The current assassination of Palestinians said to be "planning acts of terrorism" is not all that it seems because the Israelis have long been obsessed by the desire to eliminate the potential leadership of a Palestinian entity. Like the Jews, the Palestinians have always stressed the importance of education and, throughout the Arab world today, Palestinians hold important positions in government and academia. Until the invasion of Kuwait, they ran that country's economy.
The problem was that, after the 1967 war, the Palestinians remained "stuck" (a Zionist term) to their homes because they did not flee in terror as they did in 1948. From the 1930s, Israel's future leaders planned a "transfer" of Arabs they decided that it was best not to use the word "expulsion" - in order, said David Ben Gurion who was to become Israel's first prime minister, "to enlarge Jewish colonization". (Report of Congress of World Council of Poale Zion, 25 July-7 August 1937).
But, in a letter in the Observer, (19 August 2001) Professor Hyam Maccoby wrote: "Israel is not a 'colonial power'. It is an internationally recognized state which is occupying territory acquired in a war of defence against aggressors, just like the Allied powers in Germany after World War II."
But the Allied powers did not colonize former enemy territory for more than 30 years by expropriating huge tracts of land and, blatantly flouting the Geneva Convention, build settlements for foreign settlers, deport inhabitants and inflict cruel "collective punishments" on entire towns and villages.
Professor Maccoby is also mistaken in his belief that the 1967 war was one of "defence". It is not surprising that he does not know the facts because, although these were published in Israel, they were ignored by the British media. Believing that the country was in mortal danger in June 1967, British Jews contributed 16 million pounds sterling to Israel, while the American Jewish community raised between 40 million and 50 million pounds. But did the danger exist?
A story, which received wide publicity in the Hebrew press in Israel but was ignored by Western newspapers, apart from an account in Le Monde written by Amnon Kapeliuk, concerns a statement made by Levi Eshkol, Israel's prime minister, in the Knesset on 12 June 1067, immediately after the war, that: "The existence of the Israeli state hung on a thread but the hopes of the Arab leaders to exterminate Israel were brought to nought."
This claim was demolished on 11 March 1972 when Reserve General Matityahu Peled, a lecturer in the history of the Middle East at the University of Tel Aviv, who had been chief of the logistical command during the 1967 war and was one of the 12 members of the army General Staff, said at a symposium at the Zavta Club in Tel Aviv: "The thesis according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war." Israelis, he added, were under no threat of destruction "either as individuals or as a nation". While Egypt had 80,000 soldiers in Sinai, Israel had "hundreds of thousands of men poised against them".
Peled then wrote a long article in Maariv, the largest circulation Israeli newspaper on 24 March 1972: "Since 1949 no one was in any position to threaten the very existence of Israel. Despite this, we continue to nurture the feeling of inferiority as though we were a weak and insignificant people struggling to preserve our own existence in the face of impending extermination."
Various military men supported his statement and, on 19 April 1972, in an interview with Maariv, General Haim Bar-Lev, who was deputy to Chief of Staff General Yitzhak Rabin, said: "We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Day War and we had never thought of such a possibility." General Ezer Weizman who, as chief of operations, had been largely responsible for the outcome of the war, commented: "There never was a danger of extermination. The Jews of the Diaspora would like, for reasons of their own, to see us as heroes, our backs to the wall."
Then, Mordechai Bentov, a former member of the ruling coalition during the June war, said he had not voted in favour of the war because he was convinced that all diplomatic and political means had not been employed to obtain the reopening of the Gulf of Akaba. He added: "This whole story about the threat of extermination was totally contrived and then elaborated on afterwards to justify the annexation of new Arab territories."
Why did General Peled wait until 1972 before telling the truth? Kapeliuk believed this was because of Peled's opposition to Israel's annexation of the territories occupied in 1967. He maintained that Israel's leaders had deliberately distorted the objectives of the 1967 war in order to raise the spurious issue of the security of the state. Peled added: "By falsifying the causes of the war and confusing its true motivation, the Israeli government was seeking to render acceptable to the people the principle of partial or total annexation."
