Editing Palestine (section)

=====More on the Irgun, Haganah, Lehi, and Nili=====
The British hired a Jewish network to gather intelligence in the Levant during the first World War, called the Nili. Agronomist Aaron Aaronsohn and his siblings and friends composed the group, and actively supported the alliance of Britain and the Zionists against the Ottomans.

In 1921, amidst the revelation that Britain promised both the Arabs and Jews the land of Palestine, with the Arabs also supposed to gain an independent Syria in their offer, violence erupted. This lasted until 1923, after which a period of relative peace ensued. Later, in 1929, due to mutual suspicion between Palestinian Arabs and Jews, violence flared up again, leading to the deaths of 133 Jews and 116 Arabs. The British took their time in responding, but eventually restored calm among the people. The Zionists continued forging ahead under the British, taking over major infrastructure and establishing their own institutions and elected assembly. 

As the Anglo-Nazi alliance was being forged, the Zionists saw opportunity in Hitler's destruction of Jews. They called all European Jews to take refuge on land their ancestors might have never touched. This also played out well for the British, who needed a large enough population to move ahead with a Jewish state with a Jewish majority.

By May 1936, Arab violence broke out; not against Jews out of hatred, but against the British and Jews (especially immigrants) out of anger that Britain was at every turn refusing Palestinian Arabs self-determination while importing all the Jews they could find into the region to deform the organic population demographics. This reasoning was the reasoning behind the majority of the violence on the Arab side, with the aforementioned plot of al-Husseini and Qasim fanning the flames and discrediting the real (violent) expression of the Arab population. The British resorted to brutal methods to put down the revolt: public hangings, house demolition, and the use of civilians as human shields. By 1939, the insurrection was decimated, and the Palestinian leadership was crippled.

That same year, Neville Chamberlain's government wrote the 1939 White Paper, which claimed that Britain would support a single, jointly-governed state, including limitations on Jewish immigration and land purchases. Although the streets were filled with Jews protesting the decision (made for Britain's fear of war with the Arabs), Britain upheld the limits on immigration. This caused Jewish settlers to turn against Britain.

The Lehi insurgent group, lead by the seventh Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, sought to make an anti-British pact with Nazi Germany. They and other Zionist insurgent groups (Haganah, which later was absorbed by the Israeli state in 1948, and the Irgun, led by Jabotinsky and Begin among others) attacked military and civilian targets.

In October of 1945, they coordinated an attack on colonial oil refineries, railways, and police boats in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Palestine. This began a two-year long struggle by underground extremist groups against both Palestinian Arabs and the British. In July of 1946, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the British Mandate's headquarters, killing 92 people.

The American military expert John Lois Peeke wrote that Robert Asprey (American military historian), Menachim Begin (Israel's sixth Prime Minister), and Samuel Katz (New York Times best-selling author and "Middle East security and international terrorism expert") all "indicate that the King David was blown up for two reasons, to retaliate for the British attack on the Jewish Agency and to destroy the secret documents which would have linked the Jewish Agency and [David] Ben-Gurion to Haganah terrorism."

Haganah was the armed wing of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (JA), itself a branch of the same World Zionist Congress founded by Herzl and later led by Weizmann. The JA changed its official name to the Jewish Agency for Israel following the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, but continued to "encourage, ensure, and implement" the resettling of Jews in Palestine. David Ben-Gurion served as their president 1935-1948, playing a pivotal role in the Haganah's operations. "Haganah" is Hebrew for "defense force", which was the inspiration for the naming of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) following the founding of Israel. 

The Irgun and Lehi cooperated in the massacre of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. 107 Palestinians in a village of 600 near Jerusalem were slain, including women and children. In addition to the destruction of the native population, such massacres were committed with the intention of scaring them to leave. The following massacres in Saliha and Lydda triggered the flight of Palestinians from violence en masse, the expulsion, or the Nakba ''sensu stricto'' (the displacement of these refugees of the 1948 war, and later the June 1967 war).

On May 14th, 1948, Israel declared independence from Britain. (Here we cease to use the term "State of Israel" to denote a difference between the ancient kingdoms of Israel and the modern nation-state.) With the declaration of independence came the consolidation of all Zionist paramilitary forces into the official Israeli Defense Force.

Thus, there are direct links not only between the Mufti's paramilitary forces in the 1950s and the Anglo-Nazi alliance, but between Zionist paramilitary forces, the Anglo-Nazi alliance, and the IDF. Far more massacres have been carried out over the years, as are linked below.

Some try to relate the founding of Israel to the founding of America, whether it be Zionists attempting to court supporters from the unipolar order, "landback" liberal "anti-Zionists" comparing the genocide of Palestinians to that of First (Native) Americans, or those in between. However, this is a false equivalence. The two share only the fact that they were both products of British imperialism, and that they turned against Britain-- the US in a historically progressive revolution during early capitalism, on the one hand, based on popular sovereignty and constitutional democracy; and Israel in a historically reactionary revolution founded upon the explicit dispossession and genocide of an authentic, indigenous population, on the other. Where the whole of America had plenty of land to share and European settlers didn't require immanently the dispossession and mass murder of First Americans in order to live on the land, the Zionist Jews knew that the violation of Palestinian/Arab self-determination and popular sovereignty was inherent within the plan to found a Jewish state in the holy land. Infrared views the treatment of First Americans by European settlers and later by America under Andrew Jackson as a "mutual misrecognition [of antagonism]" and a product of "incommensurate ways of life" owing to differences of culture and means of production, we also think it was wrong to steal their land and that First Americans should have better representation in our country. On the same token, the Israelis knew what they were doing and tried to assert it as progressive (viz. "socialist" kibbutzim and "labour Zionism"); Palestinians don't want representation within what they view as an invading force supported by the imperialist system, they want an authentically Palestinian state and authentic popular sovereignty. This is why, whether in favor of Palestine or not, the comparison between First Americans and Palestinians falls flat.

Following the violent uprisings previously discussed, the Peel Commission was convened to assess what Britain should do about the unrest. In 1937, the Peel Commission recommended that Palestine be partitioned, or divided by the judgement of the British, for the very first time. The proposal was a Jewish region in the north, a large Arab region encompassing the West Bank, Gaza, and southern Palestine, and a British mandate engulfing Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, stretching northwest towards Tel Aviv. Though it was thrown out, the Peel Commission served as the basis for the 1947 Partition plan, much like Sykes-Picot served as the basis for the Anglo imperialization of Arab territory which followed. The Mufti rejected this plan, acting as if he had sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs in his saying that no land could be ceded to Jews.

In 1942, the Biltmore Conference was held in New York. Ben-Gurion and the Zionists, for the first time, --diplomatically, politically, officially -- demanded "that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth." Chaim Weizmann demanded the British allow unrestricted immigration of Jews into Palestine, while Jabotinsky worked to organize said immigration efforts on the logistical end.

1944 British Labour Party endorses "transfer" (expulsion) of Arabs out of Palestine. At this time Bertrand Russell was a member of the Labour Party.
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When the French Mandate of Syria expired in 1946, the newly independent Syrian Arab Republic was formed, which retained control of the Golan Heights region in northern Palestine. This is important with regard to the war of 1967, when Israel began to occupy the Golan Heights and heightened tensions between itself and Syria.