply in kind.

Kutub’s campaign included the blowing up of the
Palestine Post
building; a huge bomb that tore apart Ben Yehuda Street in the heart of Jewish Jerusalem, killing 57 people and wounding 88; and an explosion that seriously damaged the most closely guarded Jewish building in Jerusalem, that of Ben-Gurion’s Jewish Agency, killing 13 people.

It is reasonable to suppose that while Abdul Khader lived the Palestinians would not have resorted to terror tactics if the Zionists had not started it.

The events and developments described in this chapter were the in-Palestine background to the unfolding drama that was taking place at the United Nations and in President Truman’s White House, while Britain was preparing to get out of the mess it had made in the Holy Land.

Though it is mainly concerned with the politics of what happened far away from Palestine, the story the next chapter has to tell is a very dramatic one. And still today there is a question about why, really, President Truman surrendered to Zionism.

NOTE

Because the scope of this book is so vast, I did not have the space (in the chapter above and the pages to come) to do much more than scratch the surface of the story of how, really, the Palestinian refugee problem, the cancer at the heart of international affairs, was created. For those readers who would like to know more I recommend
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
, a most remarkable and chilling book by Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel’s leading “revisionist” (which means honest) historian. Pappe’s book, first published by Oneworld Publications Limited in October 2006, documents in detail the planning and implementation of Zionism’s ethnic cleansing policy—a systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres. In his Epilogue, Pappe writes: “We end this book as we began;
with the bewilderment that this crime was so utterly forgotten and erased from our minds and memories
” (emphasis added). In a recorded conversation with me in the early summer of 2008, Ilan, then a dear friend and ally in common cause, said this (again my emphasis added)
: “Probably more surprising than anything else was not the silence of the world as Zionist ethnic cleansing was taking place in Palestine, but the silence of the Jews in Palestine. They knew what had happened to Jews in Nazi Europe, and some might have seen it for themselves, yet they had no scruples in doing almost the same to the Palestinians.”

After Britain dumped the problem of what to do about Palestine into the lap of the United Nations, Zionist terrorism on the ground in the Holy Land was matched by a Zionist campaign of intimidation and threats designed to bend the world body to Zionism’s will. And there was to come a moment when President Truman would say, (in a memorandum not declassified until 1971), that if the Zionists continued with their pressures “they would succeed in putting the United Nations out of business.”
¹

The UN General Assembly was convened to consider the problem of what to do about Palestine on 28 April 1947. It appointed a Special Committee, UNSCOP, to consider the situation and report back with a recommendation.

The idea was that the recommenda-tion would then be taken forward as a resolution for approval or not by the General Assembly. If it achieved the necessary two-thirds majority there the resolution,
if endorsed by the Security Council,
would represent the will of the organised international community; and the parties to the dispute would be required to accept it as the solution to the Palestine problem. That was the theory. But what would happen in practise if one or both parties (the Arabs or Zionism) refused to accept the solution approved by the General Assembly and endorsed by the Security Council?

There were two possible answers to that question.

One was that the major powers who controlled the UN through the Security Council would summon up the will to enforce the decision of the world body, by a combination of sanctions and military means if necessary.