Deception and Politics from Washington to Tel Aviv
In these difficult times, the voice of the late Palestinian-American scholar, Edward Said is ever present, “Writing is the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
For more than fourteen painful months Israel has passed off its inhuman actions against the people of Gaza as “defensive.”
We are to believe that the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians and attacks on its Arab neighbors are somehow Israel’s “right.” Championed by the Biden administration, Tel Aviv has grown ever more bolder and barbaric in its efforts to crush the resistance and expand its “undeclared” borders; simply, because it can.
Since it proclaimed itself a state on Palestinian land in 1948, Israel has been and continues to be engaged in the largest dispossession of an ethnic group in modern history. And following its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel has emerged an expansionist, occupying and annexationist power, ruling over vast Arab lands and people.
The United States has, particularly since 1967, been the bulwark for Israel’s expansionist dreams. U.S.-Israeli supremacist intentions, papered over and buried for decades, are now clear for all to see.
Out of the ashes of World War II, the newly created United Nations, with U.S. pressure, helped legalize land theft. In 1948, the General Assembly (made up of 58 nations) said “yes” to the creation of a Jewish state on 62 percent of historic Palestine. At the time of the unequal division, 68 percent of the population were Arab Palestinian Muslims and Christians, while only 30 percent were Jewish.
Zionist plans to seize all of Palestine, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, have never ceased, and are clearly stated in the Likud Party platform of 1977: “The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable… therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
The inhumanity, injustices and militarism that we see today in Gaza, in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen have deep roots in the founding of the Jewish state and its ongoing desire to create a hegemonic Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) throughout the Middle East.
The expansionist policies of the current Israeli regime are not an aberration. They are rather a continuation and the inevitable outcome of Zionist political ideology espoused by Israel’s founding fathers, advanced by the Labour and Likud parties, and currently being prosecuted by the fanatics in the far-right Religious Zionism party.
Like the early Zionists, every Israeli leader has believed in the Jewish right to all of Palestine and the right to expel the indigenous population to achieve an exclusive Jewish state. Their plans, goals and strategies have been blatantly stated and well documented over many years.
European founders, men like the father of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904); Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of today’s Likud Party); Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), the first president of Israel; and David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973), Israel’s first prime minister, agreed that increased Jewish immigration and removal of Palestinians were required to secure control over Palestine and to create a Greater Israel.
Following are a handful of the many citations that should be weighed to understand European Zionism and its ethnic cleansing schemes for Palestine and its people:
- “When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation and removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” (Herzl, 1895) [to Herzl, Palestinians were “it”]
- “There is no choice: The Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs… We Jews, thank God, have nothing to do with the East… The Islamic soul must be broomed out of Eretz Israel… [Muslims are] yelling rabble dressed up in gaudy, savage rags.” (Jabotinsky, 1939)
- “By a Jewish National Home I mean the creation of such conditions that as the country is developed we can pour in a considerable number of immigrants, and finally establish such a society in Palestine that Palestine shall be as Jewish as England is English or America American.” (Weizmann, 1919)
- “With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]… I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” (Ben-Gurion, 1937) and “My assumption… is that a Jewish state on only a part [referring to partition plan] of the land is not the end but the beginning… every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.” (Ben-Gurion, 1938)
From Israel’s founder, Herzl, to its first prime minister, Ben-Gurion, its goal has been “a land for Israelis, without Palestinians.”
Furthermore, by looking back on Israel’s expansionist strategies, we can better comprehend what Tel Aviv and Washington are currently plotting for Palestine and the larger region. Their schemes for becoming the hegemons of the Levant are revealed in the: 1948 Plan Dalet (Plan D); Oded Yinon Plan, “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s;” and 1996 “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”
The Dalet Plan – Blueprint for the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
Long before the British terminated their mandate and pulled their army out of Palestine, a cabal of Zionist political and military leaders, led by Ben-Gurion, had been preparing militarily plans for the dispossession of the Palestinians once the British left.
