The Other Face of Terror
By Michael S. Ladah
“The present catastrophe may be laid almost entirely
at your door…. This will have the most
frightful consequences in bloody chaos beyond anything ever hinted at in Palestine
before.
…We in the Arab world were stunned to hear that you
permit open advertisements in newspapers asking for money to finance these terrorists, to
arm them openly and deliberately for murder. We could not believe this could really happen
in the modern world. Now we must believe it: we have seen the advertisements with our own
eyes.”
To those who know the history of the Palestinian problem, it
is not surprising that this statement was made by an Arab leader. It was made by King Abdullah (the first) of Jordan
in 1947. The king said it in a letter titled
“As The Arabs See The Jews” addressed to the American people and published in
the American Magazine in November of that year. The
terrorists he was referring to were the organized Zionist gangs that were roaming the
Palestinian countryside, murdering innocent Palestinians and ‘motivating’ others
to leave their homes and vacate the area. The
objective of the Zionist terrorists was to cleanse the land of Palestine from its
indigenous Arab population to make way for European Jewish immigrants who were
‘returning to their ancestral home in Israel.’
Since the administration of Harry Truman, successive U.S.
Administrations have consistently sided with the Zionists in their dream for a homeland in
Palestine. Starting in the early 1930s, but
especially during the period 1945 through 1947, Arab leaders including Ibn Saud and King
Abdullah, warned the United States and their western allies that their policies toward the
indigenous population of Palestine were on the path of disaster. The warnings were repeated by many subsequent Arab
leaders, especially by Anwar Sadat of Egypt in the 1970s and King Hussein of Jordan in the
1980s. The disaster was predicted not only for
Middle Eastern nations but for the US and the other western democracies also.
King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi
Arabia, reportedly lectured Franklin D. Roosevelt on the ‘law of the desert’
when the two leaders met on the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal on
February 14, 1945. When asked about his
opinion and feelings about the anticipated ‘Jewish homeland in Palestine’, the
king told FDR that he (the king) didn’t know how things were normally done in the
west among big powers, but he knew a lot about the law of the desert. When two tribes have a dispute, the king is
reported to have told FDR, and one wrongs the other, the party that is wronged exacts
retribution from the perpetrating party; it doesn’t go to a third party to cause
further harm. You, the Allies, seem to be
allowing the Germans, the perpetrators of crimes against the Jews, to go free. You are also allowing and even encouraging the
Jews, the wronged party, to take the land of a third party, the Palestinians, who had no
part in the conflict and have wronged no one. You
won the war against Germany; why don’t you give a piece of Germany to the Jews as
their homeland and leave Palestine alone? While
it appears that FDR accepted the king’s convincing answer and promised the king that
the rights of the Palestinians will be respected, this understanding didn’t seem to
have survived our great president.
In 1947, in his letter to the American people referenced
above, King Abdullah of Jordan attempted to inform the American people about the history
of Palestine:
“Our case is quite simple: For
nearly 2,000 years Palestine has been almost 100 per cent Arab…. I was puzzled for a long time about the odd belief
which apparently persists in America that Palestine has
somehow "always been a Jewish land." Recently an American I talked to cleared up
this mystery. He pointed out that the only things most Americans know about Palestine
are what they read in the Bible. It was a Jewish land in those days, they reason, and they
assume it has always remained so….
Such fragmentary records as we have
indicate that the Jews were wandering nomads from Iraq who moved to southern Turkey, came
south to Palestine, stayed there a short time, and then passed to Egypt, where they
remained about 400 years. About 1300 BC (according to your calendar) they left Egypt
and gradually conquered most—but not all—of the inhabitants of Palestine….
Only once, during the empire of David
and Solomon, did the Jews ever control nearly—but not all—the land which is
today Palestine. This empire lasted only 70 years, ending in 926 BC. Only
250 years later the Kingdom of Judah had shrunk to a small
province around Jerusalem, barely a quarter of modern Palestine.
In 63 BC the Jews were conquered by
Roman Pompey, and never again had even the vestige of independence. The Roman Emperor
Hadrian finally wiped them out about 135 AD. He utterly destroyed Jerusalem,
rebuilt under another name, and for hundreds of years no Jew was permitted to enter it. A
handful of Jews remained in Palestine but the vast majority were killed or
scattered to other countries, in the Diaspora, or the Great Dispersion. From that time Palestine
ceased to be a Jewish country, in any conceivable sense.”
While King Abdullah’s letter
presented a very good defense of why the United States and its western allies
shouldn’t have helped and encouraged European Jews to dispossess the Palestinians of
their homeland, he failed to site another major historical fact.
In his book “The Thirteenth Tribe:
The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage,” renowned author Arthur Keostler
painstakingly presents evidence that the European Jews ‘returning to Palestine’
never really had ancestors that came from Palestine. Koestler
points out that European Jews are predominantly from Khazar origin. The Khazar Empire extended through a large area in Eastern
Europe and north western Asia, with their major strength centered between the Black Sea
and the Caspian Sea (referred to by the Arabs even today as The Sea of The Khazar). The Khazar Empire thrived from the seventh to the
eleventh century when the Islamic conquests were progressing at lightening speed to the
north in one direction, and to the west through the North African coast and southwestern Europe
in the other direction. During the Islamic
invasion by the Arabs in their northerly direction, the Khazar Empire was squeezed between
two superpowers of the time, the Moslem Arabs and the Christian Byzantines. The Khazars were responsible for having retarded
the advance of the Arab invasion, but they eventually met defeat in a major battle in AD
737 although they were able to continue the rule of their empire.