But the problem of the Palestinian presence in the West Bank and Gaza remained. Israel then decided to "eliminate the leadership" so that academics, doctors, lawyers, writers and teachers were targeted on the spurious pretext of "incitement" of the Palestinians. A total of 1,560 educated Palestinians were summarily expelled from their country. A typical example was Dr Hanna Nasir, principal of Bir Zeit University who, at midnight on 21 November 1974, was arrested without charge, blindfolded, handcuffed and dumped, along with a group of other Palestinians, on Lebanese territory and forbidden to return to his homeland. Often the deportees would be dumped in Maronite-held areas so that they were in great danger.
Even Palestinians living abroad were not safe. Mahmoud Hamchari, a writer and representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris, died a horrible death after a bomb was attached to his telephone. Naim Khader, a young academic and PLO representative in Brussels, was killed by a bomb. Bassam Abu Sharif, who later became Yasser Arafat's spokesman during the so-called peace negotiations, was also mutilated by a Mossad letter-bomb, as was Dr Anis Sayegh, who ran the PLO Research Centre in Beirut. When he was due to visit Britain for medical treatment and was to receive an award at his old college in Cambridge, a headline in the Daily Mirror said: "Cambridge to honour a terrorist." The famous Palestinian poet, Ghassan Kanafani, and his 17-year-old niece were killed by a car bomb. Palestinian intellectuals and leaders of the PLO, Abu Youssef, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser, were killed by what the world's media described as "Israeli commandos" who broke into their block of flats in Beirut and shot them dead (as well as Abu Youssef's wife and their next-door neighbour, an elderly Italian lady, Mrs Clara Morelli, and five other bystanders.) It was said that the murderers used forged British passports but, in fact, it is common knowledge in Israel that foreign Jewish supporters of Israel "lend" their passports to Mossad.
The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war increased the rise of fanatical Islam in Iran when boys as young as 12 were sent into battle armed with coloured plastic keys which, they were told, would admit martyrs to heaven. And so, in the illegally occupied territories, Hamas and Hizbollah, supported by Iran, arose and, in the colonialist "divide and rule" belief, were seen by Israel as opposition to the PLO, but instead the suicide bombers began to operate against Israel.
In view of past events, some observers believe that Israel is not really interested in a just and lasting peace and justifies its intransigence by citing threats against its security. And so, although the country was manufacturing nuclear weapons in the Negev Desert, the Israelis bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor on 5 April 1979 because Ariel Sharon, then Israel's defence minister and now the country's prime minister, said: "We will not allow any Arab country to build an atomic bomb." Menachem Begin, Israel's then prime minister, declared that the bombing was necessary because Saddam Hussein had, according to an article in Al-Thawra, "threatened to use nuclear weapons on Israel". Many of the newspapers which gave prominence to this report failed later to mention that Begin had been forced to admit that he had been "mistaken" after Arabic-speaking Israeli journalists pointed out that Al-Thawra had reported no such threat.
However, over the next few years, many articles appeared in Israeli newspapers written by the country's nuclear experts, such as Professor Shlomo Aharonson, who wrote in Ha'aretz: "A sufficient number of atom bombs together with adequate means of despatching them can hit the Arab capitals hard. Another number can hit other cities and oil installations. Thermonuclear bombs can destroy territorial aims, including concentrations of Palestinians in Lebanon ... There are a hundred targets in the Arab world. The destruction of these will change the face of the area."
The economist Amos Rubin wrote in Al Hamishmar that Israel should adopt "a policy of defence based upon nuclear arms intended for use on the battlefield in order to ward off a conventional attack". Then, Professor Aharonson wrote: "A nuclear deterrent could annihilate even 120 million Arabs and turn their new riches into piles of dust." How, with its proximity to the Arab countries, Israel would escape annihilation was not explained.