Benny Morris, Again

Today is Nakba Day. So I thought I'd reflect on the latest emission by Israeli 'historian' Benny Morris, author of the 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, written at a time when he could have passed muster as an historian, albeit relying exclusively on Israeli archival material for his tome. Whatever Morris' worth as a historian back then, he has unfortunately undergone a precipitous decline to the point where, today, he is little more than a peddler of pro-Zionist hasbara. Indeed, one could say that the scholarly worth of an historian of the Palestine problem is in inverse proportion to his Zionism, and that there is no better example of the applicability of this axiom than Benny Morris.

What follows is his attack in the current issue of The Atlantic on the views of Palestinian-American legislator, Rashida Tlaib. I have reproduced here only the historical component of Morris' hatchet job on Tlaib, and interpolated my own comments in his text (in italics in square brackets), as well as the wonderfully acid, tweeted commentary of Asad Abukhalil (aka The Angry Arab) (in bold in square brackets) on same. Morris' distortions of the Palestinian past are enough to discredit what he has to say on the more recent history of the Palestine problem:

"On Friday, Representative Rashida Tlaib was attacked by President Donald Trump for a 'horrible and highly insensitive statement on the Holocaust' and for having 'tremendous hatred of... the Jewish people.' Trump's off-base attack distracted from the actual problems with Tlaib's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict, in which she deployed deliberately imprecise language, misleading her listeners about the early history of the conflict in Palestine and misrepresenting its present and future.

"Tlaib told the hosts of the Yahoo News podcast Skullduggery that when she remembers the Holocaust, it has a 'calming' effect on her to think that it was my ancestors, Palestinians, who lost their land, and some their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity; their existence in some ways had been wiped out... all of it in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post the Holocaust, post the tragedy and terrific persecution of Jews across the world [sic] at that time.' She was, she said, 'humbled by the fact that it was [my Palestinian] ancestors that had to suffer for that to happen.'

"But the historical reality was quite different from what Tlaib described: The Palestinians indirectly, and in some ways directly, aided in the destruction of European Jewry.

"After Hitler's accession to power in Germany in 1933, German and then European Jews sought escape and safe havens. But all the Western countries, including the United States and Britain and its dominions, closed their doors to significant Jewish immigration. [In large part because the Zionist movement wanted them only in Palestine.] Palestine emerged as the only potential safe haven. In 1932, the British allowed 9,500 Jews to immigrate to Palestine. In 1933, the number shot up to 30,000, and in 1935, it peaked at 62,000.

"But from 1933 onward, Palestine's Arabs - led by the cleric Muhammad Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem - mounted a strident campaign to pressure the British, who governed Palestine, to bar all Jews from entering the country. [You are telling me that the Palestinians were opposed to the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews who wanted to create a Jewish state on Palestinian lands and who wanted to displace the natives? And they were opposed to that? That is certainly anti-Semitic. If the Palestinians wanted to prove they were not anti-Semitic they should have given up their homeland, and told the Jewish immigrants to take it over, and they should even have welcomed the bullets and bombs directed against them. Anything less would indeed be anti-Semitic. Just think of it this way, if millions of Muslims wanted to come to America against the wishes of the American population and create a Muslim state over all the US, and if the Americans were to oppose their plan, would that not be outright anti-Islam bigotry? Think about it. Benny Morris may have a point here. Not only that, as Morris tells us, those impudent Palestinians revolted against those who occupied their homeland.] To press home their demand, in 1936 they launched an anti-British and anti-Zionist rebellion that lasted three years. [How dare they!] Apart from throwing out the British, the rebellion's aim was to coerce London into halting all Jewish entry into Palestine.

"Moreover, the anti-Jewish violence [Well, the Zionists were indeed Jewish and they wanted to create a state atop Palestine. So Palestinians should have fought Buddhists and Hindus just to prove they were not anti-Semitic?], which claimed the lives of hundreds of Jews and wounded many more, itself served to deter would-be emigrants from seeking to move to Palestine. [And Palestinians should have been mindful of this and abandoned their opposition to mass immigration? Seriously?] British entry certificates for Jews to Palestine declined to 30,000 in 1936, 10,000 in 1937, and 15,000 in 1938. Those who couldn't get in were left stranded in Germany, Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Almost all died in the Holocaust, which the Germans unleashed in 1941.

"But the Palestinians' contribution to the Holocaust was also more direct. Husseini, having fled Palestine during the revolt, helped pro-Nazi [but only because they were against the British occupation of their homeland] generals launch an anti-British rebellion in Iraq in 1941 (which itself engendered a large-scale pogrom against Baghdad's Jews, the Farhoud). [As Orit Bashkin, a genuine historian, cautions in her nuanced account of the Farhud ('New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq' (2012)) "a distinction should be made between an analysis of the Farhud and the Farhudization of Jewish Iraqi history - viewing the Farhud as typifying the overall history of the relationship between Jews and greater Iraqi society." As a Zionist, of course, Morris indulges simplistically in the latter. As Bashkin points out: "The Jewish community strived for integration in Iraq before and after the Farhud. In fact, the attachment of the community to Iraq was so tenacious that even after such a horrible event, most Jews continued to believe that Iraq was their homeland. The vision was shattered only by the realities created following the 1948 war in Palestine." (pp 138-39) That Zionism was the undoing of Iraq's Jews (among other Jewish communities in the Arab world) is made abundantly clear by Bashkin: "Equating Judaism and Zionism imperiled Jewish communities in Arab countries. Rather than thinking about the ways in which Arab regimes served colonialism, Arabs began worrying about whether the Jews living among them were serving the interests of Zionism. In this sense British colonialism created a Jewish problem in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in countries where there had not been one before. There were no conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Ottoman Palestine prior to the arrival of British colonialism and Zionism." (p 160)]

"When that rebellion failed, he fled to Berlin, where he was given a villa and a generous monthly salary, and lived in comfort until the end of the world war. During the war, he helped recruit Muslims from the Balkans for the German army and the SS, and in radio broadcasts exhorted Middle Eastern and North African Arabs to launch jihad against the British and 'kill the Jews.' (The texts of Husseini's broadcasts appear in the historian Jeffrey Herf's book The Jewish Enemy.) [Herf btw, although a Zionist historian, is at pains in a 2014 essay, 'Haj Amin, al-Husseini, the Nazis & the Holocaust', to point out that Husseini "did not have an impact on Hitler's decision to murder the Jews of Europe." He also makes no distinction in his essay between Judaism, the faith and Zionism, the political ideology, yet hypocritically critiques Husseini, a Muslim cleric, for failing to make the same distinction. Incredibly, Herf also writes thus of the Nakba: "While acknowledging pressure from other groups that made war in 1948 seem inevitable, the war of 1948 and the Arab-Israeli conflict may not have taken place without al-Husseini... " IOW, Ben-Gurion's Zionists would have taken their cue from a Jewish state-accepting/collaborating Husseini, and Zionists and Palestinians would have lived happily ever after together in the same land. Some fairy tale that!]

"Subsequently, Hussein fled Germany and, with the Allies reluctant to trigger Arab anger by trying him for collaboration [seeing the British were responsible for driving Husseini into Hitler's arms in the first place], settled down in Cairo. In 1947, he rejected the UN partition plan to settle the Palestine conflict and helped launch the first Palestinian and pan-Arab war against the Zionist enterprise. He spent his last years in Lebanon, embittered by the loss of Palestine and the pan-Arab failure to effectively support the Palestinians, and published a series of anti-Semitic articles before his death in 1974.

"The most prominent Palestinian American intellectual, Edward Said, toward the end of his life enjoined the Palestinians to study the Holocaust and empathize with what had happened to the Jews, if only to properly understand the deep-seated fears and aspirations of the Israelis. It would seem that Tlaib has forsworn such an effort. [I have no idea here just what Morris is referring to here when he paraphrases Edward Said - propagandists generally don't do footnotes - but let me conclude this post with the following eminently commonsense reflection of Said's on the Holocaust and the fate of the Palestinians, written in 2002 during Israel's cruel West Bank rampage, Operation Defensive Shield: "Every human calamity is different, so there is no point in trying to look for equivalence between one and the other. But it is certainly true that one universal truth about the Holocaust is not only that it should never again happen to Jews, but that as a cruel and collective punishment, it should not happen to any people at all. But if there is no point in looking for equivalence, there is a value in seeing analogies and perhaps hidden similarities, even as we preserve a sense of proportion. Quite apart from his actual history of mistakes, Yasir Arafat is now being made to feel like a hunted Jew by the state of the Jews. There is no gainsaying the fact that the greatest irony of his siege by the Israeli army in his ruined Ramallah compound is that his ordeal has been planned and carried out by a psychopathic leader (Ariel Sharon) who claims to represent the Jewish people. I do not want to press the analogy too far, but it is true to say that Palestinians under Israeli occupation today are as powerless as Jews were in the 1940s. Israel's army, airforce, and navy, heavily subsidized by the United States, have been wreaking havoc on the totally defenseless civilian population of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. For the past half century the Palestinians have been a dispossessed people, millions of them refugees, most of the rest under a 35-year-old military occupation, at the mercy of armed settlers who systematically have been stealing their land and an army that has killed them by the thousands. Thousands more have been imprisoned, thousands have lost their livelihoods, made refugees for the second or third time, all of them without civil or human rights." (From the essay Low point of powerlessness in Said's 2004 book From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap,  pp 206-07)]

A Guest of the Lowy Institute

"There was passionate support for foreign news reports at the Lowy Institute's media awards in Sydney on Saturday night at which the New York Times columnist Bret Stephens delivered the keynote address... Stephens referred to the controversy that followed Lowy's invitation for him to speak at the media award ceremony, which was to be named after the late ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin. But Lowy removed Colvin's name after a family disagreement. 'I'm aware of the controversy that has gone with my selection as your speaker,' Stephens said." (Guthrie's content shake-up threatens ABC empires, Amanda Meade, theguardian.com, 29/9/17)

Hmm... The controversy that has gone with my selection as speaker.

