Russian Jews first began colonising Ottoman Palestine in the 1880s. Following an 1891 visit to their colonies, the Russian cultural Zionist, Asher Ginzberg (Ahad Ha'am), noted a disturbing trend on the part of "our brethren" in Palestine:
"Serfs they were in the lands of the Diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in unrestricted freedom and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination."
That "despicable and dangerous inclination [to] treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty," has only grown since the advent of the state of Israel in 1948. These days, Zionist cruelty assumes forms and refinements which Ginsberg could never have imagined. For example:
"On Sunday afternoon, Israeli police shot and killed a 16-year old Palestinian girl near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. Although the Israeli police spokesperson claimed that the teen attempted to stab a security officer, that account has been disputed. The child has been identified as Fatima Abdul-Rahman Hajiji, 16, from Qarawat Bani Zeid village, northwest of Ramallah...
"Eyewitnesses said Fatima was standing near the entrance of Bab al-'Amoud (Damascus Gate), and was at least 10 meters away from the nearest soldier... and that one of the soldiers started shouting 'knife, knife,' before 5 soldiers fired a barrage of bullets at the child. They added that Fatima was first shot with several live rounds in the chest, and the soldiers continued to fire at her after she fell onto the ground." (From Israeli police kill 16-year old Palestinian girl near the Damascus Gate, imemc.org, 8/5/17)
Showing posts with label Ahad Ha-Am. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ahad Ha-Am. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 10, 2017
Monday, November 7, 2011
None So Blind
"Many, perhaps even most of the greatest crimes have been committed not in the dark... but in full view of so many people who simply chose not to look and not to question." (Wilful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril, Margaret Heffernan)
What is euphemistically described as the 'Middle East conflict' or the 'Palestine problem', perhaps the greatest colonial running-sore of modern times, began as an act of wilful blindness. Consider the following line of thought:
"Reading [Theodor Herzl's declarations], the reader may be conscious of a remarkable anomoly in them. If Herzl's fundamental thesis was that persecuted or unenfranchised Jews should get away from their false environment and found a State where they would be by themselves and so be the equals of any men, if this was what Herzl meant, how then could he come to consider Palestine as a spot where such a State could be founded? It was a territory where the Jews could not be self-secure, for the Arabs were already living there in hundreds of thousands. How could Herzl fix his eyes on Palestine then, where the conditions for his Sinn Fein 'ourselves alone' State were unobtainable?"
This obvious question - 'What about the Palestinian Arabs?' - so beautifully framed by British author and journalist J.M.N. Jeffries (1880-1960) in his 1939 book Palestine: The Reality, goes direct to the fatal flaw at the heart of political Zionism.
Jeffries continues:
"The question may well be asked. But it would be difficult for Zionism to provide an answer to it. Nothing is more significant of the character of the Zionist movement than the fact that in those crucial days of last century it never paid the least attention to the Arabs who peopled the country upon which all its efforts were directed. Not a lift of a Zionist eyebrow seems to have been wasted upon an Arab form.
"The sincere Mr Stein is one of the few Zionist writers who seems conscious of this shortcoming. He does what he can to rectify it. 'When Herzl', he explains, 'had spoken of a Charter' (from the Sultan) 'he had not, needless to say, contemplated any eviction of the Arabs of Palestine in favour of the Jews. He was, to judge from his Congress addresses, hardly aware that Palestine had settled inhabitants, and he had, in perfect good faith, omitted the Arabs from his calculations'.
"Was there ever anything more extraordinary than this? Vast plans are made engaging the destinies of a multitude of people, yet the man who engenders these plans never takes the essential first step of surveying the land where he proposes to carry them out. Nor apparently do any of his associates suggest it to him. There might be no Arabs in the world for all the difference it makes to him or to his associates.
"Year by year Zionist congresses are summoned, and from their platforms and in the corridors of the assembly speakers discourse incessantly about themselves, about champions and about opponents of the cause within the ranks of Jewry, about the dove-tailing of ill-fitting factors in their programme, about their hopes and their fears of Gentile help, about their own culture and their own need for spiritual expansion. Without doubt these were reasonable and respectable topics. When however were they put aside to consider the existence of inhabitants in the land which the Congress members proposed to acquire? When indeed? Was a single day's session of a single Congress devoted to the discussion of the understanding which must be reached with the people of Palestine? Not one.
"Herzl's own situation is the most extraordinary of all. He justly becomes celebrated. He goes about the world spreading his gospel. He interviews monarchs and chiefs-of-government. Strange interviews they must have been, for he is closeted with the Sultan, the ruler of Palestine, yet comes away without news that Palestine has a population. He interviews the Pope and talks with him of the custody of the Holy Places, but never learns of the Christian inhabitants who frequent them. He even visits Palestine, but seems to find nobody there but his fellow-Jews. Arabs apparently vanish before him as in their own Arabian nights. The Arabic tongue at the moment of utterance is transmuted magically into Hebrew or Yiddish or German!
