The Palestinian “liberation” movement has always relied on the idea that the founding of the state of Israel was an unparalleled disaster for the Arab world designed by a colonialist West. This historical aspersion has served to justify the numerous violent campaigns carried out against Israel for the past 55 years by groups such as the PLO. Well, like many of the myths that have fueled anti-Semitic hatred in the Arab world, the idea of colonialist Israel is simply false, as revealed in Arutz Sheva:
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war plays a key part in the Arab National Liberation tale. The Israeli victory in that war is presented as the defining event, the “nakba” or catastrophe. In order to claim that the PLO and Fatah are fighting for National Liberation in 2005, their promoters argue that British imperialism, using Jewish proxies, crushed Palestinian Liberation in 1948. The corollary: if the Jews will just grant Arabs the National Liberation they were denied in ’48, Arab leaders will deliver on peace with Israel.
Of course, if this story is false, if in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and if it was the Arab leaders and not the Jews who were agents of imperial Britain, then it certainly suggests that their proteges are not fighting for National Liberation today.
The lies that form the basis for today”s Arab nationalism are exposed in a series of British government memorandums, published in the Nation magazine and paraphrased here:
Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the common perception that the creation of Israel was a project of Western colonialism. The Nation shows that during the half year prior to the all-out Arab invasion on May 15, when Britain was responsible for security in its Palestine Mandate territory, it incited, micro-managed and did public relations work for a campaign of Arab troop infiltration and terror.
The intelligence documents cited below show that before the Arab invasion, British intelligence knew that the Arabs terrorizing the future Israel were being led in part by Nazi advisers. These included Bosnian Muslims from the infamous Handzar Division of the Waffen SS. According to a French intelligence document published by The Nation seven months later, the British sent thousands of Nazi prisoners of war, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack. This was after the Arab invasion.
Consistent with British tolerance for and apparent employment of Nazi war criminals against new-born Israel, the Nation memorandum shows that the British adopted a propaganda line reminiscent of the Nazis’ “Jewish-Bolshevik plot” motif. The British accused Jewish Holocaust survivors trying to get to Palestine of being Soviet Communist infiltrators. A 1948 article in the London Times shows that Arab leaders were saying the same thing:
Blockbuster historical research, a must read.