It appears that Colvin's wife, in particular, objected to her husband's name being associated with that of Stephens. But why? Could it possibly have had something to do with Stephens' Zionism?

Since this was nowhere explicit in Stephens' LI speech (on dissent), presumably only the brows of the more informed in the audience would have furrowed at the ludicrousness of Natan Sharansky being mentioned in the same breath as Galileo, Nelson Mandela, and Rosa Parks, and Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US, being singled out as a victim (of "organized claques of hecklers"/"junior totalitarians" no less!), we really need to look elsewhere for it.

Over at PragerU.com, for example, where Stephens lets it all hang out. Gird your loins for What's holding the Arab world back?:

"In the judo competition of the 2016 Olympics in Brazil, an Israeli heavyweight judo fighter named Or Sasson defeated his Egyptian opponent, Islam El Shehaby, in a first-round match. The Egyptian then refused to shake the Israeli's extended hand, earning boos from the crowd.*

"If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It illustrates how hatred of Israel and Jews corrupts every element of Arab society.

"You won't find this explanation for the Arab world's decline among journalists and academics. They reflexively blame the usual suspects: the legacy of colonialism, unemployed youth, the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide, and every other politically correct excuse they can think of. For them, hatred of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia - just part of the landscape.

"Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab world expelled virtually all of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred of them. Over time the result proved fatal: a combination of lost human capital, expensive wars against Israel, and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theories and a perpetual search for scapegoats. The Arab world's problems are a problem of the Arab mindset, and the name of that problem is anti-Semitism.

"As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. Historian Paul Johnson has noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed. Just a few examples:

"Spain expelled its Jews in 1492. The effect, Johnson noted, 'was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.'

"In czarist Russia, the adoption of numerous anti-Semitic laws ultimately weakened and corrupted the entire Russian government. These laws also led to mass Jewish emigration, resulting in a breathtaking loss of intellectual and human capital.

"Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn't sent Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein and Edward Teller into exile in the US.

"These patterns were replicated in the Arab world. Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. There were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Libya in 1945.

"Nor is it accurate to blame Israel for fuelling anti-Semitism by refusing to trade land for peace.

"Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Prime Minister Menachem Begin returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. And among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process.

"Johnson calls anti-Semitism a 'highly infectious' disease capable of overwhelming intellectuals and simpletons alike. Its potency, he noted, lies in transforming a personal and instinctive irrationalism into a political and systematic one. For the Jew hater, every crime has the same culprit and every problem has the same solution. Anti-Semitism makes the world seem simple. In doing so, it condemns the anti-Semite to a permanent darkness.

"Today there is no great university in the Arab world, no serious scientific research, a stunted literary culture. In 2015, the US Patent Office reported 3,804 patents from Israel, as compared with 30 from Egypt, the largest Arab country. Hatred of Israel and Jews has also deprived the Arab world of both the resources and the example of its neighbour. Israel quietly supplies water to Jordan, helping to ease the burden of Syrian refugees, and quietly provides surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to Egypt to fight ISIS in the Sinai. But this is largely unknown among Arabs, for whom the only permissible image of Israel is an Israeli soldier in riot gear, abusing a Palestinian. Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbours. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs.

"This may be starting to change. Recently, the Arab world has been forced to face up to its own failings in ways it cannot easily blame on Israel. The change can be seen in the budding rapprochement between Jerusalem and Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

"But that's not enough. So long as an Arab athlete can't pay his Israeli opposite the courtesy of a handshake, the disease of the Arab mind and the misfortunes of its world will continue.

"For Israel, this is a pity.

"For the Arabs, it's a calamity."

See what I mean?

[*"I have no problem with Jewish people or any other religion... But for personal reasons, you can't ask me to shake the hand of anyone from this State... " (Islam El Shehaby: 'I've respected the judo rules, lespritdujudo.com)]

He Who Hypes Harari

I see that that Yuval Noah Harari's over-the-top promo/Q&A by the Guardian's Andrew Anthony garnered over 600 comments. Most thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. A few evinced scepticism. Amazingly, none touched on his provenance as an Israeli living in an apartheid state built on the genocide and mass expulsion of Palestine's indigenous Arab population, or were interested in what, if anything, he had to say about this overriding matter. Ignorance is bliss?

Anyway, I thought I'd investigate Anthony. He's written a book called The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence (2008).  In it, he writes:

"I remember how disgusted I was by [the 1982 Sabra & Shatila massacre], all the more so because only months before I had travelled through Israel and the West Bank. At the time my friends had said that visiting Israel was just as bad as visiting South Africa, for it was just another vicious apartheid regime (whereas travelling to countries in the Middle East from which Jews were forcibly ejected, or countries where a sexual apartheid operated or torture a standard project, was a recommended means of broadening the mind)."

So Anthony's "friends" were talking about Israeli apartheid at the beginning of the 80s? Really?

And then he goes to the West Bank and sees nothing worthy of comment in that regard?

And also to Arab countries where he sees/hears nothing of Palestinian refugee camps full of people actually ejected from Palestine in 1948, yet can parrot Zionist propaganda about Middle Eastern Jews "ejected"* from Arab countries?

What to make of a guy who can see no evidence of Israeli apartheid while in occupied Palestine, but mutters of  "sexual apartheid" long before hijabs and niqabs became all the rage after 9/11?

What to make of a guy who sees "torture" everywhere in the Middle East but in Israel?

I'm beginning to understand why he's working for the Guardian and spruiking YNH.

Now here's another telling extract from Fallout:

"The Iraq War and the events of 11 September 2001 do not enjoy a conventional causal relationship. No evidence exists... that links Saddam Hussein to the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. And yet without 9/11 it seems certain that Iraq would not have been invaded... The destruction of the Twin Towers transformed... global politics. It created a new paradigm - the rogue state as a facilitator of a previously unimagined scale of terrorism... "

No evidence exists... and yet Anthony seems to have no trouble in linking, however tenuously, Saddam Hussein with 9/11. It - the 9/11 acts of terrorism - created a new paradigm?

No, a cabal of Ziocons, both within and without the Bush administration, created that paradigm long before 2003, and Bush, Blair, Howard and the rest ran with it, invading and occupying Iraq, destroying the Iraqi state, sowing death, destruction, division and sectarianism wherever they went, and paving the way for AQI and its even more murderous offspring, ISIS. But, in Anthony's ambiguous characterisation, there's not a hint of this.

And isn't this bit of whataboutery so like that of every other Israel apologist you've ever read?:

"By convention, when it comes to Middle East affairs, only a terrible abuse performed by the Israeli army tends to provoke Western liberals into organized condemnation."

Any wonder he's promoting YNH in the Guardian.

[*Just click on the 'Arab Jews' label below for the facts.]

Settler Haters Hate

One of the most common and tiresome of expressions tossed around by Israel firsters is hate speech. In practice, the term is usually aimed at anyone who dares to speak out against Israeli criminality. Presumably, for these tossers, only critics of Israel indulge in hate speech. Not so.

If it's the real thing you want, try beating the following vile rant by Netanyahu speechwriter, Dror Eydar, published in the Sheldon Adelson-owned Israeli tabloid, Israel HaYom (Israel Today).  It is, if you will, the textual counterpart of those flag-draped Israeli mobs currently roaming the streets of Jerusalem looking for Palestinians to do over.

Where did I find this gem? Tellingly, in this week's Australian Jewish News!

To spare you the full technicolour yawn, I've settled for extracts of same, interspersed with my own comments:

"What has the death culture that surrounds us sought to sell in the past 100 years? Look around: there are no Jews in Iraq and no 'territories' in Syria, and nevertheless the angels of death gleefully slaughter each other. No science and no industry and no inventions that will benefit humanity. Just death..." (Seeing our enemies for what they are, 4/7/14)

And why are there no Jews in Iraq? Because Israel, having rendered 78% of Palestine Arabrein in 1948, had homes and land to spare. The solution? Uproot Arab Jewish communities wherever possible. (Just click on the Arab Jews label below for details.)

As for "no 'territories'" in Syria, Eydar seems to have forgotten all about the Israeli-occupied SYRIAN Golan Heights.

"If we don't realise that the executioners who pack the condemned into cattle trucks and lay them by the dozens or hundreds in ditches and put them to death amid devilish ululations, and if we don't get that this bunch is operating on our borders, and that its successes encourage our own local death culture, we will have to pay heavier prices in the future."

