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There are 3 Apartheid Israel-related centenaries this week, namely (1) the victorious 31 October 1917 charge of the Australian Light Horse at Beersheba that led to conquest of Palestine by Britain and massive famine, (2) the nefarious and racist UK Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 that gave Palestine to Zionists as a Jewish Homeland as an inducement to help keep Russia in WW1, and (3) commencement of the Palestine Genocide (2 million Palestinian deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or imposed deprivation, 1.9 million, since WW1).
History ignored yields history repeated and genocide ignored yields genocide repeated [1]. Anniversaries are useful occasions to remember key past events, and especially those that led to appalling holocausts (deaths of huge numbers of people) and genocides (genocide being defined by the UN Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” [2]). Thus 2016 marked the 950th anniversary of “1066 and all that” – the invasion of Anglo-Saxon England by the French Normans under William the Conqueror and commencement of the genocide of the northern Anglo-Saxons (the so-called “Harrying of the North” in 1069-1070 in which northern England was devastated by mass murder, destruction of villages and famine) [3]. The New Establishment of England thence moved to genocidal conquest of Celtic Britain (Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland) and by the 16th century had started centuries of global conquest by England that saw the invasion and mostly genocidal conquest of 193 countries on all inhabited continents around the world.
The British have invaded 193 countries as compared to British off-shoot Australia 85, France 82, the US 72 (52 after WW2), Germany 39, Japan 30, Russia 25, Canada 25, Apartheid Israel 12, China 2 , and North Korea zero (0) [3-9]. These invasions were accompanied by mass mortality due to (1) lack of resistance to European-introduced diseases among the conquered Indigenous populations of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands) [10- 17], and (2) war- ,occupation- and enslavement-imposed deprivation in all these countries but on a gigantic scale in Africa, China and India [1, 13, 18-31],
Thus 2017 marks the 260th anniversary of the 1757 Battle of Plassey (Palashi) north of Calcutta (Kolkata) in which the British forces under Robert Clive deceitfully defeated the Bengali forces under the Bengali Nawab Suraj ud-Daulah [28] and thence commenced 2 centuries of deadly and destructive rule of the British in India. It is estimated that 1,800 million Indians died avoidably from brutally-imposed deprivation under the British [27]. Thus despite a very high birth rate the Indian population was about 290 million at the time of the 1857 Indian Rebellion (1857 Indian Mutiny) and about 290 million in 1933 three-quarters of a century later [29-31]. Another perspective on this is that average Indian life expectancy was 27 years under the rapacious and merciless British [26, 31]. This remorseless, slow, routine avoidable mortality was punctuated by horrendous regularly recurring famines from the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine (10 million killed) to the “forgotten” WW2 Indian Holocaust (Bengali Holocaust, 1942-1945 Bengal Famine) in which 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death in Bengal and neighbouring provinces by the British with Australian complicity [1, 21, 22]. 2017 marks the 160th anniversary of the Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny) which the British subdued and then followed by a decade of genocidal reprisals in which as many as 10 million Indians were killed [23-25]. 2017 also marks the 70th anniversary of Indian Independence but the genocidal British were not finished – their final legacy was Partition that killed 1 million Indians and generated 20 million refugees [1, 13].
Below are presented details of this week’s 100th Anniversary of the WW1 Australian Beersheba Charge, the UK Balfour Declaration and the commencement of the Palestinian Genocide in 1917.
- 31 October 1917 Australian Beersheba Charge, British Empire conquest of Palestine and Palestinian Famine.
This week variously ignorant or mendacious Australian jingoists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the famous charge of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade of the Anzac (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) Mounted Division on 31 October 1917 that captured Beersheba and thus fatally compromised the Ottoman Turkish defensive line stretching from Beersheba to Gaza on the Mediterranean coast. Palestine and thence Syria rapidly fell to the British under General Allenby [32]. While this was a famous cavalry charge that is much celebrated in mindlessly racist and jingoist Australia, the immediate consequences for the Palestinians were devastating. War-imposed deprivation in Palestine under the genocidal British was associated with a Palestinian Famine in which 100,000 Palestinian died as estimated from a catastrophic 100,000 population deficit in WW1 Palestine [33-36].
No doubt rape and murder of Palestinian civilians followed the Australian, New Zealand and British victory in Palestine – it is implausible to suppose that the genocidally racist British Empire forces did not engage in rapacious violence in Palestine, if not to the horrendous extent of the Russian forces that invaded Nazi Germany and Berlin in 1944-1945 [37-39]. Indeed in the context of a WW1 Palestinian Famine under the British and Australians, one notes that during the Australia-complicit WW2 Bengal Famine (6-7 million Indians starved to death by the British with Australian complicity) there was large-scale civilian and military sexual abuse of starving women and girls on a scale (circa 300,000 victims) commensurate with the “comfort women” sexual abuses of the Japanese Imperial military in WW2 [1, 40]. In 2018 the civilized world will mark the 100th anniversary of the Surafend Massacre (10 December 1918) in which Anzac soldiers deliberately massacred about 100 male Palestinian villagers in retaliation for the shooting death of a New Zealand soldier at the hands of a surprised Bedouin thief [41-43].
