U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see, writes M. Reza Behnam.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper arriving in Tel Aviv, October 2020. (DoD/Lisa Ferdinando)
By M. Reza Behnam
Z-Network
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bold and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with U.S. pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1947, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine.
At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Second Session of the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947, during which delegates approved the partition of Palestine into Arab and Jewish States. (UN Photo/Albert Fox)
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977:
“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader has believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country….Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” — Herzl, 1895 [to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”]
Herzl en route to Palestine aboard a ship in 1898. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs….We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East….The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel….[Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” — Jabotinsky, 1939.
Jabotisky in 1926. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” — Weizmann, 1919.
Weizmann in 1900. (Bain News Service, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]….I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” — Ben-Gurion, 1937.
And:
“My assumption…is that a Jewish state on only a part [referring to partition plan] of the land is not the end but the beginning….every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” — Ben-Gurion, 1938.
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Ben Gurion speaking at the cornerstone laying ceremony for the building of the Histadrut, which would become Israel’s national trade union, in Jerusalem, 1924. (National Photo Collection of Israel, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region.
Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
Dalet Plan — Blueprint for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing militarily plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on March 10, 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country.
The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning.
On April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
Jewish militias in the village of Deir Yassin, April 1948. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities begun during and after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
Yinon Plan — ‘Strategy for Israel in the 1980s’
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for The Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies — underwritten by the United States — that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
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Although the “de-Palestinezation of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism.
The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states.
Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
US Army tanks pose for a photo under the “Hands of Victory” in Ceremony Square, Baghdad. (U.S. Air Force, John L. Houghton, Jr., Public domain)
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
A Clean Break — ‘New Strategy for Securing the Realm’
A U.S.-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action for how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
Perle in December 2009. (New America Foundation, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless U.S.-Israeli wars and chaos in the region.
It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts — beneficial to Israeli strategy — in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam Hussein and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the U.S. leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The U.S.-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Bahar al-Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region.
It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the C.I.A. to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South.
Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The Dec. 21 large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as U.S. security coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip.
And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
From Herzl to Netanyahu
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on June 10. (State Department, Chuck Kennedy)
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same — remove all trace of Palestinians.
And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on Oct. 7, 2023 to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
M. Reza Behnam is a political scientist specializing in the history, politics and governments of the Middle East.
This article is from Z-Network.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
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Criminally insane thinking appears to be an unfortunate, eternal fact of life on planet Earth; since at least as early as 1937 up until today, men have perceived mankind’s greatest failure – war – as a form of opportunity, or (Merriam Webster dictionary): “a favorable juncture of circumstances”.
If ever there were a time when humanity faced the absolute necessity of rising to a higher form of consciousness, specifically: higher spiritual consciousness, these final days of the year 2024 is precisely that time.
Deception Politics.
A report just came out. After 4 years of this Democratic Administration, the number of homeless people has hit the Historic Achievement of a record 770,000. Up a massive 18% in this last year.
To analyze modern American Deception Politics …
how much did you hear of this as an issue in the last wave of elections?
how many ‘progressives’ campaigned at homeless camps? organized the homeless?
how many ‘progressives’ criticized this administration as it was on its way to setting this Historic Record?
did politics in America give a dang that it was creating a winter with a record number of homeless?
Deception Politics … completely disconnected from Reality.
MSM, both red and blue flavors, does the stories the oligarchs want done. The alternative press then reads the MSM and writes about what the MSM is covering. Homeless people shiver in the snow. The money is used for genocide instead.
The apartheid settler colonial state feels more empowered than ever to create a hell on earth for neighbouring (pro Palestinian) Arab populations.
Unfortunately, a lot of this empowerment comes from Iranian inaction after they were last attacked, they promised to strike back (which would have made the score 3-3) but they didn’t, this is a sign of weakness to the apartheid regime.
I’ve read that the new leader is more western orientated than his murdered predecessor – this acquiescence to the Empire will be Irans undoing.
The leader of Iran did not change. Only the President.
Kinda like America that way. We also change Presidents. But the overall policy does not change, not really. The American people will still say America is going in the wrong direction. Which tells a logical mind that in America the Presidents are not the top of the power structure either. But the leader in Iran is at least publicly acknowledged, and he gives public speeches about public policy.
The Zionist dreams for a “Greater Israel”.
Like Hitler’s dream for a “Thousand Year Reich”.
Or the dreams of Japanese militarists and nationalists for a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” prior to World War II, and openly acknowledged by Japanese spokesmen as a device for the “development of the Japanese race”. The vagueness of its six listed purposes were effective in making people more agreeable to Japanese militarism, and to collaboration with Imperial Japan.
hxxps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperity_Sphere
Netanyahu and the vast majority of Jewish leaders are now feeling like Hitler would’ve felt had he won.
Like the German people did after about 1941. Before they attacked Russia.
Or like The American Century?
By 2050, it looks like the only way it dominates the planet as it dreams and desires is if the planet is a radioactive cinder. Comes up a bit short, again.
Its the part about dominating and ruling everyone that is always the overreach that crashes the whole thing and drops the leaders into suicide or the next Nuremberg. It works okay among easily deludable and naturally submissive populations like America and Germany, but as they start to try to dominate their neighbors, there is always resistance. The more they dominate, the more resistance they find, until eventually it is a world war of resistance against them. And the 1000 Year Reich is a bit shorter than originally planned.
“A Clean Break” is the most nauseating euphemism. It really means Tel Aviv does whatever it wants and never enters into any good faith negotiations for land for peace, Israel accomplishes everything by force and violence.
Satan’s chosen people do as they please, they are literally creating Hell on earth. The axis of resistance are too busy pussy-footing and playing by the rules of the evil empire, it will be their eventual undoing.
Iran are unblocking western social media apps, their previous (assassinated leader must be turning in his grave) – the score with the settler colonial state would have been 3-3 now if he’d been still alive, this new leader is a Zionist puppet, he’s let them get away with murder – that is a sign of weakness
Great post, great info. Stay strong.
The western world of empires has made great profits from dispossession of continents and robbing their gold, silver and black gold.
The Romans robbed monotheism and weaponized it for an occupation and extreme defamation of character for its fantasy that became a form of empire.
The US has stretched defense as the best offense as it changed the War Department to Defense Department and added preemptive paranoia to it. Because of past sins it has to ignore new ones it has caused.
NATO is the new Knights Templar just like the invasion of Iraq was described as a new Roman empire but it is one that should have no place in the new Planet Earth where the military protection racket is way out of place and a risk to the human race and all life on Earth.
The western world has specialize in land theft by militarized empires for thousands of years. It has a religion weaponized for antisemitism likely by the Romans for religion acquisition just like we demonize enemies today. The long term results of that have carried down the centuries of genocides and pogroms that reverberate throughout history.
We have now redefined defense as the best offense with preemptive fantasy weaponizing paranoia.
As soon as oil based military arose for WWI that spelled trouble from the military protection racket that now has put all people on Earth at risk.
The military arms race is indefensible. NATO is a new Knights Templar way out of place for the human race.
They have been “clear for all to see” for quite some time – since “the walls came tumbling down” in Jericho quite some time ago …
The actual facts of how Palestine has been brutally stolen with massive support from “the West.” It is indeed the latest stain on the history of capitalism’s power, which must be overturned. Thank you for your work in laying out the details of this tragedy.