LETTER: Zionists' bloody colonisation evil

SIR – The sophisms of your Israeli propagandist need to be tempered with an historic reality check. Taking advantage of the European interest in African colonisation, Zionist leader Theodor Herzl sought the backing of European governments in establishing a homeland for Jews only. 

In 1904, Herzl approached King Victor Emmanuel of Italy and asked for Tripoli in North Africa for a Jewish homeland. The response: ‘it is still the home of other people.’     

Herzl approached Britain because ‘the idea of Zionism, which is a colonial idea, should be easily and quickly understood in England, an essential link in the chain of the British Empire.’              

However, the indigenous Jews in Jerusalem, Safad, Tiberias and Hebron reacted negatively to Zionism when an attempt was made to convene a Jewish National Assembly. They did not want a Jewish state in Palestine.

Jews were only 10% of the Arab population and lived in harmony with their neighbours, Muslim and Christian. European Jews were alien to them.

After Herzls administration now put enormous pressure on nations to vote at the UN in favour of dividing Palestine. 

Meanwhile, the Zionist forces of Irgun and LEHI proclaimed their goal as ethnically clearing all of Palestine and Transjordan for a Jewish state. In 1948, Zionist fundraisers collected million from US Jews to purchase weapons from East European states to arm a force of 25,000 terrorists. Plan ‘D’ called for the destruction of Arab villages, the expulsion of Arabs and Jewish settlements to replace them.                             

On April 9th, 1948, UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, shortly before his

assassination by the Zionists, reported the slaughter of 250 villagers in Deir Yassin. The survivors were trucked through the streets of Jerusalem to put fear into the residents and the 90 were later murdered.

The Zionists lobbed mortars into densely populated Haifa and bombed Tiberias, again sending residents in flight, likewise from Surik, Ikrit, Biram, Gish, Majdal and Beersheeba. Between the towns of Elabun, Safsaf and Hula, the Zionists murdered 153 unarmed civilians. In Dawaymeh they killed several hundred civilians and beat women and children to death and blew up houses with people inside.

From Haifa, Jaba, Acre, Ramleh, Saffuriya, Lyda and elsewhere, over 80,000 were

bombed out and forced to flee. In the densely-populated areas, only 60,000 Arabs remained out of 840,000. 

To the native Arabs, wrote an observer of colonialism, ‘Zionism has become a prolonged and tragically successful invasion conducted by an alien people under Western imperial auspices ending in the expulsion of most of the people whose country it was.’ 

The evil persists to this day. Israel continues to provoke a one-sided war on Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, where they have killed and maimed thousands of innocent civilians over the years.

Yours sincerely,

Daniel Teegan, 

Union Hall.