Plan Dalet (Plan D) was officially put into effect on 10 March 1948. Military orders were given to the new Israeli army and Haganah militia to systematically and forcibly remove Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The operational orders specified which population centers should be targeted and laid out in detail how to drive out the inhabitants and destroy their communities, using methods including intimidation, setting fires to homes, properties and goods, demolishing homes and planting mines to prevent inhabitants from returning. On 9 April 1948, at Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, over 150 Palestinian men, women and children were massacred by Zionist terrorist militias (members of Irgun and Stern Gang).
After six months, when the Nakba (the catastrophe) ended, over 750,000 Palestinians had been uprooted, 531 villages destroyed and eleven urban neighborhoods had been depopulated, soon repopulated with Jewish Israelis.
The destruction of Palestinian communities begun during and after the 1948 Arab- Israeli War marked the beginning of Israel’s apartheid system on 78 percent of historic Palestine.
The Yinon Plan “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”
In February 1982, an essay appeared in Kivinum (Directions), a journal of the World Zionist Organization. It was written by Oded Yinon, a journalist for the Jerusalem Post with close ties to Israel’s foreign ministry.
The Yinon Plan for the Middle East contained the key elements of the “Greater Israel” scheme reflected in the expansionist policies – underwritten by the United States – that Tel Aviv has implemented over more than eight decades.
Although the “de-Palestinezation of Palestine” has been a priority, every Arab state has been a target of Zionist expansionism. The Yinon Plan emphasizes two key elements: To survive, Israel must become an imperial regional power; and to achieve that hegemony, it must weaken and divide neighboring Arab states. Israel’s aim has been to create small, sectarian-based Arab states with little choice but to yield to Israeli domination.
The Yinon Plan has been taking shape since the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) and U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Israel’s interest in weak states in the Middle East has been borne out in its air and cyber-wars and numerous assassinations of prominent opposition figures.
Since 1967, Israel has swallowed up more Arab land. It has illegally annexed Arab lands in Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights; with plans, as recently announced, to colonize the devastated Gaza Strip and to annex the West Bank.
“A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”
A U.S.-Israeli neoconservative research group at the Institute for Advanced Strategies and Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C. prepared a policy document in 1996 for newly-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The report titled, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” laid out a plan of action on how Washington and Tel Aviv could integrate their policies to defeat Israel’s “foes” by reshaping the Middle East.
Notably, the authors of the manifesto worked in the George W. Bush White House, inside the Pentagon and Defense Department. Its lead author, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Global Strategic Affairs (1981-87), Richard Perle, was one of the key figures in the formulation of the disastrous 2003 Iraq war strategy adopted by the Bush administration.
To win American support, Netanyahu was advised to package the proposed policies in a language familiar to Americans; hence, standard-issue canards such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” and branding supporters of Palestinian rights as “terrorists.”
The strategies described in the “Yinon” and “Clean Break” plans were constructs for endless U.S.-Israeli wars and chaos in the region. It should be noted, that the United States has engaged in or sponsored wars or conflicts – beneficial to Israeli strategy – in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), Syria (from 2011 to the present), in Lebanon, Yemen, occupied West Bank and Gaza; and with Iran if Israel continues to have its way.
To “secure the realm,” Israel was urged to pursue aggressive policies of preemption and regime change against governments in the region that resisted Israel’s expansionist aims. Netanyahu was advised to collaborate with Jordan and Türkiye to destabilize Iraq and to contain Syria through proxy warfare.
Consistent with “clean break logic,” the Bush administration, under the pretext that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, invaded Iraq in 2003, toppled Saddam and dismantled the ruling Ba’ath Party.
Iraq has yet to recover from America’s eight-year-long occupation and war.
Despite the Iraqi government’s request that the U.S. leave, Washington has refused to withdraw its remaining 2,500 troops.