"But it is when we turn from Herzl to his associate leaders, and still more when we consider the action of the chiefs of Zionism who immediately succeeded him, that his plea of not having perceived the Arabs cannot be entertained. We are given to understand that this blankness of view persisted for some 6 or 7 years. Mr Stein, writing of the period round 1905, says that 'it was now coming to be realized that Palestine was not empty'. Herzl had died after the Sixth Congress, in 1904, and his death marks a demarcation.
"I cannot see how it can be held that for 6 years a great number of admittedly intelligent educated men remained ignorant of the presence of the Arabs. If they did remain so ignorant, theirs was as bad a case of culpable ignorance as can be imagined, and they cannot be allowed to profit by it. But I do not believe in this ignorance, and I maintain that the-half-and-half prolongation of it which was kept up till the War, and to all intents was resumed afterwards (as will be seen when the Balfour Declaration is analysed), altogether discredits the leaders of the Zionist cause as well as their friends in our own Cabinet.
"There were 19 Jewish colonies established in Palestine before the year 1900. The colonies of Rishon-le-Zion, Zichron Jacob and Rosh Pinah had been founded in the early 'eighties, and housed thousands of Jews who had fled from Russia. The international Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Hirsch in 1891, was busy in 1900 reorganizing these colonies, which had been over-subsidized by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The Choveve Zion or 'Lovers of Zion' organization, established in Russia, but with committees in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Paris and London, had been engaged in Jewish settlement for 6 years. The 'Jewish Colonial Trust' had been founded and registered in England to collect funds for use in Palestine and had received a quartrer of a million pounds in its first year. The Jewish 'National Fund', created to acquire land in Palestine, was founded in 1901. In Jerusalem there were many thousands of Jews, and also in Jaffa.
"All these trusts and colonies and the people who inhabited them were in regular and continuous communication with Jewish bodies and persons throughout Europe and America. Many of the Jews of Jerusalem were subsidized by pious co-religionists, so that they alone were responsible for a network of correspondence between Palestine an innumerable synagogues and congregations everywhere. The Choveve Zion and the secular associations necessarilly were drawn into association with the Zionist Organization and with the Zionist Congresses. At Basle and at the succeeding Congresses there was infinite discussion about the colonies.
"In a hundred ways the conditions prevailing in Palestine and the existence of the Arabs and the varying ways in which the Arabs reacted to existing colonies and to the promise of more colonies must have been known to all Zionists.
"The only conclusion then, and it is a conclusion forced on the observer, is that if Zionism was unaware of the Arabs it was because most Zionists perceived an obstacle in the Arabs and did not want to be aware of them. The Zionist leaders, and the more prominent of their followers, obsessed with the absurd notion that Palestine had always been the patrimony of the Jews, did not intend to be aware of anything which conflicted with this. To have made approaches to the Arab population, and to have discussed at any length the bar which that population presented or might present to the accomplishment of their plans, would have to disconfess the plea upon which those plans were based. It would have disclosed to most of the non-Jewish world, and indeed to a good part of the Jewish world, that there was a factor in existence which upset the whole formula of Jewish ownership.
"I do not say that all of the leading Zionists viewed the matter quite in this fashion. Some of them will have thought about the Arabs in a careless, indifferent way. They will have considered them as nobodies who would disappear presently, decamping from the soil after a little money had been spent or by some other almost natural sequence. They would vanish like the mist before the sun of Zion.
"Those who thought like this wasted no time in discussing persons of such little import as the Arabs. As far as they themselves were concerned the Sultan of Turkey was the temporary population of Palestine. Of him they did talk, and with him they dealt, if unsuccessfully.
"But most of the principal figures of Zionism must lie under the imputation of not having desired to perceive the Arabs. Their attention had been called to them by one man at least who belonged to their own number, Achad Ha'am. Achad Ha'am was the pen-name of Asher Ginsberg, whose essays and treatises became the literary focus of all Jews who opposed the establishment of a Jewish State. His patent disinterestedness and his altruism marked him out amidst his contemporaries. He declared that the political Zionists, that is to say those who worked for a Jewish State, were ruining the cause. 'Judaism', wrote he in 1897, 'needs at present but little. It needs, not an independent State, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favourable to its development; a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature'.
"Achad Ha'am protested even some years before the Basle Conference against the Zionist wilful or casual exclusion of the Arabs. It was folly, he said, to treat them as wild men of the desert who could not see what was going on around them. At the Basle Conference he sat 'solitary amid his friends, like a mourner at a wedding-feast', and wrote afterwards of 'the complete absurdity of Herzl's statesmanship, aimed inexorably at a Jewish state in Palestine'. Twenty-three years later, in 1920, he wrote, 'From the very beginning we have always ignored the Arab people'." (pp 39-43)
What is euphemistically described as the 'Middle East conflict' or the 'Palestine problem', perhaps the greatest colonial running-sore of modern times, began as an act of wilful blindness. Consider the following line of thought:
"Reading [Theodor Herzl's declarations], the reader may be conscious of a remarkable anomoly in them. If Herzl's fundamental thesis was that persecuted or unenfranchised Jews should get away from their false environment and found a State where they would be by themselves and so be the equals of any men, if this was what Herzl meant, how then could he come to consider Palestine as a spot where such a State could be founded? It was a territory where the Jews could not be self-secure, for the Arabs were already living there in hundreds of thousands. How could Herzl fix his eyes on Palestine then, where the conditions for his Sinn Fein 'ourselves alone' State were unobtainable?"
