Editorial from Church & State, Summer 2006 (Number 85)

Morality And Theocracy In The Middle East

Senator Mansergh has condemned Iran as a theocracy, and on that ground he has justified the Euro-American determination to keep it defenceless. The only effective weapon of defence in the post-1945 (or 1948) world is the nuclear bomb with a delivery system.

The classification of Iran as a theocracy is highly questionable. The present state has its origin in an uprising of the Iranian people against the autocracy of the Shah. With the fall of the Shah it ceased to be a bastion of Western power in the Middle East. It now has government which is representative of the general culture of society. That culture is Islamic.

Saudi Arabia is an Islamic theocracy. It is governed by a ruling family chosen by Allah. The Saudi theocracy does not submit itself to election by the people. But, since it is aligned with the West, the last thing the West wants is to democratise it. The Saudi theocracy is an agent of Western dominance in the Middle East, which a democracy would not be likely to be. The Saudi regime is therefore not described as a theocracy. Only states which are marked down for destruction by Ameranglia and the EU are described as theocracies. The term is therefore devoid of objective content in the Western media.

Israel too is a theocracy. The Jewish right to take control of Palestine rests on a Covenant which the Jewish God made with Moses thousands of years ago. Britain in 1917 decided to give effect to that Covenant for its own Imperial purposes. Then both the League of Nations and the United Nations adopted the substance of the Mosaic Covenant in breach of the spirit of their own man-made Covenant.

Senator Mansergh says: "The state of Israel was created by the international community" (Irish Times, 17.12.05).

The UN vote which on 29th November 1947 authorised the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine was in practice a vote authorising the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine. All of the Middle Eastern states voted against the project: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, as well as Greece and Cuba.

34 states voted for it, including the European states of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Also in support were the British Dominions: Australia, Canada, New Zealand and S. Africa, though Britain itself abstained. The vote in favour was bulked out by the client states of the USA and the USSR.

Ireland was excluded from the United Nations at the time, on account of its wartime neutrality, but there can be little doubt that De Valera—who opposed partition on principle—would have voted against. What the Coalition would have done is more unclear.

There were ten abstentions, including Britain, Yugoslavia, China (under Chiang kai Shek a client of the US), and Ethiopia; and also six Latin American states which defied US pressure.

Britain was the governing power in Palestine from 1918 to 1947. It opened the region to Jewish immigration in 1919 and worked with the Jewish Agency to establish the infrastructure of the Jewish State and to marginalise the Palestinian majority. When preparing in 1939 for its second war with Germany, it attempted to abort the Jewish colonisation in order to mend fences with the Arab Governments. But, although the Jewish settlements were still far short of what was required for a Jewish State, they had still become too large and too well armed for Britain to handle.

In 1945 an unrestrained Jewish terrorist offensive was launched against the British administration. The British response was the greatest washing of hands in history, putting Pontius Pilate in the shade. It abdicated responsibility for carrying through what it had begun in 1917 and referred the matter to the United Nations. And then, as a Permanent Member, it did not allow the Security Council to deal with it. That is how it came to be dealt with by the General Assembly—the only serious matter the General Assembly was ever allowed to deal with.

But the General Assembly is only a talking-shop. It has no Executive power. Executive power was deliberately made the monopoly of the Security Council when the UN was established. The General Assembly could not control the implementation of its motion to establish a Jewish State, and Britain prevented the Security Council from doing so.

The Jewish population of Palestine was still very much a minority in 1947, despite a quarter of a century of extensive immigration. The General Assembly therefore decided to divide the region into two states, allocating more than half of the territory to the Jews, who were considerably less than half of the total population. And there was a bare majority of Jews in the territory awarded for the Jewish State.

(The UN resolution also laid down that the strategic area of Jerusalem be under international control and provided for a common market between the two proposed States.)

A Jewish State could not be constructed with any semblance of democratic process in a territory where the native population was still about 48% of the whole. The Jewish nationalists therefore, when given the green light by the General Assembly motion, set about an ethnic cleansing of their territory. The General Assembly did nothing to hinder them. Nor did the British administration in its remaining six months. (The UN vote authorising the establishment of a Jewish State was in November 1947: the British administration withdrew from Palestine in May 1948.) And then the Jewish nationalists enlarged their territory by conquering half of the remainder of Palestine, including part of the area the UN intended to be under international control.

