by Jim

“By ‘Jewish national home’, I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed, we can pour in considerable numbers of immigrants and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine will be as Jewish as England is English, or America American.” – Chaim Weizmann, 1919

“War will give us the land. The concepts of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts only, and in war they lose their whole meaning.” – David Ben Gurion, 1948

It has always been the intent of Israel to depopulate and steal Palestinian lands. Numerous documents exist in the historical record stating as much, and Maryse Gargour’s outstanding 2007 documentary The Land Speaks Arabic leads us through this historical papertrail of meeting minutes, correspondence, internal documents, and newspaper reports. While other films cover various aspects of the conflict, few of them focus on the earlier period before Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation. The theft began many years before the “Nakba” of 1948, in stages through the 1920s-30s, fueled by Europeans harboring fantasies of returning to an ancestral utopian homeland. The film helps lift a veil of confusion from a history often obscured by Biblical justifications, at least in America.

As a kid growing up in a white working class Alabama family in the 1980s, I had zero understanding of what was really going on in the Middle East. The news always portrayed it as an irreconcilable religious clash borne out of some ancient feud. Palestinians were made to seem insane and irrational, blowing themselves up in public spaces and killing bystanders. You often heard that they “didn’t care about life” and that suicide bombers “blew themselves up for God.” America’s anti-Arab racism intensified again after the 1982 embassy bombing in Beirut and the 1986 U.S. bombing of Libya, and again after the Lockerbie disaster in 1988. Later failures like the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, a lopsided deal which gave Israel near total control over Palestinians’ water supplies, were portrayed as grand successes. In this and other negotiations, the U.S. pitched itself as a neutral broker when it was anything but.

In the days and weeks immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center, mainstream media outlets in the U.S. penned ridiculous editorials about the main cause being Arabs’ “jealousy” of the West. The American political class, both Republicans and Democrats, really seemed to love this idea, as it fulfilled their own false notions of cultural and racial superiority. Polls taken across the Arab world in the attack’s aftermath clearly pointed at reasons for it–decades of U.S. institutional and material support for Israeli violence and atrocities–as did an open letter issued by the terrorists themselves. Both were disregarded as antisemitic lies. Explaining why it happened was tantamount to condoning it. Given this patriotic hysteria, the left in the U.S. was divided as to how to talk about it publicly. Many did not see this as the “right time” to have honest conversations about Israel’s illegal occupation and U.S. complicity, arguing that to do so would only alienate people and conflate cause with justification. Hawks on both sides of the aisle decided more mass death was the answer, and despite huge anti-war protests around the world, over 60,000 Afghans and 500,000 Iraqis would soon be murdered by the U.S. “coalition” during its punitive invasions (there is no official death toll of Iraqis killed by the U.S. since it was a stated policy not to count them.) “Embedded” reporters acted as the Pentagon’s cheerleaders, drawing their pincer movement arrows of armored divisions and hyper-obsessed with every murdered U.S. contractor. When the WMD aerial photos were exposed as manufactured evidence (this wasn’t a surprise; no foreign policy analysts took it seriously), the liberal political class in the U.S. feigned being duped by evil neo-cons and cried about how they were manipulated for political ends, a rhetorical tactic first used to avoid responsibility for their invasion of South Vietnam.

The Land Speaks Arabic moves quickly through Britain’s Balfour Declaration and proceeds up to the early stages of the Nakba. A long interview with scholar Nur Masahla, edited throughout, leads us through this historical record. The first terrorist strikes were carried out by Zionist paramilitaries, starting in the late 1930s. Between 1937-39, the terrorist cell Irgun (led by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin) conducted over 35 public bombings, in marketplaces, hospitals, and train stations. They killed around 300 civilians, Palestinians and British. Irgun and the other Zionist terrorist factions (e.g. the Stern Gang) saw the removal of Britain’s presence as the priority. Doing so would remove limits on Jewish immigration and allow a free hand in dealing with the Arabs militarily. World War 2 saw a brief respite in Israeli terrorism; the Irgun even considered an alliance with the fascists, to hedge their bets in case the Axis breached Egypt. When the war concluded, attacks on British and Palestinians escalated sharply. In 1946, the Irgun, dressed as Arabs, completely destroyed a wing of the King David Hotel in Tel Aviv, killing 92 people. This was followed by a second bombing at the Semiramis Hotel, in 1948. Director Maryse Gargour includes interviews with survivors of both of these atrocities in the documentary.

There is nothing complex about the violence. It began with a plan to terrorize and depopulate the Palestinians from their lands, and that is clearly the intention today. As “9/11” was the golden opportunity for the Bush administration to set up U.S. oil-siphoning puppet states in Iraq and Afghanistan, so “10/7” became Israel’s best shot at mass Palestinian expulsion, genocide, and land annexation. Those now against that agenda are labeled “terrorist sympathizers” or “antisemites” in an attempt to discredit them. The fact that some of those imprisoned in open air concentration camps break out and murder/kidnap their occupiers should surprise no one since, for decades, Jews abroad have stressed that Israel’s violent apartheid system, which includes shutting Palestinians out of the political process and treating them like subhumans, only serves to endanger Israeli civilian lives and inflame antisemitism globally. The only way to stop the cycle of violence is for Israel to comply with the demands of international law and return to their 1967 borders, acknowledging and respecting the sovereignty of Gaza and the West Bank as the state of Palestine. Israel and the U.S. have always refused this equitable solution. Instead, they prefer to continue upon a path of violent, destabilizing racism and land theft, utilizing the inevitable Arab retaliation to amplify Israel’s sham victimization and phony “struggle for existence.”

The inability of the American political class to relate to the Palestinian anger caused by the theft of their land has its roots in this same racism. White people are entitled to the land, brown people are not. White people cultivate and civilize the land, brown people are savages that “eat on dirt floors”, to quote one diplomatic cable from the 1930s referenced in The Land Speaks Arabic. Today, the word barbarism is used by Netanyahu and other war criminals in exactly the same way as Hitler used it against the Slavs, or as Thomas Jefferson used it against the “merciless Indian savages”: as a justification for scorched-earth genocide and land theft for white colonizing. Such grossly immoral displays before the U.N. should be universally condemned. To paraphrase something Noam Chomsky said many years ago: It is a disservice to the memory of those who died in the Holocaust to adopt the central tenet of their murderers.