This obvious question - 'What about the Palestinian Arabs?' - so beautifully framed by British author and journalist J.M.N. Jeffries (1880-1960) in his 1939 book Palestine: The Reality, goes direct to the fatal flaw at the heart of political Zionism.
Jeffries continues:
"The question may well be asked. But it would be difficult for Zionism to provide an answer to it. Nothing is more significant of the character of the Zionist movement than the fact that in those crucial days of last century it never paid the least attention to the Arabs who peopled the country upon which all its efforts were directed. Not a lift of a Zionist eyebrow seems to have been wasted upon an Arab form.
"The sincere Mr Stein is one of the few Zionist writers who seems conscious of this shortcoming. He does what he can to rectify it. 'When Herzl', he explains, 'had spoken of a Charter' (from the Sultan) 'he had not, needless to say, contemplated any eviction of the Arabs of Palestine in favour of the Jews. He was, to judge from his Congress addresses, hardly aware that Palestine had settled inhabitants, and he had, in perfect good faith, omitted the Arabs from his calculations'.
"Was there ever anything more extraordinary than this? Vast plans are made engaging the destinies of a multitude of people, yet the man who engenders these plans never takes the essential first step of surveying the land where he proposes to carry them out. Nor apparently do any of his associates suggest it to him. There might be no Arabs in the world for all the difference it makes to him or to his associates.
"Year by year Zionist congresses are summoned, and from their platforms and in the corridors of the assembly speakers discourse incessantly about themselves, about champions and about opponents of the cause within the ranks of Jewry, about the dove-tailing of ill-fitting factors in their programme, about their hopes and their fears of Gentile help, about their own culture and their own need for spiritual expansion. Without doubt these were reasonable and respectable topics. When however were they put aside to consider the existence of inhabitants in the land which the Congress members proposed to acquire? When indeed? Was a single day's session of a single Congress devoted to the discussion of the understanding which must be reached with the people of Palestine? Not one.
"Herzl's own situation is the most extraordinary of all. He justly becomes celebrated. He goes about the world spreading his gospel. He interviews monarchs and chiefs-of-government. Strange interviews they must have been, for he is closeted with the Sultan, the ruler of Palestine, yet comes away without news that Palestine has a population. He interviews the Pope and talks with him of the custody of the Holy Places, but never learns of the Christian inhabitants who frequent them. He even visits Palestine, but seems to find nobody there but his fellow-Jews. Arabs apparently vanish before him as in their own Arabian nights. The Arabic tongue at the moment of utterance is transmuted magically into Hebrew or Yiddish or German!
"But it is when we turn from Herzl to his associate leaders, and still more when we consider the action of the chiefs of Zionism who immediately succeeded him, that his plea of not having perceived the Arabs cannot be entertained. We are given to understand that this blankness of view persisted for some 6 or 7 years. Mr Stein, writing of the period round 1905, says that 'it was now coming to be realized that Palestine was not empty'. Herzl had died after the Sixth Congress, in 1904, and his death marks a demarcation.
"I cannot see how it can be held that for 6 years a great number of admittedly intelligent educated men remained ignorant of the presence of the Arabs. If they did remain so ignorant, theirs was as bad a case of culpable ignorance as can be imagined, and they cannot be allowed to profit by it. But I do not believe in this ignorance, and I maintain that the-half-and-half prolongation of it which was kept up till the War, and to all intents was resumed afterwards (as will be seen when the Balfour Declaration is analysed), altogether discredits the leaders of the Zionist cause as well as their friends in our own Cabinet.
"There were 19 Jewish colonies established in Palestine before the year 1900. The colonies of Rishon-le-Zion, Zichron Jacob and Rosh Pinah had been founded in the early 'eighties, and housed thousands of Jews who had fled from Russia. The international Jewish Colonization Association, founded by Baron Hirsch in 1891, was busy in 1900 reorganizing these colonies, which had been over-subsidized by Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The Choveve Zion or 'Lovers of Zion' organization, established in Russia, but with committees in Vienna, Berlin, New York, Paris and London, had been engaged in Jewish settlement for 6 years. The 'Jewish Colonial Trust' had been founded and registered in England to collect funds for use in Palestine and had received a quartrer of a million pounds in its first year. The Jewish 'National Fund', created to acquire land in Palestine, was founded in 1901. In Jerusalem there were many thousands of Jews, and also in Jaffa.
"All these trusts and colonies and the people who inhabited them were in regular and continuous communication with Jewish bodies and persons throughout Europe and America. Many of the Jews of Jerusalem were subsidized by pious co-religionists, so that they alone were responsible for a network of correspondence between Palestine an innumerable synagogues and congregations everywhere. The Choveve Zion and the secular associations necessarilly were drawn into association with the Zionist Organization and with the Zionist Congresses. At Basle and at the succeeding Congresses there was infinite discussion about the colonies.
