Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Peace Gesture
http://counterpunch.com/makdisi10182007.html
"Academic colleagues, get used to it," warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. "Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you've also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night."
Re-Naqba Now!!
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Wikipogrom
disseminated via the anti-Semitic 'ALEF' chat list that operates under the
auspices of the University of Haifa, attempting partially to deny the
Holocaust. The material can be read here:
http://zioncon.blogspot.com/2008/05/when-haaretz-was-enamoured-by-hitler.html
The ALEF list is a list for outright anti-Semites, cheerleaders for
terrorism, and Neo-Nazis. The 'dialogue' concerning the Holocaust began
when Shraga Elam, an ex-Israel best known for his lavish praise for David
Irving, claimed that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis
during World War II. This was supposed to be based on an estimate of the
world Jewish population posted on a Hebrew University web site by HU's
demographer Prof. Sergio DellaPergola at
http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge121057565332688760
.
There it says that there were 11 million Jews world wide (elsewhere it
says 11.4) after World War II and 16.5 before the war in the entire world.
Elam and his ilk then claim that 'at most' 5.1 million Jews were murdered,
and the 'Six Million' number is Zionist propaganda. Elam was then joined
on the ALEF list by Stalinist British anti-Semite Tony Greenstein and
others, including a professor of [psychology from Haifa University), who
not only agreed but claimed that as few as 1.5 million Jews may have been
murdered.
This is all familiar stuff taken from Neo-Nazi and Holocaust
Denial web sites, who make similar 'statistical arguments.'
What is one to make of all this?
First of all, the 11 and the 16.5 numbers on the Hebrew University web
site are hardly firm authoritative data points and are little more than
wild guesses.
But suppose for the sake of argument that they are correct.
Would this give credence to the claims of the anti-Semites and Neo-Nazis
that the Six Million number is a fabrication? An invention of Zionists?
Where is the 'missing million' if we take those numbers at face value?
The answer is that the claim reveals far more about the demographic
illiteracy of the anti-Semites than about the actual scope of the
Holocaust. The 'claim' of the anti-Semites that the numbers show that
fewer than Six Million were murdered in the Holocaust ignores natural
growth of Jewish populations in other, non-European parts of the world,
that is, the excess of births over deaths there. (These included all
high-birth Jewish populations in North Africa and Asia.) It assumes a
static world Jewish population between 1939 and 1946, other than the
effect of the Holocaust. If the Jewish populations outside Europe in 1939
were about ten million, and if these Jewish populations were growing
naturally at 2% per year during the years of World War II, which is
probably close to or less than they were actually growing, then do the
math and that more than 'explains' the supposedly 'missing million' in the
data of the anti-Semites.
In fact, the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust may have been
closer to 7 million than six million.
The anti-Semites, including the Jewish anti-Semites, are misusing
demographic data about the Holocaust so that they can engineer a second
Holocaust of Jews.
2. As you may know, Wikipedia, the amateurish web 'encyclopedia,'
although a reference source that no one with a high school diploma would
regard as reliable, has been systematically sabotaged by a group of
anti-Semites, who distort and vandalize any entry having anything to do
with Israel or Zionism. These anti-Semites seem to be working as a team
of editors.
Details about a campaign, led by CAMERA, to correct this can be read here:
and
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1485
Since so many high schoolers and .laymen. too lazy to do real research on
topics use Wikipedia, it is important to assist those attempting to
correct the problem. Contact CAMERA for ways you can help.
3. Tel Aviv University held 'Nakba' events this week mourning
Israel.s existence on campus facilities, conducted with university
official approval and support.
4. Getting high with Hebrew University's Timothy Leary (Benny
Shanon):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3e2bc1ac-14c6-11dd-a741-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1
First Person: Benny Shanon
As told to Serge Debrebant
Published: May 3 2008 01:31 | Last updated: May 3 2008 01:31
I don.t think of myself as naive. But I was too innocent to foresee the
reactions to an academic essay I published recently. It suggested that
Moses and the early Israelites might have used psychoactive plants.
After I gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper about it, the story was
picked up by news wires all over the world. Hundreds of people wrote to me
because they.d seen headlines like .Was Moses high on psychedelic drugs?.
Some of them called me a sinner or an idiot, others heaped praise on me
because they thought I was some kind of 1960s Timothy Leary
counter-culture figure advocating hallucinogenic drugs. Just to be clear:
I.m not.
I.m a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem; my expertise is in the study of human consciousness and the
philosophy of psychology. I became interested in non-ordinary states of
consciousness when I was on holiday in the upper Amazonian region of
Brazil. I got the chance to take part in a religious ritual that meant
drinking a powerful psychoactive brew called ayahuasca. This potion plays
a central role in the cultures of the indigenous tribes of the region,
where it is used in religious rituals and medicinal practices. Ayahuasca
is famous for the vivid visions that it induces. Common effects include
psychological insights, philosophical-like reflections and deep religious
and spiritual sentiments. I have had similar experiences, which had a deep
personal impact on me.
I decided to study the potion from a psychologist.s approach. Since then,
I have consumed ayahuasca about 160 times and published my research in an
academic book, called Antipodes of the Mind.
The article on Moses was just a small offshoot of this work. I had started
noticing clues showing that the early Israelites might have used a potion
similar to ayahuasca.
I should explain that although I am not religious, I deeply respect
religious feelings and the Jewish tradition in which I was raised.
I believe that Moses was an extraordinary man.
Journalists simplified my theory and misquoted me, saying that Moses was
stoned when he received the 10 commandments. It was like the children.s
game called .broken telephone.: a child whispers a message to a friend and
this child to another, and so on . and in the end the message is totally
distorted.
Most people who wrote to me had never read my essay. I received about 100
hate messages, mostly from American fundamentalist Christians. One
Christian woman wrote to say she was praying for me and urged me to
repent. A Muslim called me a stupid Jew and said I had better never write
anything like that about the Koran.
Other people just thought I was in favour of drugs. A father wrote to say
that his son was a drug addict and that I shouldn.t publish such theories.
He didn.t know that in traditional native American societies, only mature
people are allowed to use ayahuasca. I was 42 when I first drank it . not
exactly a kid taking drugs at a rave party.
There were other people who realised I had been misinterpreted. One
message I liked a lot came from a religious Jew living in the US. He said
he thought I was right but that I should have kept my theory secret.
Indeed, in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah esoteric knowledge is
not meant for everyone. But I.m a scientist and believe in the power of
arguments.
I don.t want to hide a theory just because it could create an uproar.
5. Daniel Barenboim is back:
"We wanted to own land that had never belonged to Jews and build
settlements
there. The Palestinians see this as imperialistic provocation, and rightly
so. Their resistance is absolutely understandable - not the means they use
to this end, not the violence nor the wanton inhumanity - but their
~Qno.~R
We Israelis must finally find the courage to not react to this violence,
the
courage to stand by our history."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/14/israelandthepalestinians.classic
almusic
6. Remembert hat old definition of chutzpah - where someone kills his
parents and then asks the judge for mercy cause he is an orphan? Well,
read this
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668639064&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
7. Nutty Nadine:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1210668636801&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
8. MES Fiction:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=EB88598E-D17C-44DD-A142-4F63A1377651
9. Jews and Jew Haters II: From Cranks to Clowns
May 8th 2008, 9:28 am
(This is a guest post by Mikey)
Six months ago, I posted Jews and Jew Haters: The Anti-Zionist Jewish
Squabble. It was about the nasty feud between Tony Greenstein, an
anti-Zionist British Jew, and Gilad Atzmon, an anti-Zionist Israeli.
Greenstein wants "the state of Israel to be destroyed" and claims that
Hamas and Hizbollah are not antisemitic. Atzmon says that burning down a
synagogue is a "rational act." I wasn't sure if a sane person could
support either side, but I concluded: "this argument is set to run and
run."
And so it has turned out. The Tony Greenstein camp has established its own
blog, Anti-Zionists against Anti-Semitism, to "opppose [sic] that small
current around Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon who wish to introduce the
ideas of racism and anti-Semitism into the Palestine solidarity movement."
A large proportion of the posts are attacks on Atzmon, described as "a
holocaust denier" who is "fundamentally racist and reactionary."
The blog is very dull and only masochists will enjoy it. Apparently even
Greenstein finds it boring, which may explain why he is anxious for the
excitement of a court case. He has initiated legal proceedings against
Atzmon in respect of:
False allegations of serious criminal conduct and fraud concerning
alleged offences over 20 years ago, contrary to s.8 of the Rehabilitation
of Offenders Act 1974.
False allegations of violent crimes, in particular against Jewish people
False allegations of race hate crimes against Jewish people
False allegations of vandalising church property
In full litigation mode, Greenstein has also threatened to sue Google for
hosting the website of Atzmon's main defender.
In the Nazi mind, the ultimate evil is being a Jew. In Atzmon's mind, the
ultimate evil is being a Zionist. This is worse than being a Nazi:
there is no room for comparison between Israel and the Nazis. If a
comparison is to be made, then it is the Israelis who win the championship
of ruthlessness. Israel and Zionism endanger our world. We have to admit
that Israel is the ultimate evil rather than Nazi Germany. We should never
compare Israel to Nazi Germany. As far as evilness is concerned, we should
now let Israel take the lead.
Since it is the worst insult he can imagine, Atzmon has taken to calling
the Greenstein camp crypto-Zionists. Since it is the worst insult he can
imagine, Greenstein throws the same accusation against the Atzmon camp,
whose ideas "can only lead in one direction - to the strengthening of
Zionism." But Greenstein is more promiscuous with his abuse. Not long
after the BNP's legal adviser attacked the Board of Deputies as "a clique
of self serving Zionist racists" and a "Zionist-Nazi organisation" and the
Jewish Chronicle as "the mouthpiece of the same clique of Zionist
parasites and crooks," Greenstein wrote that the BNP is "pro-Zionist."
