I Read the Guardian Today, Oh Boy

The latest dollop of liberal Zionist claptrap in that media repository of liberal Zionist claptrap, the Guardian, is a little homily by a certain Simon Baron-Cohen, director of Cambridge University's Autism Research Centre, author of Zero Degrees of Empathy, and yes, brother of Sacha. It is based on the following premise:

"Empathy is all about imagining other minds, appreciating that different people have different perspectives, and responding to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion. After a career studying autism and the nature of empathy, I see empathy as one of our most valuable natural resources. It has particular promise as an approach to conflict resolution... We can see this if we look at the Israel-Palestine conflict, where both communities have different views of the same historic period, both claim the same piece of land and both have valid emotional reactions to the conflict that must be acknowledged." (22/1/19)

Now one might reasonably expect that anyone who is serious about the need to "imagine other minds" and "appreciate different perspectives" as a means to resolving conflict would draw on considered accounts of same by both parties. But this is not what Baron-Cohen does. He only cites Israeli views, specifically those of novelist Amoz Oz and journalist Ari Shavit, author of My Promised Land: The Triumph & Tragedy of Israel.

No Palestinian voice gets a look in - unless one excepts what "one Palestinian friend said to me: 'It's hard to empathise with someone when you are looking up the barrel of their gun'." (Indeed!)

Baron-Cohen's way out of this dilemma - "Israelis should take the initiative, because they are the stronger party" - is pure ivory tower, and flies in the face of the logic of colonialism which rules out equality between coloniser and colonised. I've dealt with this issue before in my 16/11/19 post Dialogue of the Colonizer and the Colonized (just click on the colonialism label below) where I highlighted the words of a Palestinian prisoner, Ta'er Hamad, who had been approached by the mother of one of his Israeli victims: "I cannot hold a dialogue with someone who insists on equating the occupation with its victims."

The problem with reading this kind of liberal Zionist claptrap - and the Guardian is full of it - is that it wastes the reader's time, time better spent understanding, and calling out, the worse-than-apartheid reality of the colonial-settler Zionist project (projectile?) in Palestine.

To home in on just one of Baron-Cohen's fairy tales, aka the "Israeli perspective":

"If you ask Jewish Israelis why their families came to Palestine before 1948, they'll likely refer to two major waves of antisemitism. The first included the horrific pogroms of eastern Europe in the 1880s and 90s. In the second wave in the 1930s and 40s, two out of every three European Jews were killed by the Nazis... the Jews were drowning, looking for a piece of wood they could cling on to. Palestine, which for two millennia they had thought of as their ancient homeland, was that piece of wood."

The problem here is the colossal conceit that the Zionist movement was primarily a rescue mission. The reality, of course, is that it was a colonial settler movement from its inception. One only has to read the Basel Program, which emerged from the First Zionist Congress of 1897 to see this. As for the aforementioned Tsarist pogroms of the 1880s and 90s, only a minority of Russian Jews ever headed for Palestine, and most of them were not political Zionists. Many more emigrated to Western Europe, or the United States, while others joined Russian revolutionary currents.

As for "the second wave," Western Europe and the United States were again the preferred destination for European Jews impacted by the Nazi era.

Yosef Grodzinzky's 2004 book In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews & Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II is well worth a read on this matter:

"Post-Holocaust Displaced Persons, who lived in miserable conditions, became a human reserve of great migration potential, hence a prime target for the Zionists, who planned to transfer the entire DP population to Palestine. On the face of it, this task was easy: Mostly Holocaust survivors, the DPs were supposedly convinced by now that a Jewish state was the only viable solution. All it should have taken was thus immigration permits - as Palestine was still in British hands - and a sufficient number of boats that would ship the DPs to the safe haven. This, indeed, has been the official line. It has been said that with few exceptions, the shadow of the Holocaust made almost all the DPs want to go to Palestine; as immigration quotas were extremely limited while the British were in control, only few could enter; yet on May 15th 1948, the British left and with them went the quotas. An independent Jewish state was declared, and its doors were immediately opened; previously unable to immigrate to Palestine, the rest of the DPs now rushed to make 'aliyah (immigration) to Israel, and became proud citizens of the Jewish state. This is what I learned in school.

"Yet the documentary record I found in archives helped me discover two numerical discrepancies which call for an explanation. a. Polls taken in the camps at different times indicate that the vast majority of Jewish DPs (80-96.8 percent) stated their intention to immigrate to Palestine. If not to Palestine, they said, they would rather go back to the crematoria of the death camps. Yet, of the hundreds of thousands, only 40 percent (at most) actually went to Palestine/Israel, despite the fact that other migration routes were more difficult to follow at any point in time. b. A voluntary draft drive in the camps for the Israel Defense Force (IDF), then in formation, drew only 700 volunteers in the spring of 1948 (0.3 percent of the 250,000 Jewish camp dwellers then)... The failed attempt to mobilize volunteers led the Zionists to enact forced conscription of DPs in Germany and Austria to the IDF. Just months later, the headcount of camp draftees who fulfilled their 'national duty' went up eleven fold to 7,800...

"What happened? Why did so many say they wanted to go to Palestine, when only a minority actually did so? What justified forced conscription of survivors to fight for a cause they did not necessarily support, in a land they had never seen, and whose language they did not speak? How was a non-sovereign body able to force conscripts on German and Austrian soil to embark on boats that took them to the battlefield in Palestine?

"To forecast, the Zionists successfully took control of the Jewish DP camps early on, which later enabled them to enforce a draft... Zionist planners and organizers followed a clear line of reasoning: To them, a Jew not wanting to go to Palestine adversely affected the struggle for the establishment of an independent state in two ways. First,  it was a net loss to the effort to populate Palestine... Secondly, reluctance to make 'aliyah weakened the Zionist pressure to open the gates of Palestine for unlimited Jewish immigration. As the suffering of the DPs was used as a bargaining chip in the struggle against immigration quotas imposed by the British, who controlled Palestine until the state was established, a Jew immigrating to the West was one less suffering Jew knocking on Palestine's doors. The migration of Jews to places other than Palestine was thus discouraged, sometimes even blocked by force. Attempts to evacuate child survivors to England and France immediately after Liberation in 1945 were thus thwarted, on Ben-Gurion's explicit instructions." (pp 9-12)

So much for Baron-Cohen's "drowning" Jews, just itching to reach Palestine after "two millennia" of longing. Boilerplate Zionist dogma, of course. But, where the issue of Palestine/Israel is concerned, Zionist dogma, framing, bias, and embroidery, in one form or another, is invariably what you get at the Guardian.