"In a hundred ways the conditions prevailing in Palestine and the existence of the Arabs and the varying ways in which the Arabs reacted to existing colonies and to the promise of more colonies must have been known to all Zionists.
"The only conclusion then, and it is a conclusion forced on the observer, is that if Zionism was unaware of the Arabs it was because most Zionists perceived an obstacle in the Arabs and did not want to be aware of them. The Zionist leaders, and the more prominent of their followers, obsessed with the absurd notion that Palestine had always been the patrimony of the Jews, did not intend to be aware of anything which conflicted with this. To have made approaches to the Arab population, and to have discussed at any length the bar which that population presented or might present to the accomplishment of their plans, would have to disconfess the plea upon which those plans were based. It would have disclosed to most of the non-Jewish world, and indeed to a good part of the Jewish world, that there was a factor in existence which upset the whole formula of Jewish ownership.
"I do not say that all of the leading Zionists viewed the matter quite in this fashion. Some of them will have thought about the Arabs in a careless, indifferent way. They will have considered them as nobodies who would disappear presently, decamping from the soil after a little money had been spent or by some other almost natural sequence. They would vanish like the mist before the sun of Zion.
"Those who thought like this wasted no time in discussing persons of such little import as the Arabs. As far as they themselves were concerned the Sultan of Turkey was the temporary population of Palestine. Of him they did talk, and with him they dealt, if unsuccessfully.
"But most of the principal figures of Zionism must lie under the imputation of not having desired to perceive the Arabs. Their attention had been called to them by one man at least who belonged to their own number, Achad Ha'am. Achad Ha'am was the pen-name of Asher Ginsberg, whose essays and treatises became the literary focus of all Jews who opposed the establishment of a Jewish State. His patent disinterestedness and his altruism marked him out amidst his contemporaries. He declared that the political Zionists, that is to say those who worked for a Jewish State, were ruining the cause. 'Judaism', wrote he in 1897, 'needs at present but little. It needs, not an independent State, but only the creation in its native land of conditions favourable to its development; a good-sized settlement of Jews working without hindrance in every branch of culture, from agriculture and handicrafts to science and literature'.
"Achad Ha'am protested even some years before the Basle Conference against the Zionist wilful or casual exclusion of the Arabs. It was folly, he said, to treat them as wild men of the desert who could not see what was going on around them. At the Basle Conference he sat 'solitary amid his friends, like a mourner at a wedding-feast', and wrote afterwards of 'the complete absurdity of Herzl's statesmanship, aimed inexorably at a Jewish state in Palestine'. Twenty-three years later, in 1920, he wrote, 'From the very beginning we have always ignored the Arab people'." (pp 39-43)
Monday, August 22, 2011
114 Years of Zionist Bombast
Israel's the best! Better than all the rest:
From the very first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897...
"Some months have passed since the Zionist Congress, but its echoes are still heard in daily life and in the press... In the press all these meetings, with their addresses, motions and resolutions, appear over and over again in the guise of articles - articles written in a vein of enthusiam and triumph. The meeting was magnificent, every speaker was a Demosthenes, the resolutions were carried by acclamation, all those present were swept off their feet and shouted with one voice: 'We will do and obey!' - in a word, everything was delightful, entrancing, perfect. And the Congress itself still produces a literature of its own. Pamphlets specially devoted to its praises appear in several languages; Jewish and non-Jewish papers still occasionally publish articles and notes about it; and needless to say, the 'Zionist' organ [Die Welt, the German paper founded by Herzl] itself endeavours to maintain the impression which the Congress made, and not allow it to fade too rapidly from the public memory. It searches the press of every nation and every land, and wherever it finds a favourable mention of the Congress, even if in some insignificant journal published in the language of one of the smaller European nationalities, it immediately gives a summary of the article, with much jubilation. Only one small nation's language has thus far not been honoured with such attention, though its journals too have lavished praise on the Congress: I mean Hebrew." (The Jewish State & Jewish Problem, Ahad Ha'am, 1897, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
... to the 'Tent Revolution' of 2011...
"Property prices have risen about 50% since 2008 as Israel's burgeoning population - more than 7 million people squeezed into a slither [sic] of land about a third the size of Tasmania - vastly outstrips construction. The so-called 'tent revolution' has also morphed into a wider protest about the disintegration of communal solidarity and the welfare state. But this is not Israel's equivalent of the 'Arab Spring'. Rothschild Boulevard - a leafy, European-style inner-city thoroughfare where one young woman put up a tent on July 14 in protest against her exhorbitant rent - is not Tahrir Square. There is no violence, no looting, no thuggery. The protesters are not armed with guns or stones; they bear banners with slogans such as 'the people demand social justice' and 'the people will take back the country'. This has not led to violent clashes with police, let alone government-backed armies mowing down civilians like in Syria, Tunisia or Libya. Nor has it led to urban anarchy, as has happened in Britain. In short, this is the Jewish state's democratic pulse beating as it has since the day it was born. For popular protests are a sine qua non of Israeli society - virtually every week there's a protest from a different sector of society. And the demonstrations are almost always non-violent..." (Tent city is a beacon of social justice & optimism for all Israelis, Robin Margo*, The Age, 18/8/11) [* "Robin Margo, SC, is president of the New Israel Fund's affiliate in Australia and immediate past president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies."]