Notice how Eydar has no compunction whatever in smearing the brutalised victims of Israel's occupation as cut from the very same cloth as takfiri executioners?

"We must employ full force against the emissaries of the death culture, those who aid them, their military and civilian infrastructure, their sources of funding, their families, their clans, and anyone who knows something but just nods his head and keeps quiet."

Gee, has anyone been left out? Every Palestinian man, woman and child is guilty in the eyes of this hate-monger.

"Instead of trying to understand..."

Who needs a brain?

"... we should look at it as a natural phenomenon. No-one negotiates with cancer cells - we fight to dig them out at the root. If new ones appear? We'll fight again. And if, heaven forbid, again? We'll fight again. That's our fate. In the past 150 years we have learned to grasp a scythe with one hand and a sword with the other."

"Cancer cells"? The chutzpah of it all:

Eydar's East European Jewish caliphate fanatics, under the patronage and protection of His Britanic Majesty's government, invade and colonise the poor, war-torn, non-European land of Palestine (1917-48).

By 1948, having reached critical mass and muscle, they send most of the natives packing.

Then, resting only long enough to digest their homes and lands, and beat their scythes into swords (1948-67), they snap up the rest of the natives' patrimony in 1967, sending yet more of them packing in the process.

Those who remained came under occupation, while bit by bit being relieved of their land, which was colonised by messianic American Jewish caliphate fanatics, who - immune to such subtleties as the phenomenon of psychological projection - took to referring to the natives as, among other things, "cancer cells."

"Aah, the accusers said, they're settlers, so it's understandable... but that's just it - we're all settlers. Not just in the hills of Samaria and Judea, but also in Tel Aviv. In the eyes of our neighbors and some parts of the world we are all people who stole a land that wasn't theirs."

You said it, Dror.

"This blood libel is spread every day by anti-Semites and haters of Israel, as well as by useful idiots among us."

Hm... So anything other than the official, albeit false, Zionist narrative is now a "blood libel."

Hey, here's an idea: maybe dissenters from the party line could be charged with the crime of  ZND.

ZND? Zionist narrative denial!

But wait, I'm sure the legislation is already in the pipeline.

"But this is the truth: We are settlers because we returned to settle our forefathers' inherited land. It's simple. This country was a wasteland that waited for its rightful descendants for 2000 years, like a mother keeping her milk for her true children, like a woman waiting endlessly for her lover who disappeared."

Oh, FFS, spare us!

Using Force, Rewriting History & Getting Away With It

In an opinion piece in Tuesday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald, international editor Peter Hartcher concluded his commentary on the the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre as follows:

"As it did 25 years ago in a very different situation, China is using force, rewriting history, and getting away with it." (China muscles its way to power, 3/6/14)

(The present tense is using refers, of course, to the recent sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat by a Chinese vessel in the South China Sea.)

Whatever this formulation's applicability to China, however, I was struck by how well it summed up Israel's modus operandi: using force, rewriting history, and getting away with it.

Thank you, Mr Hartcher.

But typically, not in a million would Hartcher, rambammed in 2009 and 2011, ever say any such thing about the apartheid state, its long history of murder and mayhem, its false historical narrative, and its Scarlet Pimpernel-like ability to evade censure and sanction.

To take just two recent examples from The Australian Jewish News of history rewritten:

1) A supplement to the AJN last month, Yom Ha'atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) 2014-5774, leads with a two-page spread A journey through history, by Nathan Jeffay.

Essentially a tourism ad, the only history we get here is:

a) that "the modern Jewish state" was established on May 14, 1948.
b) that an attack by Arab armies followed the above.
c) that three "Zionist militias" (the Palmach, the Etzel "paramilitary organisation, also known as the Irgun and commanded by the man who became Israel's 6th Prime Minister, Menachem Begin," and the "hard-line Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang") made this glorious event possible.

What we don't get is any mention of Palestinians or the fact of their ethnic cleansing at the time.  They are completely absent from Jeffay's journey through history.

2) An article by Uri Butnaru, The forgotten refugees, in the AJN of 23/5/14. This begins:

"The decision by the Canadian parliament earlier this year to recognise the refugee status of 850,000 Sephardi Jews forced to leave Arab lands such as Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Libya between 1948 and the early 1950s is another small step towards justice. Being the son of an Iraqi Jewish refugee, it gladdens my heart that in a small way the world is starting to understand that there was suffering on both sides of the conflict, sparked by the establishment of Israel in May 1948 - it wasn't just the Palestinians who were dispossessed and displaced. Sephardi Jews from Arab lands had to leave everything behind, their homes and all their possessions. But while not one of the 22 Arab countries that could have taken in the displaced Palestinians did so, for the Sephardi Jews there was one tiny country in the world that welcomed them with open arms."

Butnuru's is, of course, a propaganda piece premised on a false equivalence, namely that both Palestinians and Arab Jews were "refugees," sharing a similar experience and fate (summed by Butnuru as "dispossession and displacement") and that Israel's sole involvement in the matter extended to nothing more than merely "welcom[ing] them with open arms."

A Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) report from March 28, 1950 gives the lie to this:

"Premier David Ben Gurion returned today from his 3-weeks leave and tonight will attend a joint session of the Israel Cabinet and the Jewish Agency executive, called to explore the possibilities of the immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel after they are permitted to leave Iraq." (Ben Gurion returns from vacation; discusses immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel, jta.org)

The key word here, of course, is immigration. Broadly, while the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland by Zionist forces, Arab Jews emigrated from Iraq with more than a little help from Ben Gurion and friends.

Now I could stop here, but let's go on and explore some of the differences between the experiences of Palestinian refugees on the one hand, and Iraqi Jewish emigrants on the other.

Here, for example, is a description of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian port city of Jaffa in late April, 1948, courtesy of our aforementioned Israeli 'paramilitary' chieftain, Menachem Begin:

"Then a strange phenomenon was revealed before our eyes: the mass flight from Jaffa. Arab civilians and a variety of Arab 'fighters' suddenly began to leave in panic. There appear to have been two causes for this epidemic flight. One was the name of their attackers and the repute which propaganda had bestowed on them.* The Beirut correspondent of the United Press cabled that when the first boat-load of refugees arrived there from Jaffa they reported that the information that this attack was being made by the Irgun had thrown the population into a state of abject fear. The second factor was the weight of our bombardment. I do not know exactly how many [mortar] shells we sent into Jaffa. Yigal Yadin, Operations Officer of the Haganah, told me afterwards that we had not been sufficiently economical with our precious shells. The total load was certainly very heavy." (The Revolt: Story of the Irgun,1952, p 363)

[*A veiled reference to the Irgun's Deir Yassin massacre of April 9, 1948.]

Nothing even remotely comparable happened to Iraqi or any other Arab Jewish community.

To stick with the example of Iraq's Jews, news of Zionist atrocities against Palestinian civilians in 1948, the Iraqi army's involvement in the war against a Zionist takeover of Palestine, and the existence in Iraq of an armed Zionist underground, all combined to foster the view that Iraqi Jews constituted a potential 5th column for Israel.

The Iraqi government initially reacted by seizing the property of Iraqi Jews known to be in Israel, and some Jews began leaving Iraq illegally by December 1948. When restrictions on the emigration of Iraqi Jews were lifted in March 1950, a spate of mysterious bombings of Jewish targets in Baghdad followed, leading to a mass emigration, mostly to Israel, from May to August 1950. Evidence points to the work of Zionist terrorists seeking to speed up the process. (See my posts Greg Sheridan: Charmed by Israel's 'Most Dangerous Politician', 21/12/07; Shameless Israeli Propaganda at the WaPo, 3/12/14)

Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, crowed in a telegram that "[The emigration] is striking vindication persistent and daring efforts of Mossad Ha'Aliyah [underground Zionist movement for encouraging emigration] which in long years of underground work... succeeded creating movement which breathed new spirit into traditionally submissive Iraqi Jewry." (quoted in Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries, Michael R. Fischbach, 2008, p 56)

To return to our opening theme: aggression in spades, rewritten history on a grand scale, and getting away with it every time. Israel makes the Chinese look like mere amateurs.

Shameless Israeli Propaganda at the WaPo

"US envoy Martin Indyk... told [Jewish leaders] that a final peace treaty [between Israel and the Palestinians] could provide for compensation to Jews forced out of Arab countries after the founding of Israel in 1948. That would give descendants of those refugees living in Israel a potential financial stake in a deal long assumed to also provide compensation for Arabs who left land in what is now Israel." (Proposal for Israeli borders, Anne Gearan, Washington Post/Sydney Morning Herald, 1/2/14)

Putting to one side, if you can, one's cynicism at the decades-old farce of an Israeli-Palestinian 'peace' process brokered by Israel's "true friend" (Obama's description), and focusing solely on WaPo journalist Anne Gearan's choice of words here, one is compelled to ask how she can be allowed get away with the following two grievous misrepresentations: "Jews forced out of Arab countries" and "Arabs who left land in what is now Israel"?

The truth, of course, is the very reverse. To write that "Arabs" simply "left" Palestine in 1948 is, of course, now standard fare for mainstream reporters who, for whatever reasons, bend over backwards to obfuscate the fact and extent of Zionist ethnic cleansing at the time.

