As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct.7
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
Ethnic cleansing or “transfer” is an intrinsic part of Zionism’s early history, and has remained an essential feature of Israeli political life. More recently, “transfer” has been mainstreamed by billing it as encouraging “voluntary emigration.”
SCHEERPOST, By Mouin Rabbani / Mondoweiss, December 29, 2023
Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.
Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.
Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-nineteenth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.
Enter “transfer.” As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country … expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”
Writing in his diary in 1940, Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.” His diaries are littered with similar sentiments.
The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the pre-eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” additionally demonstrate that the Zionist movement actively planned for it.
The 1948 Nakba, during which more than four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should, therefore, be seen as the fulfillment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key policy. A product of design, not of war (historical Christmas footnote: the Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population, and was relieved of his command the following day).
That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as importantly, active measures to prevent their return, destroy their homes and villages, expropriate their property, and resettle those territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow Committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on June 5, 1948, presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Problem in the State of Israel,” to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme,” which included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw more than 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.
The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.
After 1948, Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact, they were encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic, Sikhs would be entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if uniformly substantiated, none of these pretexts entitles Israel to prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was consecrated in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which has been reaffirmed repeatedly since.
Ethnic cleansing after 1967
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine — the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. Most importantly, Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and encouraging others to leave (by, for example, providing a daily bus service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to Jordan), conducted a census during the summer of 1967 . Any resident who was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity document and automatically lost their right of residency.
As a result, the population of these territories declined by more than twenty percent overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho, for example — until 1967, the West Bank’s largest — became a virtual ghost town after almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population levels until the early 1980s.
Within the West Bank, there were also cases of mass expulsion………………………………………………….
Depopulation through administrative rule
In subsequent years, Israel employed all kinds of administrative shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the occupied territory. It was valid for only three years and thereafter renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years (for a fee) at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit or failed to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason (including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that Palestinian automatically lost residency rights………………………………………………..
………………………………………. the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation but rather a collection of individual deportations……………………………………………….
Israel’s strategies to ‘thin’ Gaza’s population
With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that, for decades, the primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, particularly its refugee population, which accounts for approximately three-quarters of the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq………………………………………………………………………………….
‘Transfer’ and Gaza today
In the decades since, “transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior government official,” quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.
Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition government. As has the idea that “transfer” should include Palestinian citizens of Israel — Avigdor Lieberman, for example, who was Israel’s Minister of Defense several years ago, is an advocate of not only emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians but of getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a minister who was in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an axe.”
Against this background, Israel saw the attacks of October 7 as not only a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional U.S. and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert.
The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United States and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. As ever hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout of the Menendez scandal, and the looming Egyptian presidential elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the Middle East, Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first and foremost by Egypt.
‘Transfer’ as ‘voluntary immigration’
The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing campaign in history; a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in infectious disease. …………………………………………………..
In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary emigration — their choice……………………………………………………………….
As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on December 27: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of humanitarian aid.”………………………………………………
Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza.” Notably, such proposals consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. ………………………………………….
While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of hostilities across the Middle East.
When it comes to love for the limelight and delusions of grandeur, Zelenskiy outstrips most politicians and not least of all Putin. Almost all politicians are egoistic, but Zelenskiy is narcissistic.
Zelenskiy’s inexperience and ego likely played pivotal roles in his disastrous decision-making.
Zelenskiy himself remained mired in personal corruption as the Pandora Papers demonstrated
Zelenskiy’s failures also have made him eminently expendable
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zeleneksiy appears to be at the end of the line politically and perhaps biologically. Portraying himself as a fighter for peace, anti-corruption, and full democratization when he ran for and won the presidency in 2019, he proceeded to lead the country into war, further corruption, and de-republicanization (authoritarianization).
On both a personal and global level this is high tragedy. A superb comedian and actor stars in a television fictional series as the president of Ukraine, rises in popularity, wins the country’s presidency on a peace platform, and leads the country into a catastrophic, easily avoidable war that threatens the survival of his country and himself.
The unreality of Ukraine refracts in our century of simulacra and disinformation through this icon moved from the television screen to real life politics, and the tragedy of it all is sold as a heroic triumph on the road to universal democracy, peace, and brotherhood.
In the real world, however, there is a rub. The country is historically divided along every conceivable line (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, ideological, economic, and social), an almost accidental state cobbled together by communists but claimed by hapless republicans and determined ultra-nationalists. Thus, Zelenskiy becomes president of a fundamentally divided country further riven by schism as a result of two ‘revolutions’ – really revolts – and a civil war compounded by foreign (Russian) intervention.
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Zelenskiy’s emergence and victory are as surreal as the Maidan regime of which he assumed leadership.
A cornered, nuclear-armed Benjamin Netanyahu would be the definition of a perilous situation in a war where nothing, not journalists, schools, or even hospitals, has proven off-limits.
Israel’s robust military, the fourth-strongest in the world, is ravaging Gaza and, along with armed settlers, terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank following the brutal Hamas massacres of October 7th. Like so many other colonial projects, Israel was born of terror and has necessitated the use of violence to occupy Arab territory and segregate Palestinians ever since. The realization that its existence was dependent on a superior military in an unfriendly region also encouraged Israel to pursue a nuclear weapons program shortly after the state’s founding in 1948.
Even though Israel was a young nation, by the mid-1950s, with the aid of France, it had secretly begun the construction of a large nuclear reactor. That two allies had teamed up to launch a nuclear weapons program without the knowledge of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned out to be a colossal (and embarrassing) American intelligence failure.
Not until June 1960, the final year of Eisenhower’s presidency, did U.S. officials catch wind of what was already known as the Dimona project. Daniel Kimhi, an Israeli oil magnate, having undoubtedly had one too many cocktails at a late-night party at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, confessed to American diplomats that Israel was indeed constructing a large “power reactor” in the Negev desert — a startling revelation.
“This project has been described to [Kimhi] as a gas-cooled power reactor capable of producing approximately 60 megawatts of electric power,” read an embassy dispatch addressed to the State Department in August 1960. “[Kimhi] said he thought work had been underway for about two years and that a completion date was still about two years off.”
The Dimona reactor wasn’t, however, being built to deal with the country’s growing energy needs. As the U.S. would later discover, it was designed (with input from the French) to produce plutonium for a budding Israeli nuclear weapons program. In December 1960, as American officials grew more worried about the very idea of Israel’s nuclear aspirations, French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville admitted to U.S. Secretary of State Christian Herter that France had, in fact, helped Israel get the project off the ground and would also provide the raw materials like uranium the reactor needed. As a result, it would get a share of any plutonium Dimona produced.
