Unclassified minutes of a secret Israeli cabinet meeting held 51 years ago indicate that Israel is planning a massive transfer of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to the small Latin American country of Paraguay.
The minutes of the May 1969 government vote left open an Israeli-Paraguayan agreement to encourage the “emigration” of 60,000 Palestinians from areas captured by Israel during the 1967 Sixteenth War.
The transcript, released on Tuesday, details the obligations of each nation, including Israeli funding for flights transferred by Palestinians who agreed to leave the Gaza Strip, a subsidy of $ 100 per deportee, and a payment of $ 33 per person. to the Paraguayan government, which in turn promised the refugees permanent residence and a four-year path to citizenship.
At the time the agreement was ratified, Paraguayan tyrant Alfredo Stroessner was 15 years into what would become the longest dictatorship in Latin American history, and was better known for protecting top Nazi officers than for welcoming refugees. Renowned SS doctor Josef Mengele was one of the Third Reich elite who fled to Paraguay after World War II. Stroessner’s interest in Palestinian immigrants was probably linked to his nation’s urgent need for agricultural workers, which could help bring its cash-strapped and resource-poor nation to life.
Details of the scheme confirm long-standing Palestinian claims that Israel, since its inception, only wanted to befriend the indigenous Arabs who owned its land.
Kamal Cumsille, a University of Chile professor of Arabic studies and an expert on Arab migration to Latin America, told The Daily Beast, “there is no doubt that Israel maintains a hostile policy aimed at leaving Palestine , “but said he” never heard of an actual agreement “for the transfer of Palestinians until the exposition, which was first revealed in a broadcast by Eran Cicurel, foreign editor for the Israeli Can News.
The shock does not stop there. Despite its importance, the Israeli-Paraguayan scheme seems to be thwarted by poor planning, exposure to Mossad agents, and a swift overthrowing terrorist attack that left one Israeli dead and helped the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) terror against Israeli terror goals that characterized much of the 1970s and 1980s.
“It turned out to be a massive conspiracy that was not accidentally hidden from public view.”
It is unclear how many Palestinians emigrated to Paraguay within the framework of the short-term plan. In a 2004 interview, Meir Novik, a police commander involved in the operation, said “a few dozen Palestinians” had been displaced. In talks with Cicurel, Paraguayan authorities joined.
But Moses Peer, an Israeli diplomat who served as Israel’s consul in 1970 to Paraguay and the first secretary of the embassy, said in a 2004 interview that thousands have been transferred.
On May 4, 1970, a year after the Israeli government formally approved the plan, two Palestinian gunmen armed with rifles forced their way into the Israeli embassy in Asunción, Paraguay, with the aim of assassinating Ambassador Benjamin Varon.
As told Varon was out that day, Khaled Derwish Kassab, 21, and Talal al-Demasi, 20, instead shot and killed Edna Peer, 34, the secretary of the ambassador, the wife of Moses and a mother of three.
Two years later, a Paraguayan court sentenced the couple, identified as PLO members, to 13 years in prison.
By then, Israel had become the target of much more ambitious attacks by PLO terrorists, including the 1972 massacre of its Olympic team in Munich.
The strikes did not stop, including two now infamous attacks launched by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a far-left faction of the PLO. In 1976, an Air France jet intended for Tel Aviv was hijacked to Entebbe, Uganda. Lt. Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was assassinated on command of the successful rescue mission. In 1985, the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship that sailed from Egypt to the Israeli port of Ashdod, was commanded, resulting in the death of American passenger Leon Klinghoffer, 69.
“His goal was to land as much land as possible, with as few Arabs as possible living on it. ”
Cicurel discovered the damning protocol of 1969 in a tranche of recently declassified documents. “I could not believe my eyes,” he said. “It turned out to be a massive conspiracy that was not accidentally hidden from public view.”
Allusions to a transfer plan have slipped over the years, but now no information has emerged on its true dimensions.
In 1969, with Israel still basking in the euphoria of its 1967 victory over the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq, the nation’s leaders had no idea how to deal with some one million Palestinians. t were now under their control.
Israel had expelled the issue of Palestinian refugees through its 1948 war of independence. According to Tom Segev, the leading Israeli historian and expert on the founding of the nation, Israeli Founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion considered “a Jewish state in the land of Israel, with maximum territory and minimal Arabs.”
Of the roughly 950,000 Arabs living in the British-controlled country that became Israel, close to 80 percent fled as were expelled during the war. About 150,000 remained, making them Israeli citizens.
“The Mossad agent who accompanied her promised that he would return in two or three weeks to see how they did, and never returned.”
“Maximum territory does not mean the whole country,” explained Segev, whose most recent book is the 2018 Ben Gurion Biography Able at any cost. ‘It never did. In 1948, Ben Gurion ordered the army not to expand to East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, not because we did not have the power to conquer it – we did – but because so many Arabs lived there. . His goal was to land as much land as possible, with as few Arabs as possible living on it. When the possibility of an Israeli expansion to land with a large Arab population arose, the answer was no. ”
Yet 19 years later, Prime Minister Golda Meir confronted the connection of the fate of the same stateless Palestinians, whom she said in an interview, “have nowhere to turn for their needs other than us.” About 300,000 of them live in Gaza.
Meir waited for several options, including asking Egypt and Jordan, who ruled the West Bank and Gaza until the 1967 war, for help.
“For many years, Israeli diplomats stationed from Australia to Brazil have been accused of dealing with the refugee case, with the aim of settling them elsewhere,” Segev said. ‘It was the wish of the state of Israel to solve the problem in this way. So for Golda, this plan was just another in a long line of similar schemes. ”
Little is known about other initiatives to take over Palestine, but the Paraguay plan was both concrete and ambitious. And, according to Moses Peer, it was also a botched “security flaw.”
“If they knew a group like this was coming to Paraguay, why was the embassy not secured?” he asked in a largely unobtrusive 2004 interview with the Israeli newspaper Maariv. In what appears to be the only public statement he has ever made about the events, Peer revealed an ominous coincidence: he was the diplomat responsible for implementing the Palestinian reforestation plan.
Three weeks before the embassy shooting, Peer found himself rescuing a Mossad agent who was arrested following complaints from some of the transferred Palestinians who believed they were left without money and without work.
Mosssad agents provided backbone of the operation, investigated possible emigrants in Gaza and promised resettlement in Paraguay.
In the week after the murder of his wife, one of them made Peer swear not to breathe a word of the plan for at least 30 years.
Peer said Gazan refugees “were assured they would become landowners, that this was their promised land. The Mossad agent who accompanied them promised that he would return in two or three weeks to see how they did it. , and never came back. They were told ‘start working, you’ll get the money later.’ They felt they were set up. “
‘They were looking for the ambassador and when they could not find him, they shot my wife,’ he concluded, ‘my family was the victim of this transfer.’
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