The U.S.-Israel war on Syria, which led to the fall of President Assad in December 2024 began with the 1996 “Clean Break” strategy for the region. It escalated in 2011 when President Barack Obama covertly instructed the CIA to overthrow President Assad in Operation Timber Sycamore. Thirteen years of deadly war, frequent Israeli air strikes, and crippling U.S.-led economic sanctions, left Syria impoverished, fragmented and unable to resist foreign invasion.
Israel got what it wanted in Syria, a Balkanized and weakened country. The United States, Türkiye and their forces dominate in the North, while Israel controls areas in the South. Tel Aviv now claims control over the demilitarized buffer zone in the Golan Heights, and has declared its intent to expand its illegal colonies in the Golan Heights, declaring them part of the Israeli state “for eternity.”
Netanyahu has eagerly embraced “Clean Break” proposals on ways to “secure the realm” in Palestine. He has perversely sabotaged the Oslo Accords (1993/1995), completely written-off the so-called two-state solution (land for peace) and sown division within the Palestinian national movement.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) tasked with limited government over parts of the occupied Palestinian territories by the now extinct Oslo Accords, has been reduced to an enforcement arm of the Israeli security state.
The recent (21 December) large-scale armed crackdown against Palestinian resistance groups in the Jenin refugee camp carried out by PA Security Forces exemplifies the extent of the collaboration.
It should be noted, that the assault was coordinated with Washington and Tel Aviv, and put under the direction of U.S. Army Lieutenant General Michael R. Fenzel, who has served as U.S. Security Coordinator of the Israel-Palestinian Authority since November 2021.
Clean Break strategists callously advised Israel, “to pursue Palestinians into all areas.” In its sinister belief that it can physically destroy the Palestinian national desire to return home to a free Palestine, Israel has ravaged and pulverized the defenseless Gaza Strip. And for more than 17 years, Netanyahu has made it his mission to kill as many Palestinians as the United States and its Western allies will tolerate.
Conclusion
From Herzl’s “spirit them out” to Netanyahu’s campaign of genocide, the message and actions have been the same – remove all trace of Palestinians. And from President Harry S. Truman to President Joe Biden, the message has been: the United States will prevent Israel from failing, whatever the political or economic cost.
When President Biden asserts that he is a “committed Zionist,” he emphatically says to Israelis and Americans that the United States is in lockstep with Israel’s plans to erase Palestinians and their hopes for a sovereign Palestinian nation. Americans, too, many unwittingly, have become committed Zionists by financing Israeli supremacy and regional militarism.
In addition, by suppressing the truth about Israel’s expansionist plans, American politicians and the corporate media have fed the country’s addiction to regional supremacy and its dreams of a Greater Israel, without Palestinians.
Ben-Gurion’s words in a letter to his son in 1937 were menacing and foreboding:
“The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
Israel’s current Zionist extremists have seized upon the Palestinian act of resistance on 7 October 2023 to make Ben-Gurion’s hoped for “opportune moment” a reality, believing that they, like their predecessors, can continue to disfigure history.
Israel Bombs, America
Yawns and Gatekeepers Con
January 13, 2025
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
As gatekeepers of the corporate information bazaar, you have served Israel well. Echoing the propaganda of Tel Aviv and Washington has become mainstream fare, with omission at the heart of the campaign.
Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president, judiciously wrote in 1789: “Whenever the people are well informed, they may be trusted with their own government.” Unfortunately, today’s media mind managers have forgotten that. The public’s right to know the truth about Israel’s genocidal war on Palestinians, supported by the United States, has been subordinated to currying the favor of special interest groups and monied interests.
You have been tranquilized by your intimate relationship to the national security state, ever willing to espouse the pro-Israel views of the White House, State Department, the Pentagon, and most, if not all, members of the American political class.
British novelist, George Orwell, in a passage from his prophetic novel, 1984, aptly described the relationship that has evolved between the establishment media and Israel; he wrote: “If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
There is a tendency among journalists to believe in their individual autonomy, although most work in large, hierarchical, corporate media organizations. Many have convinced themselves that they are engaged in watchdog journalism, when they are, in fact, acting as stenographers for the powerful.
