STONE, I.F. Zionism offered [race-based] "outpost in the Arab world for one of the great empires"

Isador Feinstein Stone (1907-1989) was born in Philadelphia on 24th December, 1907 to a Russian Jewish family. He studied philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and moved to The New York Post in 1933, shortly after beginning his career as a journalist. His first book, “The Court Disposes” (1937), was a defense of Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to expand the Supreme Court. In 1939, Stone became associate editor of The Nation. “Business as Unusual (1941)”attacked the US failure to prepare for war. “Underground to Palestine” (1946) dealt with the migration of Eastern European Jews at the end of WW2. In 1953 he began his own journal, “I. F. Stone's Weekly”, which in 1967 became “I. F. Stone's Bi-Weekly”. He famously published “The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951”. He led the attack on McCarthyism and racial discrimination in the United States and, in 1964, he was the only American journalist to challenge President Johnson's account of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and throughout the 1960s he exposed the evil of the Vietnam War (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone and http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/holy_war_stone.html .

I. F. Stone on race-based Israel (1967): “There is a good deal of simplistic sophistry in the Zionist case. The whole earth would have to be reshuffled if claims 2,000 years old to irredenta were suddenly to be allowed. Zionism from its beginning tried to gain its aims by offering to serve as outpost in the Arab world for one of the great empires. Herzl sought to win first the Sultan and then the Kaiser by such arguments. Considerations of imperial strategy finally won the Balfour Declaration from Britain. The fact that the Jewish community in Palestine afterward fought the British is no more evidence of its not being a colonial implantation than similar wars of British colonists against the mother country, from the American Revolution to Rhodesia. In the case of Palestine, as of other such struggles, the Mother Country was assailed because it showed more concern for the native majority than was palatable to the colonist minority. The argument that the refugees ran away "voluntarily" or because their leaders urged them to do so until after the fighting was over not only rests on a myth but is irrelevant. Have refugees no right to return? Have German Jews no right to recover their properties because they too fled? The myth that the Arab refugees fled because the Arab radios urged them to do so was analyzed by Erskine B. Childers in the London Spectator May 12, 1961. An examination of British and US radio monitoring records turned up no such appeals; on the contrary there were appeals and "even orders to the civilians of Palestine, to stay put." The most balanced and humane discussion of the question may be found in Christopher Sykes's book Crossroads to Israel: 1917-48 (at pages 350-57). "It can be said with a high degree of certainty," Mr. Sykes wrote, "that most of the time in the first half of 1948 the mass exodus was the natural, thoughtless, pitiful movement of ignorant people who had been badly led and who in the day of trial found themselves forsaken by their leaders…. But if the exodus was by and large an accident of war in the first stage, in the later stages it was consciously and mercilessly helped on by Jewish threats and aggression toward Arab populations…It is to be noted, however, that where the Arabs had leaders who refused to be stampeded into panic flight, the people came to no harm." Jewish terrorism, not only by the Irgun, in such savage massacres as Deir Yassin, but in milder form by the Haganah, itself "encouraged" Arabs to leave areas the Jews wished to take over for strategic or demographic reasons. They tried to make as much of Israel as free of Arabs as possible. The effort to equate the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine with the new Jewish immigration out of the Arab countries is not so simple nor so equitable as it is made to appear in Zionist propaganda. The Palestinian Arabs feel about this "swap" as German Jews would if denied restitution on the grounds that they had been "swapped" for German refugees from the Sudetenland. In a sanely conceived settlement, some allowance should equitably be made for Jewish properties left behind in Arab countries. What is objectionable in the simplified version of this question is the idea that Palestinian Arabs whom Israel didn't want should have no objection to being "exchanged" for Arabic Jews it did want. One uprooting cannot morally be equated with the other.” [1].

[1]. I.F. Stone, “Holy War”, Les Tempes Modernes, Paris, June 1967: http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/holy_war_stone.html .

I.F. Stone (famed anti-racist Jewish American journalist): “Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist” (David Wilson, “From Albert Einstein to Noam Chomsky: famous Jews who have opposed Israel”, Stop the War Coalition, 12 August 2014: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/news-comment/1307-from-albert-einstein-to-noam-chomsky-famous-jews-who-have-opposed-israel ).