Stop the Slaughter in Palestine, by Eric Margolis

Speaking up for the Palestinians has never been the road to popularity. From Eric Margolis at unz.com:

Palestinians have become sand in the eyes of the Mideast. How did this happen? From where did they come?

Nowhere, according to the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. She insisted Palestinians did not exist and were merely human flotsam and jetsam. That was pretty rich coming from Golda Mabovich, born to a Jewish family in Kiev, Russia.

So where did the Palestinians come from who are now under terrifying siege by Israeli forces in and around Gaza, with 15,000 killed so far by Israeli bombing, half of them children? These Palestinians came from next door Galilee in Palestine. They are third generation refugees.

In the early 1950’s, my mother, a journalist and lecturer, went to Palestine sponsored by a number of US newspapers and, secretly, by the US State Department.

Newly founded Israel’s official position was that Palestine – and particularly the fertile Galilee region – was a ‘land without people for a people without land (meaning Jewish immigrants).’

My mother discovered hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in huts made from tin cans or cardboard boxes. There were some tents erected by foreign aid agencies and the United Nations. The refugees were huddled together in the biting cold. Many were near starvation.

There was only a handful of doctors or medical personnel, and no hospitals. Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe were moving in and seizing all the arable land. The United States was financing these settlers. Donations to Israel in the US were, mostly, tax deductible. The propaganda book ‘Exodus’ and subsequent film paved the way for the seizure of Palestinian land.

Those who backed challenged creation of a greater Israel on lands owned by Palestinians were viciously assailed in the US. The newspapers for whom my mother wrote were cowed into silence. Newspapers were threatened with boycotts by their vital advertisers if they did not eliminate my mother’s writings and lectures on Palestine.

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