- 2 November 2017 Balfour Declaration and theft of a country.
A mere 2 days after the victorious charge of the Australian Light horse at Beersheba – that is, effectively immediately after the event – the evil, racist and warmongering British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, issued the notorious Balfour Declaration as a letter dated 2 November 1917 to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (the British press published the letter on 9 November 1917): “His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country” [44]. The caveat of no detriment to either Jews or Indigenous Palestinians was rapidly ignored by the genocidally racist British and the genocidally racist Zionists, this leading rapidly to a worsening Palestinian Genocide (that is still proceeding apace) and to the Jewish Genocide by the Nazi Germans (5-6 million Jews killed by violence or imposed deprivation) on the basis that there was no place for Jews in Europe as advocated by the Nazi-collaborating Zionists.
Arthur Balfour (1848- 1930), was a degenerate, racist and wealthy warmonger who played an important role in the genesis of the obscenities of both WW1 and WW2 in which 40 million and 100 million people died, respectively (this ignoring the post-WW1 influenza epidemic that killed 50 million people world wide) [1, 13, 45, 46] . British writer William Gerhardie saw WW1 and thence WW2 as fundamentally deriving from competing national economic systems that wanted a fair share or more than a fair share of dominating world markets for national Establishment profit (“the scramble for world markets”). Restricted from domestic sales of goods to the impoverished workers producing them, the imperialist powers sought to export goods and accompanying debt to the world at large [47, 48]. William Gerhardie in his important book “God’s Fifth Column” [47, 48] describes Arthur Balfour as an extremely wealthy, Cambridge Trinity College-trained philosopher, steel industry heir at 21, UK PM 1902-1905, violent suppressor of the Irish agrarian poor, Leader of the Opposition 1906 – 1911 , First Lord of the Admiralty 1915-1916, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1916-1919, war profiteer, warmonger, and snob – as well as being the and thieving, racist author of the infamous Balfour Declaration that allocated the newly-conquered land of the Palestinians to the racist Zionists as a Jewish Homeland. A callous, warmongering Balfour famously declared (as one of Britain ‘s richest people): “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all” [49] .
William Gerhardie commented on childless and unmarried Balfour thus : “Dear Arthur , whose hand in Irish politics in the closing century was to pave the way for De Valera, and whose hand in making the peace by pandering to the senile cynicism of Clemenceau was to pave the way for Hitler, and whose early graduation and long experience in diplomacy was to culminate in an achievement which set the Jews and Arabs by the ears in Palestine”([47], page 87). According to Jewish British Zionist and leading historian of Jewish History, WW1, WW2, and Churchill, Professor Sir Martin Gilbert [50], the Balfour Declaration (1917) was actually made to get traitorous Russian Zionists to try to keep Russia in the war (they were unsuccessful) ([51], page 373). 14 million variously grossly violated Indigenous Palestinians today can well understand the racist, humanity-despising mentality of Arthur Balfour that enabled this “Father of the Palestinian Genocide” to dispassionately declare: “ Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all” [49].
- 1917 Commencement of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide.
Some 20 territories other than Palestine have been proposed for a Zionist colony [52], including Australia (a well-backed scheme for Jewish settlement of NW Australia was finally vetoed in 1944 by the war-time Curtin Labor Government, possibly on advice from the British Government) [53, 54], but the racist Zionists and successive racist British Governments decided to colonize and thence ethnically cleanse Palestine (the decision to Partition Palestine was taken by the British War Cabinet in 1944). One notes that the genocidally racist psychopath Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, was actually ambivalent over whether a Jewish State should be set up in Argentina or Palestine. In his book “Der Judenstaat” (“The Jewish State”) Herzl declared (1896): “Shall we choose Palestine or Argentine? We shall take what is given us… For Europe we shall constitute there [in Palestine] a sector of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as the vanguard of culture against barbarism” [55].
There were 25,000 Jews (half immigrants) and 500,000 Indigenous Palestinians in Palestine in 1880, and 250,000 Jews and 900,000 Indigenous Palestinians by the mid-1930s [33, 34, 56-58]. Jews represented one third of the population by 1948 and even today after 70 years of recurrent mass expulsions (800,000 in the 1948 Nakba or Catastrophe and 400,000 more in the 1967 Naksa or Setback) and an ongoing murderous Palestinian Genocide (continuing dispossession, high avoidable mortality from dispossession and a high rate of violent killing of Palestinians), Indigenous Palestinians still represent about 50% of the population of the Holy Land which is composed of 6.5 million Jewish Israelis, 0.4 million non-Arab and non-Jewish Israelis, 1.8 million Indigenous Palestinian Israelis (second class citizens under Apartheid Israeli race laws) and 5.0 million Occupied Palestinians with zero human rights.