Perhaps he was trying to enliven his blog by making it hard for his
readers to keep a straight face.
It may become a double-act. Both Gilad Atzmon and Tony Greenstein despise
Anthony Julius for his criticisms of anti-Zionism. Greenstein recently
dismissed Julius as "quite a simple fellow" under a headline that
screamed, "Gilad Atzmon Joins with Anthony Julius to Attack Jewish
Anti-Zionists." That was shortly after Atzmon attacked Julius for his role
in "the destruction of history revisionist David Irving's career."
Meanwhile the Trotskyist Alliance for Workers' Liberty has rallied to
Greenstein defence. This is in spite of Greenstein's boast on the very
same webpage that he
would lose no sleep if they [AIPAC], the Bush White House, the leadership
of the Republican Party, New Labour's cabinet and any other warmongers I
can think of, were vaporised.
As Paul Bogdanor commented:
Previously I exposed Greenstein's thoughts on vapourising as many as
100,000 American Jews in AIPAC, along with the inhabitants of the White
House, as well as his endorsement of the IRA atrocity at the Brighton
hotel. Greenstein now extends the list to the leadership of the Republican
Party, New Labour's cabinet "and any other warmongers I can think of."
Thus Greenstein's "anarchist wishful thinking" encompasses the mass murder
of the entire democratically elected leadership of America and Britain,
and, apparently, anyone at all who supported the Iraq war. That would
presumably include everyone from Iraqi voters who support Coalition forces
to those he has elsewhere described as "the racist warmongers of Harry's
Place"!
Greenstein's troubles go beyond allegations of serious criminal conduct
and the exposure of his "wishful thinking" about terrorism. While coping
with the tedium of his own blog, he faces the humiliation of a spoof blog
by a supporter of Atzmon. The unidentified blogger has even started
posting videos mocking a certain "Mony Gripstein" and his comrade, the
irreplaceable Roland Rance.
Watching the farce of the Jewish anti-Zionists, you may think that the
lunatics have taken over the asylum. I prefer to say that the clowns are
now running the circus
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
When Haaretz was enamoured by Hitler
The following material is being disseminated via the ALEF list that
operates under the auspices of the University of Haifa
(Tont Greenstein is a British Jewish anti-Semitic communist; Shraga Elam
is an ex-Israeli supporter of David Irving living in Switzerland)
[alef] New Israeli study: Not more than 5 million Jews were exterminated
by the Nazis (Shraga Elam).
From: alef-bounces@list.haifa.ac.il on behalf of tony greenstein
(tonygreenstein@yahoo.com)
Sent: 14 May 2008 01:13:18
To: alef@list.haifa.ac.il
In fact the 6 million figure has never been accepted uncritically and
indeed it is impossible to know exactly how many died. Raul Hilberg
estimated that 5.1 million died. Hannah Arendt I think went as low as 4
million. The reality is that noone knows how many hundreds of thousands,
possibly as much as 1.5 million, Russian Jews escaped to or were taken
into the Soviet heartland. Certainly whole Jewish villages were evacuated
as the Nazis began Operation Barbarossa. Likewise the number of those who
were hidden or otherwise survived may have been larger than is recognised.
To those for whom the Holocaust is primarily an ideological weapon to be
employed against the Palestinians then of course 6 million is a symbol
that cannot be abandoned. But noone seriously believes you can make an
estimate within a million and claim absolute accuracy. Rudolph Vrba
believed over 2.5 million died in Auschwitz and this was what Hoess, the
Commandant also came up with. Hilberg estimates it as little more than 1
million.
Differences as to how many died have nothing to do with holocaust denial
because as Shraga says, it is immaterial whether it was 5 million or 6
million. It was a crime against humanity regardless. The holocaust
deniers do indeed use such differences to build a case, but that is
because the case they build is so threadbare that they have to seize on
such 'inconsistencies'. The fact is that noone even knows how many
Germans died in the 'Euthenasia' campaign. 80,000 says Henry Friedlander
in his From Euthenasia to Final Solution. Noone even knows whether it was
1/4 or 1/2 million Gypsies who were murdered.
What matters is that members of different religious or ethnic groupings
were deliberately singled out and targetted for extermination. It is that
intentionality that marks the difference between the claims that the Jews
and others were war victims as opposed to the targets of deliberate
annihilation. It is though interesting that those who deny the Nakba also
claim that the Palestinian refugees were not deliberately expelled but
merely the unfortunate victims of war.
Tony Greenstein
In response to message from Shraga Elam who wrote:
I wonder if the known Israeli demographer Prof. Sergio DellaPergola
figures mean that around 5 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
In a new publication to be found in the Hebrew University website he
claimed that before WWII there were16.5 million Jews worldwide and after
the war there were11.5 million. Theses figures are to be found in the
Hebrew version. In the English translation it says:
Approximately 11 million Jews remained worldwide in the aftermath of
World War II and the Holocaust, compared to 16.5 million before the war.
(http://www.huji.ac.il/cgi-bin/dovrut/dovrut_search_eng.pl?mesge121057565332688760.
Considering that some Jews, like DellaPergola himself, were born during
WWII but for sure they were not a million and that that probably even more
died at this period not through the Nazis or as soldiers, DellaPergola..s
newest publication means that he considers 5 million to be the utmost
figure of Jews exterminated by the Nazis during WWII.
In 1996 DellaPergola wrote: At this stage it would appear that the
definitive figure [of victims] may fall in the range between 5.6 and 5.9
million victims.
Obviously he has now new data which compels him to reduce the figure,
which might be reduced further as e.g. of the total half-million of the
Jewish soldiers in the Red Army who fought against the Nazis, 216,000 fell
in action..
I have to emphasize that as such the discussion about the exact Jewish
Nazi victims is rather unnecessary, as from the moral point of view it
doesn..t make a real difference if 3 millions or 6 millions were murdered
by the Nazis. It was one way or another a crime, a genocide. The UN
definition of genocide from 1948, which is still accepted, does not
mention any minimal figure of victims necessary to define a genocide.
If the number of the slaughtered Jews were lesser, would the Nazi crimes
be less dreadful?
The problem is that the figure 6 million Jewish Nazi victims got a
religious status and it is considered to be almost a denial of the Nazi
Judeocide if the ..holy.. number is questioned. At the same time there is
actually not enough reliable information about all those that the Nazis
considered to be Jew and also murdered them for this reason.
Shraga Elam
2. Israel's 'doom' could also be Europe's
By Mark Steyn
JWR | Almost everywhere I went last week . TV, radio, speeches . I was
asked about the 60th anniversary of the Israeli state. I don't recall
being asked about Israel quite so much on its 50th anniversary, which, as
a general rule, is a much bigger deal than the 60th. But these days
friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist
Entity.
Assuming Iranian President Ahmadinejad's apocalyptic fancies don't come to
pass, Israel will surely make it to its 70th birthday. But a lot of folks
don't fancy its prospects for its 80th and beyond. See the Atlantic
Monthly cover story: "Is Israel Finished?" Also the cover story in
Canada's leading news magazine, Maclean's, which dispenses with the
question mark: "Why Israel Can't Survive."
Why? By most measures, the Jewish state is a great success story. The
modern Middle East is the misbegotten progeny of the British and French
colonial map makers of 1922. All the nation states in that neck of the
woods date back a mere 60 or 70 years . Iraq to the Thirties, Syria,
Jordan, Lebanon and Israel to the Forties. The only difference is that
Israel has made a go of it.
Would I rather there were more countries like Israel, or more like Syria?
Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East (Iraq may yet
prove a second), and its Arab citizens enjoy more rights than they would
living under any of the kleptocrat kings and psychotic dictators who
otherwise infest the region.
On a tiny strip of land narrower at its narrowest point than many American
townships, Israel has built a modern economy with a GDP per capita just
shy of $30,000 . and within striking distance of the European Union
average. If you object that that's because it's uniquely blessed by Uncle
Sam, well, for the past 30 years the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid
has been Egypt: their GDP per capita is $5,000, and America has nothing to
show for its investment other than one-time pilot Mohamed Atta coming at
you through the office window.
Jewish success against the odds is nothing new. "Aaron Lazarus the Jew,"
wrote Anthony Hope in his all but unknown prequel to "The Prisoner Of
Zenda," "had made a great business of it, and had spent his savings in
buying up the better part of the street; but" . and for Jews there's
always a "but" . "since Jews then might hold no property . ."
Ah, right. Like the Jewish merchants in old Europe, who were tolerated as
leaseholders but could never be full property owners, the Israelis are
regarded as operating a uniquely conditional sovereignty. Jimmy Carter,
just returned from his squalid suck-up junket to Hamas, is merely the
latest Western sophisticate to pronounce triumphantly that he has secured
the usual (off-the-record, highly qualified, never to be translated into
Arabic and instantly denied) commitment from the Jews' enemies,
acknowledging Israel's "right to exist." Well, whoop-de-doo. Would you
enter negotiations on such a basis?
Since Israel marked its half-century, the "right to exist" is now
routinely denied not just in Gaza and Ramallah and the region's
presidential palaces but on every European and Canadian college campus.
During the Lebanese incursion of 2006, Matthew Parris wrote in The Times
of London: "The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and
incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and
reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and
sympathy so fast. My opinion . held not passionately but with little
personal doubt . is that there is no point in arguing about whether the
state of Israel should have been established where and when it was" .
which lets you know how he would argue it if he minded to.