But to top that with the fiction that the post-1948 Israeli government-engineered immigration of Arab Jews to Israel was an equivalent Arab ethnic cleansing is to enlist directly as a spear carrier in Israel's current propaganda campaign to undermine the legitimate claims of Palestinian refugees.

I've exposed this kind of dishonesty before, of course, and you need only click on the 'Arab Jews' label below for the details. For those interested, here are two more items on the subject which give the lie to Gearan's (& Indyk's) shameless partisanship:

"In January 1952, about half a year after the official conclusion of the operation that brought Iraq's Jews to Israel, two Zionist activists, Yosef Basri and Shalom Salah, were hanged in Baghdad. They had been charged with possession of explosive materials and throwing bombs in the city center. According to the account of Shlomo Hillel, a former Israeli cabinet minister and Zionist activist in Iraq, their last words, as they stood on the gallows, were 'Long live the State of Israel.' It would have been only natural for Iraqi Jews in Israel to have reacted with outrage to news of the hanging. But on the contrary, the mourning assemblies organized by leaders of the community in various Israeli cities failed to arouse widespread solidarity with the two Iraqi Zionists. Just the opposite: a classified document from Moshe Sasson, of the Foreign Ministry's Middle East Division, to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett maintained that many Iraqi immigrants, residents of the transit camps, greeted the hanging with the attitude: 'That is God's revenge on the movement that brought us to such depths.' The bitterness of that reaction attests to an acute degree of discontent among the newly arrived Iraqi Jews. It suggests that a good number of them did not view their immigration as the joyous return to Zion depicted by the community's Zionist activists. Rather, in addition to blaming the Iraqi government, they blamed the Zionist movement for bringing them to Israel for reasons that did not include the best interests of the immigrants themselves." (From The Jews of Iraq, Zionist Ideology, & the Property of the Palestinian Refugees of 1948: An Anomaly of National Accounting, Yehouda Shenhav, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1999, p 605)

"'It is far from the first instance of tampering with, exploiting, and deleting our history, but it is the straw that broke the camel's back, and so... we formed the Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan.' That is how writer, poet and activist Almog Behar described a decision by a group of Jews from Arab and Kurdish backgrounds to speak out forcefully against renewed Israeli government propaganda efforts to counter Palestinian refugee rights by using the claims of Jews who left Arab countries for Israel in the 1950s. Israeli diplomats, Haaretz reported last week, 'have been instructed to raise the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries at every relevant forum. This part of a new international campaign to create parity between the plight of Jewish and Palestinian refugees, Deputy Foreign Minister Daniel Ayalon announced on Monday.'

"'The way the Israeli establishment uses our history from the 1950s is not in order to give us our rights back, but in order to get rid of the rights of the Palestinians, and avoiding a peace agreement with them,' Behar wrote to The Electronic Intifada. The idea is that Palestinian refugee and property rights are negated by equivalent claims from Jews from Arab countries, thus absolving Israel of having to make any restitution to Palestinians. Jews who left Iraq and some other Arab countries in the 1950s for Israel were deprived of their property and citizenship. But in an extraordinary statement posted on Facebook last week, the newly-formed Committee of Baghdadi Jews in Ramat-Gan, of which Behar is a founding member, hit back: 'We are seeking to demand compensation for our lost property and assets from the Iraqi government - NOT from the Palestinian Authority - and we will not agree with the option that compensation for our property be offset by compensation for the lost property of others (meaning Palestinian refugees) or that said compensation be transferred to bodies that do not represent us (meaning the Israeli government).'

"The statement went on to demand an investigation of Israel's complicity in the departure of Iraqi Jews from their homeland including terrorist acts against Jews: 'We demand the establishment of an investigative committee to examine: 1) If and by what means negotiations were carried out in 1950 between Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri as-Said, and if Ben-Gurion informed as-Said that he is authorized to take possession of the property and assets of Iraqi Jewry if he agreed to send them to Israel; 2) who ordered the bombing of the Masouda Shem-Tov synagogue in Baghdad, and if the Israeli Mossad and/or its operatives were involved. If it is determined that Ben-Gurion did, in fact, carry out negotiations over the fate of Iraqi Jewish property and assets in 1950, and directed the Mossad to bomb the community's synagogue in order to hasten our flight from Iraq, we will file a suit in an international court demanding half of the sum total of compensation for our refugee status from the Iraqi government and half from the Israeli government.'

"The role of Israel and Zionist undercover agents in helping precipitate the departure of Jews from Iraq has long been suspected. Naiem Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who joined the Zionist underground as a young man in Iraq and later came to regret his role in fostering the departure of some 125,000 Jews from Iraq, wrote that 'Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country.' But 'the terrible truth,' Giladi said, 'is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews'." (From Iraqi Jews reject 'cynical manipulation' of their history by Israel, Zionists, writer Almog Behar tells EI, Ali Abunimah, electronicintifada.net, 17/9/12)

Zionism Happened

Drop everything and read this fascinating account of the Galilee village of Buqei'a in the 1920s:

"Turning aside, the cavalcade rode into the village [of Bukeia], one of the oldest in Palestine, and extremely interesting as it holds the most ancient community of Jews in the Holy Land. They have been there for many centuries; according to their own story they are the descendants of the Jews who lived there before the Dispersion, it is quite probable they are, and that they escaped both Roman and Arab exterminators. It is in a most inaccessible spot in the mountains, and may well have been overlooked, even by those professed and bitter anti-Semites, the Crusaders. In this village, small as it is there are 3 distinct communities, Christian, Jew and Moslem, they live, and always have done, in the most perfect amity and accord. The Jewish community claims that both the Christians and Moslems living amongst them are of Hebrew blood, that they represent the people who apostatized many centuries ago. It is certain that the good offices of both these communities have time and again, according to the local tradition, saved the Jews of the village from persecution and even martyrdom, under the many conquerors these villages have known since Flavius Josephus surrendered in the well of Jotapata, and the last trace of independent Israelitish rule disappeared. A small Druze community, also, inhabits the outskirts of the place and lives on the most cordial relationship with the other peoples." (Galilee Galloper, Douglas V. Duff, 1935, pp 92-93)

The "cavalcade" referred to by Duff was a contingent of Palestine police led by a Briton known to the Palestinians of western Galilee as 'Abu George'. They had ridden into Buqei'a to investigate the murder of a Christian woman.

Writes Duff tellingly:

"Riding into the village at the head of his men, Abu George had expected to find the place seething with excitement, and to find the Christians demanding vengeance at his hands from one of the other sects, a situation which would have arisen in any other part of Palestine. Here the elders of the four communities had met together and were solemnly discussing the affair."

(The murderer, as it happens, turned out to be the woman's husband.)

Known also as Peki'in (or Peqi'in) in Hebrew, Buqei'a is now an almost exclusively Druze town.

Almost: "The only Jewish resident to remain in the village is Margalit Zinati, whose family has lived in Peki'in for centuries." (Last Jewish family leaves Peki'in, Goel Beno, ynetnews.com, 3/12/07)

In Buqei'a we have the intriguing case of a Palestinian Arab village, in which Arab Muslims, Arab Christians, Arab Jews and Arab Druze had lived harmoniously together for centuries, but which is now almost exclusively Druze.

So what happened to destroy this tiny model of sectarian co-existence? 

In a word, Zionism.

In the 1920s and 30s, the British flooded Palestine with European Zionist colons, the latter hell-bent on transforming a multi-sectarian land into a Jewish majority state. The native Arabs, as natives have done throughout the history of European colonialism, resisted this foreign invasion, a resistance that today's Zionists and their dupes still seem to find utterly surprising and totally unreasonable for reasons that escape me.

Unfortunately for Palestine's Arab Jews, however, the Zionist colons' fraudulent conflation of Zionism with Judaism led to them being tarred with the Zionist brush. And so, when indigenous Arab resistance to the Zionists and their British backers peaked, in 1929, and again from 1936-1939, Arab Jews also felt the heat. The result in Buqei'a? In 1936, at the start of the first great Palestinian uprising, most of its Arab Jews left, never to return.

Those in search of an indigenous Palestinian model of ethno-religious harmony, as inspiration for a future non-sectarian, non-Zionist state between 'the river and the sea', need look no further than the little Palestinian village of Buqei'a as it was in the 1920s.

Cassandra Wilkinson & Herstory

The Australian's holy war against the demonic forces of the pro-Palestinian BDS movement in Australia took a most unusual turn today with an opinion(ated) piece by columnist Cassandra Wilkinson, Boycott continues centuries-old hatred.

Described at the Australian as a "strategy consultant," an adviser to ex-NSW Labor politicians, Michael Costa and Christina Keneally, and a "regular SkyNews commentator on political issues," Wilkinson has never before, so far as I'm aware, broken into print on the subject of Palestine/Israel. Nor, it appears, has she ever been rambammed. And as for Exodus - that'd be the second book of the Bible, right?