In the case of Israel, journalists quickly learn compliancy, what can and cannot be said to protect careers. While pro-Israel reporting and editorializing are rewarded, exact narratives and historical perspectives suffer repercussions.
Censors have become unnecessary because an ideological self-censorship has formed and congealed. Many of them can recall instances when they were told not to antagonize powerful interests and advertisers, and can name principled journalists, like the late Helen Thomas and John Pilger, who were banished for saying the “unacceptable.”
Years of unexamined logic, unrevealed truths and self-deception in the coverage of Palestine-Israel and America’s defense of the Zionist colony have contributed to a labored understanding of 7 October 2023 and its aftermath.
It was apparent soon after the October insurrection that you intended to focus on Israel’s story. The Islamic Resistance Movement’s (Hamas) act of resistance on that day has never been put into the context of Israel’s terror against the Palestinians. And you have never made it explicit that international law (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949) affirms the right of national liberation movements—like Hamas—to resist, to use force against military occupation and colonization.
Astonishingly, fifteen months into the genocide you continue to describe Israel’s war on an imprisoned stateless people under occupation as “defensive.” What you shamelessly leave out is that it is a war against all Palestinians, sponsored by the United States. Also missing from your coverage and analysis is Tel Aviv’s plan to grab more land, to further its design for a “Greater Israel,” and to capture the water and other vital resources of its neighbors, Lebanon and Syria.
Israel has banned foreign journalists from Gaza. It has been Palestinian journalists who speak of the horrors that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, and it has been they who have paid a heavy price.
Since the beginning of the insurrection (October 2023-December 2024), Israel has killed 222 Palestinian journalists and media personnel. That is a war crime. Article 79 of the Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions, clearly states: all journalists “engaged in dangerous professional missions in zones of armed conflict shall be considered civilians…[and] shall be protected.”
There are an estimated 85,000 news and editorial personnel in the profession in the United States. Although some have raised alarms over Israel’s targeting of them, persistent calls for fair coverage have gone essentially unheeded.
In November 2023, for example, 1,484 journalists signed a letter to leaders in Western newsrooms condemning the killing of reporters and their family members. They also encouraged newsroom editors to be “clear-eyed in coverage of Israel’s repeated atrocities against Palestinians.”
An earlier attempt was made in June 2021. Then, 514 journalists signed an open letter stating: “For the sake of our readers and viewers—and the truth—we have a duty to change course immediately and end this decades-long journalistic malpractice. The evidence of Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians is overwhelming and must no longer be sanitized.”
The continuing erosion of press freedom and independence is reflected in the Reporters Without Borders 2024 World Press Freedom Index. It ranked the United States 55 out of 180 countries indexed.
Editorial intimidation has not stopped some reporters from trying to end the whitewashing of Israel. In November and December 2024, for example, journalists at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) endeavored to expose the blatant pro-Israel bias that dominates its reporting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
BBC staffers stated that coverage consistently devalued Palestinian lives, ignored Israeli atrocities, and created a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas. They also called for an end to the practice of presenting Israel’s version of events as facts, and requested that more be done to provide regular historical context about Israel’s apartheid occupation that predates October 2023.
Journalists at CNN have, also, expressed frustrations over systematic and institutionalized bias toward Israel and the silencing of Palestinian perspectives in their newsrooms.
Written language is the craft of journalists and journalism. Unfortunately, in the case of Israel, it has been distorted in order to normalize the abnormal, make the apocryphal real and the fraudulent legal. The culture of silence on Gaza, has made genocide—the most severe crime against humanity—the “accepted” backdrop of daily life.
Examples abound of how language has been misused to sell the public on the idea that the genocide of Palestinians will make Israel secure. I bristle each time I hear journalists use the word “war” or “conflict,” used repeatedly, to describe the horrors Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians.