Richard Cohen in The Washington Post was more straightforward: "Israel
itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake,
a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation
of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has
produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.
Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most
formidable enemy is history itself."
Cohen and Parris, two famously moderate voices in the leading newspapers
of two of the least anti-Israeli capital cities in the West, have
nevertheless internalized the same logic as Ahmadinejad: Israel should not
be where it is. Whether it's a "stain of shame" or just a "mistake" is the
merest detail.
Aaron Lazarus and every other "European Jew" of his time would have had a
mirthless chuckle over Cohen's designation. The Jews lived in Europe for
centuries but without ever being accepted as "European." To enjoy their
belated acceptance as Europeans, they had to move to the Middle East.
Reviled on the Continent as sinister rootless cosmopolitans with no
conventional national allegiance, they built a conventional nation state,
and now they're reviled for that, too. The "oldest hatred" didn't get that
way without an ability to adapt.
The Western intellectuals who promote "Israeli Apartheid Week" at this
time each year are laying the groundwork for the next stage of Zionist
delegitimization. The talk of a "two-state solution" will fade. In the
land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, Jews are barely a majority.
Gaza has one of the highest birth rates on the planet: The median age is
15.8 years. Its population is not just literally exploding, at Israeli
checkpoints, but also doing so in the less-incendiary but demographically
decisive sense. Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state . Jews
and Muslims . from Jordan to the sea. And even those Western leaders who
understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so
confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they'll be
unable to argue against it.
Contemporary Europeans are not exactly known for their moral courage: The
reports one hears of schools quietly dropping the Holocaust from their
classrooms because it offends their growing numbers of Muslim students
suggest that even the pretense of "evenhandedness" in the
Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" will be long gone a decade hence.
The joke, of course, is that Israel, despite its demographic challenge,
still enjoys a birth rate twice that of the European average. All the
reasons for Israel's doom apply to Europe with bells on. And, unlike much
of the rest of the West, Israel has the advantage of living on the front
line of the existential challenge. "I have a premonition that will not
leave me," wrote Eric Hoffer, America's great longshoreman philosopher,
after the 1967 war. "As it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us."
Indeed. So, happy 60th birthday. And here's to many more.
3. Thanks Israel
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=FD08C9C9-E259-444A-B663-E4F3AE5EBAF5
4. No Peace Now
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=9C34B06C-BFE3-4A83-BDD3-8F7BED747C92
5.
STATE OF THE UNION
Funding Israel's Detractors
By GERALD M. STEINBERG
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
May 6, 2008
Jerusalem
In the 60 years of Israeli independence, relations with Europe have gone
through phases of cooperation as well as conflict. Some of the recent
friction results from hidden European Union funding for anti-Israel "civil
society organizations." While supposedly promoting peace and coexistence,
these groups often preach division and confrontation. The secrecy of the
NGO funding process also stands in sharp contrast to the EU's pious claims
of transparency and accountability. There is no central database on NGO
funding and many EU officials contacted proved unwilling or unable to
provide any information.
Among the recipients are a number of Israeli political groups that focus
on allegations of human rights abuses, such as Machsom Watch and B'tselem.
They diligently take down every Palestinian complaint at face value and
write inflammable reports castigating Israel as the aggressor. They do so
by leaving out essential context, such as the constant Palestinian terror
attacks that prompt the criticized Israeli policies, including road blocks
and incursions, in the first place.
Even more radical are Israeli Arab NGOs, such as Adalah, Mossawa, the Arab
Association for Human Rights (HRA), and HaMoked. Their titles and mission
statements use the language of human rights and peace and they receive EU
money in this guise. But actually they do the opposite. These groups
poison any reasonable dialogue by demonizing Israel, for example by
drawing parallels to the apartheid regime. Their advocacy for a single
state, where Jews would quickly become a minority, is just another way of
calling for the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
The EU was also one of the main funders of the infamous NGO Forum of the
2001 Durban conference. Designed to fight racism, it turned into one of
the most despicable displays of modern anti-Semitism. The Forum accused
Israel of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and called for "a policy of
complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state" through
boycotts, divestment and sanctions. After leading the Forum, the
Palestinian NGO Network became the primary sponsor of the academic boycott
and divestment campaigns against Israel. Under the guise of promoting
peace and understanding, the EU thus indirectly funds campaigns to ban
Israeli academics from international conferences.
In justifying support for groups which oppose the EU's own policies,
officials claim that their funding is narrowly confined to specific
projects that supposedly don't contradict EU positions. But given the fact
that money is fungible, this is a rather weak excuse. Apart from funding
Israel's critics, the EU is also surreptitiously trying to manipulate the
Israeli democratic process.
The EU's Partnership for Peace program, with an annual budget of over .8
million, lists a number of mysterious recipients, such as the H.L.
Education for Peace Ltd. This organization has no Internet site, and a
check at the Israeli government registry for non-profit organizations
failed to turn up any trace of this group. Our research found that H.L.
Education for Peace was a cover for the Geneva Initiative -- a
controversial attempt to bypass the Israeli government and negotiate a
private peace agreement between former (left-wing) Israeli officials and
Fatah members.
Furtively funded by the EU, this NGO bombards Israelis with exhortations
to attend rallies and takes out expensive newspaper ads extolling the
virtues of the initiative, while attacking the government's policies. It
is hard to imagine the EU interfering in such blatant ways in the
political process of any other democratic country.
Among the numerous and highly confusing EU funding frameworks for NGOs
claiming to promote democracy and peace, the European Commission's
Directorate-General for Humanitarian Aid (DG ECHO) is both the wealthiest
and the most secretive. ECHO's 2006 budget was approximately .700 million,
of which over .80 million was allocated to the West Bank and Gaza,
including an unspecified amount for NGOs. As elsewhere, there is no public
record of which NGOs receive the funds, the projects for which they are
allocated, or the evaluation process, if any.
However, many recipients advertise the fact that they receive EU support,
thereby increasing legitimacy and visibility. In this way, we uncovered
details of funding for groups such as Medical Aid for Palestinians, which
received over .1 million in 2004-2006. Its full-page ad published in The
Times in January proclaims: "After two years of sanctions, the cutting-off
of fuel supplies, repeated military incursions and the closure of its
borders, Gaza is in the grip of a humanitarian crisis." There is no
mention of terror attacks, corruption, or Hamas.
With the Durban review conference and another round of vitriolic NGO-led
attacks against Israel scheduled for 2009, Jerusalem is watching for a
change in European policy. Canada, for example, already said that it won't
participate in Durban II because it's likely to become another
anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli hate fest. Ottawa has also barred government
funding for NGOs participating in the conference.
Both Canada and the U.S. practice full transparency by providing details
for their NGO funding. They have strict guidelines designed to prevent
grant recipients from using the money for hostile campaigning instead for
humanitarian projects. The EU could do worse than follow this example.
Mr. Steinberg is executive director of NGO Monitor and chairman of the
Political Studies Department at Bar Ilan University.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on
Opinion Journal1.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum2.
URL for this article:
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5. Haaretz: On April 29 Haaretz ran a front page news story on the
responses of the Israeli pre-state media to the rise of Hitler in Germany.
It claims that the media saw Hitler in favourable eyes. As it turns out,
the only Israeli medium cited in the article that saw Hitler in positive
eyes in the 1930s was Haaretz itself. Haaretz' correspondent in Germany
in the early 1930s wrote a series of articles on Hitlers rise. He looks
handsome, is a bachelor, self-assured, wrote the Haaretz correspondent.
'I like him,' he added. The correspondent dismissed Hitler.s
anti-Semitism as unimportant because Germany was such a civilized country.
So the Haaretz romance with anti-Zionism and Post-Zionism is not exactly
something new for the Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Nakba Parties
quote supporting Zionism in a posting of mine last week, it is from a book
by Daniel Pipes:
It is from his
Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition, page 179.
2. Got THAT one right!
http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/story.html?id=ca1e7fab-d433-402c-b47d-412b9f140158
3. Israeli campuses this week are full of anti-Israel .Nakba.
ceremonies, organized by leftist Jewish students and faculty and Arabs, to
mourn Israel.s existence. All on campus facilities paid for by Israeli
taxpayers and by Jewish donors from outside Israel.
Meanwhile, I thought it of interest that Jordan has BANNE anti-Israel
Nakba ceremonies in its territory.
Jordan often bans such anti-Israel events lest the protesters get uppity
and attack Jordanian police or officials or building:
Jordan bans 'Nakba' commemorations
Khaled Abu Toameh , THE JERUSALEM POST May. 9, 2008
www.jpost.com
/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627042533&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Jordanian authorities have banned all events marking the "Nakba," or
Catastrophe, as Arabs refer to the creation of Israel 60 years ago.
Several pro-Palestinian groups and Jordanian opposition parties has been
planning to hold a rally in Amman on Friday.
But the authorities informed the organizers of the decision to ban the
event, as well as other "illegal public gatherings."
The Islamic Labor Front, which was planning a major rally in the capital,
condemned the ban as unconstitutional.
The party expressed outrage over the decision, noting that the Jordanian
government had allowed the Israeli Embassy in Amman to celebrate Israeli
Independence Day.
Earlier this year, Jordan banned relatives of Ala Abu Dhaim, the
Palestinian
who killed eight students and wounded eight at Jerusalem's Mercaz Harav
Yeshiva on March 6, from mourning him in public.
The relatives were warned against receiving mourners in a public place or
erecting a monument to commemorate the gunman, who was killed in the
attack.
The family expressed outrage at the decision, pointing out that Israel had
allowed their relatives in Jerusalem's Jebl Mukaber neighborhood to hoist
Hizbullah and Hamas flags and to identify publicly with the gunman.