... and everything in between.
From the very first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1897...
"Some months have passed since the Zionist Congress, but its echoes are still heard in daily life and in the press... In the press all these meetings, with their addresses, motions and resolutions, appear over and over again in the guise of articles - articles written in a vein of enthusiam and triumph. The meeting was magnificent, every speaker was a Demosthenes, the resolutions were carried by acclamation, all those present were swept off their feet and shouted with one voice: 'We will do and obey!' - in a word, everything was delightful, entrancing, perfect. And the Congress itself still produces a literature of its own. Pamphlets specially devoted to its praises appear in several languages; Jewish and non-Jewish papers still occasionally publish articles and notes about it; and needless to say, the 'Zionist' organ [Die Welt, the German paper founded by Herzl] itself endeavours to maintain the impression which the Congress made, and not allow it to fade too rapidly from the public memory. It searches the press of every nation and every land, and wherever it finds a favourable mention of the Congress, even if in some insignificant journal published in the language of one of the smaller European nationalities, it immediately gives a summary of the article, with much jubilation. Only one small nation's language has thus far not been honoured with such attention, though its journals too have lavished praise on the Congress: I mean Hebrew." (The Jewish State & Jewish Problem, Ahad Ha'am, 1897, jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
... to the 'Tent Revolution' of 2011...
"Property prices have risen about 50% since 2008 as Israel's burgeoning population - more than 7 million people squeezed into a slither [sic] of land about a third the size of Tasmania - vastly outstrips construction. The so-called 'tent revolution' has also morphed into a wider protest about the disintegration of communal solidarity and the welfare state. But this is not Israel's equivalent of the 'Arab Spring'. Rothschild Boulevard - a leafy, European-style inner-city thoroughfare where one young woman put up a tent on July 14 in protest against her exhorbitant rent - is not Tahrir Square. There is no violence, no looting, no thuggery. The protesters are not armed with guns or stones; they bear banners with slogans such as 'the people demand social justice' and 'the people will take back the country'. This has not led to violent clashes with police, let alone government-backed armies mowing down civilians like in Syria, Tunisia or Libya. Nor has it led to urban anarchy, as has happened in Britain. In short, this is the Jewish state's democratic pulse beating as it has since the day it was born. For popular protests are a sine qua non of Israeli society - virtually every week there's a protest from a different sector of society. And the demonstrations are almost always non-violent..." (Tent city is a beacon of social justice & optimism for all Israelis, Robin Margo*, The Age, 18/8/11) [* "Robin Margo, SC, is president of the New Israel Fund's affiliate in Australia and immediate past president of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies."]
... and everything in between.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Avnery's Apology: A Critique
Taking the Canadian Prime Minister's recent parliamentary apology to the indigenous people of Canada as his cue, veteran Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery has followed his problematic essay 1948 (see my 1/6/08 post, Uri Avnery: A Critique) with an equally problematic stab at an official Israeli apology (An Apology, 14/6/08) to the Palestinian people:-
"We recognize the fact that we have committed against you an historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country... it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here."
Avnery at least appears here to concede that there is no meaningful distinction between "national home" and "state." The contrary has, of course, been argued by legions of Zionist propagandists. The notion that the early Zionists were prepared to settle for anything less than a Jewish state has, however, been decisively refuted by Canadian philosopher and author of The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann: "Could pre-Israel Zionism be understood as the quest for a homeland as opposed to a state?" he asks. "Was this to be a scattering of Jewish homes and farms, or a Jewish country with its own army, police, and government?" Neumann's evidence leaves us in no doubt. To quote just 3 of his many authoritative statements (pp 23-30):
1) "The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had already in 1896 written an essay called 'Der Judenstaat'. In it, he said, 'The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state... Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves'."
2) "Max Nordau, Herzl's vice-president at early Zionist congresses, wrote in 1920 that: 'I did my best to persuade the claimants of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would say all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested 'Heimstatte [homeland] as a synonym for state... It was equivocal but we all understood what it meant... to us it signified Judenstaat and it signifies the same now'."
3) "Here is Walter Laqueur's account: 'When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state, what exactly was meant by the phrase 'a Jewish national home'. Weizmann replied that for the moment [my italics] an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that 70 to 80 thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals'."
But when Avnery claims that "the Zionist movement had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people," it is hard to take him seriously. Assuming that the early Zionists went about their business of agitating for a homeland/state in Palestine without being aware of the grave implications their project held for the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population defies belief.