Israeli and French officials assured Eisenhower that Dimona was being built solely for peaceful purposes. Trying to further deflect attention, Israeli officials put forward several cover stories to back up that claim, asserting Dimona would become anything from a textile plant to a meteorological installation — anything but a nuclear reactor capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Atomic Denials
In December 1960, after being tipped off by a British nuclear scientist concerned that Israel was constructing a dirty (that is, extremely radioactive) nuke, reporter Chapman Pincher wrote in London’s Daily Express: “British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.”
Israeli officials issued a terse dispatch from their London embassy: “Israel is not building an atom bomb and has no intention of doing so.”
With Arab countries increasingly worried that Washington was aiding Israel’s nuclear endeavors, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission John McCone leaked a classified CIA document to John Finney of the New York Times, claiming that the U.S. had evidence Israel, with the help of France, was building a nuclear reactor — proof that Washington was none too pleased with that country’s nuclear aspirations.
President Eisenhower was stunned. Not only had his administration been left in the dark, but his officials feared a future nuclear-armed Israel would only further destabilize an already topsy-turvy region. “Reports from Arab countries confirm [the] gravity with which many view this possibility [of nuclear weapons in Israel],” read a State Department telegram sent to its Paris embassy in January 1961.
As that nuclear project began to make waves in the press, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion moved quickly to downplay the disclosure. He gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, admitting the country was developing a nuclear program. “The reports in the media are false,” he added. “The research reactor we are now building in the Negev is being constructed under the direction of Israeli experts and is designed for peaceful purposes. When it’s complete, it will be open to scientists from other countries.”
He was, of course, lying and the Americans knew it. There was nothing peaceful about it. Worse yet, there was a growing consensus among America’s allies that Eisenhower had been in on the ruse and that his administration had provided the know-how to get the program off the ground. It hadn’t, but American officials were now eager to prevent United Nations inspections of Dimona, fearful of what they might uncover.
By May 1961, with John F. Kennedy in the White House, things were changing. JFK even dispatched two Atomic Energy Commission scientists to inspect the Dimona site. Though he came to believe much of the Israeli hype, the experts pointed out that the plant’s reactor could potentially produce plutonium “suitable for weapons.” The Central Intelligence Agency, less assured by Israel’s claims, wrote in a now-declassified National Intelligence Estimate that the reactor’s construction indicated “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”
And, of course, that’s precisely what happened. In January 1967, NBC News confirmed that Israel was on the verge of a nuclear capability. By then, American officials knew it was close to developing a nuke and that Dimona was producing bomb-worthy plutonium. Decades later, in a 2013 report citing U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency figures, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsrevealed that Israel possessed a minimum of 80 atomic weapons and was the only nuclear power in the Middle East. Pakistan wouldn’t acquire nukes until 1976 and is, in any case, normally considered part of South Asia.
To this day, Israel has never openly admitted possessing such weaponry and yet has consistently refused to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the secretive site. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that a “major project” at Dimona was underway in 2021 and that Israel was by then actively expanding its nuclear production facilities. The lack of U.N. or other inspections at Dimona has, however, meant that there has been no public Israeli acknowledgment of its nuclear warheads and no threat of accountability.
A Rogue Nuclear Power?
Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel seized large tracts of Arab land, including the West Bank from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Not coincidently, that year was also the moment Israel crossed the nuclear threshold. (In 2017, it was revealed that, on the verge of the Six-Day War, the Israelis had even contemplated exploding a nuclear bomb in Egypt’s Sinai Desert as the ultimate threat to its neighbors.)
At that time, as human rights attorney Noura Erakat explained to Daniel Denvir on The Dig, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration came to see in Israel “a significant Cold War asset and [pivoted] very quickly and [established] this new policy of ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region whereby it can defeat singularly or collectively any Middle Eastern powers.” And that, she added, was done in those Cold War years “to ensure its sphere of influence across the Middle East in competition with the Soviet Union.”
As Israel and the U.S. remained the closest of allies, the thinking in Washington went, it could act as Washington’s military proxy in the Middle East. “From 1966 through 1970, average aid per year increased to about $102 million, and military loans increased to about 47% of the total,” the Congressional Research Service reported in 2014. “Israel became the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance in 1974… From 1971 to the present, U.S. aid to Israel has averaged over $2.6 billion per year, two-thirds of which has been military assistance.”
Despite Washington’s wish for a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, Israel wasn’t afraid to go rogue when its leaders believed it would serve their interests. In June 1981, for instance, with the assistance of France and Italy, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor, then under construction in Iraq.
Top officials in the administration of President Ronald Reagan weren’t pleased that the strike had been carried out with American F-16s, as Israel was legally required to utilize the fighter jets only in cases of “legitimate self-defense.” After some backroom wrangling, however, they decided to chalk the matter up as a diplomatic dispute, having come to believe that erasing Iraq’s nuclear program and maintaining Israel’s sole nuclear arsenal in the region justified the airstrike.
By the late 1980s, as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Israel joined the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia in forming Operation Cyclone to supply arms to the anti-Soviet mujahideen resistance fighters. As the Cold War ended and the first Gulf War in Iraq began in 1990, Israel quietly assisted President George H.W. Bush’s administration from the sidelines, believing that directly entering the conflict would only embolden Arab countries to back Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Despite the once-tenuous nature of the U.S.-Israeli bond, it’s long been understood that Israel can, at times, play an impactful role in the service of American operations in the region by providing intelligence and other covert support.
A Developing Dangerous Situation
Following the 9/11 attacks, Israel counseled the George W. Bush administration on how best to handle Osama bin Laden (and apparently later provided intelligence for the ambush that would kill him). As the planes struck the World Trade Center, Israel was experiencing a new Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada. Its leaders came to believe that they could benefit from the “Global War on Terror” President Bush had just announced. When Benjamin Netanyahu, then a former prime minister, was asked what it meant for the U.S.-Israel relationship, he replied, “It’s very good.” Then, lest he sound too optimistic about 9/11, he added, ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy… [it will] strengthen the bond between our two peoples because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive hemorrhaging of terror.”
A year later, Israel became a booster of an American war on Iraq, helping spread the falsehood that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat not only to Israel and America but to the rest of the world as well.
“[Saddam] is a tyrant who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu declared to the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform in September 2002, six months before the invasion of Iraq. “And today, the United States must destroy [Saddam’s] regime because a nuclear-armed Saddam will place the security of our entire world at risk. And make no mistake about it: if and once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons. And once the terror network has nuclear weapons, it is only a matter of time before those weapons will be used.”
Israel would later use a similar line of reasoning to justify its 2007 strike on a suspected nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. Over the years, Israel has purportedly targeted Iran’s nuclear objectives in various ways as well, from cyberattacks to bombings. In 2010, Iran accused Israel of murdering physicist Masoud Ali Mohammadi and engineer Majid Shariariby in two separate incidents, as well as other scientists believed to be integral to Iran’s nuclear program. In 2021, Iran also claimed that Israel had struck a facility in the city of Karaj that its officials believed was being used to build nuclear centrifuges.