4. Tel Aviv U's Prof. Sand denounces Jewish peoplehood:
http://isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/TAU%20-%20Shlomo%20Sand%20-%20denys%203000%20years.htm
5. Orange County Nakba:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=74CD0F7B-6133-4DA4-82F2-FFE826C1A861
6. Jews for a Second Holocaust:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=11B8941E-DAB3-4FB4-AE2C-400B9C4A0A81
7. Whose land?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3542500,00.html
8. Boteach on Dawkins:
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627067540&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
9. GLOBAL VIEW
By BRET STEPHENS
From Lebanon to Hezbollahstan
May 13, 2008; Page A15
On Friday, Hezbollah gunmen set fire to the Beirut offices of Future TV, a
Lebanese broadcaster. On a purely symbolic level, it was an apt
demonstration of where the Party of God stands in relation to the future
itself.
But that wasn't the worst of what has happened in the past week in
Lebanon, where scores of people have been killed in interfactional
violence. More ominous was the role of the Lebanese army, avowedly neutral
and nominally under civilian control. "An army officer accompanied by
members of Hezbollah walked into the station and told us to switch off
transmission," an unnamed Future TV official told Reuters. So much for
army neutrality.
AP
Shiite gunmen patrol the streets in Chouweifat, south of Beirut, May 11.
The army also countermanded government orders to dismantle Hezbollah's
telecommunications network at the Beirut airport and remove the brigadier
responsible for airport security, who is said to be a Hezbollah pawn. "I
have called on the army to live up to its national responsibilities . . .
and this has not happened," Fouad Siniora, Lebanon's increasingly
irrelevant prime minister, said on national TV.
Future historians will look for the precise moment the Lebanese Republic
began to transmogrify into Hezbollahstan. Was it the June 2005 murder of
anti-Syrian journalist Samir Kassir . the earliest sign that Syria, whose
29-year military occupation of its neighbor had ended just two months
before, intended to reinsert itself by stealth and terror (and with the
connivance of Hezbollah)? Was it the role played by the Maronite Gen.
Michel Aoun, a hero of the last Lebanese civil war, who returned from
exile in 2005 intending to play the part of de Gaulle only to become,
after striking a bargain with Hezbollah, another Ptain?
Was it the summer war of 2006, when Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah
militarily and, in so failing, gave Hezbollah an aura of invincibility?
Was it the unwillingness of international peacekeepers to patrol the
Lebanese-Syrian border, thereby allowing Hezbollah to rearm itself after
the war? Was it the absence of an effective, or even intelligible,
American policy toward Lebanon, epitomized by Condoleezza Rice's decision
to rehabilitate Damascus by inviting it to November's Annapolis Middle
East conference?
The answer is all of the above: An accumulation of policy mistakes,
political dodges and moral atrocities that have nearly killed the "new"
Lebanon in its crib.
Demography has also played a role. Christians in particular have been
fleeing Lebanon for decades. And though a census hasn't been taken in
Lebanon in 75 years, Nizar Hamze of the American University of Beirut
estimates that there are between eight and nine live births per Shiite
household. The comparable figure for Lebanon's Sunnis is about five; for
Christians and Druze, about two. These numbers must ultimately count
against an outmoded constitutional order geared to favor Christians first,
Sunnis second, Shiites third.
But even if Lebanon cannot escape its Shiite destiny, it is not ordained
that it must also become a Hezbollah state, taking its orders from Tehran.
So what are the U.S.'s policy options?
Inside Lebanon, they are few. No American president will send American
troops back to Beirut and risk a reprise of 1983. Supplying the Lebanese
army is a nonstarter; it is no longer clear whose side that army is on.
Should the U.S. arm the anti-Hezbollah factions in the event of an all-out
civil war? Some of them, like Samir Geagea's Lebanese Forces, have
well-earned reputations as war criminals.
A more productive thought comes from Dwight Eisenhower, who observed that
"if a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it." The reason the U.S. lacks for
options in Lebanon is because it has no policy toward Syria.
In 2003, Congress passed the Syria Accountability Act, but the
administration has observed only its weakest provisions. They could be
enforced in full. A Syria Liberation Act, similar to the Iraq Liberation
Act of 1998, would be a step forward. So would international sanctions for
Syria's violations of the Nonproliferation Treaty, exposed by Israel in
its raid last year on an unfinished nuclear reactor. Bombing the runway of
the Damascus airport for the role it plays in serving as a conduit for
Iranian arms to Hezbollah would also be an appropriate signal of American
displeasure.
None of this is likely to happen, however. U.S. policy toward Syria will
continue to vacillate between partial engagement and partial ostracism,
achieving neither. And Lebanon will continue its transformation into
Hezbollahstan, a sad fate for a country that might have stood for
something fine.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com1
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on
Opinion Journal2.
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URL for this article:
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Friday, May 09, 2008
Welcome Joe Buck
Karsh on 1948 (long but worth reading)
1948, Israel and the Palestinians: The True Story
May 8, 2008
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act
of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is
subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy
theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively
condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is
constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by
segments of advanced opinion in the West.
1
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state
has become a cause clbre among many of these educated Westerners. The
"one-state solution," as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing
the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole
of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a
permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the "original sin"
of Israel's founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) "on the
ruins of Arab Palestine" and achieved through the deliberate and
aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of
the longstanding Palestinian "refugee problem" forms, indeed, the central
plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel's alleged victims and
their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed.
As early as the mid-1950s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz
undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly
confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris,
the most influential of Israel's revisionist "new historians," and one who
went out of his way to establish the case for Israel's "original sin,"
grudgingly stipulated that there was no "design" to displace the
Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of
the British Mandate (1920-48) and Israel's early days, documents untapped
by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the "new
historians," paints a much more definitive picture of the historical
record. These documents reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only
completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based
on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data
hitherto unreported.
* * *
Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was
Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920s onward, and very much
against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless
campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign
culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. resolution of Nov. 29,
1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had
these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states,
accepted the U.N. resolution, there would have been no war and no
dislocation in the first place.
The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to
the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority
that would participate on an equal footing "throughout all sectors of the
country's public life." The words are those of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the
founding father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of today's
Likud Party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness "to
take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do
anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall
never try to eject anyone."
Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a
constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and
Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood,
including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were
to enjoy the same legal standing, and "in every cabinet where the prime
minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and
vice-versa."
If this was the position of the more "militant" faction of the Jewish
national movement, mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full
equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of
its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim
Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a
peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn
Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then
until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist
spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These
included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal's elder brother and founder of the
emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of Jordan), incumbent and former
prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of
King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia) and Palestinian Arab
elites of all hues.
As late as Sept. 15, 1947, two months before the passing of the U.N.
partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys were still seeking to
convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab League's secretary-general, that the
Palestine conflict "was uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab
League," and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit "from active
policies of cooperation and development." Behind this proposition lay an
age-old Zionist hope: that the material progress resulting from Jewish
settlement of Palestine would ease the path for the local Arab populace to
become permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to the
project of Jewish national self-determination. As David Ben-Gurion, soon
to become Israel's first prime minister, argued in December 1947:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, . . . if the state
will help him in a truthful and dedicated way to reach the economic,
social, and cultural level of the Jewish community, then Arab distrust
will accordingly subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic,
Jewish-Arab alliance.
On the face of it, Ben-Gurion's hope rested on reasonable grounds. An
inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I had revived
Palestine's hitherto static condition and raised the standard of living of
its Arab inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states. The
expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of
citrus growing, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and
Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades
between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as did
vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled.
No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most
significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply
and life expectancy rose from 37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44
(compared with 33 in Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by
a third.
That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring
British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only
by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine's socioeconomic
well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a 1937 report
by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel:
The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on Arab welfare is
illustrated by the fact that the increase in the Arab population is most
marked in urban areas affected by Jewish development. A comparison of the
census returns in 1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase
percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while in purely
Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7, and at Gaza there was
a decrease of 2 percent.
Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices,
they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the
opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that,
throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded
those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small
fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately for both Arabs and Jews,
however, the hopes and wishes of ordinary people were not taken into
account, as they rarely are in authoritarian communities hostile to the
notions of civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world,
moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who have led the
great revolutions or carried out the worst deeds of violence, but rather
militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed classes
of society.
So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel report:
We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by the development of
the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory
effect. On the contrary . . . with almost mathematical precision the
betterment of the economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the
deterioration of the political situation.
In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged
betters for the crime of "selling Palestine" to the Jews. Meanwhile, these
same betters were enriching themselves with impunity. The staunch
pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is either
placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the
Jews in the country," facilitated the transfer of 7,500 acres to the
Zionist movement, and some of his relatives, all respected political and
religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of land. So
did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab
clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad Tahir, father of Hajj
Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem.
It was the mufti's concern with solidifying his political position that
largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133 Jews were massacred and
hundreds more were wounded -- just as it was the struggle for political
preeminence that triggered the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian
Arab violence in 1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist
revolt against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then
streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In fact, it was a
massive exercise in violence that saw far more Arabs than Jews or
Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs, that repressed and abused the general
Arab population, and that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country
in a foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.
Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back against their
inciters, often in collaboration with the British authorities and the
Hagana, the largest Jewish underground defense organization. Still others
sought shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic
atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic boycott,
Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical levels even during
such periods of turmoil, and was largely restored after their subsidence.
* * *
Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that most
Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent attempt 10 years later
by the mufti-led Arab Higher Committee (AHC), the effective "government"
of the Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 U.N. partition resolution.
