No source in modern times proved this more dramatically than Mordechai Vanunu. He worked for some years at the Dimona plant in Israel, where nuclear weapons were being manufactured. He was shocked by the fact that no one in Israel or anywhere else seemed to know about it. At a time when weapons of mass destruction were very much in the news, and the conflicts in the Middle East constantly covered in the media, no one knew that the most powerful military force in the area was arming itself with nuclear weapons. He took pictures of the plant, and of the nuclear processes, and left his job. In 1986 he came to London and gave his information and his photographs to The Sunday Times ...
In all the excitement surrounding the publication of the scoop, The Sunday Times managed to lose its precious source. Mordechai was consigned to the loose charge of a couple of journalists who had no instructions as to how they were to keep him safe, and no means to do so. Wandering around disconsolate and lonely, he was approached in Leicester Square by an attractive young woman who befriended him and persuaded him to fly with her to Rome. The woman was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. In Rome the unsuspecting Mordechai was attacked, knocked unconscious, drugged, bound hand and foot, and taken by boat to Israel, where he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to prison for 18 years. That sentence has now been served in full, much of it in solitary confinement, and Mordechai is due to be released this month. The Israeli government, which never stops boasting about its commitment to the rule of law, is threatening either not to release him or to commit him to house arrest. Paul Foot, article ‘Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s Whistle Test’
The United States, My Prime Minister, has been proud of its association with the State of Israel. Alexander Haig
Rest assured that the security of Israel is a principle objective of this administration. Ronald Reagan
I want everybody to know should I be the President, Israel will be our friend. I will stand by Israel. George W Bush
Americans admire a people who can scratch a desert and produce a garden. The Israelis have shown qualities that Americans identify with: guts, patriotism, idealism, a passion for freedom. I have seen it. I know. I believe that. Richard Nixon
Israel was not created in order to disappear – Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom. John F Kennedy
Clinton Tells Israelis: US Will Stand With You Always On October 27th 1994. News article, cited Texe Marrs, Babylon’s Illuminati Secret Society Empire
Since 9/11 more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained ... Even prior to September 11th as many as 140 other Israelis have been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States. Fox News
A war game where Israel has already bombed Iran and a war has already begun. A simulation where all the players will be Israeli. Dispatches: Nuclear War Games, Channel 4 2012
Israel is a more peculiar county than it looks. It’s smaller than Wales but is has its own nuclear bomb. It has more soldiers than Britain and Germany combined. ibid.
Twenty-five years ago I made a film called Palestine is Still the Issue. It was about a nation of people – the Palestinians – forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain. But Israel is backed by a very powerful friend – the United States. So in twenty-five years, if we are to speak of the great injustice here – nothing has changed. John Pilger, Palestine is Still the Issue
The heart of the conflict here is a struggle for land, for the hills and valleys of Palestine, for precious water and fertile soil. During the early twentieth century the great majority of the people of Palestine were Palestinian Arabs. In 1948 Israel was founded in the shadow of the Holocaust. For the Palestinians this meant the loss of 78% of their country. Today they are seeking only the remaining 22% of their homeland. For thirty-five years this homeland has been dominated by Israel. ibid.
This is bomb damage in Gaza. Although America is Israel’s main arms supplier, it’s not widely recognised that Britain also fuels the conflict here, even though it condemns Israel for its illegal occupation. During the first fourteen months of the Palestinian uprising, the Blair government approved two hundred and thirty export licenses for weapons and military equipment to Israel. ibid.
But a true sensitivity to that awful memory comes from the same basic humanity that recognises the suffering of the Palestinian people and the courage of their endurance. The truth is that the Israelis will never have peace until they recognise that Palestinians have the same right to the same peace and the same independence that they enjoy. Recently that great voice of freedom Archbishop Desmond Tutu asked this: Have the Jewish people of Israel forgotten their collective punishment, their home demolitions, their humiliations so soon? ibid.
It’s not simply an Israeli-Zionist assault. It’s an American assault. The two have to be brought together – that’s very important. We can’t simply say it’s all Israel because without the United States, and to some degree Britain and the European countries complicit, but really without the United States, Israel would be forced to be a normal country. John Pilger, interview Adam Hart
There is a actually difference between Judaism and Zionism. Zionism’s great success has been to conflate the two. So if you criticise Israel, by definition you’re anti-Semitic. Now in fact when you know the difference that they are total opposites you understand why it’s perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. That’s the key, is it not? ibid.
This is the longest military occupation [of Palestine] in the modern era. Israel holds the world record for lawlessness. John Pilger, lecture ‘Freedom Next Time’
In 1948, the year Israel’s right to exist was granted and Palestine’s annulled, Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other leading Jews in the United States warned the administration not to get involved with fascists like Menachem Begin who described the Palestinians in the way the Nazis used untermenchen – as ‘animals on two legs’. He became prime minister of Israel. This fascism, which was not often flaunted openly, was the harbinger of Likud and Kadima. These are today ‘mainstream’ political parties, whose influence, in the treatment of the Palestinians, covers a national ‘consensus’ that is the source of the terror in Palestine: the brutal dispossessions and perfidious controls, the humiliation and cruelty by statute. The mirror of this is domestic violence at home ...
There are the ubiquitous myths, too: that Israel has suffered terribly from thousands of missiles fired from Gaza. In truth, the first homemade Qassam rocket was fired across the Israeli border in October 2001, and the first fatality occurred in June 2004. Some 24 Israelis had been killed in this way, compared with 5000 Palestinians killed, more than half of them in Gaza, at least a third of them children. Now imagine if the 1.5 million Gazans had been Jewish, or Kosovar refugees. ‘The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect the people of Kosovo’, declared the Guardian on 23 March, 1999. Inexplicably, the Guardian has yet to call for such ‘an honorable course’ to protect the people of Gaza. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘Come On Down For Your Freedom Records’; viz also website
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, ‘Israel’s right to exist’. They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous ‘Plan D’ resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as ‘ethnic cleansing’. Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, ‘What shall we do with the Arabs?’ Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, ‘made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, Expel them’. The order to expel an entire population ‘without attention to age’ was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. John Pilger, article New Statesman, ‘Holocaust Denied: The Lying Silence of Those Who Know’; viz also website
The true victims are classified often as the perpetrators. For instance, Palestinians are called terrorists and Israelis are never called terrorists. John Pilger, interview Guardian Hay Festival 2006
Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain’s Channel 4 News, were targeting key militants of Hamas and the Hamas infrastructure. The BBC described a clash between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.
Consider one such clash. The militants’ car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the Hamas’ infrastructure, this was the headquarters of the party that won last year’s democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also clashed with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.