2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the launch of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948. Unfortunately, in 1948 inhumanity prevailed with the launch of Apartheid in South Africa by the newly-elected neo-Nazi Afrikaner National Party, and of genocidal Apartheid Israel in Palestine by the neo-Nazi Zionist settler-colonialists who murderously depopulated Palestine of over half of its Indigenous Palestinians in the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe).
The State of Israel was founded 75 years ago. The effects can still be felt today in the ongoing Palestinian struggle for freedom and the overall Middle East conflict. To shed lights on the historical roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Dr. Gideon Poyla goes back to the decisive years from 1897 to 1948 in his; 2023 Paradox: 75th Anniversary Of 1948 UDHR Launch & Start Of South African & Israeli Apartheid
The pivotal turning point came in November 1947 with the United Nations plan to partition British Mandatory Palestine. For some, it was a dream turned reality – an independent state offering Jews protection, refuge, and a homeland. For others, it marked the beginning of a “catastrophe,” what Palestinians call the “Nakba,” defined by the loss of homeland, displacement, and uncertainty. More than 75 years after the historic UN vote, the conflict between Israel and the now occupied Palestinian territories continues. It is a source of unresolved tension in the region with reverberations in and beyond the Middle East.
The forebears of the present Indigenous Palestinians have continuously inhabited the land known as “Palestine” (or variants thereof) for 3,000 years, and indeed to the very start of the Agrarian Revolution in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago. In 1880 as part of the 400-year Ottoman Caliphate, Palestine had a population of 800,000 that was mostly Muslim with a 10% Christian community (there were then about 25,000 Jews in Palestine, about half of them immigrants). In 1914 the imperialist and genocidally racist British deliberately confected war with the Turks (by seizing 2 British-built Turkish battleships) and invaded the Ottoman Empire for oil and imperial hegemony. 2 days after the victory over the Turks by the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba in Palestine (31 October 1917), the imperialist British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour issued the Balfour Declaration to racist Zionist Lord Rothschild on 2 November 1917 granting Palestine as a Jewish Homeland in an attempt to get Jewish Bolsheviks to keep Russia in the war against Germany. A Palestinian Famine in WW1 killed about 0.1 million Palestinians.100 Palestinian men and boys were killed by Australian and New Zealand soldiers of the ANZAC Mounted Division on 10 December 1918 in the Surafend Massacre. Massive Jewish immigration to British-ruled Palestine caused massive dislocation of the rural Palestinian population of tenant farmers resulting in an Arab rebellion in the 1930s that was suppressed by the British and by British-armed and British-trained Zionist militias (10% of the adult male Indigenous Palestinian population was killed). In 1939 Jewish immigration was stopped to forestall Muslim disaffection in the British Empire during WW2. Jewish immigration resumed in 1945, and by 1948 there were 650,000 Jews and 1.4 million Indigenous Palestinian in Palestine [10].
In 1947 the UN put forward a Partition plan for Palestine, the genocidally racist Zionist settler-colonialists having rejected civilized proposals for a unitary secular democracy in Palestine [11]. In 1948 the British withdrew leaving British-armed and British-trained Zionist militias behind. The Jewish militias seized 78% of Palestine and expelled about 800,000 Indigenous Palestinians or about 57% of the Indigenous population. This mass expulsion called the Nakba (Catastrophe) was accomplished with 70 massacres involving 15,000 killings and the ethnic cleansing of 530 Palestinian villages. 120 mosques were eventually destroyed. In 1967 Apartheid Israel attacked all its neighbors, seizing 100% of Palestine plus parts of all its neighbors, and expelling a further 400,000 Arabs in the1967 Naksa (Setback). The WW1 onwards Palestinian Genocide has been associated with 2.2 million Indigenous Palestinians killed by violence, 0.1 million, and by imposed deprivation, 2.1 million. The killing continues – each year Apartheid Israel violently kills about 500 Occupied Palestinians (active mass killing) and kills a further 4,000 Occupied Palestinians through imposed deprivation (passive mass murder). Since 2000 about 10,000 Palestinians have been killed violently and a further 110,000 have died from imposed deprivation. About 4,000 Zionists have been killed by Indigenous Palestinians since 1920 (about 1,000 since 2000), and only about 40 have been killed by Gaza rockets since 2000 [7-10]. An average Israeli population since 2000 of 7.519 million [1] and an Israeli homicide rate of about 20 per million of population per year [12] means that Israelis have murdered about 3,500 fellow Israelis since 2000.