With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in their minds, many opted to
stay out of the fight. In no time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban
areas) were negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors;
other localities throughout the country acted similarly without the
benefit of a formal agreement.
Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying their supreme
leadership. In his numerous tours around the region, Abdel Qader Husseini,
district commander of Jerusalem and the mufti's close relative, found the
populace indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms. In
Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the salaried force he
sought to form in that city; his efforts in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm,
and Qalqiliya were hardly more successful. Arab villagers, for their part,
proved even less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa,
Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven out by angry
residents protesting their village's transformation into a hub of
anti-Jewish attacks. Even the few who answered his call did so, by and
large, in order to obtain free weapons for their personal protection and
then return home.
There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The outbreak of
hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a sharp drop in trade and an
accompanying spike in the cost of basic commodities. Many villages,
dependent for their livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities,
saw no point in supporting the AHC's explicit goal of starving the Jews
into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite for war that in
early February 1948, more than two months after the AHC initiated its
campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion maintained that "the villages, in most
part, have remained on the sidelines."
Ben-Gurion's analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general Ismail Safwat,
commander-in-chief of the Arab Liberation Army (ALA), the volunteer Arab
force that did much of the fighting in Palestine in the months preceding
Israel's proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800 of
the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from Palestine itself,
and that most of these had deserted either before completing their
training or immediately afterward. Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of
ALA forces, was no less scathing, having found the Palestinians
"unreliable, excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized warfare
virtually unemployable."
This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the fateful six
months of fighting after the passing of the partition resolution. Even as
these months saw the all but complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab
society, nowhere was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs
by Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely viewed by
Arab leaders as "Zionist in inspiration, Zionist in principle, Zionist in
substance, and Zionist in most details" (in the words of the Palestinian
academic Walid Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid
about their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there was no
doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the bloodletting.
Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the Jews set out
to lay the groundwork for their nascent state while simultaneously
striving to convince their Arab compatriots that they would be (as
Ben-Gurion put it) "equal citizens, equal in everything without any
exception," Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that "should partition be
implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the Arabs of
Palestine, their sons, and their women." Qawuqji vowed "to drive all Jews
into the sea." Abdel Qader Husseini stated that "the Palestine problem
will only be solved by the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine."
* * *
They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make these threats
come true, with every means at their disposal. In addition to regular
forces like the ALA, guerrilla and terror groups wreaked havoc, as much
among noncombatants as among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping,
ambushes, bombings, which in today's world would be condemned as war
crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians. "Innocent and
harmless people, going about their daily business," wrote the U.S.
consul-general in Jerusalem, Robert Macatee, in December 1947,
are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the streets, and stray
shots even find them while asleep in their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of
five children, was shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the
roof. The ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned, and
finally the mourners following her to the funeral were attacked and one of
them stabbed to death.
As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well, and the
occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale violence. Thus, the
December 1947 murder of six Arab workers near the Haifa oil refinery by
the small Jewish underground group IZL was followed by the immediate
slaughter of 39 Jews by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some
100 Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948
was "avenged" within days by the killing of 77 Jewish nurses and doctors
en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.
Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these gruesome events
for what they were, at times withholding details so as to avoid panic and
keep the door open for Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts
not only inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented numerous
nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April 21-22), for example, gave
rise to totally false claims of a large-scale slaughter, which circulated
throughout the Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false
rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18), during the
battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa, where in late April the
mayor fabricated a massacre of "hundreds of Arab men and women." Accounts
of Deir Yasin in the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed
hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and accusations of
havoc and rape.
This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the widest
possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and casting the Jews as
brutal predators. But it backfired disastrously by spreading panic within
the disoriented Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by
April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this phase of the Arab
war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing was the second, wider and more
prolonged phase involving the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded
Palestine in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to join
the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to the road, leaving
their homes either for places elsewhere in the country or fleeing to
neighboring Arab lands.
* * *
Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of hostilities, and
still larger numbers decamped before the war reached their own doorstep.
"Arabs are leaving the country with their families in considerable
numbers, and there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab
centers," reported Alan Cunningham, the British high commissioner, in
December 1947, adding a month later that the "panic of [the] middle class
persists and there is a steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the
country."
Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted in
mid-December an "evacuation frenzy that has taken hold of entire Arab
villages." Before the month was over, many Palestinian Arab cities were
bemoaning the severe problems created by the huge influx of villagers and
pleading with the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the
Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early exodus,
demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs to stay put and fight.
But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the AHC or from
anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack of national cohesion, let
alone any sense of shared destiny. Cities and towns acted as if they were
self-contained units, attending to their own needs and eschewing the
smallest sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many "national
committees" (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export of food and drink
from well-stocked cities to needy outlying towns and villages. Haifa's
Arab merchants refused to alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin,
while Gaza refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron,
armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time there was
extensive smuggling, especially in the mixed-population cities, with Arab
foodstuffs going to Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.
The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by the abysmal
treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands of refugees scattered
throughout the country. Not only was there no collective effort to relieve
their plight, or even a wider empathy beyond one's immediate neighborhood,
but many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and subjected
to ridicule and abuse for their supposed cowardice. In the words of one
Jewish intelligence report: "The refugees are hated wherever they have
arrived."
Even the ultimate war victims -- the survivors of Deir Yasin -- did not
escape their share of indignities. Finding refuge in the neighboring
village of Silwan, many were soon at loggerheads with the locals, to the
point where on April 14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan
delegation approached the AHC's Jerusalem office demanding that the
survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their relocation was
forthcoming.
Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all, for fear of
overstraining existing resources. In Acre (Akko), the authorities
prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from disembarking; in Ramallah, the
predominantly Christian population organized its own militia -- not so
much to fight the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many
exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially by fleecing
them for such basic necessities as transportation and accommodation.
Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever growing pace.
By early April some 100,000 had gone, though the Jews were still on the
defensive and in no position to evict them. (On March 23, fully four
months after the outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in-chief Safwat
noted with some astonishment that the Jews "have so far not attacked a
single Arab village unless provoked by it.") By the time of Israel's
declaration of independence on May 14, the numbers of Arab refugees had
more than trebled. Even then, none of the 170,000 to 180,000 Arabs fleeing
urban centers, and only a handful of the 130,000 to 160,000 villagers who
left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.
The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated
by ad hoc military considerations -- reducing civilian casualties, denying
sites to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces to repel
them -- rather than political design. They were, moreover, matched by
efforts to prevent flight and to encourage the return of those who fled.
To cite only one example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising
top Arab-affairs advisers, local notables and municipal heads with close
contacts with neighboring Arab localities traversed Arab villages in the
coastal plain, then emptying at a staggering pace, in an attempt to
convince their inhabitants to stay put.
* * *
What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is that they took
place at a time when huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively
driven from their homes by their own leaders and by Arab military forces,
whether out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from
becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state. In the largest and
best-known example, tens of thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied
into leaving the city of Haifa on the AHC's instructions, despite
strenuous Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier,
Tiberias's 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly forced out by
its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes. In Jaffa, Palestine's
largest Arab city, the municipality organized the transfer of thousands of
residents by land and sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of
women and children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of several
neighborhoods.
Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced out by order of
the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA. Within weeks of the latter's
arrival in Palestine in January 1948, rumors were circulating of secret
instructions to Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their
villages so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce the
risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.
By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of the country. It
gained considerable momentum in April and May as ALA and AHC forces
throughout Palestine were being comprehensively routed. On April 18, the
Hagana's intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general order
to remove the women and children from all villages bordering Jewish
localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa counterpart reported an ALA
command to evacuate all Arab villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in
anticipation of a new general offensive. In early May, as fighting
intensified in the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer
all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the Jerusalem
sub-district, Transjordan's Arab Legion likewise ordered the emptying of
scores of villages.
As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had placed their
reluctant constituents on a collision course with Zionism in the 1920s and
1930s and had now dragged them helpless into a mortal conflict, they
hastened to get themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most
critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local leaders
similarly rushed en masse through the door. High Commissioner Cunningham
summarized what was happening with quintessential British understatement:
You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine is in some
measure due to the increasing tendency of those who should be leading them
to leave the country. . . . For instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on
four-day leave 12 days ago and has not returned, and half the national
committee has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left
some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army left actually
during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab magistrate has left. In all
parts of the country the effendi class has been evacuating in large
numbers over a considerable period and the tempo is increasing.
Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate era and the
doyen of Palestinian historians, described the prevailing atmosphere at
the time: "Wherever one went throughout the country one heard the same
refrain: 'Where are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the
AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine, their own
country, needs them?' "
* * *
Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during the 1948 war,
would sum up the situation in these words: "The Palestinians had
neighboring Arab states which opened their borders and doors to the
refugees, while the Jews had no alternative but to triumph or to die."
This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason for the
refugees' flight and radically distorts the quality of their reception
elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy from their brethren at home, the
reaction throughout the Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There
were repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or at the
very least of young men of military age, many of whom had arrived under
the (false) pretense of volunteering for the ALA. As the end of the
Mandate loomed nearer, the Lebanese government refused entry visas to
Palestinian males between 18 and 50 and ordered all "healthy and fit men"
who had already entered the country to register officially or be
considered illegal aliens and face the full weight of the law.
The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach, banning from
its territory all Palestinian males between 16 and 50. In Egypt, a large
number of demonstrators marched to the Arab League's Cairo headquarters
and lodged a petition demanding that "every able-bodied Palestinian
capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay abroad." Such was the
extent of Arab resentment toward the Palestinian refugees that the rector
of Cairo's al-Azhar institution of religious learning, probably the
foremost Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made the
sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious duty.
Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time. "Fright has
struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled their country," commented Radio
Baghdad on the eve of the pan-Arab invasion of the newborn state of Israel
in mid-May. "These are hard words indeed, yet they are true." Lebanon's
minister of the interior (and future president) Camille Chamoun was more
delicate, intoning that "The people of Palestine, in their previous
resistance to imperialists and Zionists, proved they were worthy of
independence," but "at this decisive stage of the fighting they have not
remained so dignified."
No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees themselves
blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews. During a fact-finding
mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British
Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was
surprised to discover that while the refugees
express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the
Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the
Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will
say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare,
persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I even heard it
said that many of the refugees would give a welcome to the Israelis if
they were to come in and take the district over.
* * *
Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and their
descendants remain in the squalid camps where they have been kept by their
fellow Arabs for decades, nourished on hate and false hope. Meanwhile,
their erstwhile leaders have squandered successive opportunities for
statehood.
It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two leaders who
determined their national development during the 20th century -- Hajj Amin
Husseini and Yasser Arafat, the latter of whom dominated Palestinian
politics since the mid-1960s to his death in November 2004 -- were
megalomaniacal extremists blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly
obsessed with violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace
and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had promised the
British officials who appointed him to his high rank in the early 1920s,
the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial
part of Mandate Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the
traumatic experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from
the start on the path to peace and reconciliation, instead of turning it
into one of the most murderous terrorist organizations in modern times, a
Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the
early 1970s, in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty,
by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process, or at the very latest with the
Camp David summit of July 2000.
Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his control in
the 1990s into an effective terror state from where he launched an all-out
war (the "al-Aqsa intifada") shortly after being offered an independent
Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip and 92% of the West Bank, with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the Palestinian
population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to a repressive and corrupt
regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships and plunged their
standard of living to unprecedented depths.
What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is that, far from
being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and Arafat were quintessential
representatives of the cynical and self-seeking leaders produced by the
Arab political system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the
Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents against Zionism and
the Jews, while lining its own pockets from the fruits of Jewish
entrepreneurship, so PLO officials used the billions of dollars donated by
the Arab oil states and, during the Oslo era, by the international
community to finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary
Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.
And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen condemned
their people to statelessness by rejecting the U.N. partition resolution,
their reckless decisions are being reenacted by the latest generation of
Palestinian leaders. This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006
replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority, but also to the
supposedly moderate Palestinian leadership -- from President Mahmoud Abbas
to Ahmad Qureia (negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to
prime minister Salam Fayad -- which refuses to recognize Israel's very
existence as a Jewish state and insists on the full implementation of the
"right of return."
And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the name of
justice (no less) call today not for a new and fundamentally different
Arab leadership but for the dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when
these dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look forward
to putting their self-inflicted "catastrophe" behind them.
Mr. Karsh is head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University
of London, and the author most recently of "Islamic Imperialism: A
History" (Yale). This article appears in the May issue of Commentary2.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121019679929074973.html
Hyperlinks in this Article:
(1) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
(2) http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Zionism's Greatest Achievement
Zionism's Greatest Achievement
(reposting)
In some ways it is a depressing period in Jewish history. The American
Jewish Diaspora community, or at least the non-Orthodox bulk therein, is
in the process of committing cultural/national/religious suicide. Most
American Jews are indifferent to their Jewishness; intermarriage is close
to and may be above 50 percent; and the dominant "religion" of the
American non-Orthodox Jews is the pseudo-religion of
Liberalism-as-Judaism, its chief tenet being that Judaism is nothing more
nor less than the political agenda of the American Left, never mind that
this agenda is totally bankrupt intellectually on its own demerits.
The Reform movement, the Deconstructionist Reconstructionists and many
Conservatives (as in Conservative synagogues) are simply religious
liberals, with political liberalism as their dogma.
The "defense" organizations, American Jewish Congress, Bnai Brith, et al,
are also largely devoted to the practice of political liberalism as
pseudo-religion.
And then we have the chattering classes in Israel - the media and
intelligentsia and literati - devoted to seeing Israel weakened and
dismembered through the Oslo process of national suicide.
In these days of frustration, I think there is one idea that we should
bear in mind. And that is that the Zionist movement has many fantastic
accomplishments under its belt, one of the most important of which is that
Zionism forced a major change in the nature and expression of
anti-Semitism.
Not that anti-Semites are really any different when they hide behind the
mask of anti-Zionism. These are the same gutter bigots, the same people
who refuse to acknowledge that Jews are humans, that Jews are entitled to
rights and equality. But they have been forced to express their bigotry
differently.
This should be obvious any time you observe the campus anti-Semites of the
Left, the Arab fascists and the self-hating leftist Jewish Uncle Toms
demonstrating against Israel.
For centuries, the slogans of the anti-Semites were that Jews were
racially inferior, intellectually inferior, cowards, money-grubbers,
killers of God, sub-humans.
But observe the main slogan of anti-Semites today: The Jews are mean. They
are mean to the poor Palestinians.
Ooooh, soooo mean.
What a marvelous transformation! The main calumny thrown at the Jews is
that they are bullies, meanies. What greater accomplishment of Zionism
could be imagined?
Of course, this does not mean that the anti-Semites really think that the
Jews are mean or cruel to the "poor" Palestinians. The anti-Zionists do
not give a damn about the Palestinians, and the last thing they care about
is Arab human rights. This is why they have absolutely nothing to say
about the treatment of Arabs in Arab countries or by the Palestinian
Authority's Gestapo.
When Saddam Hussein ordered Kuwaiti civilians to be forced to drink
gasoline and then had his troops shoot into their bellies to make them
explode (to the cheers and laughs of his stormtroopers) there was not a
single anti-Zionist who expressed disapproval or concern. The
anti-Zionists know perfectly well that Arabs are treated a thousand times
better in Israel (and this would be so even if one were to believe all
their accusations and allegations of mistreatment) than are Arabs in Arab
countries.
The anti-Semites lament supposed Israeli mistreatment of the "poor"
Palestinians because they think this is an effective way to delegitimize
and undermine the existence of Israel. In other words, they are motivated
by hatred of Jews and not by any compassion for Palestinians. They seek
to see Israel destroyed, not the Palestinians enfranchised, or rather
their only interest in Palestinian enfranchisement is as a tool to
endanger Israel's existence. Of the enormous Arab territories of the
Middle East, almost twice the land mass of the United States, the only
place where they suddenly are concerned for the welfare and civil rights
of Arabs is in Israel. The other Arabs, as far as they're concerned, can
go to hell.
And if they can accuse Israel of violating Arab civil rights (never mind
that their accusations are false and invented) then they can pretend to be
compassionate and interested in peace, not gutter bigots who hate Jews.
The anti-Semites have lost their ability to march about and accuse the
Jews of ritual murders and similar medieval libels (at least outside the
Arab media and Counterpunch magazine). Such things would make them
laughable in the West. No one outside the Arab world takes the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion as anything other than an embarrassment for
anti-Zionists. Hence they have seized onto a new propaganda tactic,
complaining that the Jews are oh, so mean and cruel - and bullies to boot.
At long last - after two millennia of exile - to be accused of being
bullies! To leave the anti-Semites with no more effective weapon than
heaping invective upon the mean Jews! For this one must say a blessing of
thanksgiving, a shecheyanu. And often.
2. OPINION
Israel Is Now America's Closest Ally
By MICHAEL B. OREN
May 7, 2008
President George W. Bush will soon make his second visit to Israel in less
than six months, this time to celebrate the country's 60th anniversary.
The candidates for the presidency, Republican and Democratic alike, have
all traveled to Israel and affirmed their commitment to its security. So
have hundreds of congressmen.
American engineers, meanwhile, are collaborating with their Israeli
counterparts in developing advanced defense systems. American soldiers are
learning antiterrorist techniques from the Israeli army.
Corbis
John McCain visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, March 2008.
Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is
rarely (if ever) burned in protest . indeed, some Israelis fly that flag
on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are
named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in
the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United
States and Israel.
Yet the bonds between the two countries were not always so strong. For
much of Israel's history, America was a distant and not always friendly
power.
Consider the period before Israel's founding in 1948, during the British
Mandate over Palestine. Though many Americans, Christians as well as Jews,
were committed to building the Jewish national home, their government's
policy was strictly hands-off. Palestine, in Washington's view, was
exclusively Britain's concern, and the Arab-Jewish conflict was a British
headache.
Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration raised no objection to Britain's
1939 decision to end Jewish immigration into Palestine, sealing off
European Jewry's last escape route from Nazism. The U.S. indifference to
Zionism deepened during World War II, when America feared alienating its
British allies and angering the Arabs, whose oil had become vital to the
war effort. Deferring to British and Arab demands, America confined
hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors in displaced-persons camps in
Europe rather than let them emigrate to Palestine.
America's ambivalence toward Zionism persisted after the war, as the
battle against Nazism gave way to the anticommunist struggle. While a
sizeable majority of Americans welcomed Israel's creation in May 1948,
policy makers in Washington feared that such support would trigger an Arab
oil boycott of the West and the Soviet take-over of Europe. Secretary of
State George Marshall even warned the president, Harry Truman, that he
would not back him for re-election if he recognized the newborn state. An
ardent Baptist whose best friend was a Jew, Truman ignored these warnings
and made the U.S. the first nation to accord de facto recognition to
Israel. But buckling to State and Defense Department pressures, Truman
also imposed an arms embargo on Israel during its desperate war of
independence. Later, he arm-twisted Israeli leaders to relinquish land to
the Arabs and to readmit Palestinian refugees.
