OCTOBER 28TH, 2022 by https://www.mintpressnews.com/
KIT KLARENBERG
Academics Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University and Benjamin Z. Kedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem have produced an extraordinary paper based on a welter of archival material, exposing in disturbing detail the hitherto obfuscated dimensions of an operation by Zionist forces to use chemical and biological weapons against both invading Arab armies and local civilians during the 1948 war.
That brutal conflict created the state of Israel, and led to permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, known as the “Nakba” – Arabic for disaster, catastrophe, or cataclysm.
Morris and Kedar offer a highly granular timeline of events, starting in the initial months of that year, as Britain prepared to evacuate Mandatory Palestine on May 15. In the lead up to that date, Zionist settlers were very much on the defensive, with militias “continuously” attacking their enclaves and convoys, with the support of neighboring armies, due to their joint rejection of UN Resolution 181, passed in November 1947, which proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.
With Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan all having expressed an intention to invade Palestine when Britain left – and having been actively encouraged in this regard by British intelligence – Zionist guerrillas began mounting an offensive, not merely to neutralize Arab fighters, but capture territory, destroying houses and civilian infrastructure along the way, to prevent displaced residents from returning.
In order to augment the latter component of this effort, ensure Zionist seizure of Arab villages and towns was permanent, facilitate easier conquest of further areas, and hinder the progress of advancing Arab armies, these militias began poisoning wells with bacteria to create local epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, malaria and other diseases, in direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which strictly prohibits “the use of bacteriological methods of warfare.”
As we shall see, the Zionists were suitably emboldened by the clandestine operation’s success that they eventually attempted to expand their poisoning campaign to invading Arab armies’ home soil.