Still, there exists at least one sign that the lady's for turning. Here she is, for example, discoursing on "20th century security":

"The history of 20th century security shows that when the West turns a blind eye to trouble around the world, things get worst [sic]. When the French and British ran out of Suez, the Middle East got less safe..." (Sky News, The Nation with Helen Dalley, Kerry Chikarovski, Cassandra Wilkinson & Ed Husic, scottryan.com.au, 8/11/12)

Wowee, break out the pith helmets and the puttees NOW!

Apparently, back in '56, the Britz and the Frogz should've told Eisenhower to go get stuffed, shocked and awed Cairo, pursued Nasser all the way to his spiderhole in the sticks, put him on trial for stealing the Suez Canal, pronounced him guilty and strung him up. The fact that they didn't means the Middle East's been all down hill since then.

A recent (23/5) twitter exchange yields another insight. Make of it what you will:

Glenn Barling: great article this morning in the australian.
Cassandra Wilkinson: thanks - small gesture of solidarity from a Bondi girl to her neighbours.

And so to Wilkinson's column:

She's deeply troubled about something she calls "the bonds of convenience growing between elements of the Left and anti-Semitism."

Her beloved UNSW, in particular, is a real worry:

"The student activists who tried to prevent the University of NSW from allowing Mr Brenner [!] to open on campus, claimed the BDS campaign was initiated in 2005. Such sloppy referencing and fact-checking wouldn't pass muster on their exams, I hope. As it happens, I studied history at UNSW - something the protesters could profit from before they graduate. A basic grasp of history shows us the boycotting of businesses is a longstanding tactic in the campaign of hate against the Jewish people."

Let me get this straight, Wilkinson's study of history at UNSW taught her that boycotts of Jewish businesses have always been, are now, and will always be nakedly anti-Semitic. Right...

Maybe, if that's what is being dished out as history at UNSW, our 'offending' student activists would do well to ignore her advice.

It's painfully obvious here that however much 'history' Wilkinson actually studied at UNSW she still does not have the wherewithal to distinguish between Jews as Jews and Jews as Zionists.

Never mind, she still has the wherewithal (UMURDOCH?) to con her readers into thinking of the Israeli corporation which owns the Max Brenner brand as just a sweet little man standing behind a counter against a backdrop of yummy chocolate allsorts.

The only alternative explanation is that she really does believe that to be the case. Hell, maybe she's the kind of person - poor thing! - who walks into, say, a Dick Smith outlet expecting to see the guy in person.

That Ms Wilkinson has a 'way' with history becomes appallingly apparent at the start of her next paragraph:

"Boycotts of Jewish merchants were practised in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and later across eastern Europe..."

Let's focus, shall we, just on the Ottoman Empire? Unless she's prepared to cite a source or two for the assertion that boycotting Jewish shops was a feature of life under the Ottomans, I think we can safely dismiss it as garbage.

For my part, however, having read the fascinating study Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (2011) by Michelle U. Campos, Assistant Professor of the Modern Middle East at the University of Florida, the only reference to a boycott I could find was a joint Muslim/Christian/Jewish Ottoman citizen boycott of Austro-Hungarian products following the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Just one quote should suffice: "Importantly, Muslims were not the only participants in the imperial boycott, and in many locations Christians and Jews were also active as organizers, mobilisers, and participants. When the mass demonstrations spread inland to Jerusalem, they were led by the Mufti Taher al-Husayni, but he was joined by Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian representatives who were elected to serve alongside him on a boycott committee." (p 104)

On the general status of Ottoman Jews, Campos writes as follows:

"For the Ottoman state... population diversity was a product of, and a powerful testament to, successful empire building. The eponymous founder of the dynasty, Osman, had consolidated his power in Asia Minor in the late 13th century through alliance with local Turkic tribes and Christian principalities. As the empire spread throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, later sultans continued to integrate their diverse subjects into the state... After the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, Sultan 'Fatih' Mehmet ('the Conqueror') retained the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and strategically moved Jews into the city to replace the fleeing Byzantines. Decades later, in 1492, when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, Sultan Beyazit II famously welcomed the exiles to Ottoman shores.

"The point of this recounting is not to argue that the Ottoman Empire was a multicultural paradise, for it surely was not. As an Islamic empire it maintained an 'institutionalized difference' between Muslims and non-Muslim subjects which was accentuated - or indeed erupted - in times of crisis. Non-Muslim populations were organized, counted, taxed, legislated, and otherwise 'marked' according to their confessional or ethno-confessional communities. At the same time, however, non-Muslim communities were allowed a tremendous degree of self-governance and autonomy in the realms of communal institutions and religious law, and comparatively speaking, the status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire was far better than that of non-Christians in Europe." (pp 8-9)

To say that Wilkinson's grasp of history is shaky is to indulge in understatement:

"In 1922, the Fifth Palestine Arab Congress called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses."

An Arab Congress meeting in Nablus in 1922 resolved to boycott the elections for a proposed gerrymandered Legislative Council. This had nothing whatever to do with 'Jewish businesses'.

"In 1943, the Arab League banned the purchase of 'products of Jewish industry'."

The Arab League was not founded until 1945.

"Note I have passed over here the not insignificant events of 1933-45 lest I fall foul of politicians such as Greens MP David Shoebridge..."*

When it comes to the subject of boycotts, I certainly won't be passing over the Nazi era. The fact is that when American Jews called for a boycott of German goods in 1933, the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) opposed the idea: "It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers." (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Lenni Brenner, 1983, p 59)

Now let me draw Wilkinson's attention to the Zionist anti-Arab boycott: "But this [Zionist] craze for the possession of [Palestinian] land did not prevent the [British] Government from attempting to protect [Palestinian Arab] cultivators against displacement through the sale of land over their heads. It was no secret that no Arab could be employed on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund. In fact clause 23 of the lease agreement [Jewish] settlers are required to sign, makes it incumbent on the lessee 'to execute all works connected with cultivation of the holding, only with Jewish labour." (Palestine Through the Fog of Propaganda, M.F. Abcarius, 1946, p 131)

Ah, but why bother with the real facts or the actual dynamics of the colonial struggle still underway in Palestine, when you're just a cog in the machinery of the Australian's holy war against defenders of Palestinian rights? Just get on with it and smear to your heart's content:

"In reality [the BDS] is the most recent name for a centuries-old economic persecution of Jews for having the temerity to become educated and entrepreneurial despite their exclusion from many occupations, geographies and institutions."

Wilkinson's grasp on the present is equally shaky.

She is shocked that NSW Labor MLC Shaoquett Moselmane** "disgraced the house by accusing Israel of running torture camps..."

Moselmane was, of course, referring to the notorious Khiam Prison in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon (1982-2000), and his disgraceful accusation just happens to be supported by Human Rights Watch. (See Torture in Khiam Prison: Responsibility & Accountability, 27/10/99.)

Wilkinson is also shocked by Moselmane's claim that "Israel is driven by a 'craving to take over other people's lands'," seemingly oblivious to Israel's 65 years of territorial expansion, aka wiping Palestine (and chunks of Syria and Lebanon) off the map. She then has the gall to accuse him of being "particularly guileless in his views"!

Finally, Wilkinson spruiks the thoroughly bogus London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism*** as though it's the only thing capable of preventing the seemingly "trivial or childish" BDS protest at UNSW from morphing into something - Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean? - more "potent."

"The Left," she cries, must "stand with those who educate women, stand with those who let gays serve openly in the military, stand with those who allow free speech and political activism. Stand, in short, with the Jewish people and their state of Israel."

It's hard to believe she's even read the declaration, which calls on its signatories to legislate against hate crime, essentially Zio-speak for criticism of the Zionist project and its manifold crimes against the Palestinian and other Arab peoples.

Doesn't it say somewhere in the Old Testament that 'It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt'?

[*Yet another indication of Wilkinson's shoddy journalism. This 'Correction' appeared in The Australian on 24/5: "Cassandra Wilkinson's opinion article in The Australian yesterday... incorrectly attributed a quote, which accused supporters of Israel of 'using the Holocaust for political purposes', to NSW Greens MLC David Shoebridge. In fact, the statement was made by fellow Greens MLC John Kaye. The Australian apologises to Mr Shoebridge for the error."; **See my 3/4/13 post Doing the Donkey in the NSW Knesset 10; ***See my 17/5/13 post The Tel Aviv Declaration on Combating Criticism of Israel.]

Ending a 'Diaspora'

"A State of seven hundred, eight hundred thousand Jews cannot be the climax of a vigil kept unbroken through generations and down the patient centuries... No! So empty a State would be little justified, for it would not change the destiny of Jewry, or fulfill our historic covenant. The duty of the State is to end Galut [exile of the Jews] at last. Perhaps our generation will not live to see a homecoming from the New World, or from Russia in the Old World, but, when the war is over and the State made strong, what let or hindrance will deny us early sight of the ending of the Diaspora in Moslem lands of North Africa and the Middle East, and in Western Europe no less!"