Today the GDP per capita is a deadly $3,500 for Occupied Palestinians versus $55,500 for the Occupier Israelis. Each year Apartheid Israel violently kills about 500 Occupied Palestinians (active mass killing) and kills a further 4,000 Occupied Palestinians through imposed deprivation (passive mass murder). The Exiled Palestinians violently excluded from Palestine number about 7 million. About 7 million Palestinian refugees within and outside Palestine represent about 10% of the world’s refugees. Of about 15.5 million mostly impoverished Indigenous Palestinians today, there are 7.0 million Exiled Palestinians (excluded from their own country by genocidally racist Zionist colonizers), and 7.5 million Indigenous Palestinian Subjects of Apartheid Israel (representing about 50% of the population, whereas 7.0 million Jewish Israelis represent 47%). The 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians are 73% of 7.5 million Indigenous Palestinian Subjects of Apartheid Israel but are excluded from voting for the government ruling them i.e. they are subject to egregious Apartheid. The 5.5 million mostly impoverished Occupied Palestinians are deprived of all human rights specified by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and are highly abusively confined to ever-dwindling West Bank ghettoes (3.3 million) and the blockaded and bombed Gaza Concentration Camp (2.2 million). The 2 million Israeli Palestinians can vote for the government ruling them, albeit as Third-Class citizens under 60 Nazi-style, race-based laws [9].
Whereas the world condemned and sanctioned South African Apartheid for over 30 years, the West has resolutely ignored or denied Israeli Apartheid for 75 years, and condemned sanctions against Israeli Apartheid as “anti-Semitism”. The Orwellian, mendacious and racist West has overwhelmingly signed up to the Zionist and all-European International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) that contrary to its false propaganda is egregiously anti-Jewish anti-Semitic, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, and holocaust-ignoring. Nearly all EU and NATO countries belong to the set of 35 countries that are members of the anti-Semitic and holocaust-ignoring International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). Of these 35 soiled, pro-Apartheid countries: (1) all are European; (2) the 5 located outside Europe (Argentina, Australia, Canada, Apartheid Israel, and the US) were all created based on the genocide of the Indigenous People; (3) 9 members were part of the genocidal WW2 Nazi Germany Alliance; (4) 4 (the US, UK, France and Apartheid Israel) are nuclear terrorist states; (5) 28 belong to the 30-member nuclear-armed NATO that accepts mass incineration of billions of men, women and children as an acceptable military strategy; (6) 14 were notably involved in the brutal conquest and genocide of Indigenous non-European people over 5 centuries; (7) only 2 (Austria and Ireland) have had the moral decency to sign and ratify the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW); and (8) all but 4 shockingly voted No to the annual UNGA Anti-Nazi Resolution in 2022 that condemns Nazism, neo-Nazism and related racist obscenities.
The IHRA Definition of “antisemitism” lists 11 false examples of assertions (e.g. criticism of Apartheid Israel, Nazi-style Israeli policies and hugely disproportionate Zionist influence) that it regards as anti-Jewish anti-Semitic. All 11 examples can be shown to be utterly false assertions designed to damage and defame anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish critics of genocidally racist Zionism and of Apartheid Israel and its ongoing Palestinian Genocide. Simply put, anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly, the racist and mendacious IHRA Definition has been condemned by scholars around the world and by over 40 anti-racist Jewish organizations [13].