Theodore Herzl, the 'father' of political Zionism, was certainly wise to the matter, writing in his diary in 1895: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices. We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews." (Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, I, 51)
Typically, however, as Israeli historian Benny Morris points out in his discussion of the idea of transfer (the Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thinking, the leaders of the movement tended to be forthcoming only in private*. (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p 41)
That the logic of the Zionist push for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine meant that the Palestinians, absent an effective campaign of resistance, were doomed to dispossession, must surely have exercised the minds of all concerned, colonists and colonized alike. Neumann again: "Certainly it was possible that the Zionists would settle for less than all of Palestine. It was possible they would not forcibly transfer the indigenous population; it was just barely possible that, somehow, Zionism would be abandoned altogether. But there was no basis for supposing any of these outcomes likely. Nor could it be assumed that even a territorial compromise could be obtained without catastrophe... Indeed, the Palestinians could look at all of modern European history from the 17th century religious wars to the year of the Balfour Declaration as a record of failed territorial compromises. When settlers move into an inhabited area, territorial compromises are all too often mere pauses in a savage process of dispossession. This was apparent at the time. The rise of Zionism coincided with the last bloody stages of just such a process in the American West. Significantly, the American settler's progressive and very violent displacement of the native inhabitants was not some grand scheme thought out in advance. At many points in the story, the settlers seemed to have got all they wanted. But successful settlement and increasing immigration brought new usurpations. Enough was never, it seemed, enough. Even if the Zionists had never dreamed of taking all of Palestine from the Palestinians, it would have been foolish to suppose that they would not come to do so, bit by bit. The prospect of a Jewish state, therefore, posed a mortal danger to the Palestinians, a prospect of ethnic subjugation and very likely of what is now called ethnic cleansing." (pp 45-46)
As improbable as it sounds, Herzl and others may have entertained fantasies that the Palestinian Arabs could simply be bought out, but the Zionist movement's first Likudnik, Vladimir Jabotinsky, put paid to such nonsense in 1923: "Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains... Colonization has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Jew and Arab with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population." (See my 12/6/08 post, Pemulwuy in Palestine for a fuller quotation) To this end, Jabotinsky saw the necessity for a successful Zionist colonization to proceed behind an iron wall of bayonets, perhaps British, preferably Jewish. He was adamant that every Jew "with his wits about him" understood the logic of the Zionist enterprise, and that the only question was how to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. In fact, even Herzl admitted the need for a Jewish paramilitary corps "in preparation for the struggle against the indigenous population whose land was being systematically occupied." (Diaries, I, 88-89) It was of course Zionist militarism and force of arms, Jabotinsky's "iron wall," that prevailed in 1948. Avnery's depiction of his Zionist forbears as essentially well-intentioned blunderers, therefore, lacks all credibility.
[*David Ben-Gurion, who was later to to preside over the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and become Israel's first prime minister, continued this venerable Zionist tradition of dissimulation. He is described by Benny Morris as a man who "knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint." (The New History & the Old Propagandists, Haaretz 9/5/89)]
"The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic proportions."
Lofty idealists? How to square this with the testimony of Zionist moderate, Ahad Ha-Am, who wrote as early as 1891: "They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." Ha-Am was later compelled to ask, "Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" He scathingly described Avnery's pioneers as "a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence? If this be the 'Messiah', then I do not wish to see his coming." (Quoted in The Zionist Mind, Alan R Taylor, p 103)
Or take the findings of the shelved 1919 report, Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq. US President Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the wishes of the population concerned should be the determining element in the choice of a mandatory power, had sent Henry King and Charles Crane to take the pulse of both communities in Syria/Palestine. Finding that Lord Balfour, in his famous 1917 declaration favouring 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', had gone too far, they called for "the extreme Zionist programme" to be "greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase." This was for public consumption. It was left to the British interviewees to reveal the elephant in the room: given the intensity of the indigenous opposition to unlimited Jewish immigration, "No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms."
Nor did Ha-Am's "new Levantines" improve with the advent of a leadership "obsessed"* from the 30s on with the idea of forced transfer of the Palestinians (Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89) - a leadership who even managed to convince themselves that it was "just, moral and correct,"** who hatched and implemented (in April, 1948) Plan Dalet ["a strategic and ideological anchor and basis for expulsions"***] , and who "understood at every level of military and political decision making that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger and more viable both militarily and politically."****
[*Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89; **Morris, 1948 & After: Israel & the Palestinians, p 43; *** Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p 63; **** Morris, 1948 & After, p 22]
Avnery's idea of "a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity" is, of course, the two-state solution: Israel as an apartheid state ("governed by laws of our own making" as he puts it, presumably including those laws which incorporate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews and deny 93% of Israeli territory to non-Jews, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948) on 78% of historic Palestine, and a truncated state of Palestine on the remaining 22% currently occupied by Israel, which he hypes as "... the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations..." Avnery clings to the stale formula now trotted out by every friend of Israel within coee of a microphone. Meanwhile, the settlements expand, the Jews-only roads snake across the occupied West Bank, and walls and cages spring up around defenceless and impoverished Palestinians faster than than the words 'viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state' can trip off a politician's lip.
And what of the thorniest problem of all, that of the Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces under cover of war in 1948?
We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just, and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their descendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us."