David Ben Gurion, 13/8/48 (Cited in his book, Rebirth & Destiny of Israel, 1954, pp 276-277)

Could Nassir Sharhoom be onto something here?: "A new wave of Iraqi Christians has fled to northern Iraq or abroad amid a campaign of violence against them and growing fear that the country's security forces are unable or, more ominously, unwilling to protect them. The flight - involving thousands of residents from Baghdad and Mosul, in particular - followed an October 31 siege at a church in Baghdad that killed 51 worshippers and two priests and a subsequent series of bombings and assassinations singling out Christians... Those who fled the latest violence - many in a panicked rush, with only the possessions they could pack in cars - warned the new violence presages the demise of the faith in Iraq. Several evoked the mass departure of Iraq's Jews after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. 'It's exactly what happened to the Jews', said Nassir Sharhoom, 47, who fled last month to the Kurdish capital, Erbil, with his family from Dora, a once-mixed neighbourhood in Baghdad. 'They want us all to go'." (Iraqi Christians flee violence, New York Times/ Sydney Morning Herald, 18/12/10)

If Nassir's correct, and what is happening to Iraqi Christians is exactly what happened to Iraqi Jews after 1948, then it's Zionist operatives who are behind this current exodus.

So what exactly happened to Iraqi Jews in the years immediately following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948? The incredible story of the dark force responsible for ending, to use Ben-Gurion's euphemism for 'uprooting', Iraqi Jewry is told by British historian David Hirst in his first-rate history of the Palestine problem, The Gun & the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East (1977). I present it here in abridged form:

"It was the last day of Passover, April 1950. In Baghdad, the Jews had spent it strolling along the banks of the Tigris in celebration of the Sea Song. This was an old custom of the oldest Jewish community in the world; the 130,000 Jews of Iraq attributed their origins to Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile. A good 50,000 of them thronged the esplanade. By nine o'clock in the evening the crowds were thinning out. But on Abu Nawwas street young Jewish intellectuals were still gathered in the Dar al-Beida coffee-shop.

"Suddenly, the convivial atmosphere was shattered by an explosion. A small bomb, hurled from a passing car, had gone off on the pavement just outside. By chance no one was hurt. But the incident shook the Jewish community. They were convinced that Iraqi extremists wanted to kill them. The fainter-hearted began to murmur 'it is better to go to Israel'. The next day there was a rush to the offices where Jews wishing to renounce their Iraqi citizenship had to present themselves for registration. Their right to emigrate had been officially acknowledged by the government on the feast of Purim a month before. Its object was to prevent emigration by illegal means... In all, about 10,000 Jews signed up to leave after the bomb; the big Ezra Daud synagogue had to be set aside as a registration office... The panic did not last very long, however, and registration tapered off...

"Then there was another explosion. This time it was at the US Information Centre, where many young Jews used to come and read. Again the theory was that an extremist Iraqi organization had planted the bomb, which only by chance failed to hurt anyone. Once again, therefore, there was a rush on the Ezra Daud synagogue; only this time the panic - and the number of would-be emigrants - was less than before. The year ended, and March 1951, the time-limit set for the renunciation of citizenship, was approaching.

"The third time there were victims. It happened outside the Mas'uda Shemtov synagogue... That day in January the synagogue was full of Kurdish Jews from the northern city of Suleimaniyyah. Outside a Jewish boy was distributing sweetmeats to curious onlookers. When the bomb went off he was killed instantly and a man standing behind him was badly wounded in the eyes.

"And this time there was no longer any doubt in Jews' minds: an anti-Jewish organization was plotting against them. Better to leave Iraq while there was still time. The queues lengthened outside the Ezra Daud synagogue... A few days later the Iraqi parliament passed a law confiscating the property of all Jews who renounced their citizenship... The planes started arriving at a rate of 3 or 4 a day. At first the emigrants were flown to Nicosia accompanied by an Iraqi police officer. But after a while even that make-believe was dropped and they went directly to Israel's Lydda airport - the police officer returning alone in the empty plane. Before long all that was left of the 130,000, abandoning home, property and an ancient heritage, was a mere 5,000 souls.

"It was not long before a bombshell of a different kind hit the pathetic remnants of Iraqi Jewry. They learned that the 3 explosions were the work not of Arab extremists, but of the very people who sought to rescue them; of a clandestine organization called 'The Movement', whose leader, 'commander of the Jewish ghettoes [!] in Iraq', had received this letter from Yigal Allon, chief of the Palmach commandos, and subsequently Foreign Minister of Israel: 'Ramadan my brother... I was very satisfied in learning that you have succeeded in starting a group and that we were able to transfer at least some of the weapons intended for you. It is depressing to think that Jews may once again be slaughtered, our girls raped, that our nation's honour may again be smirched... should disturbances break out, you will be able to enlarge the choice of defenders and co-opt Jews who have as yet not been organized as members of the Underground. But be warned lest you do this prematurely, thereby endangering the security of your units which are, in fact, the only defence against a terrible pogrom'.

"The astonishing truth - that the bombs which terrorized the Jewish community had been Zionist bombs - was revealed when, in the summer of 1950, an elegantly dressed man entered Uruzdi Beg, the largest general store in Baghdad. One of the salesmen, a Palestinian refugee, turned white when he saw him. He left the counter and ran out into the street, where he told two policemen: 'I recognize the face of an Israeli'. He had been a coffee-boy in Acre, and he knew Yehudah Tajjar from there. Arrested, Tajjar confessed that he was indeed an Israeli, but explained that he had come to Baghdad to marry an Iraqi Jewish girl. His revelations led to more arrests, some 15 in all. Shalom Salih, a youngster in charge of Haganah arms caches, broke down during interrogation and took the police from synagogue to synagogue, showing them where the weapons, smuggled in since World War II, were hidden. During the trial, the prosecution charged that the accused were members of the Zionist underground. Their primary aim - to which the throwing of the three bombs had so devastatingly contributed - was to frighten the Jews into emigrating as soon as possible. Two were sentenced to death, the rest to long prison terms.

"It was Tajjar himself who first broke Jewish silence about this affair. Sentenced by the Baghdad court to life imprisonment, he was released after ten years and found his way to Israel. On 29 May 1966 the campaigning weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh published an account of the emigration of Iraqi Jews based on Tajjar's testimony. Then on 9 November 1972, the Black Panther, militant voice of Israel's Oriental Jews, published the full story...

"When Ben-Gurion made his impassioned pleas for immigrants to people of the new-born state of Israel, he was addressing European Jews (from both the New and the Old Worlds) in particular. Not only had European jury founded Zionism, it was the main source of that high- quality manpower, armed with the technical skills, the social and cultural attitudes which Israel needed. But with the Holocaust over, the source was tending to dry up. So the Zionists decided that 'Oriental' Jewry must be 'ingathered' as well. It is often forgotten that the safeguard clause of the Balfour Declaration - 'it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of the exisiting non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in other countries - was designed to cover Diaspora Jews as well as native Arabs. But the uprooting of a million 'Oriental' Jews showed that, for the Zionists, it was a clause to be ignored in both its parts. Everywhere they applied the same essential techniques, but nowhere perhaps, with such thoroughness as they did in Iraq. 'Cruel Zionism', someone called it." (pp 155-160)

Revolted

Nothing much shocks me anymore when I read the howling nonsense (and worse) written on the Middle East in the corporate press, but the brazen neoconservative cheerleading of the following letter in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald revolted me to the core:

"Caroline Rae (Letters, December 1) says the truth about the Iraq war 'has not been pretty'. War is always ugly, but most of the time the outcome has been worth it. Despite the gruesome stories in the initial stages of the war and the number of deaths (most inflicted by insurgents on their own population), Iraq has emerged as a country standing up on its own feet, hungry for democracy and prosperity. Iraq today has countless newspapers scrutinising its government. It has minority groups lobbying for more power in parliament, something unheard of in most Arab nations. And an Iraqi minister has been charged with corruption. Ever had that happen in this great democracy of ours." (Alice Khatchigian Ryde)

What inspires someone (presumably neither in the pay of Rupert Murdoch nor one of the Zionist faithful) to sit down, compose and actively seek to publish such crap? From what unfathomable depth of blissful ignorance and/or ideological blindness did it emerge? Normally I suppose I would have just dismissed it with a curse on the head of the letters editor for giving the bloody thing oxygen. However, I just happen to be reading one of those books about the ongoing gang rape of Iraq (by the Coalition of the Willies) which makes you realise that it is worse - far worse - than you ever expected. The back cover blurb for Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned & Academics Murdered (edited by Raymond W Baker, Shereen T Ismael & Tariq Y Ismael, 2010) gives you the gist:

"Why did the invasion of Iraq result in cultural destruction and the killing of intellectuals? Conventional wisdom portrays these events as the resut of poor planning and accidents of war in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. However, the authors of this book argue that the reality is very different. The authors reveal that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state in order to remake it as a client regime. The post-invasion chaos was not an accident but a deliberate aim of the invasion, creating conditions under which the cultural foundations of the state could be undermined. The authors painstakingly account for the willful inaction of the occupying forces, which led to the ravaging of one of the world's oldest recorded cultures. In addition to the destruction of unprotected museums and libraries, they document the targeted assassination of over 400 academics, widespread kidnapping and the forced flight of thousands of doctors, lawyers, artists and other intellectuals. All in all, they show that Iraq suffered a comprehensive cultural cleansing which was part of a deliberate attempt to weaken and ultimately to end the Iraqi state. This important book lays to rest claims that the invasion aimed to free an educated population to develop its own culture of democracy."