Many are concerned that Israel’s cruel war on Gaza, if it were to expand regionally to include Hezbollah in Lebanon, would drag Iran, a prominent Hezbollah supporter, into the fray. And that, in turn, might be all the justification Netanyahu would need to strike Iran’s supposed nuclear sites. In fact, in response to drone and rocket attacks on American personnel in Iraq and Syria by Iranian-backed militants, the U.S. recently destroyed a weapons facility in Syria.
As for the situation in Gaza, right-wing Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu, a member of Netanyahu’s coalition government, recently commented that “one way” to eliminate Hamas would be the nuclear option. “[T]here’s no such thing as innocents in Gaza,” he added. In response to those comments, Netanyahu suspended Eliyahu — a largely meaningless act — in an attempt to quiet criticisms at home and abroad that the war was harshly impacting innocent civilians. Or, perhaps, it had more to do with Eliyahu inadvertently admitting to Israel’s nuclear capabilities.
No doubt fearing a broader war in the Middle East, the Biden administration is committing itself heavily to Israel’s efforts to eliminate Hamas: not only by delivering interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system and upwards of 1,800 Boeing-made JDAMs (guidance kits for missiles) but also by replenishing stocks of weapons for Israel’s American-made F-35 fighter jets and CH-53 helicopters as well as KC046 aerial refueling tankers. In addition, two U.S. aircraft carrier task forces have been deployed to the Middle East, as has an Ohio-class nuclear submarine. To top it off, according to a New York Times investigation, the U.S. is providing commandos and drones to help locate Israeli (and American) hostages in Gaza.
While the Biden White House seems anything but eager for an expanded Middle Eastern war, it is nonetheless preparing for just such a scenario. Of course, any military escalation, especially one that leaves Israel fighting on multiple fronts, would only increase the chances that things could get much worse. A cornered, nuclear-armed Benjamin Netanyahu would be the definition of a perilous situation in a war where nothing, not journalists, schools, or even hospitals, has proven off-limits. Indeed, well over 25,000 tons of bombs had already been dropped on Gaza by early November, the equivalent of two Hiroshima-style nukes (without the radiation). Under such circumstances, a nuclear-capable Israel that blatantly flouts international law could prove a clear and present danger, not only to defenseless Palestinians but to a world already in ever more danger and disarray.
Nationalists began ethnic cleansing of Jews during WWII, even before German occupation began, documents show
RT has obtained a trove of declassified KGB documents, highlighting crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists in Soviet territories occupied by Nazi Germany during WWII. The files include witness accounts of people who survived ethnic cleansing, as well as testimonies of Ukrainian collaborators captured by the Soviet domestic intelligence, then known as the NKVD.
Large swaths of present-day Ukraine fell under Nazi occupation in summer 1941 as German troops advanced deep into the Soviet Union. In fact, attacks on ethnic Jews and Poles, as well as local communists, began immediately as Soviet troops withdrew.
“In the first hours following the retreat of the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainian population has demonstrated commendable activity against Jews,” a status report from the Gestapo, Nazi Germany’s secret police, dated July 16, 1941, reads.
Said “commendable activities” involved burning down a synagogue in the western Ukrainian city of Dobromyl and the murder of some 50 Jews by an “angry crowd” in Sambor. In Sokal, the help of local “trustworthy Ukrainians” allowed Nazis to find and exterminate some 183 “communist Jews.” Moreover, Ukrainian nationalists rounded up and brutally abused around 1,000 Jews in Lvov, subsequently putting them into a local prison, with the facility and the ‘inmates’ eventually taken over by the Germans, according to the status report.
With the German occupation regime properly established, the ethnic cleansing process was streamlined, with the so-called Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, created by the Nazis in August 1941, playing a very active role in it. According to the testimony of the Ukrainian police commander in Belya Tserkov, a major city in the Kiev region, Mikhail Tomasevish, members of his unit were so eager to kill Jews that they acted even beyond orders given by their Nazi masters. Namely, the local police secretary took pleasure in “questioning” arrested Jews, beating them with a rubber tube, and freely taking them “away” afterwards, with none of the detained ever returning to the police HQ.
Tomasevich led the police unit until 1943, when he fled alongside retreating German forces but ultimately ended up in the NKVD’s custody. While Tomasevich claimed most of the city’s Jews were exterminated before he assumed the post, he admitted partaking, one way or another, in the killing of over 1,000 people. Under his leadership, the police continued to actively search for survivors, using various tricks to lure the remaining Jews in the city to their deaths.
“To identify hiding persons of Jewish nationality, the [German field] gendarmerie, through the [Ukrainian] police, organized so-called traps, i.e., it was announced throughout the city that henceforth Jews would be allowed to live freely, but only in select houses,” Tomasevich testified.
“I put all the Jews who believed that and settled in the houses on a special register, a special folder of cases, titled ‘Yids’ [a derogatory term for ‘Jews’], was opened,” he explained, adding that when the flow of Jews willing to settle in the houses waned, all of them, some 50 people, were detained and killed “around January or February 1942.”
Civilian Ukrainian authorities, established under German occupation, have actively contributed to ethnic cleansings as well. For instance, according to an indictment in a 1944 case about Nazi crimes committed in the city of Sarny and its vicinity, local Ukrainian mayor Marinyuk directly facilitated the extermination of the entire local Jewish population in August 1942.
Some 13,000 people were gathered at a local concentration camp, guarded by field gendarmerie and Ukrainian police, under the pretext of being relocated for “work” in Germany. Instead, the Jews ended up before firing squads, with children thrown into the death pits and buried alive. Only some 40–50 people managed to escape the massacre, with Ukrainian nationalist units in pursuit, and those who managed to capture escapees were awarded a sack of salt.
The missing context for what’s happening in Gaza is that Israel has been working night and day to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people from their homeland since even before Israel become a state – when it was known as the Zionist movement.
Israel didn’t just cleanse Palestinians in 1948, when it was founded as a Western colonial project, and again under cover of a regional war in 1967. It also worked to ethnically cleanse Palestinians every day between those dates and afterwards. The aim was to move them off their historic lands, and either expel them beyond Israel’s new, expanded borders or concentrate them into small ghettoes inside those borders – as a holding measure until they could be expelled outside the borders.
The ‘settler’ project, as we call it, is a misnomer. It’s really Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme. Israel even has a special word for it in Hebrew: ‘Judaisation’, or making the land Jewish. It is official government policy.
Gaza was the largest of the Palestinian reservations created by Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme, and the most overcrowded. To stop the inhabitants spilling out, Israel built a fence-barrier in the early 1990s to pen them in. Then when policing became too hard from within the prison, Israel pulled back in 2005 to the outer perimeter barrier.
