The Ironic Case of Gaza

Find additional special coverage on Gaza here

Israel fought the first Israeli-Arab war with Nazi weapons
The opening chapter of Israel’s intriguing history contains a sordid and perversely ironic twist of fate wherein a nation of persecuted peoples found their existence on the very weapons used to lead them to German gas chambers less than 5 years earlier. With six regional players exhibiting increasingly aggressive behavior towards it, and with the prospect of war all but eminent, a newly independent Israel drafted an arms agreement with Czechoslovakia in which it was to supply Israel with 50, 000 rifles, 6, 000 machine, 90 million munitions and thousands of vehicles, tanks and planes, many of which were surplus weapons confiscated on former battlefields and Nazi occupied territories. In the deal Israel received thousands of original WWII Mauser Karabiner 98k rifles, standard infantry rifle of the german Wehrmach, all of which still retained standard Nazi insignias engraved on the receiver (which the IDF had to deface before sending to the battlefields of Israel’s war of independence).

Canada Played an Integral Role in the Formation of Israel

In 1947 the UN, responding to increasing Arab-Israeli hostilities, formed an advisory committee to investigate the causes of the Israeli-Arab conflict and formulate recommendations towards a peaceful solution. The United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was chaired by 11 representatives (each chosen for perceived neutrality in the conflict) one of which was Canada, represented by Canadian Supreme Court Justice Ivan Rand. Among the recommendations of the the committee was the termination of the British Mandate of Palestine as well a partition plan which endorsed a two state solution for both Arab and Israeli independence. Canada’s then Foreign Minister and future Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson also expressed support for the partition plan. The UNSCOP recommendations, which were adopted in UN resolution 181, were directly responsible for the outbreak of the beginning phases of the Israei-Palestine conflict as Arabs expressed outrage at the plan which culminated in the 1947-1948 civil war, inevitably ending in the formation of the State of Israel. This was the first major instance of Canada-Israel relations which were later cemented in the Suez Canal crisis wherein Lester B. Pearson proposed the UN’s first designated peacekeeping mission to end the conflict, for which he was awarded he Nobel Prize.

The Founder of Zionism was a Secularist

Theodore Herzl’s influential book, “The Jewish State”, written in June 1895, is undoubtedly the most significant text of early Zionism and in authoring it Herzl insured his position as the father of modern Zionism. In the book, Herzl argues against assimilation in the then deeply anti-semitic culture of Europe and instead proposes that the Jewish problem could only be solved through the formation of an autonomous Jewish State. Herzl’s ideas emerged as the dominant Jewish philosophy after World War II and were instrumental in justifying the existence of the State of Israel. However, despite Herzl’s ideas about Jewish statehood, his relationship with his own Jewish identity was tumultuous at best. An assimilated Viennese Jew who was ambivalent towards theism if not an outright athiest, Herzl was both distant and openly disdainful towards the Jewish community, at one point even proposing that converting to Christianity was a viable means of escaping persecution, a path which he himself came close to taking on several occasions. To Herzl, the Jewish people were less a religious group than a widely dispersed nation of people that required pragmatic political solutions to ensure their own safety and survival. As such, Herzl’s ideas were fiercely secular and he proposed solutions which directly circumvented aspects of Jewish faith in favor of establishing a Jewish State. Chief among these supposedly heretical ideas was the notion of an established Jewish homeland before the emergence of the Messiah, which is deemed blasphemous in its very existence in that it directly negates Biblical prophecy (a belief which leads many orthodox Jews to reject the state of Israel to this day) For his beliefs Herzl was deemed a heretic by orthodox Jews at the time. It was only after the horrors of the Holocaust were discovered that his philosophy was given the traction it needed to culminate in the state of Israel.

Israel Orchestrated False Flag Operations in Egypt

In a rare instance of a confirmed false flag operation partaken by a state intelligence agency that would undoubtedly pique the interest of conspiracy theorists everywhere, the ominously named “Unit 131” of Israeli military intelligence authorized a conspiratorial operation inside Egypt in a failed attempt to thwart the evacuation of British troops from the Suez Canal in 1947. British military presence was seen as a necessary buffer against Egyptian aggression towards Israel and thusly the operation called for cells within Egypt to firebomb American and British targets (which included a libraries, a post office and a theatre) in the hope that the attacks would be blamed on “The Muslim Brotherhood” an Egyptian Islamist organization. It was believed that this would prompt Britain to rethink its decision to normalize British-Egyptian relations by pulling its troops out of Egypt. The operation, which yielded no casualties and negligible property damage, failed miserably as many of its conspirators were captured and killed by Egypt. Having been exposed, the operation culminated in a major international scandal for Israel in which its relations with both the United States and Britain were severely tarnished. Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett denied any knowledge of the operation while MInister of Defense Pinhas Lavon and head of Military Intelligence Binyamin Givli blamed each other (Both later resigned) and an independent inquiry was unable to determine who actually initiated the operation. The debacle was later seen as a catalyst for the steady escalation of hostilities among the regional powers that inevitably led to Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal.

Israel funding supported Hamas in the 1980’s

With the 70’s coming to a close and with the Cold War in full swing, Israel’s main political rival in the Palestinian camp proved to be the controversial Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). An organization which Israel found to be unacceptably nationalistic, and whose secular, left wing ideology posed the threat of a possible Soviet alliance, the PLO contrasted ideologically with the right wing, religious extremism of Israel’s current political enemies, who therefore proved to be the perfect counterweight to PLO power at the time. Thus, in a move which hindsight has shown to have been ironically detrimental to Israel’s national security, Israeli intelligence began directly and indirectly funding the Palestinian wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which we know today as Hamas. In addition to funding Hamas, Israel both actively and passively encouraged the inflow of foreign funding into the organization and also allowed the radical Islamic group the unprecedented rights to open, uncensored media in the form of newspapers and radio stations and even the ability to hold public rallies without any state or military interference while the PLO was summarily denied all of these rights within the same period of time.

Email • Print • Share on Facebook • Add to del.icio.us • Stumble It!