When Labor and Liberal politicians repeat deceptive Israeli propaganda without scrutiny and knowledge of the facts, they lose credibility and reveal their undignified ignorance and sycophantic submission to Israel. We heard leaders from both sides repeating Israel’s accusation that those who raise the slogan “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” are being antisemites. Let us examine the facts.

The aims of the Zionist organisation, from its founding father Theodor Herzl, “The Complete Diaries”, Vol. I, p. 88. to Israel’s founding leaders Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, to Benjamin Netanyahu, were never to establish a Jewish state in a part of Palestine. Their aim has been all along to colonise all of Palestine from the river to the sea and parts of neighbouring Arab states, which they call “Eretz Israel”, and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people.

Herzl wrote in his diary that the area of the Jewish state stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” He also wrote we should “try to spirit the penniless population across the border.”

In 1947, the United Nations in resolution 181, gave the newly arrived European Jewish colonialists, whose number at that time did not exceed one-third of the population, owning less than 6% of the land, 56.47 per cent of Palestine including the best Palestinian agricultural land and cities, to establish a Jewish state, and the two-thirds indigenous Palestinian population, who owned 94 per cent of the land, only 42 per cent of their own country. The capital of Palestine, Jerusalem was to be placed under international trusteeship.

The Palestinians rejected this unjust and illegal partition, saying the United Nations had no jurisdiction to partition any country against the wishes of the majority of its people. They instead proposed Britain’s withdrawal, Palestine’s independence and for all citizens to live equally under the law in a democratic system. The Zionists, on the other hand, accepted the partition because it gave them, for the first time, the legitimacy they were looking for, but with the intention to expand beyond the partition borders and ethnically cleanse Palestinians, as Ben Gurion and other Zionist leaders were advocating openly.

On 1 April 1948, in collusion with British........

© Pearls and Irritations