New technology allowed Israel to besiege Gaza remotely by land, sea and air in 2007, limiting the entry of food and vital items like medicine and cement for construction. Automated gun towers shot anyone who came near the fence. The navy patrolled the sea, stopping boats straying more than a kilometre or two off shore. And drones watched 24 hours a day from the sky.
The people of Gaza were sealed in and largely forgotten, except when they lobbed a few rockets over the fence – to international indignation. If they fired too many rockets, Israel bombed them mercilessly and occasionally launched a ground invasion. The rocket threat was increasingly neutralised by a rocket interception system, paid for by the US, called Iron Dome.
Palestinians tried to be more inventive in finding ways to break out of their prison. They built tunnels. But Israel found ways to identify those that ran close to the fence and destroyed them.
Palestinians tried to get attention by protesting en masse at the fence. Israeli snipers were ordered to shoot them in the legs, leading to thousands of amputees.
The ‘deterrence’ seemed to work. Israel could once again sit back and let the Palestinians rot in Gaza. ‘Quiet’ had been restored.
Until, that is, last weekend when Hamas broke out briefly and ran amok, killing civilians and soldiers alike.
So Israel now needs a new policy. It looks like the ethnic cleansing programme is being applied to Gaza anew. The half of the population in the enclave’s north is being herded south, where there are not the resources to cope with them. And even if there were, Israel has cut off food, water and power to everyone in Gaza.
The enclave is quickly becoming a pressure cooker. The pressure is meant to build on Egypt to allow the Palestinians entry into Sinai on ‘humanitarian’ grounds.
Whatever the media are telling you, the ‘conflict’ – that is, Israel’s ethnic cleansing programme – started long before Hamas appeared on the scene. In fact, Hamas emerged very late, as the predictable response to Israel’s violent colonisation project.
And no turning point was reached a week ago. This has all been playing out in slow motion for more than 100 years.
Ignore the fake news. Israel isn’t defending itself. It’s enforcing its right to continue ethnically cleansing Palestinians.
NFTV Edited by Debanish Achom October 11, 2023 , New Delhi:
The Israel-Gaza war has a real risk of spreading into a larger regional war with Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group firing missiles into Israel. Israel also launched counterattacks at the Hezbollah amid soaring border tensions. Both Israel and its closest ally the US have warned Hezbollah against opening a second front as Israel battles Hamas in Gaza Strip.
Israel and Iran have been fighting a proxy war. While Iran has been funding Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and is said to be angling for the “leader” of the Arab world status, Israel has expressed concerns over Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. Israel, along with the US, have been vocal in condemning Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons programme, which they claim can destabilise the entire region.
It is in this context that a June 1981 airstrike by the Israeli Air Force, called “Operation Opera”, on a nuclear reactor in Iraq becomes relevant. Military analysts suspect Israel will not hesitate to carry out a similar strike on Iran if it finds itself cornered from all sides in the event of a full-scale regional war.
For now, there is no indication of an impending offensive by Hezbollah against Israel, despite growing border tensions. Iran, officially at least, has insisted it has no involvement in Hamas’ assault on Israel. While some neighbouring Arab countries — which have been keen to improve relations with Israel — see a chance to play a role as mediator. But the situation is extremely volatile…………………………………………………………………………
The Israel-Hamas war coincides with the 50th anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Yom Kippur War. But as the Biden administration scrambles to prevent the fighting from escalating into a broader conflict, it is often forgotten just how close the Yom Kippur War brought the world to nuclear war.
The 1973 war began on the morning of Oct. 6, when Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack against Israel, not unlike the attack by Hamas on Israel this weekend……..
The conflict soon became a proxy war between Egypt’s principal backer, the Soviet Union, and Israel’s patron, the United States. Things became so dire that U.S. global forces went to a Defcon 3 alert, the highest state of peacetime readiness, reflecting the risk of nuclear confrontation with the Soviets………………………………………………………………………………………
On 22 September, during a visit to the Canadian Parliament by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Speaker Anthony Rota publicly introduced ninety-eight-year-old Yaroslav Hunka as a constituent ‘who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians’ as part of the First Ukrainian Division during the Second World War. He was ‘a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service.’ Hunka received a standing ovation from all present.
This scene was reported two days later by an antifascist site on Twitter, who pointed out that the First Ukrainian Division was also known as the Waffen-SS Galizien Division. Canadian academic Ivan Katchanovski linked to a veterans’ webpage in which Hunka wrote that he had been a volunteer recruit to the Galizien Division in 1943. Hunka had also uploaded photographs showing him in uniform with the ‘boys’.
These embarrassing episodes continue to occur in countries that resettled the post-war displaced persons of Central and Eastern Europe. This mass of around one million people had refused to return to homes that were under Soviet control. As well as concentration camp inmates and forced labourers, these political refugees included soldiers who had fought in German military units, as well as civilian collaborators. Security screening was difficult and there was also some sympathy from the Allied military authorities for veterans on the losing side. Whole cohorts were resettled in Britain, including 8,000 Ukrainian members of the Waffen-SSGalizien Division. Ukrainian nationalist declarations were also treated seriously. While all Ukrainian displaced persons held either Polish or Soviet Union citizenship, they were treated as a separate group quite quickly.
Many of these men should have been charged with war crimes. The German-led Holocaust had relied on the firepower and administrative skill of non-German Central and Eastern Europeans, including Ukrainians. Ukrainian anti-Soviet and anti-Polish nationalists were initially involved in individual and group paramilitary acts, including voluntary local pogroms and/or acts of murder before or beside the German occupation. One of the pogroms, which involved the massacre of 12,000 Jews, was named Aktion Petliura after the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, who had been assassinated by a Ukrainian Jew (this assassination itself framed as retaliation for earlier pogroms) in 1926.
After the initial wave of pogroms, Ukrainians became progressively involved with an institutionalised German genocidal machinery. Ukrainians joined a Ukrainian Auxiliary Police Force (Schutzmannschaft), the German security police (Sicherheitspolizei, SiPo) and the intelligence agency (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS, SD). Others hunted Jews in their forest warden jobs. Local policemen were empowered to kill anyone the Germans defined as enemies of the state, including Jews; indeed, the Germans relied on the dramatically increased numbers of local forces to do the dirty work of the Holocaust, including the shooting of children. Between 1941 and 1944, 1.6 million Jews had been murdered in Ukraine. In 1943, 100,000 of these men volunteered to join the Waffen-SS Galizien Division. In this capacity, they have been accused of murdering Polish civilians.
The United Nations’ International Refugee Organisation resettled the displaced persons in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The western world was eager to use the labour of these healthy, white, and stridently anti-communistic young men. Australia resettled 170,700 displaced persons including Poles, ‘Balts’ (Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians), Yugoslavs, Ukrainians and Hungarians. There was immediate criticism by Jewish groups and sections of the press that the new migrants included war criminals but these were roundly dismissed as Soviet communist propaganda.