The pre-1967 borders, which are now taken to be the legitimate borders of the Jewish State, are not the borders set by the General Assembly motion in 1947.

The Jewish claim to Palestine never limited itself to the territory awarded by the UN in 1947, or to the territory conquered in 1948, or even to the territory occupied in 1967. The land God gave to Moses extended across the Jordan.

The Palestinians, systematically disabled by a generation of British rule, could not defend themselves against the Jewish expansion of 1948. But a couple of Arab states intervened and stopped the Jewish conquest at Ceasefire lines beyond the territory specified as Jewish in the UN resolution.

In 1956 Israel broke out of those Ceasefire lines under terms of a conspiracy with Britain and France to attack Egypt, but was forced to retire, along with Britain, under an ultimatum from the United States. Under the doctrine of the aggressor pays, it should have been punished by having to withdraw from territories it had illegally occupied in 1948. But it was not. Indeed, eleven years later, it occupied the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan in what it claimed was a "pre-emptive war".

The 'international community', as Senator Mansergh puts it, awarded part of Palestine to the Jews for a Jewish State, and stood idly by while it took the rest. The conquest and ethnic cleansing of 1948 are now accepted de facto as legitimate by the UN, even though we are told unceasingly that the basic purpose of the UN was to ensure that such things would never again be legitimate. And resistance to Jewish conquest by the Palestinians is held to be illegitimate by the UN, and the USA and EU declare it to be a form of terrorism which endangers the world.

What is morality in this context?

Leaving God aside, the moral authority that gave Palestine to the Jews included Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Panama, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Even if they had not been clients of the United States, acting under pressure from Washington, where would they have got the moral authority to impose a colonial settlement on the other side of the world, at the expense of the inhabitants, and against the will of all the Governments of the region? And why should the victims recognise that assertion of moral authority as valid?

It was said in 1947 that President Truman backed the formation of the Jewish State in order to get the New York Jews off his back. But a generation later the US came to see Jewish nationalist dominance in the Middle East as vital to its interests.

There is overwhelming physical force on the side of Israel. Why debase the idea of morality by even mentioning that miserable UN resolution, which was never implemented, and whose terms were broken on the Jewish side within a month, and have long since been forgotten.

The Jewish State was, and remains, a colonising project involving conquest, terror and ethnic cleansing. It cannot end until the victim population is either exterminated or utterly broken in spirit. There is a realistic maxim that whoever wills the end wills the means. Britain set the thing in motion, and Churchill and his colleagues knew what it implied. And the Governments who voted for it in 1947 also knew what it implied. And the Jewish nationalists ever since have only been doing what the Great Powers gave them permission to do. Those Great Powers were not simpletons who thought it could be done nicely.

The strongest will within the early stages of the Jewish conquest was Jabotinsky's. He described it frankly as a conquest in which the native population would have to be broken. Public relations considerations in the early stages required that Jabotinsky should be almost disowned, but as Jewish power grew stronger his view was increasingly acknowledged.

Sharon declared that it was his intention to punish the Palestinians until they beg for mercy. That is what his successor, Olmert, is doing as we write—though the helpless Palestinians gain a kind of victory by refusing to beg.

Sharon formed a new Party before his collapse and Olmert won an election with it. The name of the Party, Kadema, is an explicit recognition of Jabotinsky as the true prophet of Israel.

Anthony Marecco, the last legal survival of the Nuremberg Trials of 1947, died recently. An Irish Times obituary says:

"He believed devoutly in the conventions established at Nuremberg that the conspiracy or common plan to make aggressive war was a criminal offence. Under this convention, he said, not only Saddam Hussein, but arguably also British prime minister Tony Blair and US president George W. Bush could be tried in the international Court at the Hague" (6 June).

The Nuremberg Trials were show trials. They were held under specially invented laws that were promptly set aside once the Germans had been punished. International Law was decreed by the Great Powers to consist of decisions of the Security Council of the United Nations, and the Security Council was prohibited from finding any of its five Permanent Members to be in breach of it.

The UN is for some a pleasant illusion. But it is an illusion which occupies the space which genuine international law and justice should occupy. The devout can believe in it. But we prefer to look the unpleasant reality in the face.

Contents of Number 84

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