Pressure for territorial concessions escalated under Truman's successor,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also vetoed weapons sales to Israel. His
secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, dismissed Israel as "the millstone
around our necks," and threatened it with sanctions during the 1956 Suez
Crisis. Israel is home to the Middle East's largest memorial to John F.
Kennedy, but Kennedy similarly refused to sell tanks and planes to Israel,
and warned that America's relationship with the Jewish state would be
"seriously jeopardized" by Israel's nuclear program. Lyndon B. Johnson was
the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, to
Washington . 16 years after Israel's birth . but he then balked at
Eshkol's request for American help against the Arab armies assembling for
war in June 1967. "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it
alone," Johnson replied, implying that the U.S. would not stand beside
Israel militarily.
The Six-Day War nevertheless inaugurated a dramatic change in America's
attitude toward Israel. Israel's astonishing victory in that conflict
instantly transformed the "millstone" into an American asset, a hardy
fellow democracy and Cold War ally. Nixon regarded Israel as "the best
Soviet stopper in the Mideast," and furnished the weaponry Israel needed
to prevail in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both
ran on platforms highly favorable to Israel, and dedicated themselves to
the search for Israel-Arab peace. By the end of the 1970s, an inchoate
U.S.-Israeli alliance had emerged, sealed by the existence of a potent
pro-Israel lobby in Washington and the extension to Israel of billions of
dollars of American aid.
But the relationship was hardly friction-free. Israel's reluctance to
forfeit territories captured in 1967, and its efforts to settle them,
became a perennial source of tension. Presidents Ford and Carter
threatened to withhold assistance from Israel unless it made territorial
concessions. President George H.W. Bush denied Israel loan guarantees for
resettling Russian immigrants in the West Bank. Israel's security policies
also jolted the alliance . Ronald Reagan condemned Israel's bombardment of
the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 as well as its siege of Beirut the
following year. Americans, in turn, irritated the Israelis with their
transfer of sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia and their opposition to
Israeli arms sales to China.
Such rifts have grown increasingly infrequent, however, and today there
are few visible fissures in the U.S.-Israeli front. Yet America has never
recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital . imagine if Israel refused to
recognize Washington. Powerful interest groups lobby against Israel in
Washington while much of American academia and influential segments of the
media are staunchly opposed to any association with Israel.
How does the alliance surmount these challenges?
One reason, certainly, is values . the respect for civic rights and the
rule of law that is shared by the world's most powerful republic and the
Middle East's only stable democracy. There is also Israel's determination
to fight terror, and its willingness to share its antiterror expertise.
Most fundamentally, though, is the amity between the two countries'
peoples. The admiration which the U.S. inspires among Israelis is
overwhelmingly reciprocated by Americans, more than 70% of whom, according
to recent polls, favor robust ties with the Jewish state.
No doubt further upheavals await the alliance in the future . as Iran
approaches nuclear capability, for example. Israel may act more muscularly
than some American leaders might warrant. The impending change of U.S.
administration will also have an effect. But such vicissitudes are
unlikely to cause a major schism in what has proven to be one of history's
most resilient, ardent and atypical partnerships.
Mr. Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is the author
of "Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the
Present," now available in paperback from Norton.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on
Opinion Journal1.
And add your comments to the Opinion Journal forum2.
URL for this article:
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Hyperlinks in this Article:
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Israel at 60
gil troy , THE JERUSALEM POST May. 6, 2008
Today, too many friends and foes define Israel, and Zionism, by
the Arab world's hostility. Doing so misses Israel's everyday
miracles, the millions who live and learn, laugh and play, in
the Middle East's only functional democracy. Doing so ignores
the achievements of Zionism, a gutsy, visionary movement which
rescued a shattered people by reuniting a scattered people.
Doing so neglects the transformative potential of Zionism, which
could inspire new generations of Israeli and Diaspora Jews to
find personal redemption by redeeming their old-new communal
homeland.
Tragically, Zionism is embattled. Arabs have demonized Zionism
as the modern bogeyman, and many have clumped Zionists, along
with Americans and most Westerners, as the Great Satans. In
Israel, trendy post-Zionists denigrate the state which showers
them with privilege, while in the Diaspora a few Jewish
anti-Zionists loudly curry favor with the Jewish state's
enemies.
Jews should reaffirm their faith in Zionism; the world should
appreciate its many accomplishments. Zionists must not allow
their enemies to define and slander the movement. No nationalism
is pure, no movement is perfect, no state ideal. But today
Zionism remains legitimate, inspiring, and relevant, to me and
most Jews. Zionism offers an identity anchor in a world of
dizzying choices - and a road map toward national renewal. A
century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label "Jew"; today,
Jews must revive pride in the label "Zionist."
I AM a Zionist because I am a Jew - and without recognizing
Judaism's national component, I cannot explain its unique
character. Judaism is a world religion bound to one homeland,
shaping a people whose holy days revolve around the Israeli
agricultural calendar, ritualize theological concepts, and
relive historic events. Only in Israel can a Jew fully live in
Jewish space and by Jewish time.
I am a Zionist because I share the past, present, and future of
my people, the Jewish people. Our nerve endings are uniquely
intertwined. When one of us suffers, we share the pain; when
many of us advance communal ideals together, we - and the world
- benefit.
I am a Zionist because I know my history - and after being
exiled from their homeland more than 1900 years ago, the
defenseless, wandering Jews endured repeated persecutions from
both Christians and Muslims - centuries before this
anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust.
I am a Zionist because Jews never forgot their ties to their
homeland, their love for Jerusalem. Even when they established
autonomous self-governing structures in Babylonia, in Europe, in
North Africa, these governments in exile yearned to return home.
I am a Zionist because those ideological ties nourished and were
nurtured by the plucky minority of Jews who remained in the land
of Israel, sustaining continued Jewish settlement throughout the
exile.
I am a Zionist because in modern times the promise of
Emancipation and Enlightenment was a double-edged sword, often
only offering acceptance for Jews in Europe after they
assimilated, yet never fully respecting them if they did
assimilate.
I am a Zionist because in establishing the sovereign state of
Israel in 1948, the Jews reconstituted in modern Western terms a
relationship with a land they had been attached to for
millennia, since Biblical times - just as Japan or India
established modern states from ancient civilizations.
I am a Zionist because in building that state, the Jews returned
to history and embraced normalcy, a condition which gave them
power, with all its benefits, responsibilities, and dilemmas.
I am a Zionist because I celebrate Israel's existence. Like any
thoughtful patriot, though I might criticize particular
government policies I dislike - I do not delegitimize the state
itself.
I am a Zionist because I live in the real world of
nation-states. I see that Zionism is no more or less "racist"
than any other nationalism, be it American, Armenian, Canadian,
or Czech. All express the eternal human need for some internal
cohesion, some tribalism, some solidarity among some historic
grouping of individuals, and not others.
I am a Zionist because we have learned from North American
multiculturalism that pride in one's heritage as a Jew, an
Italian, a Greek, can provide essential, time-tested anchors in
our me-me-me, my-my-my, more-more-more, now-now-now world.
I am a Zionist because in Israel we have learned that a country
without a vision is like a person without a soul; a big-tent
Zionism can inculcate values, fight corruption, reaffirm
national unity, and restore a sense of mission.
I AM a Zionist because in our world of post-modern
multi-dimensional identities, we don't have to be "either-ors",
we can be "ands and buts" - a Zionist AND an American patriot; a
secular Jew BUT also a Zionist. Just as some people living in
Israel reject Zionism, meaning Jewish nationalism, Jews in the
Diaspora can embrace it. To those who ask "How can you be a
Zionist if you don't make aliya," I reply, "How will anyone make
aliya without first being a Zionist?"
I am a Zionist because I am a democrat. The marriage of
democracy and nationalism has produced great liberal
democracies, including Israel, despite its democracy being
tested under severe conditions.
I am a Zionist because I am an idealist. Just as a century ago,
the notion of a viable, independent, sovereign Jewish state was
an impossible dream - yet worth fighting for - so, too, today,
the notion of a thriving, independent, sovereign Jewish state
living in true peace with its neighbors appears to be an
impossible dream - yet worth seeking.
I am a Zionist because I am a romantic. The story of the Jews
rebuilding their homeland, reclaiming the desert, renewing
themselves, was one of the 20th century's greatest epics, just
as the narrative of the Jews maintaining their homeland,
reconciling with the Arab world, renewing themselves, and
serving as a light to others, a model nation state, could be one
of this century's marvels.
Yes, it sometimes sounds far-fetched. But, as Theodor Herzl, the
father of modern Zionism, said in an idle boast that has become
a cliche: "If you will it, it is no dream."
The writer is Professor of History at McGill University and the
author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the
Challenges of Today. This is an updated version of an essay he
first wrote for Independence Day in 2001.
http://www.jpost.com
/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627025562&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
2. Reprint: Israel Memorial Day
(reprint from 4 years back)
http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-ISSUE/plaut-3.htm
ISRAEL AT 56
Steven Plaut
This week is Memorial Day in Israel and right after it is Independence
Day. I have believed for years that the best way to commemorate these days
is by turning them into a battle against the loss of perspective.
Memorial Day is the more troubling of the two days. The problem is that
Israelis have lost their sense of Jewish perspective to such an extreme
extent, and this becomes glaringly evident on Memorial Day. Israelis are
incapable of viewing their problems and that of the state within the
perspective of Jewish history, in large part because of the efforts of the
radically secularist Israeli Left, which dominates civil discourse, the
media, academia and politics, and seeks to detach all of Israel from
Jewish history and to deny any connection between .Israeli-ness. and
Judaism.
All of this is reflected in the whiny defeatism that dominates all
thinking about the losses of life by Jews struggling for Israel.s
survival. It is blindingly apparent on Memorial Day.
