The Case for Palestine

A highly recommended reading. Some quotes:

Chapter 1:
At no time, certainly in the last 3500 years, did people cease to live [in Palestine]. The Zionist catch-cry ‘A land without a people for a people without a land' was, when first uttered in the 19th century, palpably wrong.

For an Australian of British ancestry such a slogan necessarily touches a raw or sensitive chord. Australia was of course described as ‘terra nullius'. That genocide was practised on the Australian aboriginal cannot be denied. Readers interested in attempts by Australia to rectify the wrong might well start with the decision of the Australian High Court in Mabo and Another v The State of Queensland [1988]
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Chapter 3:
In 1928 [Transjordan] achieved modified independence sufficient to control immigration policy.

The indigenous people of Palestine, however, were not considered fit for independence or to have control over immigration before 1948. At any time before the end of WWII independence for Palestine would have meant an Arab immigration minister. An immigration minister, as John Howard and Philip Ruddock made very clear to Australians in the early years of this century, is a most important minister, because every sovereign nation has the right to say who is admitted and when.

It is ironic that the parts of the Arab world which achieved independence following the break up of the Ottoman Empire were the most socially, culturally, and economically backward, while the more sophisticated areas, including Palestine, were placed under the control of Western Christian nations.
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Chapter 4:
there is convincing evidence that Zionists prompted Jews in Arab countries to move to Israel. Iraqi Jews had no desire to adopt Zionism. Former CIA agent Wilbur Eveland asserts it was necessary for Zionists to attack Iraqi Jews to induce them to “flee to Israel, and that they planted bombs in Iragi synagogues and in an American building in an attempt to portray the Iragis as anti-American and to terrorise the Jews.”
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Chapter 5:
During the war of 1948, more than half of the Palestinian population at the time 1,380,000-were driven off their homeland by the Israeli Army.
Though Israel officially claimed that a majority of the refugees fled and were not expelled, it still refused to allow them to return, as a UN resolution demanded shortly after the 1948 war.
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Chapter 7:
The International Court of Justice found that the right of self-defence did not apply because there was no armed attack against Israel by another state. Israel's problem was building the wall in the Occupied Territories. If Israeli settlers were not located there a situation of Israel's own making they would not require protection. The problem was they were seeking to defend its citizens in Occupied Territories where they had no right to be.
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Chapter 11:
Ilan Pappe has described Israel as a herrenvolk democracy; democracy only for the masters, for one ethnic group, which, given the space Israel controls, i.e. including the Territories, is not even a majority group. No known definition of democracy applies to Israel.
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Postscript
A final statement. The Jewish people, rightly, came out of World War II with the goodwill of the world. The state of Israel and those who support it, have, however, in my opinion, used up that goodwill.
Paul Heywood-Smith
27 July 2014