Since 1948 the genocidally racist Zionists have imposed a remorseless and egregious Apartheid on the Indigenous Palestinians, and those denying this awful reality (the racist Zionists, Apartheid Israel, the US, UK, Canada, Australia, NATO and the EU) are simply lying. To reiterate the Awful Truth, of 15.5 million Indigenous Palestinians, 7 million Exiled Palestinians are excluded from their own country; 5.5 million Occupied Palestinians are highly abusively imprisoned without human rights and the right to vote under violent and deadly military occupation in ever-dwindling West Bank ghettoes and in the bombed and blockaded Gaza Concentration Camp; and 2 million Israeli Palestinians are able to vote for the government ruling them albeit as Third Class citizens under Nazi-style, race-based laws.
This is egregious, Zionist-imposed Apartheid that is far worse than the former South African Apartheid. Whereas in Apartheid South Africa the Whites wanted the Africans and other non-Europeans as cheap and powerless labor, in Apartheid Israel the neo-Nazi and genocidally racist Zionists simply want the Land but not the Indigenous People. Numerous anti-racist and non-Jewish scholars, writers (including Nobel Prize-winning writers), human rights groups (including Israeli human rights groups), and indeed Jewish and non-Jewish heroes in the fight against South African Apartheid have condemned the evil of Israeli Apartheid. For an alphabetically-organized compendium of such informed and humane opinions see [14]. Thus, for example, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Israel human rights groups Boteler and Yesh Din have condemned Israeli Apartheid. The South African Government and 4 South African Nobel Laureates, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, have condemned the horrendous Israeli abuse of Indigenous Palestinians [14]. Numerous other eminent anti-racist Jewish and non-Jewish writers and Nobel Laureates have condemned the race-based segregation, abuse and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians [14-18]. Even Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the “architect of Apartheid”, opined: “Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” [14].
Conversely, for an alphabetically-organized compendium of frankly genocidal assertions by Zionists from the psychopathic racist founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, to the present Apartheid Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu see [19]. Thus Theodor Herzl (1895): “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 country”, and Benjamin Netanyahu (1989): “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories”. Former Apartheid Israeli PM Golda Meir (1969): “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people… It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn’t exist”. Meir has been obscenely echoed by present Apartheid Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (2023): “The Palestinian people are an invention from the last century. There is no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people” [19].
Zionism is genocidal racism and Nazism without gas chambers but with 100 nuclear weapons and one of the world’s biggest high-technology armies and arms industries. Unfortunately, the Zionist-subverted West dominated by Zionist-subverted America is fervently committed to neo-Nazi Zionism (Zionazism) and to Apartheid Israel and its ongoing Palestinian Genocide. The mendacious West ignores the horrendous realities of Israeli Apartheid and ongoing Palestinian Genocide. The West maintains a blatant fiction of a “2 state solution” through “peace negotiations”, ignoring the harsh asymmetric realities of a rich, nuclear-armed Apartheid Israel versus defenseless and impoverished Occupied Palestinians, and that the ethnic cleansing of 90% of Palestine has made a “2-state solution” impossible.
In Palestine one envisages a secular, democratic and multiracial post-Apartheid reality akin to that in post-Apartheid South Africa, and involving return of all refugees, zero tolerance for racism, equal rights for all, all human rights for all, one-person-one-vote, justice, goodwill, reconciliation, economic justice, airport-level security, nuclear weapons removal, internationally-guaranteed national security initially based on the present armed forces, and untrammeled access for all citizens to all of Palestine [11, 25]. It can and should happen tomorrow. However the fundamental requirement that should be implemented immediately is that all the human rights set out in the 30 Articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) be immediately restored to Indigenous Palestinians. Exclusion of Palestinians from the all the human rights set out in the 1948 UDHR has meant 75 years of appalling abuse that I and other decent folk have been calling out for decades [1, 10, 26-28] In the absence of such immediate restoration of all basic human rights to the Palestinians, decent humanity will continue to urge and expand comprehensive Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and all people, politicians, parties, collectives, corporations and countries supporting this evil, genocidally racist and neo-Nazi (Zionazi) technocracy.