The UN deliberated the issue of Palestine and set up a committee on the issue United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP). The Palestinians, horrified at the turn of events, refused to cooperate with the UN. Despite much concern about the proceedings, the US used its influence over the smaller countries on sub-committees to sway their votes.

After much haggling the UN voted to partition Palestine. They gave 57% of the land to the Jews who at the time comprised of only 33% of the population.

With superior weaponry and training the Consultancy calculated that they could beat the surrounding Arab counties should they try to come to the aid of the Palestinians but they wanted to hedge their bets and in an effort to avoid confrontation with the best equipped Arab force, they secretly negotiated with the client King of Transjordan, Abdullah. Together they agreed to carve up Palestine with Abdullah taking the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the Zionists taking the rest.

By February 1948 the Consultancy called up all Jews between the ages of 25 and 35 to enrol into the Hagana in preparation for the war they were planning and deal with what the Zionists called “the Arab problem” and establish a Jewish majority.

The ethnic cleansing began in earnest. The Zionists started putting Plan Dalet into action. The Zionists used the village files to kill any traces of Palestinian resistance. Plan Dalet was to achieve the goals of the Zionists by: Killing the Palestinian political leadership, killing the Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters, killing the Palestinians who acted against Jews, killing senior Palestinian officers and officials in the Mandatory system, damaging Palestinian transportation, damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods: water wells, mills etc., Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks, attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses and meeting places etc. The goal was to empty Palestine of the Palestinians.

Dier Yassin was a village outside Jerusalem and on the 9th April the Zionists entered the village. Jaques de Reynier from the International Red Cross counted 150 bodies thrown into a cistern. Of the 254 bodies 145 were women, of whom 35 were pregnant. The attack which involved the use of machine guns and hand grenades was “finished off with knives, anyone could see that” Reynier reported. Having been a witness of Nazi war crimes in Europe, Reynier said “All I could think of was the SS troops I had seen in Athens”.

“They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front of us, and when my mother yelled bending over him – carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her – they shot her too.” (Fahim Zayadan survivor aged 12 at the time)

The Zionists used psychological warfare. When news spread of the massacre many civilians fled, those that refused to flee were expelled by force or killed. Looting and raping were also weapons deployed by the Zionists. In all 750,000 or two thirds of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. 531 villages were destroyed. Destroyed Palestinian villages were either planted over or built over largely by the Jewish National Fund (JNF).

The British brought forward their departure from August to the 14th May 1948. The Zionists declared independence at midnight. War was inevitable. The US and Russia recognised Israel almost immediately.

"In my heart, there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations at last acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half of the country, Judea and Samaria, and , in addition, that we [would] have [in our state] 400,000 [Palestinian] Arabs." (David Ben Gurion)

The Arab response was uncoordinated and patchy with Abdullah, of all people, taking charge of the Arab response. The man in the street in the Arab capitals wanted to come to the rescue of the Palestinians but the Arab leaders did not have the guts to put up a real fight. The conclusion was foregone.

Volunteer efforts led by the Al-Bana’s Muslim Brotherhood were blocked by Egyptian government. The Palestinians were betrayed by their brethren. The Zionists overwhelmed them within months.

“On 12 August 1949, a platoon of soldiers in the Negev, based in Kibbutz Nirim not far for (sic) Beit Hanun, on the northern edge of today’s Gaza Strip, captured a twelve year old Palestinian girl and locked her up for the night in their military base near the kibbutz. For the next few days she became the platoon’s sex slave as the soldiers shaved her head, gang-raped her and in the end murdered her. Ben-Gurion lists this rape too in his diary but it was censored out by his editors”. (Ilan Pape)

Reeling from events the UN appointed an emissary, Count Bernadotte to look at the situation. To the fury of the Zionists, Bernadotte called for the return of the Palestinian refugees to their homeland. For his efforts to bring some justice for the Palestinians he was assassinated by the Zionists in September 1948.

The Zionists quickly established a system of apartheid. State sponsored discrimination against the Palestinians they had uprooted. The discriminatory laws applied to land, property, employment, marriage, travel and political rights. The appetite for collective punishment remained insatiable. History was also rewritten for the convenience of and by the Zionists. This tradition of rewriting history continues today. Websites such as Wikipedia are used to propagate a host of lies about the illegal occupation and its origins.

"There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist." (Golda Meir)

Despite over 60 UN resolutions against Israel including the confirmation of the rights of over six million Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, there have been seven wars between Israel and her neighbours. The Palestinians remain dispossessed and are even attacked in their refugee camps. The violence originating at the time and planned in Zionist thought many decades previously, still reverberates today. The violence is based on the Zionist belief that the Jews are the “chosen people” and therefore can do no wrong. The Palestinians are portrayed as inferior people and therefore discrimination is justified. The Palestinians steadfastly refuse to give up their right to return to their homeland and peace will be elusive until they do so.

---