Decades later, all four of the main resettlement countries instituted judicial processes against the alleged perpetrators of the Holocaust who were now resident in their countries. In Australia, such men were guaranteed a fair criminal trial: the evidence, for crimes that occurred over forty-five years before, had to include documentary and material evidence and, ideally, eyewitnesses to the alleged individual perpetrator carrying out a war crime. Of course, the nature of the Holocaust was such that very few eyewitnesses to genocide survived in order to testify against individual killers.
After a flawed investigative process, only three men were charged. All three were Ukrainians who had resettled in Adelaide. Ukrainian auxiliary policeman Mikolay Berezowsky was accused of being party to a mass murder of 102 Jewish villagers. Henry Wagner, an ethnic German liaison officer between the German and Ukranian auxiliary police force, was charged with being party to two mass murders, including the shooting of nineteen part-Jewish children. Forest warden Ivan Polyukhovich was accused of hunting and killing Jews under the German occupation, and in taking part in a mass shooting. However, the evidence bar was so high that there were no convictions.
Immediately after the unsuccessful war crimes trials, Ukrainians again attracted attention with an award-winning novel by Helen Demidenko, purporting to be written by a Ukrainian-Australian and based on the life story a member of that community. To the great embarrassment of the Australian literati, Demidenko was soon unmasked as English-Australian Helen Darville, who had attended the Polyukhovich trial with a young man who was noticed to be repeatedly muttering ‘Jews’.
Many responses to Ivan Katchanovski’s tweets shedding light on this unsavoury history — one that Canada and Australia share — claimed that this was not the time to be critiquing Ukraine or Ukrainian nationalists. Ukraine was, of course, invaded by Russia in 2022 and that war is ongoing. Most in the West sympathise with, and support, Ukraine’s fight. And Russia has attempted to smear all Ukrainians with accusations of Nazism, which is simply not true. Dismissing inconvenient histories and the problematic pasts of individual migrants to both Canada and Australia, however, is not useful.
The complicity of the West in assisting perpetrators to escape justice should be acknowledged, and we must be wary of any attempt to normalise fascist views and actions in the public sphere. #Ukraine
the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)…….. Konovalets served as its first leader….. The OUN allied itself with Nazi Germany during World War II in the hope of creating a Berlin-backed Ukrainian state.
A Ukrainian unit was bestowed with the title ‘Evgeny Konovalets’ to mark a national military holiday.
Kiev has renamed a military unit in honor of Evgeny Konovalets, the fascist sympathizer who led the Ukrainian nationalist insurgency in Poland during the 1920s. The ‘honorary title’ was bestowed by President Vladimir Zelensky last week.
According to a presidential decree published by Zelensky’s office, the 131st reconnaissance battalion of the army was given its new name as part of events connected with the Day of Defenders of Ukraine, which was marked on Sunday.
Konovalets is one of numerous historical figures who have been lionized in modern Ukraine for their roles in fighting for an independent nation state. A Galician-born veteran on the Austro-Hungarian side in World War I, he was peripherally involved in the short-lived secessionist Ukrainian People’s Republic in the late 1910s.
In 1920, Konovalets moved to Czechoslovakia, where he and other Ukrainian nationalists with combat experience founded the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO), a paramilitary organization that was involved in the armed fight in what is now Western Ukraine.
The insurgency conducted assassination attacks against Polish officials, as well as supposed Ukrainian collaborators who supported Warsaw’s sovereignty over Galicia. The UVO existed until 1929, when it merged with other radical nationalist and fascist groups into the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Then based in Switzerland, Konovalets served as its first leader.
The UVO’s terrorist activities against Poland were partially financed by Germany’s Abwehr military intelligence. Konovalets maintained contact with various fascist organizations in Europe and personally met Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. According to papers published later, Konovalets expressed skepticism about the German Nazi leader in private communications with fellow nationalists.
Konovalets was assassinated in Rotterdam in 1938 by a Soviet intelligence agent. The OUN allied itself with Nazi Germany during World War II in the hope of creating a Berlin-backed Ukrainian state.
Kiev’s elevation of controversial figures was further highlighted last month, when Zelensky joined the Canadian parliament in giving a standing ovation to Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old veteran of a Nazi Waffen-SS unit. Parliament Speaker Anthony Rota, who had invited the Ukrainian-Canadian Hunka to the chamber, stepped down from his position last week after taking full responsibility for the incident.
SCHEERPOST, By Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone 1 Oct 23 “…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Throughout the Nazi German occupation of Poland, the Ukrainian journalist Michael Chomiak served as one of Hitler’s top propagandists. Based in Krakow, Chomiak edited an antisemitic publication called Krakivs’ki visti (Krakow News), which cheerled the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – “The German Army is bringing us our cherished freedom,” the paper proclaimed in 1941 – and glorified Hitler while rallying Ukrainian support for the Waffen-SS Galicia volunteers.
Chomiak spent much of the war living in two spacious Krakow apartments that had been seized from their Jewish owners by the Nazi occupiers. He wrote that he moved numerous pieces of furniture belonging to a certain “Dr. Finkelstein” to another aryanized apartment placed under his control.
In Canada, Chomiak participated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), which incubated hardcore nationalist sentiment among diaspora members while lobbying Ottawa for hardline anti-Soviet policies. On its website, the UCC boasted of receiving direct Canadian government assistance during World War Two: “The final and conclusive impetus for [establishing the UCC] came from the National War Services of Canada which was anxious that young Ukrainians enlist in military services.”
The UCC’s first president Volodymyr Kubijovych, had served as Chomiak’s boss back in Krakow. He also played a part in the establishment of the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia, announcing upon its formation, “This historic day was made possible by the conditions to create a worthy opportunity for the Ukrainians of Galicia, to fight arm in arm with the heroic German soldiers of the army and the Waffen-SS against Bolshevism, your and our deadly enemy.”
FREELAND NURTURES MEDIA CAREER AS UNDERCOVER REGIME CHANGE AGENT IN SOVIET-ERA UKRAINE
Following his death in 1984, Chomiak’s granddaughter, Chrystia Freeland, followed in his footsteps as a reporter for various Ukrainian nationalist publications. She was an early contributor to Kubijovych’s Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which whitewashed the record of Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera, referring to him as a “revolutionary.” Next, she took a staff position at the Edmonton-based Ukrainian News, where her grandfather had served as editor.
A 1988 edition of Ukrainian News (below on original) featured an article co-authored by Freeland, followed by an ad for a book called “Fighting for Freedom” which glorified the Ukrainian Waffen-SS Galician division.
During Freeland’s time as an exchange student in Lviv, Ukraine, she laid the foundations for her meteoric rise to journalistic success. From behind cover as a Russian literature major at Harvard University, Freeland collaborated with local regime change activists while feeding anti-Soviet narratives to international media bigwigs.
“Countless ‘tendentious’ news stories about life in the Soviet Union, especially for its non-Russian citizens, had her fingerprints as Ms. Freeland set about making a name for herself in journalistic circles with an eye to her future career prospects,” the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported.