Like the two-state solution, Avnery's notion of the refugees exercising a "free choice" of returning to "the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us" is yet another example of his "solution(s) that may not fill all justified aspirations." Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right of all refugees to return and claim their properties (Articles 13 & 17), that the Palestinian refugees have the backing of the UN Charter and international law for their right of return, and that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for precisely that, Avnery is only prepared to go so far.
Sorry, Uri, it's back to the drawing board I'm afraid.
"We recognize the fact that we have committed against you an historic injustice, and we humbly ask your forgiveness. When the Zionist movement decided to establish a national home in this country... it had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people. Indeed, almost no one in the Zionist movement had ever been in the country before the first Zionist Congress in 1897, or even had any idea about the actual situation here."
Avnery at least appears here to concede that there is no meaningful distinction between "national home" and "state." The contrary has, of course, been argued by legions of Zionist propagandists. The notion that the early Zionists were prepared to settle for anything less than a Jewish state has, however, been decisively refuted by Canadian philosopher and author of The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann: "Could pre-Israel Zionism be understood as the quest for a homeland as opposed to a state?" he asks. "Was this to be a scattering of Jewish homes and farms, or a Jewish country with its own army, police, and government?" Neumann's evidence leaves us in no doubt. To quote just 3 of his many authoritative statements (pp 23-30):
1) "The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, had already in 1896 written an essay called 'Der Judenstaat'. In it, he said, 'The Idea which I have developed in this pamphlet is a very old one: it is the restoration of the Jewish state... Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation, the rest we shall manage for ourselves'."
2) "Max Nordau, Herzl's vice-president at early Zionist congresses, wrote in 1920 that: 'I did my best to persuade the claimants of the Jewish state in Palestine that we might find a circumlocution that would say all we meant, but would say it in a way that would avoid provoking the Turkish rulers of the coveted land. I suggested 'Heimstatte [homeland] as a synonym for state... It was equivocal but we all understood what it meant... to us it signified Judenstaat and it signifies the same now'."
3) "Here is Walter Laqueur's account: 'When a Zionist delegation appeared on 27 February 1919 before the Supreme Allied Council, Weizmann was asked by Lansing, the American secretary of state, what exactly was meant by the phrase 'a Jewish national home'. Weizmann replied that for the moment [my italics] an autonomous Jewish government was not wanted, but that he expected that 70 to 80 thousand Jews would emigrate to Palestine annually. Gradually a nation would emerge which would be as Jewish as the French nation was French and the British nation British. Later, when the Jews formed the large majority, they would establish such a government as would answer to the state of the development of the country and to their ideals'."
But when Avnery claims that "the Zionist movement had no intention of building our state on the ruins of another people," it is hard to take him seriously. Assuming that the early Zionists went about their business of agitating for a homeland/state in Palestine without being aware of the grave implications their project held for the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population defies belief.
Theodore Herzl, the 'father' of political Zionism, was certainly wise to the matter, writing in his diary in 1895: "We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. The voluntary expropriation will be accomplished through our secret agents. The Company would pay excessive prices. We shall then sell only to Jews, and all real estate will be traded only among Jews." (Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, I, 51)
Typically, however, as Israeli historian Benny Morris points out in his discussion of the idea of transfer (the Zionist euphemism for ethnic cleansing) in Zionist thinking, the leaders of the movement tended to be forthcoming only in private*. (The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p 41)
That the logic of the Zionist push for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine meant that the Palestinians, absent an effective campaign of resistance, were doomed to dispossession, must surely have exercised the minds of all concerned, colonists and colonized alike. Neumann again: "Certainly it was possible that the Zionists would settle for less than all of Palestine. It was possible they would not forcibly transfer the indigenous population; it was just barely possible that, somehow, Zionism would be abandoned altogether. But there was no basis for supposing any of these outcomes likely. Nor could it be assumed that even a territorial compromise could be obtained without catastrophe... Indeed, the Palestinians could look at all of modern European history from the 17th century religious wars to the year of the Balfour Declaration as a record of failed territorial compromises. When settlers move into an inhabited area, territorial compromises are all too often mere pauses in a savage process of dispossession. This was apparent at the time. The rise of Zionism coincided with the last bloody stages of just such a process in the American West. Significantly, the American settler's progressive and very violent displacement of the native inhabitants was not some grand scheme thought out in advance. At many points in the story, the settlers seemed to have got all they wanted. But successful settlement and increasing immigration brought new usurpations. Enough was never, it seemed, enough. Even if the Zionists had never dreamed of taking all of Palestine from the Palestinians, it would have been foolish to suppose that they would not come to do so, bit by bit. The prospect of a Jewish state, therefore, posed a mortal danger to the Palestinians, a prospect of ethnic subjugation and very likely of what is now called ethnic cleansing." (pp 45-46)
As improbable as it sounds, Herzl and others may have entertained fantasies that the Palestinian Arabs could simply be bought out, but the Zionist movement's first Likudnik, Vladimir Jabotinsky, put paid to such nonsense in 1923: "Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birthright to Palestine for cultural and economic gains... Colonization has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Jew and Arab with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible... Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population." (See my 12/6/08 post, Pemulwuy in Palestine for a fuller quotation) To this end, Jabotinsky saw the necessity for a successful Zionist colonization to proceed behind an iron wall of bayonets, perhaps British, preferably Jewish. He was adamant that every Jew "with his wits about him" understood the logic of the Zionist enterprise, and that the only question was how to cleanse Palestine of its indigenous population. In fact, even Herzl admitted the need for a Jewish paramilitary corps "in preparation for the struggle against the indigenous population whose land was being systematically occupied." (Diaries, I, 88-89) It was of course Zionist militarism and force of arms, Jabotinsky's "iron wall," that prevailed in 1948. Avnery's depiction of his Zionist forbears as essentially well-intentioned blunderers, therefore, lacks all credibility.
