'Divide & Conquer', the model was Ireland's, 1692, Ulster Plantation
20 April 2010 at 05:15
It is no surprise that the Israelis should be using the tactic of "divide and conquer", the cornerstone policy of an empire that dominated virtually every continent on the globe save South America. The Jewish population of British-controlled Palestine was, after all, victim to exactly the same kind of ethnic manipulation that the Israeli government is presently attempting in Northern Iraq.
Following the absorption of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the British set about shoring up their rule by the tried and true strategy of pitting ethnic group against ethnic group, tribe against tribe, and religion against religion. When British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour issued his famous 1917 Declaration guaranteeing a "homeland" for the Jewish people in Palestine, he was less concerned with righting a two thousand year old wrong than creating divisions that would serve growing British interests in the Middle East.
Sir Ronald Storrs, the first Governor of Jerusalem, certainly had no illusions about what a "Jewish homeland" in Palestine meant for the British Empire: "It will form for England," he said, "a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." Storrs' analogy was no accident.
Ireland was where the English invented the tactic of divide and conquer, and where the devastating effectiveness of using foreign settlers to drive a wedge between the colonial rulers and the colonized made it a template for worldwide imperial rule.
Divide and Conquer Revisited
Former Israeli Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin normally take credit for creating the "facts on the ground" policies that have poured more than 420,000 settlers into the Occupied Territories.
But they were simply copying Charles I, the English King, who in 1609 forcibly removed the O'Neill and O'Donnell clans from the north of Ireland, moved in 20,000 English and Scottish Protestants, and founded the Plantation of Ulster.
The "removal" was never really meant to cleanse Ulster of the Irish. Native labor was essential to the Plantation's success and within 15 years more than 4,000 native Irish tenants and their families were back in Ulster. But they lived in a land divided into religious castes, with the Protestant invaders on top and the Catholic natives on the bottom.
Protestants were awarded the "Ulster privilege" which gave them special access to land and lower rents, and also served to divide them from the native Catholics. The "Ulster Privilege" is not dissimilar to the kind of "privilege" Israeli settlers enjoy in the Territories today, where their mortgages are cheap, their taxes lower and their education subsidized.
The Protestant privileges were a constant sore point with the native Irish; although in fact, most Protestants were little better off than their Catholic neighbors. Rents were uniformly onerous, regardless of religion.
Indeed, there were numerous cases where Protestants and Catholics united to protest exorbitant rents, but in virtually every case, the authorities successfully used religion and privilege to split such alliances. The Orange Order, the organization most responsible for sectarian politics in the North today, was originally formed in 1795 to break a Catholic-Protestant rent strike.
Ireland as Imperial Laboratory
The parallels between Israel and Ireland are almost eerie, unless one remembers that the latter was the laboratory for British colonialism.
As in Ulster, Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories have special privileges that divide them from Palestinians (and other Israelis as well).
As in Ireland, Israeli settlers rely on the military to protect them from the "natives."
As in Northern Ireland, there are political organizations, like the National Religious Party and the Moledet Party, which whip up sectarian hatred, and keep the population divided.
The latter two parties both advocate the forcible transfer of all Arabs Palestinians and Israelis alike to Jordan and Egypt
Prior to the Ulster experiment, the English had tried any number of schemes to tame the restive Irish and build a wall between conquerors and conquered. One set of laws, the 1367 Statutes of Kilkenny, forbade "gossiping" with the natives. All of them failed. Then the English hit on the idea of using ethnicity, religion, and privilege to construct a society with built-in divisions.
It worked like a charm
The divisions were finally codified in the Penal Laws of 1692, divisions that still play themselves out in the streets of Belfast and Londonderry. Besides denying Catholics any civil rights (and removing those rights from Protestants who intermarried with them), the Laws blocked Catholics from signing contracts, becoming lawyers, or hiring more than two apprentices. In essence, they insured that Catholics would remain poor, powerless, and locked out of the modern world.
The laws were, in the words of the great English jurist Edmund Burke,
"A machine of wide and elaborate contrivance and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man."
Once the English hit on the tactic of using ethnic and religious differences to divide a population, the conquest of Ireland became a reality. Within 250 years, that formula would be transported to India, Africa, and the Middle East.
