Revolution#137, July 27, 2008

Think You Know the Facts About Israel?
Take this Quiz and Find Out

Increasingly these days, “Israel’s security” is being invoked as a justification for the accelerating confrontation with Iran, and even moves toward a possible military attack by the U.S. (or by Israel with U.S. backing) on Iran.

When Iran carried out missile tests on July 9 and 10, the U.S. and Israel quickly denounced these actions as “provocative” and “unacceptable,” as if they were actions of a group of madmen bent on fomenting war in a peaceful region—even though these tests took place three days after the U.S. and Britain conducted their own naval exercises right off Iran’s coast, and after Israel conducted a major practice run for bombing Iran in June, involving over 100 warplanes.

This portrayal of Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East” and a victim of “aggression” is widely echoed in the American media—along with threatening statements from top U.S. and Israeli officials that “no options” will be left off the table in defending Israel. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said after the Iranian missile tests, “We take very seriously our obligations to help our allies defend themselves and no one should be confused about that.” Israel’s Defense Minister declared that Israel had “proved in the past that it won’t hesitate to act when its vital security interests are at stake.” The previous month, both presidential candidates spoke at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful pro-Israel group. Barack Obama said at this major event, “In a state of constant insecurity, Israel has maintained a vibrant and open discourse, and a resilient commitment to the rule of law.” John McCain told the same audience, “The State of Israel stands…as the great democracy of the Middle East. [It has] thrived and…built a nation that’s an inspiration to free nations everywhere.”

Ruled out of order in all this is any discussion about the actual history and nature of the state of Israel. (When former Democratic President Jimmy Carter came out with a book titled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid last year, making some comparisons between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with the racist apartheid regime that existed in South Africa, he was fiercely attacked, including by top Democratic officials.) In these times of great danger and urgency, it is crucial that people broadly know the truth. Think you know the facts about Israel? Take this quiz and find out. It may bring out truths that you did not know, and it might make you uncomfortable. It might even cause you to question long-held beliefs.

Who Said It?

1. "For Europe we shall create there in Palestine an outpost against Asia, we shall be the vanguard of the civilized world against barbarism.”
2. “If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”
3. “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either…. There is not a single place in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”

“A Land Without People for a People Without a Land?”—Or an Ethnically Cleansed Settler State?

4. True or False: Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. All citizens of the state of Israel, including Arabs, enjoy equal rights under the law.
5. Multiple Choice: Zionists [those with a colonial ideology that says Palestine was “given” to Jews by god] hold that historically, Palestine had been “a land without people for a people without land.” What was the actual Palestinian Arab population compared to the Jewish population in Palestine at the beginning of World War 1 in 1914?
   1. 10,000 Arabs and 150,000 Jews
   2. 100,000 Arabs and 150,000 Jews
   3. 15,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews
   4. 683,000 Arabs and 60,000 Jews
6. In the 1967 “Six-Day War,” Israel took over the remaining 23 percent of historic Palestine—the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem—along with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. True or False: All Israeli leaders have insisted that they were defending themselves against Arab aggression, in particular threats from Egypt’s Nasser.

Israel’s Friends

7. Multiple Choice: During the time the apartheid government of South Africa was isolated by a UN embargo on trade, a number of governments still maintained some trade with the racist South African regime. In the case of Israel, that nominal trade consisted of…
   1. Trade limited to the export of oranges and other food.
   2. Trade limited to the export of eyeglasses and medical supplies.
   3. Trade centered on large scale, strategic military assistance including material and training to help the apartheid regime massacre protesters, and assistance in developing a nuclear weapons program.
   4. None of the above—Israel was one of the few countries in the world to strictly observe the boycott of trade with South Africa.
8. Multiple Choice: In addition to providing military aid to the pariah apartheid regime in South Africa, which of the following other notorious regimes or armies was a recipient of Israeli military aid?
   1. Iran under the Shah, a tyrant who killed thousands of opponents and whose vicious secret police, the SAVAK, received training from Israel.
   2. The reactionary regimes in Guatemala—Israel provided arms and helped form the government’s death squads.
   3. The Nicaraguan Contras, who carried out attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua.
   4. All of the above.

Who Has Nukes?

9. Multiple Choice: Which country in the Middle East today has nuclear weapons?
   1. Syria
   2. Egypt
   3. Israel
   4. Iran
   5. All of the above

Answers:

1: Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement in the 1890s. Zionism arose at a time of great social ferment in Europe, including over the place of Jews in society. Many Jewish people joined Marxist movements or other movements fighting against the oppression of Jews in European societies. But Zionist leaders instead offered to set up a settler-state in the Middle East in the service of various imperialist powers. The imperialist power that eventually became the patron of the Zionist movement was Britain. Herzl explained that “England with her possessions in Asia should be most interested in Zionism…. The shortest route to India is by way of Palestine. And so I believe in England that the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should easily be understood.” Source: The Jewish State, Theodor Herzl, BN Publishing, 2006

2: David Ben-Gurion, a founder of the state of Israel, in 1956, to Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress. Source: The Jewish Paradox, Nahum Goldmann, Grosset and Dunlap, 1978

3: Moshe Dayan, the commander of Israel’s 1967 war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Approximately 500 Arab villages and nearly a dozen urban neighborhoods were utterly destroyed by Israeli settlers. Dayan also remarked that, “There is not a single Jewish village in the land which was not built on the site of an Arab dwelling place.” Source: quoted in The Jewish Paradox, Nahum Goldmann

4: False. A few of the many reasons: Israel was founded in 1948 as a Jewish state. In 1992, a Knesset (Israeli parliament) committee removed a clause from the Israeli Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty before the final version became law. That clause would have guaranteed equal rights before the law for all citizens and outlawed discrimination based on race, nationality, country of origin, religion, or gender. The Israel Democracy Institute reported in May 2003 that 53 percent of Israeli Jews “are against full equality for the Arabs” and only 31 percent “support having Arab political parties in the government.”

5: d. And over half of these 60,000 Jews were recent settlers.

6: False. After the war, Menachem Begin, who later became prime minister, said in a speech to the Israeli National Defense College, “The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.” And a number of historians and researchers—even within, and supportive of, Israel—have challenged the official story that the “Six Day War” was in response to the threat of Egyptian aggression.

7: c. Source: The Guardian, “Brothers in arms—Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria,” February 7, 2006

8: d. Sources: The Guardian, “Worlds apart,” February 6, 2006; “Murder and Complicity in Guatemala,” Catholic Reporter, April 7, 1995

9. c. Israel, in fact, is the only country in the Middle East possessing nuclear weapons. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said this May that Israel has “150 or more” nuclear weapons. And Israel (unlike Iran) has refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

[Most of this quiz was taken from a longer version that appeared in two previous issues of Revolution, in #103 (October 7, 2007) and #104 (October 14, 2007), available online at revcom.us.]

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