[*David Ben-Gurion, who was later to to preside over the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and become Israel's first prime minister, continued this venerable Zionist tradition of dissimulation. He is described by Benny Morris as a man who "knew what to say and what not to say in certain circumstances; what is allowed to be recorded on paper and what is preferable to convey orally or in hint." (The New History & the Old Propagandists, Haaretz 9/5/89)]
"The Zionist founders who came to this country were pioneers who carried in their hearts the most lofty ideals. They believed in national liberation, freedom, justice and equality. We are proud of them. They certainly did not dream of committing an injustice of historic proportions."
Lofty idealists? How to square this with the testimony of Zionist moderate, Ahad Ha-Am, who wrote as early as 1891: "They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination." Ha-Am was later compelled to ask, "Is this the dream of a return to Zion which our people have dreamt for centuries: that we now come to Zion to stain its soil with innocent blood?" He scathingly described Avnery's pioneers as "a small people of new Levantines who vie with other Levantines in shedding blood, in desire for vengeance, and in angry violence? If this be the 'Messiah', then I do not wish to see his coming." (Quoted in The Zionist Mind, Alan R Taylor, p 103)
Or take the findings of the shelved 1919 report, Recommendations of the King-Crane Commission with Regard to Syria-Palestine and Iraq. US President Woodrow Wilson, who believed that the wishes of the population concerned should be the determining element in the choice of a mandatory power, had sent Henry King and Charles Crane to take the pulse of both communities in Syria/Palestine. Finding that Lord Balfour, in his famous 1917 declaration favouring 'the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people', 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine', had gone too far, they called for "the extreme Zionist programme" to be "greatly modified. For a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conferences with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase." This was for public consumption. It was left to the British interviewees to reveal the elephant in the room: given the intensity of the indigenous opposition to unlimited Jewish immigration, "No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms."
Nor did Ha-Am's "new Levantines" improve with the advent of a leadership "obsessed"* from the 30s on with the idea of forced transfer of the Palestinians (Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89) - a leadership who even managed to convince themselves that it was "just, moral and correct,"** who hatched and implemented (in April, 1948) Plan Dalet ["a strategic and ideological anchor and basis for expulsions"***] , and who "understood at every level of military and political decision making that a Jewish state without a large Arab minority would be stronger and more viable both militarily and politically."****
[*Morris, Haaretz, 9/5/89; **Morris, 1948 & After: Israel & the Palestinians, p 43; *** Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, p 63; **** Morris, 1948 & After, p 22]
Avnery's idea of "a solution that may not fulfill all justified aspirations nor right all wrongs, but which will allow both our peoples to live their lives in freedom, peace and prosperity" is, of course, the two-state solution: Israel as an apartheid state ("governed by laws of our own making" as he puts it, presumably including those laws which incorporate the distinction between Jews and non-Jews and deny 93% of Israeli territory to non-Jews, Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel and the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948) on 78% of historic Palestine, and a truncated state of Palestine on the remaining 22% currently occupied by Israel, which he hypes as "... the free and sovereign State of Palestine in all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, which will be accepted as a full member of the United Nations..." Avnery clings to the stale formula now trotted out by every friend of Israel within coee of a microphone. Meanwhile, the settlements expand, the Jews-only roads snake across the occupied West Bank, and walls and cages spring up around defenceless and impoverished Palestinians faster than than the words 'viable, contiguous and independent Palestinian state' can trip off a politician's lip.
And what of the thorniest problem of all, that of the Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces under cover of war in 1948?
We must approach with open hearts, compassion and common sense, the task of finding a just, and viable solution for the terrible tragedy of the refugees and their descendants. Each refugee family must be granted a free choice between the various solutions: repatriation and resettlement in the State of Palestine, with generous assistance; staying where they are or emigration to any country of their choice, also with generous assistance; and yes - coming back to the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us."
Like the two-state solution, Avnery's notion of the refugees exercising a "free choice" of returning to "the territory of Israel in acceptable numbers, agreed by us" is yet another example of his "solution(s) that may not fill all justified aspirations." Despite the fact that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) enshrines the right of all refugees to return and claim their properties (Articles 13 & 17), that the Palestinian refugees have the backing of the UN Charter and international law for their right of return, and that UNGA Resolution 194 calls for precisely that, Avnery is only prepared to go so far.
Sorry, Uri, it's back to the drawing board I'm afraid.
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