And here's part of the introduction: "The consequences in human and cultural terms of the destruction of the Iraqi state have been enormous: notably the deaths of over 1 million civilians; the degradation in social infrastructure, including electricity, potable water, and sewage systems; the targeted assassination of over 400 academics and professionals and the displacement of approximately 4 million refugees and internally displaced people. All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people. Rampant chaos and violence hamper efforts at reconstruction, leaving the foundations of the Iraqi state in ruins. The majority of Western journalists, academics, and political figures have refused to recognize the loss of life on such a massive scale and the cultural destruction that accompanied it as the fully predictable consequences of American occupation policy. The very idea is considered unthinkable, despite the openness with which this objective was pursued. It is time to think the unthinkable. The American-led assault on Iraq forces us to consider the meaning and consequences of state-destruction as a policy objective. The architects of the Iraq policy never made explicit what decontructing and reconstructing the Iraqi state would entail; their actions, however, make the meaning clear. From those actions in Iraq, a fairly precise definition of state-ending can now be read. The campaign to destroy the state in Iraq involved first the removal and execution of Saddam Hussein and the capture of Ba'ath Party figures. However, state destruction went beyond regime change. It also entailed the purposeful dismantling of major state institutions and the launching of a prolonged process of political reshaping. Contemporary Iraq represents a fragmented pastiche of sectarian forces with the formal trappings of liberal democracy and neo-liberal economic structures. Students of history will recognize in the occupation of Iraq the time-honoured technique of imperial divide et imperia (divide and rule), used to fracture and subdue culturally cohesive regions. The regime installed by occupation forces in Iraq reshaped the country along divisive sectarian lines, dissolving the hard-won unity of a long state-building project. The so-called sovereign Iraqi government, the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC), established by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), was founded as a sectarian ruling body, with a system of quotas for ethnic and professional groupings. This formula decisively established the sectarian parameters of the 'new Iraq'." (pp 4-5)

I thought I'd google Khatchigian and see what came up. I found the following letter to the editor, again on the subject of Iraq: "Robert Krochmalik is being too kind in his letter about the diminished Jewish communities in Arab nations being merely 'forced to leave'. My father, who was a young boy in Baghdad in 1948, recalls how Jews were dragged through the streets with ropes around their necks to be hung on lampposts, and dragged out of their homes and beaten almost to death as onlookers cheered." (brisbanetimes.com.au, 11/8/09) No source I've read on the subject (and I can highly recommend Iraqi Jews: A History of Mass Exodus, Abbas Shiblak, 1986/2005) comes anywhere near corroborating Khatchigian's shocking allegation. I can only conclude that it's black propaganda.

PS: I note that our 'expert' de jour on Iraq continues to peddle her neoconservative cliches. The following appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald of 4/12/09: "If Steven Prentice expects a definition of 'worth it' in regards to the Iraq war, it is this: that any number of deaths in war is tragic, but this is and always has been the price we pay for freedom. Is freedom not worth fighting for?"

Unfortunately, the mainstream press being what it is, I expect this isn't the last we'll be hearing from this insufferable creature.

Spinning Refugees

Remember how Zionist propagandists used to flog the lie that the Palestinians of 1948 simply melted away at the behest of Arab leaders, leaving an astonished Jewish community scratching their scones in wonderment? This whopper was, of course, always a diversion, designed to shift the spotlight from Zionist ethnic cleansing onto alleged Arab military orders. However, it was really too absurd an explanation for the 'exodus' of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, around 85% of the indigenous population of the areas overrun by Zionist forces at the time, and fell victim to the labours of historians, Western, Israeli and Arab. Although still occasionally trotted out by the lower echelons of the Israeli propaganda machine, no reputable historian, Israeli or otherwise, will have a bar of it. The more streetwise among the legions of Zionist pen pushers are now, it seems, prepared to admit (60 years on!), albeit grudgingly and contemptuously, that, 'Yes, OK, the bloody Palestinians were dispossessed, but so what: "I would like to remind Randa Abdel-Fattah (October 4) that the Palestinians do not have a monopoly on dispossession."* (From a letter in Good Weekend by Lorin Blumenthal, Bondi Beach, 25/10/08)

[Imagine the howls of outrage at 'I would like to remind Elie Wiesel that European Jewry does not have a monopoly on genocide'.]

In an effort to wriggle out of responsibility for such a crime, however, a new lie was required: "Dare I mention the thousands of Jews forced to leave their homes in other Arab nations, where they had lived for centuries, due to violence and persecution?" (ibid)

If you think about this, and Blumenthal's hope is that you, the reader, won't, she is asking you to swallow the morally indefensible notion that, all things being equal (& I'll get to that later), while Zionist forces may have ethnically cleansed Palestine in 1948, the Arabs are guilty of ethnically cleansing Jews from Arab countries. Where this argument falls flat, of course, is in its assumption that, because the ethnically cleansed Palestinians are Arabs, and Arabs (other Arabs, that is) ethnically cleansed Jews from their lands, this somehow absolves Jews (other, European Jews, that is) from responsibility for Palestinian dispossession.

Let us, for the sake of argument, take seriously Blumenthal's allegation that Jews were dispossessed by Arabs. If we were in a position to ask her when exactly this alleged dispossession took place, she'd say 'in the fifties'. But notice she doesn't supply this information. And there's a reason for that: if the reader were told that the dispossession of the Palestinians came first - in 1948 - he or she might legitimately conclude that the so-called dispossession of Jews from Arab countries was undertaken in revenge for the earlier dispossession of the Palestinians, and that Israel, therefore, bears primary responsibility for perpetrating such a crime. Propagandists like Blumenthal therefore tend to avoid any reference to timing and prefer to leave the reader labouring under the mistaken notion that both dispossessions - the real and the alleged - took place simultaneously.

I now come to the allegation itself - that Arab Jews were dispossessed by Arabs. It is, of course, false, as I have shown in earlier posts (see Greg Sheridan: Charmed by Israel's 'Most Dangerous Politician' 21/12/07 & Hue & Cry on the Letters Page 5/1/08). The Israeli daily Haaretz, however, recently (15/8/08) carried a pertinent article by Yehuda Shenhav, professor of sociology at Tel Aviv University, titled Hitching a ride on the magic carpet. Some excerpts:-

"An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past 3 years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries - depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a 'right of return' on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of 'lost' assets. The idea of drawing this analogy constitutes a mistaken reading of history, imprudent politics, and moral injustice. "

Shenhav went on to tell the story of the rise and fall of the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC), an earlier manifestation of this spin: "The WOJAC figure who came up with the idea of 'Jewish refugees' was Yaakov Meron, head of the Justice Ministry's Arab legal affairs department. Meron propounded the most radical thesis ever devised concerning the history of Jews in Arab lands. He claimed Jews were expelled from Arab countries under policies enacted in concert with Palestinian leaders - and he termed these policies 'ethnic cleansing'. Vehemently opposing the dramatic Zionist narrative, Meron claimed that Zionism had relied on romantic, borrowed phrases ('Magic Carpet', 'Operation Ezra & Nehemiah') in the description of Mizrahi immigration waves to conceal the 'fact' that Jewish migration was the result of 'Arab expulsion policy'. In a bid to complete the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, WOJAC publicists claimed that the Mizrahi immigrants lived in refugee camps in Israel during the 1950s (ie ma'abarot or transit camps), just like the Palestinian refugees. The organization's claims infuriated many Mizrahi Israelis who defined themselves as Zionists. As early as 1975, at the time of WOJAC's formation, Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu declared: 'We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations'. Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: 'I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists'. In a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: 'I have this to say: I am not a refugee'. He added: 'I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee'." Shenhav described how WOJAC's funding was eventually cut off and Meron fired from the Arab legal affairs department: "Today," he asserted, "no serious researcher in Israel or overseas embraces WOJAC's extreme claim."

After pointing out that the current crop of campaigners around this 'issue' have "learned nothing from [WOJAC's] woeful legacy," Shenhav concluded: "Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own volition. In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression."

The fact that Blumenthal's Zionist folderol (and that of others like her) continue to dominate the letters pages of the corporate press is a sad indictment of the ignorance and/or partisanship of its editors.

Hue & Cry on the Letters Page

Factual references to Palestine or Palestinians in the letters pages of the mainstream press inevitably elicit a fierce baying from a pack of dedicated Zionist media hounds.

Their latest hue and cry, in The Australian of January 4, was occasioned by a January 3 letter by Bob Birch (Smiths Lake, NSW) on the subject of David Hicks. Responding to a call by a previous letter writer (Henry Geelhoed, 29/12/07) for the cancellation of Hicks' (and anyone else's) citizenship for fighting other peoples' wars, Bob relevantly observed, "Curiously, he omits to mention those Australians of Jewish descent who have served in Israel's wars with its Arab neighbours, and who continue to serve in the Israel Defence Force's oppression of the indigenous inhabitants of Israel/Palestine."

Well, Bob's letter set off the pro-Israel pack something terrible. Leading the charge was Vic Alhadeff (CEO, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Darlinghurst NSW). Vic took umbrage at Bob's "swipe" at the IDF, which he defended as an outfit "obliged to respond to the ominous threat of terrorism [which it did] in accordance with international law." Well, no. Israeli human rights monitor, B'Tselem's 2002 report, Trigger Happy - Unjustified Gunfire and the IDF's Open-Fire Regulations during the al-Aqsa Intifada , for one, suggests otherwise.