You have been driven to accept the Israeli regime’s narrative that its crime of extermination in Gaza is a “war,” while recognizing that it is not.
Responding to an Israeli airstrike on 21 December 2024 that killed 25 Palestinians in Jabalia, including 12 members of one family, seven of them children, Pope Francis did not equivocate: “Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war.”
Merriam-Webster tells us that war is “a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.” The Gaza Strip is not a state. It is illegally occupied land and its inhabitants have been under occupation and siege since 2007. War also implies a battle between equals or near-equals. The total asymmetry in power between Israel and Hamas continues to be unreported.
Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group.
Israel has committed the first four of the five acts. It has yet to transfer children out of the group. However, its imprisonment of 650 children from the occupied West Bank since October 2023, often for prolonged periods of time, could be understood as removal, separation from their communities.
Limited coverage has been given, if at all, to the number of rights organizations that have meticulously documented and called Israel’s atrocities genocide—Amnesty International (5 December 2024); Human Rights Watch (19 December 2024); UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices (11 November 2024); UN Special Rapporteur Report (March 2024); and the International Court of Justice, “plausible genocide in Gaza” opinion (26 January 2024).
The Geneva Conventions criminalizes genocide and those complicit in it. False media narratives and omissions are part of that complicity.
That complicity, for example, was exhibited recently when the New York Times (8 January 2025) rejected an American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) paid ad that urged Americans to: “Tell Congress to stop arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza now!” The Times refused to print the ad unless the organization agreed to swap the word “genocide” for “war;” which they refused to do.
The use of passive phrasing is another way the public has been conned into believing that Israel has been the victim rather than the aggressor. Ambiguous headlines and statements, as well as omissions, have obscured the reality of the perpetrator.
Doubt is cast, for example, on Israel’s culpability with passive language such as “father loses family in an airstrike.” His family wasn’t “lost;” they were killed by American-supplied Israeli bombs.
When Israel massacres starving women and children, blows up hospitals, kills, arrests and tortures doctors, carpet bombs Palestinians in a crowded tent camp in Rafah and opens fire on hungry Gazans desperate for food (Flour Massacre); you have accepted Israel’s version of the atrocities.
Most of the structures in Gaza have been leveled or destroyed. You continue, however, to parrot Israel’s claims that Hamas fighters are hiding in residential areas or that they are targeting “terrorist” strongholds.
There has also been no shortage of deceptive newspeak language surrounding countries and organizations that have demanded an end to the carnage. Forces against Israeli genocide—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Ansar Allah in Yemen, and the Islamic Republic of Iran—are portrayed as villains, aggressors and terrorists. However, the United States—the funder of the genocide—is depicted as a neutral mediator.
Little attention has been given to Israel’s true schemes in Gaza and to the “Greater Israel-Greater America” land grab—to reshape the Middle East— currently unfolding in the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria. Under the subterfuge of security, Israel has taken and plans to hold water-rich areas in the southern areas of Syria and Lebanon, as well as the natural gas off Gaza’s coast; land it has always eyed and coveted for its dream of a “Greater Israel.”
For the better part of the last century, Zionism has been the most destructive force in the history of Palestine, the region and for international stability. Yet, it has seldom been accorded serious attention by media commentators and members of the U.S. political class. When members of the political class “trespass” to tell the Palestinian story or use unscripted terminology, they are met with the wrath of the corporate media, and that includes American presidents. Such was the case when the late President Jimmy Carter published his 2006 book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.
History reveals that it has been dangerous and costly to keep the people uninformed. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Gaza are potent and lethal reminders. As gatekeepers of the news, your “first rough draft of history” on Gaza and the Middle East has been fictional. The last chapter, however, has yet to be written.
Dr. Behnam is a political scientist who specializes in comparative politics, with a focus on West Asia.
© 2025, M. Reza Behnam, Ph.D.