Citing KGB files, the CBC described Freeland as a de facto intelligence agent: “The student causing so many headaches clearly loathed the Soviet Union, but she knew its laws inside and out – and how to use them to her advantage. She skillfully hid her actions, avoided surveillance (and shared that knowledge with her Ukrainian contacts) and expertly trafficked in ‘misinformation.’”
In 1989, Soviet security agents rescinded Freeland’s visa when they caught her smuggling “a veritable how-to guide for running an election” into the country for Ukrainain nationalist candidates.
She quickly transitioned back to journalism, landing gigs in post-Soviet Moscow for the Financial Times and Economist, and eventually rising to global editor-at-large of Reuters – the UK-based media giant which today functions as a cutout for British intelligence operations against Russia.
CANADA TRAINS, PROTECTS NAZIS IN POST-MAIDAN UKRAINE
When Freeland won a seat as a Liberal member of Canada’s parliament in 2013, she established her most powerful platform yet to agitate for regime change in Russia. Milking her journalistic connections, she published op-eds in top legacy papers like the New York Times urging militant support from Western capitals for Ukraine’s so-called “Revolution of Dignity,” which saw the violent removal of a democratically elected president and his replacement with a nationalist, pro-NATO government in 2014.
In the midst of the coup attempt, a group of neo-Nazi thugs belonging to the C14 organization occupied Kiev’s city council and vandalized the building with Ukrainian nationalist insignia and white supremacist symbols, including a Confederate flag. When riot police chased the fascist hooligans away on February 18, 2014, they took shelter in the Canadian embassy with the apparent consent of the Conservative administration in Ottawa. “Canada was sympathizing with the protesters, at the time, more than the [Ukrainian] government,” a Ukrainian interior ministry official recalled to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Official Canadian support for neo-Nazi militants in Ukraine intensified after the 2015 election of the Liberal Party’s Justin Trudeau. In November 2017, the Canadian military and US Department of Defense dispatched several officers to Kiev for a multinational training session with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion. (Azov has since deleted the record of the session from its website).
Azov was controlled at the time by Adriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed “White Leader” who declared, “the historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival… A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen.”
AS NAZI FAMILY HISTORY SURFACES, FREELAND LIES TO THE PUBLIC
Back in Canada, Freeland’s troubling family history was surfacing for the first time in the media. Weeks after she was appointed in January 2017 as Foreign Minister – a post she predictably exploited to thunder for sanctions on Russia and arms shipments to Ukraine – her grandfather’s role as a Nazi propagandist in occupied Poland became the subject of a raft of reports in the alternative press.
The Trudeau government responded to the factual reports by accusing Russia of waging a campaign of cyber-warfare. “The situation is obviously one where we need to be alert. And that is why the Prime Minister has, among other things, encouraged a complete re-examination of our cyber security systems,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale declared.
Yet few, if any, of the outlets responsible for excavating Chomiak’s history had any connection to Russia’s government. Among the first to expose his collaborationism was Consortium News, an independent, US-based media organization.
For her part, Freeland deployed a spokesperson to lie to the public, flatly denying that “the minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator.”
When Canadian media quoted several Russian diplomats about the allegations, Freeland promptly ordered their deportation, accusing them of exploiting their diplomatic status “to interfere in our democracy.”
By this time, however, her family secrets had tumbled out of the attic and onto the pages of mainstream Canadian media. On March 7, 2017, the Globe and Mail reported on a 1996 article in the Journal of Ukrainian Studies confirming that Freeland’s grandfather had indeed been a Nazi propagandist, and that his writing helped fuel the Jewish genocide. The article was authored by Freeland’s uncle, John-Paul Himka, who thanked his niece in its preface for helping him with “problems and clarifications.”
“Freeland knew for more than two decades that her maternal Ukrainian grandfather was the chief editor of a Nazi newspaper in occupied Poland that vilified Jews during the Second World War,” the Globe and Mail noted.
After being caught on camera this September clapping with unrestrained zeal alongside hundreds of peers for a Ukrainian veteran of Hitler’s SS death squads, Freeland once again invoked her authority to scrub the incident from the record.
Three days after the embarrassing scene, Freeland was back on the floor of parliament, nodding in approval as Liberal House leader Karina Gould introduced a resolution to strike “from the appendix of the House of Commons debates” and from “any House multimedia recording” the recognition made by Speaker Anthony Rota of Yaroslav Hunka.
Thanks to decades of officially supported Holocaust education, the mantra that demands citizens “never forget” has become a guiding light of liberal democracy. In present day Ottawa, however, this simple piece of moral guidance is now treated as a menace which threatens to unravel careers and undermine the war effort in Ukraine.
Given the fact that Ukraine and Nazis are again making news, it is important to point out that there are indeed commemorative monuments to Ukrainian Nazis in Canada, located where the Ukrainian populations are the greatest. The reasons for such monuments are known to the Ukrainian community alone, but so it is essential to make a record of them here, along with a hint at what those being commemorated did back in the days of World War Two.
“Ukrainian partisans and their allies burned homes, shot or forced back inside those who tried to flee, and used sickles and pitchforks to kill those they captured outside. Churches full of worshipers were burned to the ground. Partisans displayed beheaded, crucified, dismembered, or disemboweled bodies, to encourage remaining Poles to flee… It was this maimed OUN-Bandera, led by Mykola Lebed’ and then Roman Shukhevych, that cleansed the Polish population from Volhynia in 1943” (The Reconstruction of Nations).
The 14th Division of the Ukrainian SS surrounded the village Huta Pieniacka from three sides… The people were gathered in the church or shot in the houses. Those gathered in the church—men, women and children—were taken outside in groups, children killed in front of their parents. Some men and women were shot in the cemetery, others were gathered in barns where they were shot” (British archives).
“One of their major tasks as UPA partisans was the cleansing of the Polish presence from Volhynia. Poles tend to credit the UPA’s success in this operation to natural Ukrainian brutality; it was rather a result of recent experience. People learn to do what they are trained to do, and are good at doing what they have done many times. Ukrainian partisans who mass-murdered Poles in 1943 followed the tactics they learned as collaborators in the Holocaust in 1942: detailed advance planning and site selection; persuasive assurances to local populations prior to actions; sudden encirclements of settlements; and then physical elimination of human beings. Ukrainians learned the techniques of mass murder from Germans. This is why UPA ethnic cleansing was striking in its efficiency, and why Volhynian Poles in 1943 were nearly as helpless as Volhynian Jews in 1942. It is one reason why the campaign against Poles began in Volhynia rather than Galicia, since in Volhynia the Ukrainian police played a greater role in the Final Solution” (The Reconstruction of Nations).
