Palestine--Rhiannon Propaganda Pamphlet Threatens Greens Political Integrity

Australian Greens Leader Senator Richard Di Natale needs to immediately shred a misleading and deceptive pro-Palestinian pamphlet authorised and printed by Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon. The pamphlet contains two statements purportedly made by Israel's Moshe Dayan in 1969 and Ariel Sharon in 1973. Dayan is quoted as saying:

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"We came to a region of land that was inhabited by Arabs and we set up a Jewish State...Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages"

Dayan actually said:

"We came to a region that was inhabited by Arabs, and we set up a Jewish state. In many places, we purchased the land from Arabs and set up Jewish villages where there had once been Arab villages."

Dayan's statement refutes the canard repeated in Palestinian text books and media that

"the Zionist gangs stole Palestine"

Why Rhiannon deleted Dayan's highly significant remarks remains unexplained.

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The authenticity of Sharon's supposed statement is shrouded in uncertainty. Michael Shaik writing in the Greens Left Weekly claimed the statement was made by a British journalist boasting at Israel's National Press Club. Max Blumenthal writes it was made in a private chat with Winston Churchill's grandson in 1973. On 18 July 2002 George Hishmeh - an Arab-American journalist based in Washington elucidated:

Winston S. Churchill III, grandson of the famed British prime minister, recalled last October [11 October 2001--Ed] at the National Press Club here a telling encounter he had had in 1973 with the hawkish Ariel Sharon, now the Israeli prime minister, about Zionist objectives. "What is to become of the Palestinians?" Churchill asked. "We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them," Sharon said. Churchill responded, "What?" "Yes, we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."

Hishmeh identified as his source--Geoffrey Aronson:

"who is recognized in the US as the preeminent American expert on the Israeli settlement movement, loves to relate this significant exchange as he did in an interview with The [Lebanon--Ed] Daily Star on two different occasions."

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Churchill recounting a 1973 private discussion in such precise detail at the Washington National Press Club twenty eight years later--is highly suspect. Churchill never made any mention of this conversation with Sharon in his published speech at the Press Club--although he could have recalled the conversation as an aside or in some discussion with Aronson or others afterwards. Churchill's bombshell revelation seems to have gone unnoticed as this contemporaneous report indicates. No other reports have been found. I have been unable to listen to or download a copy of a tape that apparently exists and could possibly shed some light on what Churchill said. Please help me retrieve it if you can. Whether that tape surfaces or not--a question mark must hang over the accuracy of Sharon's previously unpublished 1973 private remarks--only disclosed by Churchill in 2001 Sharon and Churchill are not alive to confirm or deny what was said--yet the terms of this private conversation are quoted with unerring accuracy and entrenched as gospel in Rhiannon's pamphlet. Rhiannon's continuing use of Sharon's "statement"--compounded by her excluding part of Dayan's statement - raises questions as to the propriety of the Greens using this pamphlet to garner votes in the upcoming July Federal elections. Shredding these pamphlets has become an urgent priority. The Greens political integrity requires its support for the Palestinian Arabs be based on solid grounds--not shaky foundations.

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