Those supporting Nazi Germany can be accurately described as “pro-Nazi” and those supporting US-, UK- , Australia- and Apartheid Israel-backed, neo-Nazi Apartheid South Africa can be accurately described as “pro-Apartheid”. Accordingly those supporting US-, UK- , Australia-, Canada- and EU-backed Apartheid Israel can be accurately described as “pro-Apartheid”, noting that Apartheid is condemned by the UN Convention on Apartheid as a criminal violation of the UN Charter as set out by eminent lawyer John Dugard (Professor of International Law, Department of Public Law, Faculty of Law, Leiden University): “The Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (hereinafter Apartheid Convention) has it roots in the opposition of the United Nations to the discriminatory racial policies of the South African Government – known as apartheid – which lasted from 1948 to 1990. Apartheid was annually condemned by the General Assembly as contrary to Articles 55 and 56 of the Charter of the United Nations from 1952 until 1990; and was regularly condemned by the Security Council after 1960. In 1966, the General Assembly labelled apartheid as a crime against humanity (resolution 2202 A (XXI) of 16 December 1966) and in 1984 the Security Council endorsed this determination (resolution 556 (1984) of 23 October 1984). The Apartheid Convention was the ultimate step in the condemnation of apartheid as it not only declared that apartheid was unlawful because it violated the Charter of the United Nations, but in addition it declared apartheid to be criminal. The Apartheid Convention was adopted by the General Assembly on 30 November 1973, by 91 votes in favour, four against (Portugal, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States) and 26 abstentions. It came into force on 18 July 1976. As of August 2008, it has been ratified by 107 States” [59]. Neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel determines that 74% of its now 50% Indigenous Palestinian population are excluded from voting for the government ruling them. In its opposition to the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 that condemned Israeli war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (passed unanimously except for Obama US abstention) , Australia became second in the world after Trump America as a supporter of Apartheid Israel and hence of Apartheid [60].
Both Apartheid Israel and pro-Apartheid Australia have sought to claim the Australian Charge at Beersheba as a key military step in the Zionist project. Thus Paul Daley commented in the Guardian: “But the federal government is now cashed up (with some $600m at last count) to spend on [WW1] commemoration until the end of 2018. And, so, Beersheba will get its moment. It will pay to listen closely and to be wary about what you might hear from the Australian and Israeli governments. Israel? It didn’t exist, of course, at the time of the charge, which took place in what was then Ottoman Palestine. But Israel has gone to some lengths to claim what happened as something of a formative step in its establishment” [61]. However pro-Israel Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull’s media release for welcoming serial war criminal Apartheid Israeli PM Netanyahu to Australia referred to “our shared past” and more specifically asserted “Later this year we will jointly commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba, a foundation stone of the relationship” [62] . Serial war criminal Netanyahu echoed Turnbull’s falsehood on arriving in Australia this week: “We admire Australia, we embrace Australia and this visit will enable us to bring our countries even closer. I’ve been here before and counted the years wanting to come back again and I’m very proud to be here as the first Israeli Prime Minister to make an official visit to Australia…We’re celebrating 100 years of friendship between Australia and Israel. I always remember, it was Australian light horse that liberated Beersheba, an old, old city in our history. We have been friends — extraordinary friends — ever since” [63, 64]. Indeed Australia Post joined with its Apartheid Israeli counterpart in issuing stamps in Hebrew and English commemorating the Beersheba charge [65].
The Beersheba Charge and the subsequent Balfour Declaration occurred within several days of each other (31 October 1917 and 2 November 1917, respectively) and hence the commencement of the Palestinian Genocide can be dated to these 2 almost simultaneous and connected events. Passive mass murder of 100,000 Palestinian through famine under the British quickly followed [33] as did the first active, violent mass murder by Australians of about 100 Palestinians in the village of Surafend [41, 42]. The ongoing Palestinian Genocide has involved generation of a 7 million exiled Palestinian Diaspora, 8 million Palestinian refugees, ethnic cleansing of 90% of Palestine and 2 million Palestinian deaths from violence, 0.1 million, or imposed deprivation, 1.9 million, since WW1 [66] . Remember that “genocide’ is defined by the UN Genocide Convention as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” [2]. Indeed in a multi-author book on the Palestinian Genocide nearly all the eminent and variously Jewish, non-Jewish, Arab, Western, Palestinian or Israeli contributors referred to an ongoing “Palestinian Genocide” [67, 68].
- Summary of the horrendous dimensions of the ongoing Palestinian Genocide, the 50 year Occupation and egregious violation of Palestinian human rights.