Sometimes populations were splintered by religions, as with Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims in India. Sometimes societies were divided by tribes, as with the Ibos and Hausa in Nigeria. Sometimes, as in Ireland, foreign ethnic groups were imported and used as a buffer between the colonial authorities and the colonized. That is how large numbers of East Indians ended up in Kenya, South Africa, British Guyana, and Uganda.
South Africa's PM John Vorster is feted by Israel's PM Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan during his 1976 visit to Jerusalem
During WW2 the future South African PM John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem.
http://tinyurl.com/92n89dSouth Africa's PM John Vorster is feted by Israel's PM Yitzhak Rabin and Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan during his 1976 visit to Jerusalem During WW2 the future South African PM John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem.
http://tinyurl.com/92n89d
It was "divide and conquer" that made it possible for an insignificant island in the north of Europe to rule the world. Division and chaos, tribal, religious and ethnic hatred, were the secret to empire. Guns and artillery were always in the background in case things went awry, but in fact, it rarely came to that.
It would appear the Israelis have paid close attention to English colonial policy because their policies in the Occupied Territories bear a distressing resemblance to Ireland under the Penal Laws.
The Israeli Knesset recently prevented Palestinians married to Arab Israelis from acquiring citizenship, a page lifted almost directly from the 1692 laws. Israeli human rights activist Yael Stein called the action "racist," and Knesset member Zeeva Galon said it denied "the fundamental right of Arab Israelis to start families." Even the U.S. is uncomfortable with the legislation. "The new law," said U.S. State Department spokesman Phillip Reeker, "singles out one group for different treatment than others."
Which, of course, was the whole point?
Imperial Blowback
As the penal laws impoverished the Irish, so do Israeli policies impoverish the Palestinians and keep them an underdeveloped pool of cheap labor. According to the United Nations, unemployment in the West Bank and Gaza is over 50%, and Palestinians are among the poorest people on the planet.
Any efforts by the Palestinians to build their own independent economic base are smothered by a network of walls, settler-exclusive roads and checkpoints. It is little different than British imperial policy in India, which systematically dismantled the Indian textile industry so that English cloth could clothe the sub-continent without competition.
Divide and conquer was 19th and early 20th century colonialism's single most successful tactic of domination. It was also a disaster, one which still echoes in civil wars and regional tensions across the globe. This latter lesson does not appear to be one the Israelis have paid much attention to. As a system of rule, division and privilege may work in the short run, but over time it engenders nothing but hatred. These polices, according to Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, foment "terror,"adding, "In tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interests."
The policy also creates divisions among Israelis. Empires benefit only a few, and always at the expense of the majority. While for example the Sharon government spends $1.4 billion a year holding on to the territories, 27% of Israeli children are officially designated "poor," social services have been cut, and the economy is in shambles.
By playing the Kurds against Syria and Iran, the Israelis may end up triggering a Turkish invasion of Kurdish Iraq, touching off a war that could engulf the entire region. That Israel would emerge from such a conflict unscathed is illusion.
Divide and conquer fails in the long run, but only after it inflicts stupendous damage, engendering hatreds that still convulse countries like Nigeria, India and Ireland. In the end it will fail to serve even the interests of the power that uses it. England kept Ireland divided for 800 years, but in the end, it lost.
The Israelis would do well to remember the Irish poet Patrick Pearse's eulogy over the grave of the old Fenian revolutionary, Jeremian "Rossa" O'Donovan:
"I say to my people's masters, beware. Beware of the thing that is coming. Beware of the risen people who shall take what yea would not give."
Conn Hallinan is a foreign policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus and a Lecturer in Journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The Model for Iraq was Ireland, 1692, Divide and Conquer as Imperial Rules
by Conn Hallinan
Global Research, Feb 20, 2007
Iraqi League - 2006-12-28
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh's revelations that the Israeli government is encouraging Kurdish separatism in Iraq, Iran, and Syria should ring a bell for anyone who has followed the long history of English imperial ambitions.
Orange Order
"divide and conquer"
The use of this strategy was imputed to administrators of vast empires, including the Roman and British, who were charged with playing one tribe against another to maintain control of their territories with a minimal number of imperial forces. The concept of "Divide and Rule" gained prominence when India was a part of the British Empire, but was also used to account for the strategy used by the Romans to take Britain, and for the Anglo-Normans to take Ireland. It is said that the British used the strategy to gain control of the large territory of India by keeping its people divided along lines of religion, language, or caste, taking control of petty princely states in India piecemeal.