First of all, the atmosphere of Memorial Day in Israel resembles that of
Holocaust Remembrance Day . Yom HaShoah, in nearly all things: the same
siren, the same closing of cafes and restaurants, the same conversion of
the media into official mourners. The timing is also suggestive . Memorial
Day is a week after Yom HaShoah. If anything, Memorial Day is the more
dramatic of the two days, as there are two sirens sounded on Memorial Day
but only one on Yom HaShoah. And this is not because the loss of soldiers
is .more recent.. The bulk of soldiers killed in Israel.s wars, far more
than half, died in the 1948-9 War of Independence, only three years after
the end of the Holocaust.
The two juxtaposed days equate the Holocaust with a tragedy that is two
six-hundredths its size. Second, all sense of proportion has been lost. In
ALL of Israel.s wars, something like 21,000 soldiers and civilians died,
although thanks to the Oslo team the civilians have dominated the death
toll this past decade. These numbers are similar to the numbers of Jews
murdered every two days at Auschwitz at the height of its .efficiency.. In
other words, had Auschwitz operated for only two days longer than it
actually did, the losses of Jewish life would have been the same as all of
Israel.s military and civilians losses! The soldiers killed in Israel of
course died in valor, defending their people and country.
Here we are, 56 years after the Holocaust, and the country is still
gripped with the Grand Oslo Delusion, still trying to .negotiate. with the
Palestinian Nazis instead of achieving total military victory over them,
afraid to follow the lead of the Americans in Fallujah. In 21st-century
Israel, the fact that one or two soldiers got killed per week in Lebanon
was cause for total unilateral surrender to the Hizbullah and its Syrian
masters and for a panic-stricken retreat out of Lebanon to Israel.s
.international border.. Two deaths a week of soldiers in Lebanon, deaths
that indeed could have been prevented had the country.s leadership the
courage to do so, were thought to be sufficient reason for abandoning all
rationality and determination, and for putting all of northern Israel
under threat of massive bombardment from Hizbullah rockets. On the other
front, Palestinians tossing rocks at soldiers in the1980s were sufficient
reason adopt .Oslo. in the 1990s, where Israel imported an Islamofascist
terrorist army of its sworn enemies into the suburbs of Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem.
.Oslo. Israel is post-survivalist Israel, defeatist Israel, exhausted
Israel. .Oslo. was based on a total loss in the ability to reason
rationally, a total loss of historic proportion, a relinquishment of
reality for a make-pretend imaginary universe, and a complete loss in the
Jewish determination to survive as a nation. First and foremost, it was a
complete loss in Jewish self-respect and dignity in Israel. Here we had
the spectacle of Israeli leaders meeting, back-slapping and kissing the
same Arab fascists who murdered Jewish children and only yesterday denied
there had ever been a Holocaust, but at the same time insisting that if
there had been one . the Jews deserved it. The Israeli media continues to
be the occupied territory of Israel.s extremist Left; the Independence Day
issue of Ha.aretz a couple of years back featured a banner Op-Ed by
columnist Akiva Eldar entitled .To the Glory of the States of Israel and
Palestine., and explaining that Israel will never be truly independent
until Palestine has pushed Israel behind its 1949 borders and liberated
East Jerusalem. He is not even the most extremist anti-Israel journalist
in Israeli journalism.
In Orwellian .Oslo. Israel, defeatism became the greatest form of
triumphalism, cowardice became the highest form of courage, and
McCarthyism was the greatest expression of democracy, at least in the
first few years after the Rabin assassination.
The Israeli military was as blinded by the loss in perspective as the rest
of the country. The military leadership has been McClellenist since 1992,
and was . if anything . ahead of the rest of the country in saying amen to
the Left.s Vision of .Oslo. and backing the national suicidal ambitions of
the politicians of the Left. The military brass was louder than the media
in demanding a unilateral unconditional surrender of Israel in Lebanon and
relinquishing of the Golan to Syria. Military intelligence has never quite
gotten around to the point where it discovers that Yassir Arafat is a
genocidal terrorist and that there are no differences between the Hamas
and the PLO, if there ever were.
Meanwhile, even Ariel Sharon is trying to capitulate his way into
tranquility. Just what does he think the PLO-Hamas terrorists will do in
the Gaza Strip once Israel has ethnically cleansed it of Jews and
abandoned it?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Yom Haatzmaut Special from Isracampus - Sternhell and the Debasement of the Israel Prize
Sternhell and the Debasement of the Israel Prize
Sternhell and the Debasement of the Israel Prize
by Saul Zadka
May 5, 2008
He called on IDF tanks to roll over the settlements, he advised the
Palestinians to direct their armed Intifada east of the green line, he
maintains that killing Arab children becomes part of national policy, he
condemns Israel's "barbaric behavior" in the territories, he branded
Israeli ministers as "stupid", "megalomaniac", "trigger-happy gangsters,
he opposed Israel's right to fight terrorism and does not even think that
he lives in a democracy. Yet, this nightmarish country will award Prof.
Ze'ev Sternhell its most prestigious prize on Independence Day and he has
the audacity to accept it.
It should be quoted to be believed: "In the end we will have to use force
against the settlers in Ofra or Elon Moreh. Only he who is willing to
storm Ofra with tanks will be able to block the fascist danger threatening
to drown Israeli democracy."
He wrote this call for a civil war twenty years ago (in the late Davar
daily), but his pen did not cease to drip the familiar venom that became
his hallmark. In May 2001, a year into the "second Intifada", in the
height of the suicide bombings, this time in Ha'aretz, he wrote: "Many
Israelis, possibly the majority of voters, do not doubt the legitimacy of
the armed resistance in the territories proper. If the Palestinians had a
little sense, they would have concentrated their struggle against the
settlements and would not hurt women and children, fire rockets on Gilo,
Nachal Oz and Sderot, or plant explosives on the Western side of the Green
Line. In this manner, the Palestinians would themselves draft the solution
that will be reached in any case."
Zeev Sternhell was always obsessed with the residents of Judea and
Samaria, but he did not confine his hatred to them only. Throughout his
academic-political career he did not refrain from viciously attacking the
IDF whom he accused of committing crimes against humanity in the service
of the settlers. For him, the army is nothing short of a happy trigger
gang, hell bent to kill Palestinian children. "We had never experienced
such colonial contempt for human life, for the inferior .natives..", he
wrote on May 2004, "We have never had cynicism and obtuseness like that
seen in recent days in the appearance and the behavior of members of the
new army, from the defense minister and the chief of staff to the
commander of the Gaza Division, with their cold, alienated and
bureaucratic language. The stain on the army uniform is steadily
spreading".
"The only sin lies not in
committing crimes, but in
failing to conceal them",
he wrote about the IDF.
After an incident in Girit military outpost, in Gaza, where IDF soldiers
shot dead a local girl, he wrote: "In the territories they shoot at
anything that moves, without asking too many questions. Even after they
shoot, they don't ask questions, except when a particularly horrifying
case comes to the attention of the media. Then the whitewash mechanism
called an .investigation. goes into action".
Sternhell regards the incident as part of a pattern that characterized the
army's conduct for many years. "When forces sowed unnecessary destruction
and terror, they were operating in the spirit of their commanders and
according to their instructions, from Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz (former
chief of staff) on down. The Palestinian girl who was killed opposite the
Girit outpost was not the only one". And he went on to denounce the
officer in-command (Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai) who "saw no reason to
open an investigation against the company commander because he didn't
consider such a pattern of behavior exceptional, but rather a part of
combat, in which the killing of children has become an everyday
occurrence. These norms were known to all the ranks of command, as well as
to the defense minister and the prime minister".
The prize winner does not stop here. In his tendency to smear and
generalize, he points a finger at the soldiers and denounces them as
criminals. "What do the young soldiers and the petty officers internalize
today? They leave the army with the knowledge that human life, when the
life is not a Jewish one, is extremely cheap. The death of a Jew by the
hands of a Palestinian is a tragedy; the death of a Palestinian by the
hands of a Jew is no big deal. They learn that the killing of Palestinian
children, women and old people, the destruction of their homes and their
property, is permitted not only in cases of self-defense, but even for the
sake of operational convenience. They learn that the Palestinian
population is of no interest to anyone and force can be used against it
unrestrainedly, even when the only real purpose is revenge and scare
tactics. From the affair of the commander of the Gaza Division and the
company commander from the Girit outpost, they have learned the lesson
that might makes right. Because the only sin lies not in committing
crimes, but in failing to conceal them".
The assassination of Shehadeh,
who was responsible for a dozens of
suicide bombings, was described by him
as a "barbaric behavior"
Not surprisingly he seized the opportunity to unleash his harsh words at
the army following the pilots' letter, protesting at the operation in
which the residence building of Salah Shehadeh, the then head of Hamas'
military wing was bombed. In what he described as an "uprising", he wrote
in his Ha'aretz regular column that the act "draws its strength and
authority from the classic distinction between an order that is legal but
illegitimate, and an order that is both legal and legitimate. Nobody
questions the authority of the Israeli government to drop a one-ton bomb
on a residential building, but that fact is not enough to make the act
legitimate and to remove the fear that a crime was committed on behalf of
the state".
And he continued to illuminate us: "by the force of those principles the
secular West created democracy; it exists only in those places where
individuals use their judgment as moral beings. But the same principle
covers every society and every regime: Even orders given by a government
elected by a perfectly formal democratic process can be criminal orders.
The French in their colonies and the Americans in Vietnam provided classic
examples of war crimes perpetrated by democratic governments".
Sternhell thought that the pilots opened a broad breach in the wall of
Israeli conformism. "Indeed, with all