“On that day, early in the morning, soldiers of this division, dressed in white, masking outfits, surrounded the village. The village was cross-fired by artillery. SS-men of the 14th Division of the SS ‘Galizien’ entered the village, shooting the civilians rounded up at a church. The civilians, mostly women and children, were divided and locked in barns that were set on fire. Those who tried to run away were killed. Witnesses interrogated by the prosecutors of the Head Commission described the morbid details of the act. The crime was committed against women, children, and newborn babies” (The Institute of National Remembrance. Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation).
It’s 10 p.m. at Montrose Harbor in Chicago. Kiko and Tamar help me step from the dock into the wobbly rowboat. Kiko rows us out to the Golden Rule and I climb aboard in wonder. Oh my God! This is it – the 30-foot, anti-nuke sailboat with a history going back almost seven decades . . . back to the era of atmospheric nuclear testing and the Cold War at its simmering height.
The Golden Rule: “Floating for sanity in an insane world.”
Well, somebody’s got to do it! The United Nations has tried. In 2017 it passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which was finally ratified (by 50 countries) in 2021. Technically, nuclear weapons are now “illegal” – what a joke. The possibility of nuclear war, i.e., Armageddon, is more alive than ever. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is now set at 90 seconds to midnight.
But the nuclear-armed nations and their allies haven’t given an inch. Their motto remains: Nukes forever (or at least until the end of the world as we know it). This is the case despite an overwhelming global opposition to nukes and “mutually assured destruction.”
Perhaps humanity’s primary – or only – hope is a global reunification from the ground up: the creation of one world, which is not at perpetual war with itself and realizes that power results not from domination but connection: power with others, not over them.
And this, I believe, is where the Golden Rule comes in. Let’s return for a moment to 1958, when hell was still naked and visible: when atmospheric nuclear testing was the order of the day. For the United States, the chosen test site was Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the Marshall Islands. The inhabitants were relocated and their home destroyed. A total of 67 nuclear tests were conducted, beginning in 1946, with nuclear fallout spreading across the island chain.
A man named Albert Bigelow, unable to shrug off what could be the end of the world, finally felt driven to action, declaring; “How do you reach men when all the horror is in the fact that they feel no horror?” He bought a boat, which was named the Golden Rule, and he and three other Quakers took it upon themselves to sail to the Marhsall Islands and disrupt the testing – you know, with their own lives. As they prepared to do so, they declared their intention to the world.
What happened, however, was that the Golden Rule was stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard before it reached the island chain and the four men were arrested. They were jailed for several months, but the publicity surrounding the event was enormous, igniting outrage. The eventual outcome was the end of atmospheric nuclear testing – step one, you might say, in the process of global nuclear disarmament.
Bigelow eventually sold the Golden Rule and, by 2010, it was just a forgotten fragment of history, sitting derelict in Humboldt Bay, California. One day it sank. Though it was pulled up, the plan was to burn it. This is where Veterans for Peace – aware of the boat’s history – stepped in. The organization purchased and restored the Golden Rule, and it became, once again, a floating force for peace.
The Golden Rule is reborn. And its most recent journey is something called the Great Loop. The boat was transported from Humboldt Bay to Minneapolis, where it set sail down the Mississippi River, captained (for much of the journey) by Kiko Johnston-Kitazawa, a Hawaiian educator, sailor and canoe builder, who responded when Veterans for Peace began seeking a crew and captain.
Kiko described the Great Loop to me thus: “one year, 10,000 miles, a hundred stops.” It went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, then sailed around the tip of Florida, went over to Cuba to reconnect with that island (ah, site of the infamous “Cuban Missile Crisis” of 1962), then came back to the U.S. coast. Up to New York, into the Hudson River and the Erie Canal, then across Lake Erie, up the Detroit River and around the Great Lakes. Its final stop was Chicago, which was where I met Kiko and connected with the Golden Rule, at a reception hosted by Nuclear Energy Information Service.
This is a peace journey extraordinaire. Kiko was adamant, when he talked to me, that reaching beyond the community of committed peace activists was a crucial part of their mission – connecting with people regardless of their political viewpoints: simply talking about nuclear weapons and the danger humanity is facing: building, you might say, a movement of ordinary people . . . creating a sane future, one human being at a time.
The Veterans for Peace website describes the Golden Rule’s Great Loop journey thus: “We’ve had great reception from local peace activists, politicians, and people of faith. Brass bands, Raging Grannies, musicians and artists have welcomed us in many towns. . . Media coverage has been outstanding, with frequent interviews on local radio, TV and newspapers. Twenty mayors, city councils and state legislatures welcomed the Golden Rule with proclamations supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Thousands of volunteers helped with events, hosting and crewing the Golden Rule!”
It was when I was talking to Kiko at the NEIS event that he invited me to see the Golden Rule, which was docked just a few miles away. There’s no way I could turn down this invitation, despite my balance issues and untrustworthy joints. We drove to the harbor, then rowed beneath a shimmering moon out to the boat. I was able to climb aboard. They showed me around. I stood on the historic vessel – this floating future of peace – and took in its cramped quarters with reverence and awe.
We’re all on this journey – to transcend war and nukes, to evolve, to create a world at peace with itself.
Kiev was offered a peace deal long ago, but chose war instead, egged on by its Western backers. Now its fate is sealed
September 2 marked the 78th anniversary of the World War Two surrender ceremony onboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This moment formalized Japan’s unconditional capitulation to the United States, and its allies, and marked the end of the conflict. From the Japanese perspective, it had been ongoing since the Marco Polo bridge incident of July 7, 1937, which started the Sino-Japanese War.
There was no negotiation, only a simple surrender ceremony in which Japanese officials signed documents, without conditions.
Because that is what defeat looks like.
History is meant to be studied in a manner that seeks to draw out lessons from the past that might have relevance in the present. As George Santayana, the American philosopher, noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Ukrainian government in Kiev would do well to reflect on both the historical precedent set by Japan’s unconditional surrender, and Santayana’s advice, when considering its current conflict with Russia
First and foremost, Ukraine must reflect honestly about the causes of this conflict, and which side bears the burden of responsibility for the fighting. ‘Denazification’ is a term that the Russian government has used in describing one of its stated goals and objectives. President Vladimir Putin has made numerous references to the odious legacy of Stepan Bandera, the notorious mass murderer and associate of Nazi Germany who is feted by modern-day Ukrainian nationalists as a hero and all but a founding father of their nation.
That present-day Ukraine would see fit to elevate a man such as Bandera to such a level speaks volumes about the rotten foundation of Kiev’s cause, and the dearth of moral fiber in the nation today. The role played by the modern-day adherents of the Nazi collaborator’s hateful nationalist ideology in promulgating the key events that led to the initiation of the military operation by Russia can neither be ignored nor minimized. It was the Banderists, with their long relationship with the CIA and other foreign intelligence services hostile to Moscow, who used violence to oust the former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovich, from office in February 2014.