The British employed "Divide and Rule" in British India as a means of preventing an uprising against the Raj. The partition of India is often attributed to these policies.
In his historical survey Constantine's Sword, James P. Carroll writes,
"Typically, imperial powers depend on the inability of oppressed local populations to muster a unified resistance, and the most successful occupiers are skilled at exploiting the differences among the occupied. Certainly that was the story of the British Empire's success, and its legacy of nurtured local hatreds can be seen wherever the Union Flag flew, from Muslim-Hindu hatred in Pakistan and India, to Catholic-Protestant hatred in Ireland, to, yes, Jew-Arab, hatred in modern Israel. [Ancient] Rome was as good at encouraging internecine resentments among the occupied as Britain ever was."
A coin with two sides. The "Nazi-Zionist" medallion.
1.
"Nazi-Zionist" medallion was issued by the Berlin daily Der Angriff to commemorate a joint visit to Zionist Palestine by SS officer Leopold von Mildenstein and Zionist Federation official Kurt Tuchler. A series of articles on their tour, appearing under the heading "A Nazi Travels to Palestine," appeared in Der Angriff in late 1934.
"Zionism and the Third Reich,"
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v13/v13n4p29_Weber.html
2.
It was a struck for Goebbels' Der Angriff newspaper and translates as "A (Nazi) travels to Palestine". It served to commemorate the occasion a Zionist supporter/sympathiser, (and assured collaborator), SS member Baron Leopold Von Mildenstein, together with his wife and Kurt Tuchler of The Zionist Federation of Germany, spent six months travelling Palestine.
At this time many German Zionists, like Tuchler, were Nazi supporters and emphatically indulged themselves in what they saw as the integrity and goodwill of NSDAP policy toward Jewish resettlement: it also furthered their political objectives. Mildenstein's favourable report was therefore sought equally by German Zionists and Nazi's in their collective efforts at proselytising the peopling of Palestine with Jewish Semites. The Journals of this visit were subsequently serialised in Der Angriff in the mid 30's. I believe Von Mildenstein also championed the promotion of Eichmann within the Resettlement Dept.
The twisted genius of Goebbels can never be underestimated.
3.
THE Medallion was struck by the Third Reich to honor the co-operation and support given by the Zionist Jewish Agency in helping to make Germany "Judenfrei". The SS concluded written Agreements with the Zionist organization to ensure that Jews in Germany or under their control were forced to emigrate, selling their assets, the proceeds of which were placed in German bank accounts which would be available to the Jewish Agency for the purchase of goods and services from Germany IF the deportee agreed to settle in Palestine.
The new immigrant to the Jewish controlled area of Palestine, and his family would be given jobs, typically on a Kibbutz, and become a farm laborer - with his tractor and farm equipment purchased from Germany (but owned by the Jewish Agency). It was a difficult choice for the Jew who hated farming and the nasty climate in Palestine - but if it meant his and his family's life, he often took it.
Accordingly, the Zionists encouraged the Nazi regime to make life as frighteningly miserable as possible for Jews under their control. The choice was Concentration Camp or Palestine (Israel). Many thousands chose Palestine. Germany rid itself of Jews and improved it's economy and Jewish Palestine ( then a Communist entity) received the colonists it desperately needed to outnumber the indigenous peoples whose land it was. Much literature exists documenting this arrangement including a book entitled "The Transfer Agreement ". In other words, Zionists strongly supported the harshest treatment of European Jews by Hitler. The Nazi regime created this Medal in honor of their collaboration in ridding Europe of Jews, while preserving their lives.
4.
The medal commemorated Baron von Mildenstein's visit to Palestine.
"... Thus, in early 1933, Baron Leopold Itz Edler von Mildenstein, a man who a few years later was to become chief of the Jewish section of the SD (the Sicherheitsdienst, or security service, the SS intelligence branch headed by Reinhard Heydrich), was invited along with his wife to tour Palestine and to write a series of articles for Goebbels's Der Angriff. And so it was that the Mildensteins, accompanied by Kurt Tuchler, a leading member of the Berlin Zionist Organisation, and his wife, visited Jewish settlements in Eretz Israel.
The highly positive articles, entitled "A Nazi Visits Palestine," were duly published, and, to mark the occasion, a special medallion cast, with a swastika on one side and a Star of David on the other."