Introduction:
“The ethnic cleansing of Palestine is as much America's crusade as Israel's. On 16 August, the Bush administration announced an unprecedented $30bn military "aid package" for Israel, the world's fourth biggest military power, an air power greater than Britain, a nuclear power greater than France. No other country on earth enjoys such immunity, allowing it to act without sanction, as Israel. No other country has such a record of lawlessness: not one of the world's tyrannies comes close. International treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratified by Iran, are ignored by Israel. There is nothing like it in UN history”. John Pilger, August 2007
1948: LEST WE FORGET aim to expose the lies which have, for far too long, been presented as the true scenario of how Israel came to be in 1948.
There is nothing mysterious about what is referred to as ‘the Palestine problem’. What Palestinians refer to as their Nakba was not enacted in some obscure era of history but rather in the 20th Century, within our life span and under the eyes of Western politicians and administrators. It was broadcast through sophisticated means of modern communication and was carefully documented and archived in the inner sanctum of many institutions and think-tanks.
But, until recently, information about ‘the Palestine problem’ has been hidden from public scrutiny and officially classified by governmental agencies.
Apart from the declaration in 1897 by the Zionists at Basel to create a Jewish home in Palestine, the real decisions which helped bring about the Palestinian tragedy were in fact taken in two Western capitals: London and Washington. These decisions were backed by a strategy of propaganda and implementation to realise the Zionist ‘vision of a Jewish home in Palestine’. All the crises that have beset the Middle East from the early days of the Palestine rebellions of the 1930’s until the modern wars between Israel and the Arabs flow directly and indirectly from that Basel decision of 1897. There have been persistent, determined and concerted Zionist efforts to implement, consolidate and even expand the Zionist ‘vision’. All else is derivative from this policy. This process continues to the present day and will continue in the future until that ‘vision’ has fully materialised. There is no question about that.
The Zionist Vision - Paris Conference 1919
As the process of turning that ‘vision’ into reality continues, Western acquiescence to, and accommodation of such a ‘vision’, also continues. Its manifestation lies at the heart of what might be termed as the Bible Syndrome. Its epicentre is the great dialogue between Christianity and Judaism. This epicentre is vast, powerful and is proving to be the final doomsday chapter of what is left of Palestine.
No conflict in the world is as well documented, mapped or recorded as the Palestine tragedy. There is a mass of detailed maps, photographs, populations counts, up-to-date reports, graphs and official resolutions which document this crisis in all its details and which show that the physical, human and economic basis of an independent and viable Palestinian state has long disappeared. The two-state solution is now an empty phrase. There is a huge gap between what is being said and what we hear, between what is being done on the ground and what is officially reported or admitted. The construction of Israeli tunnels, bridges, settlements, exclusion zones and bypass roads for Jews only continues unabated on confiscated Palestinian land despite world condemnation. The construction of the illegal prison Wall continues to rob Palestinians of their land and of the farms. The establishment of new illegal settlements and the enlargement of existing illegal ones are a daily activity in defiance of international law. Nobody makes a formal complaint and when they do, no one listens.
For this reason 1948: LEST WE FORGET, convinced that the Basel Conference aims are the basis for Israeli policies in all of Palestine, will now go back to the beginning to show that the problems did not start with the establishment of the Israeli state in May 1948 (for that is the event that caused the Palestinian Nakba), but with the decisions taken by the Zionist leadership in Basel in 1897: to create an exclusive home for the Jews in Palestine.
At the time of that Basel Conference of 1897, 95% of the population in Palestine were Palestinian Arabs and 99% of its land was Arab owned. This fact was excluded from the thinking of the Zionist leadership at the time and was memorably reflected in Golda Meir’s famous statement: “There was no such thing as a Palestinian people…it was not as though there was a Palestinian people considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist”.
Israel did not exist before May 1948. That so-called state has neither recognised boundaries nor a national constitution.