From the act of illicit politicized violence came the mainstreaming of the forces of ethnic and cultural genocide, manifested in the form of the present-day Banderists, who initiated acts of violence and oppression in eastern Ukraine. This, in turn, triggered the Russian response in Crimea and the actions of the citizens of Donbass, who organized to resist the rampage of the Bandera-affiliated Ukrainian nationalists. The Minsk Accords, and the subsequent betrayal by Kiev and its Western partners of the potential path for peace that these represented, followed.
Ukraine cannot disassociate itself from the role played by the modern-day Banderists in shaping the present reality. In this, Kiev mirrors the militarists of Imperial Japan, whose blind allegiance to the precepts of Bushido, the traditional ‘way of the warrior’ dating back to the Samurai of 17th century Japan, helped push the country into global conflict. Part of Japan’s obligations upon surrender was to purge its society of the influence of the militarists, and to enact a constitution that deplatformed them by making wars of aggression – and the military forces needed to wage them – unconstitutional.
Banderism, in all its manifestations, must be eradicated from Ukrainian society in the same manner that Bushido-inspired militarism was removed from Japan, to include the creation of a new constitution that enshrines this purge as law. Any failure to do so only allows the cancer of Banderism to survive, festering inside the defeated body of post-conflict Ukraine until some future time when it can metastasize once again to bring harm……………………….
As the Western establishment media begins to come to grips with the scope and scale of Ukraine’s eventual military defeat (and, by extension, the reality of a decisive Russian military victory), their political overseers in the US, NATO, and the European Union struggle to define what the endgame will be. Having articulated the Russian-Ukrainian conflict as an existential struggle where the very survival of NATO is on the line, these Western politicians now have the task of shaping public perception in a manner that mitigates any meaningful, sustained political blowback from constituents who have been deceived into tolerating the transfer of billions of dollars from their respective national treasuries, and billions more dollars’ worth of weapons from their respective arsenals, into a lost and disgraced cause.
………………………………….. Russia has been undertaking the successful demilitarization of Ukraine’s armed forces since the initiation of partial mobilization. The equipment Ukraine is provided by the West is similarly being destroyed by Russia at a rate that makes replacement unsustainable. Meanwhile, Russia’s own defense industry has kicked into full gear, supplying a range of modern weapons and ammunition that is more than sufficient.
The harsh reality is that neither Ukraine nor its Western allies can sustain the operational losses in manpower and equipment that the conflict with Russia is inflicting……….. if Kiev persists in extending this conflict until it is physically unable to defend itself, it runs the risk of losing even more territory, including Odessa and Kharkov.
Russia did not enter the conflict with the intent of seizing Ukrainian territory. But in March 2022, Kiev rejected a draft peace agreement (which it had preliminarily approved at first), and this decision to eschew peace in favor of war led to Russia absorbing Donbass, Zaporozhye, and Kherson.
As one of its conditions to even begin negotiating for peace with Moscow, Kiev demanded the return of all former Ukrainian territories currently under Russian control – including Crimea. To achieve such an outcome, however, Ukraine would have to be able to compel compliance by defeating Russia militarily and/or politically. As things stand, this is an impossibility.
What Ukraine and its Western partners do not yet seem to have come to grips with is the fact that Russia’s leadership is in no mood for negotiations for negotiations’ sake. Putin has listed its goals and objectives when it comes to the conflict – denazification, demilitarization, and no NATO membership for Ukraine.
Oppenheimer was an obstacle to the H-bomb project,”.. “That’s why they had to discredit him. And Edward Teller [at left] was the one person, more than anyone else in the scientific community, who saw Oppenheimer as an obstacle. Teller had to blacken his reputation in such a way that no one would listen to Oppenheimer any more.
The release of the film Oppenheimer in cinemas this summer aroused the curiosity of one particular film buff, Montrealer Gordon Edwards, a world-renowned expert on nuclear issues. He’s the man the Canadian and Quebec media want to hear from when it comes to nuclear waste, atomic bombs or power plants like Gentilly-2, which Hydro-Québec is eyeing as a solution to its energy shortage.
For the president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, this film was like a trip back in time, because he had the opportunity to confront in person none other than Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb , during a 45-minute televised debate organized in Toronto in 1974.
Gordon Edwards began to become seriously involved in the anti-nuclear camp when India detonated its first nuclear bomb [in 1974]. The Government of Canada had earlier given India a 20 MW nuclear reactor for research, a reactor identical to the one [first built at Chalk River – a site currently making headlines because of the multi-billion dollar legacy of radioactive wastes there], he says. [India used the plutonium produced by that Canadian reactor as a nuclear explosive in its first atomic bomb.]
Plutonium and politics
“All nuclear reactors produce plutonium. It doesn’t exist in nature. It is the most commonly used explosive in the world’s nuclear arsenal,” he said.
“The first reactors were built for the sole purpose of producing plutonium for bombs. This is the case for [the first reactors at] Chalk River (in Ontario). The idea of turning nuclear energy into electricity came later.” — Gordon Edwards
Despite all the dangers it represents, nuclear energy has continued to develop in the world.
According to Gordon Edwards, one of the main reasons is the manufacture of nuclear bombs. “Nuclear weapons are so powerful. They play a very big role in international politics,” he explains.
A select club
The expert recalls that one of the reasons given repeatedly by Hydro-Québec [correction: by the government of Quebec] for not closing Gentilly-2 was that it wanted to maintain a minimum level of expertise in Quebec in the nuclear field.
According to him, “when you have a nuclear reactor, you belong to the nuclear club and you are invited to international meetings to which you would not otherwise be invited”.
“It gives political prestige to be part of the club of nuclear powers, that is to say people who have access to plutonium. You can rub shoulders with very powerful people, very powerful corporations.” —Gordon Edwards
Blackening the Oppenheimer Name
After viewing the Oppenheimer film, Gordon Edwards had nothing but good words for the production as a whole. However, he regrets that the film “does not state very clearly the real reason why Oppenheimer’s reputation was attacked.
“It almost is portrayed as petty revenge from people like Commissioner Strauss and Edward Teller when in fact it was all H-bomb related. They both wanted, and Teller in particular wanted, to proceed to build a whole arsenal of H-bombs, but Oppenheimer didn’t want that. Instead, Oppenheimer said, the time had come for the world to negotiate an end to nuclear weapons and bring them under international control and thus prevent an endless cycle of arms races.”
“Oppenheimer was an obstacle to the H-bomb project,” explains Mr. Edwards. “That’s why they had to discredit him. And Edward Teller was the one person, more than anyone else in the scientific community, who saw Oppenheimer as an obstacle. Teller had to blacken his reputation in such a way that no one would listen to Oppenheimer any more.
The film suggests that it was done for less important reasons,” he notes. Moreover, “the role played by Teller was greatly understated in the film. In fact, his role was much more significant in nullifying Oppenheimer’s influence,” he says.
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