According to Koestler, the entire Khazar
Empire, starting with their royal court and their military elite, converted to Judaism in
mass around AD 740 to avoid potential forced conversion into Islam by the Arab invaders or
to Christianity by the Byzantines. Eventually,
the Khazar Empire was wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan and most of the survivors
immigrated primarily into present day’s Poland but eventually also into Russia and
most other parts of Europe. Koestler goes on
to provide evidence that the compelling majority of today’s Jews, especially those
who came from Russia and Eastern Europe, and eventually immigrated to the United States,
never really had Middle Eastern lineage. About
the majority of today’s Jews, Keostler believes “…their ancestors came not
from the Jordan but from the Volga, not from Canaan but from the Caucasus, once believed
to be the cradle of the Aryan race; and that genetically they are more closely related to
the Hun, Uigur and Magyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” He explains that the dogma of the Chosen Race is a
farce and the theory of ‘return’ of the European Jews to ‘The Land of
Israel’ is a hoax.
It is obvious today that the only things
most Americans know about Palestine are still from what they read in the Bible, from what
is preached by unsuspecting Christian Zionists and from what the biased news media
bombards them with, generally myths created by Israel and its public misinformation
campaign. Our representatives in Congress, who
are subservient to their re-election campaign contributors and to major financiers of such
campaigns such as AIPAC, have generally repeated the mistruths scripted for them by Israel
and the pro Zionist lobby.
While the terror attacks by the
Palestinian radicals are reprehensible and are strongly condemned by the United States and
the western allies, none of the western politicians uttered a word against the terror that
was perpetrated by the founders of Israel. They
conveniently forget that, in recent history, it was the Zionist gangs in Palestine who
invented terror in the Middle East and introduced it to Palestine.
The Israeli Professor from Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, has
recently stated that “…the Jewish State was built on the ruins of the indigenous
people of Palestine, whose livelihood, houses, culture and land had been systematically
destroyed.” He is in the process of being
expelled from his post for clearly uncovering the terror that caused the Palestinian Nakba. Such terror as used by the Zionist gangs included
massacres of entire population of Palestinian villages after which news of the events was
deliberately circulated to frighten the Palestinian population and make them leave their
homes. They included bombs planted in various
sections of Arab cities, which were intended to cause indiscriminate death, damage and
fear. They included the demolition of entire
villages, expulsion of their inhabitants and their replacement with imported European
Jews. They included assassinations of international personalities including the head of
the UN mission to Palestine. They included
methods and locations that are still, today, being uncovered by Israelis of conscience
like Professor Ilan Pappe. The most recent invasions of Palestinian Areas by the Israeli
Defense Forces in the name of eliminating terrorists is a lame excuse for the continuous
deliberate destruction of the Palestinian Society which the Zionists plotted early in the
20th century and have been implementing since 1948.
We in the U.S. have never spoken against this other face of
terror, the Zionist terror of 1948 which continued through the most recent terror of
invasions and assassinations. More
regrettably, this other face of terror was financed by our aid to Israel, subsidized by U.S.
tax payers and carried out with U.S. military equipment.
What the Zionists did in Palestine, creating a “Jewish” state at
the expense of oppressing, colonizing and enslaving the indigenous Palestinians should not
be allowed to stand. The land must now be
shared and the rights of the Palestinians must be fully restored. The Palestinians have no power to accomplish this
objective on their own and need our help and the help of the world community.
One need not speculate that Saudi Arabia’s Prince
Abdullah gave the same lecture to George W. Bush on the ‘law of the desert’ that
his father Ibn Saud gave FDR, when the two leaders met recently in Texas. Prince Abdullah brought with him an Arab plan to
forgive the Zionists for their transgressions against the Palestinians and allow them to
correct their mistakes by sharing the land with equal rights and opportunities for
Israelis and Palestinians. It is about time we
heeded Ibn Saud’s lecture and King Abdullah’s words when he told the American
public: “The present catastrophe may be laid almost entirely at your door....” Let’s end the occupation and oppression and
let’s find an equitable solution even if we, the only super power in the world, have
to force such a solution.
© 2002 by Michael S. Ladah. The writer is an
Arab American who lived and worked in various parts of the Middle East. He is the
author of “Quicksand, Oil and Dreams: The Story of One of Five Million Dispossessed
Palestinians.” He may be reached at
ladah@hotmail.com
Writer’s Note: The complete version of King Abdullah’s letter
“As The Arabs See The Jews” is obtainable from the November 1947 issue of The
American Magazine, copies of which are available from the archives of any respectable
reference library. It is also available from http://www.kinghussein.gov.jo/kabd_eng.html the Web site of the Jordanian government archives. |