Shilling for Israel: The Case of Richard Crossman I

The cluelessness of our politicians is a never-ending source of fascination and wonder. And none, I believe, are  quite as clueless as when under the distorting influence of Zionism. In fact, I would go so far as to contend (and this should come as no surprise to readers of this blog) that a politician's intellectual and moral worth is in inverse proportion to his/her support for the Zionist project. To be sure, contemporary politics being what it is, many politicians feel under pressure to pay lip service to that dubious cause. Still, whether they are true believers or merely along for the joy ride, my contention holds true - as, I suggest, this post will demonstrate.

One of the most ardent supporters of the Zionist goal of wiping Palestine off the map was the British gentile, Labour politician and socialist intellectual Richard Crossman (1907-1974). Crossman, who went on to became the editor of the influential journal New Statesman after leaving politics, even  authored two books on the subject of Palestine/Israel.

The quotations which follow come from A Nation Reborn: The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin & Ben-Gurion (1960). Hyped on its dust jacket as "pertinent, stimulating, provocative," A Nation Reborn contains passages of such arrant foolishness and casual racism as to cry out for exposure. Hence this post.

Here, for example, is Crossman's exposition of the conflict between the greater and lesser injustice so called. No surprises for guessing which is the lesser injustice:

"The truth is that, throughout the period of the [British] Mandate [1923-1948], Britain was presented not with a choice between right and wrong but with a conflict of obligations. [Chaim] Weizmann was the only Jew or Arab to admit this frankly. Testifying before Commission after Commission, he reiterated that the choice in Palestine was not between right and wrong but between a greater and a lesser injustice. How often he warned successive British Governments and High Commissioners that there was no simple decision which would resolve this conflict. Instead, they would have to do something evil for the sake of a greater good." (pp 60-61)

As George Orwell might have quipped: I see, so all injustices are equal, but some are more equal than others. 

Now here's Crossman, while deploring Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's post-war support for the 1939 White Paper which advocated halting Jewish immigration into Palestine prior to the eventual  creation of an Arab state with a Jewish minority, lamenting in effect, If only the lesser injustice had been committed at the beginning of the Mandate:

"I believe that the Balfour Declaration could have been fulfilled by building up a Jewish majority very quickly indeed. In order to make this possible, the British Government would have had to appoint a first High Commissioner strong enough to purge his own staff of anti-Zionists, to disregard Arab opposition and encourage large-scale Jewish immigration. Obviously he would have had to be a Gentile, because no Jew selected by a British Government could possibly commit the lesser injustice to the Arabs required to build the National Home in the 1920s." (p 62)

And just to spell it out:

"Even if Providence had arranged for the appointment of a tough, non-Jewish High Commissioner, as well as for the arrival of half a million Russian Jews, that would not have been sufficient without a Government in Westminster conscious of its Imperial destiny and prepared to accept military obligations in order to fulfil it." (p 63)

In other words, the Balfour Declaration's promised "National Home for the Jewish people" (in reality a Jewish state) should simply have been imposed on the Arabs of Palestine by force of British arms at the very beginning of the mandate. Yes, Crossman would have added, that would indeed have been an injustice to the Arabs, but just think of the far greater injustice to the Jews if their National Home had not proceeded as promised.

Wonderful stuff, isn't it? Sort of my injustice is bigger than your injustice.

Now observe Crossman as he perishes the thought of British arms being trained on Palestine's Jewish community:

"At any time during 1946 Ernest Bevin could have smashed Jewish resistance and imposed British rule on Palestine for another 10 or 15 years. In June of that year, for example, the Haganah leaders... decided to demonstrate the strength and efficiency of their forces by blowing up all the Jordan bridges on one night and thus isolating the British forces. The temptation to hit back was very strong, and Mr Bevin's military advisers assured him that the air force and tanks at their disposal were amply sufficient to smash every Kibbutz, while the rest of the Army broke resistance in the cities. It is to the credit of Mr Bevin that he refused to permit the orgy of destruction pressed on him by his military advisers." (p 73)

So here's the deal: smashing Palestinian Arab resistance to the takeover of their homeland by the Zionist movement would merely be a lesser injustice, but smashing the Zionist terrorist gangs out to steal that homeland in the late 40s, why that'd be a veritable orgy of destruction. What a phony the man  was. But no more so than any of the legions of Western politicians who have at one time or another shilled for political Zionism.

One shudders to think how many readers of his day Crossman led up the garden path with this kind of racist shite. But that's just the tip of the Crossman iceberg, to which I'll be returning in future posts.