Vic also took exception to Bob's reference to the Palestinians as the "indigenous inhabitants of Israel/Palestine." The real indigenes, he asserted, "are Jews; they have been there for 3800 years." Well, yes and no, Vic, the Devil is, as always, in the detail. Consider Palestinian scholar, Nur Masalha's reference to same: "[I]t would not be unreasonable to argue that the modern Palestinians are more likely to be the descendents of the ancient Israelites (and Canaanites) than Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom were European converts to Judaism. Certainly historically...many of the original Jewish inhabitants of ancient Palestine had remained in the country but had accepted Christianity and Islam many generations later." [The Bible & Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology & Post Colonialism in Palestine-Israel, Verso, 2007, p 253]

In any event, such 'We've been around longer than you lot' talk cannot gainsay the fact that the Palestinians, now a minority in Palestine-Israel, were there well before the Zionist colonial project, resulting in what is now Israel, expelled them beyond the borders of historic Palestine.

Peter Cohen (Ormond, Vic) was also there, snapping at Bob's heels, but to some comic effect: so outraged was Peter, as his fingers fairly flew over the keyboard, that he wrote, "Henry Geelhoed (29-30/12) tells us that Israel attacks the 'indigenous inhabitants' of Palestine," oblivious of the fact that it was really Bob Birch, not Henry Geelhoed (the gent to whom Bob had responded), who was his intended target. Alas, poor Henry. So reactive, so blood-to-the-head, are these Zionist attack dogs that collateral damage, a specialty of the trigger happy IDF, is bound to result.

Of course, for Peter, as for Vic, Palestine's "indigenous inhabitants" could only be Jews, or at least "the descendents of Jews whose families remained in Israel after the Roman revolt..." "The Roman revolt"? Goodness, more comedy? Surely he means the Jewish Revolt against the Romans (66-70 AD), the one that resulted in the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem.

Then there's his final paragraph: "And don't forget the half of Israel descended from nearly a million Jews who fled from other Arab lands, and the Christians, Baha'i and others who also found refuge in the democratic State of Israel." Peter's a laugh a minute. "A million Jews who fled...other Arab lands"? I dealt in my first post, below, with the issue of "Jews who fled Arab lands" - in reality Arab Jews, numbering some 500,000, who emigrated to Israel following Zionist efforts to uproot them. "Christians, Baha'i...who found refuge in...Israel"? God only knows what Christians he's on about, surely not indigenous Palestinian Christians? And as for Baha'is, www.bci.org/boise/persecut points out that some Baha'is were exiled in the 1860s to Ottoman Palestine, where their leader, Baha'u'llah, "established the world centers of the new religion in Akka and Haifa long before the establishment of the State of Israel."

Finally, the yappiest of them all: Michael Burd, without whose snarl no letters page of The Australian is complete. Michael asked Bob "to look at the world map and see all the conflicts involving David Hicks' mates: apart from Palestine, none has anything to do with Israel or the Jews."

Ah Michael, you really should pick up a copy of Israeli scholar, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi's The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms & Why, I.B. Tauris, 1988, p xii: "Mention any trouble spot in the Third World over the past 10 years, and, inevitably, you will find smiling Israeli officers and shiny Israeli weapons on the news pages. The images have become familiar: the Uzi submachine gun or the Galil assault rifle, with Israeli officers named Uzi and Galil, or Golan, for good measure. We have seen them in South Africa, Iran, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Namibia, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Bolivia, and many other places from Seoul To Tegucigalpa, from Walvis bay to Guatemala City, from Taipei to Port-au-Prince, Israeli civilians and military men have been helping, in their own words, in 'the defence of the West'."

That was then. What about now? Here's just a glimpse:1) "...the leaders of the nationalist Hindu Indian People's party (BJP) decided in 1999, after a fresh wave of bloody clashes with Kashmiri guerillas.., to call on Israeli expertise to help quell the guerilla war in Kashmir...Israel is now India's second-largest arms supplier after Russia." [Sharon and Vajpayee see eye to eye in war on terror, The Guardian Weekly, 18/9/03] 2) "Israeli intelligence and military operatives were, by mid-2004, quietly at work in Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and...running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and Syria. The Israeli operatives include members of the Mossad...who work under cover in Kurdistan as businessmen..." [Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Seymour Hersh, Allen Lane, 2004, p 353] 3) "New allegations that Israeli arms dealers helped the army of Ivory Coast attack a French military base look likely to reignite long-tense relations between Israel and France." [Analysis: Israel hand seen in Ivorian clash, World Peace Herald, 17/11/04] 4) "Israel has passed Britain to become the world's fourth largest weapons exporter." [Defense Min: Israel now world's fourth largest weapons exporter, Haaretz, 9/12/07].

Greg Sheridan: Charmed by Israel's "Most Dangerous Politician"

Greg Sheridan is The Australian's Foreign Editor. He is also a recipient of the Zionist Federation of Australia's Jerusalem Prize "for his support for Israel." (The Australian Jewish News, 27/4/07) Currently in Israel, he's been talking to some VIPs - VIPs like Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, dubbed by Hebrew University's Professor Zeev Sternhell, "Israel's leading academic specialist on fascism and totalitarianism...[as] 'perhaps the most dangerous politician in the history of the state of Israel.' " (Extreme right-winger to join Israeli government, The Scotsman, 23/10/06)

Lieberman, who heads a party called Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), was born in Moldova and emigrated to Israel in 1978. As a Jew he became an instant citizen under Israel's Law of Return. This parvenu, whom Sheridan found "charming in a rough, Russian way," (Israeli right-winger redraws the battle lines, The Australian, 17/12/07) has a bellicose bee in his Moldovan bonnet about the indigenous peoples of the area, whether Israeli Arabs (who should be moved out of Israel), inhabitants of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (who should be treated like the Russians treat the Chechens), or other Arabs, such as Egyptians (whose Aswan dam should be bombed). (Israel must treat Gaza like Russia does Chechnya: hardliner, AFP, 1/11/06)

Sheridan really digs Lieberman, finding him, "...more open to compromise than many Israelis." But what could Sheridan possibly mean here by "compromise"? Does Lieberman believe in ending the 40-year Israeli occupation of the territories, allowing for a contiguous Palestinian state on 22% of historic Palestine? As if! No, Lieberman believes that "as well as territory, Israel should give away people too, in particular its Muslim Arab citizens. He doesn't want to expel them exactly, just redraw some borders so that some Arab towns and villages move into a new Palestinian state nextdoor, thus making Israel a more Jewish state." Seems that in Israel the word 'compromise' is as movable as the word 'borders'.

At first Sheridan seems to recoil from such a Clayton's "compromise": "The idea of excluding people on the basis of their ethnicity or religion is anathema to every liberal principle..." But, where Israel is concerned, "liberal principles" can always be compromised and excuses found: "Yet it conforms to the reality of the Middle East. Hamas extremists are trying to kill, convert or drive into exile the tiny Christian minority in the Gaza Strip. The Jewish minorities have been driven out of virtually every Arab state. And even the logic of objecting to every Jewish settlement in the West Bank can be seen as endorsing the notion that Israel should bequeath the Palestinians a state which contains not a single Jew."

Let us examine these bold but specious assertions. First, that the reality of the Middle East is ethno-religious exclusion. This is certainly the case with Israel, and does not depend on whether or not Lieberman's brand of ethnic cleansing is one day implemented. As a Jewish state, representing not its citizens (one fifth of whom are Arabs), but 'the Jewish people' from Moldova to wherever, Israel privileges Jews over non-Jews. This is true both for its own non-Jewish citizens, who are denied access to land and resources within Israel, and to the stateless Palestinian refugees expelled by Zionist forces in 1948 from their homes and lands in what is now Israel, who are denied the right of return. As American-Palestinian academic Joseph Massad puts it: "...Israeli racism...manifests in its flag, its national anthem, and a bunch of laws that are necessary to safeguard Jewish privilege, including the Law of Return (1950), the Law of Absentee Property (1950), the Law of the State's Property (1951), the Law of Citizenship (1952), the Status Law (1952), the Israeli Lands Administration law (1960), the Construction and Building Law (1965), and the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and Palestinians of the occupied territories." (Israel's right to be racist, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007836/op1.htm) No other Middle Eastern state, whatever their failings, comes anywhere near the Israeli reality of ethno-religious exclusivism.

Second, that Hamas is "trying to kill, convert or drive into exile the tiny Christian minority in the Gaza Strip." One recent source, the Jerusalem Post, no less [Gaza: Christian-Muslim tensions heat up, 25/9/07], reports an attack on an 80 year-old Christian woman by "a masked man" who "demanded her money." This led to an appeal by Palestinian Christians to Hamas "to make an effort to protect Christians." Curious that they should be appealing to a movement allegedly involved in "killing, converting and exiling" Christians. In fact, as Palestinian academic, Khaled Hroub, has written: "In its conduct towards the Palestinian Christians Hamas has shown extraordinary sensitivity...there have been no religious-driven or sectarian friction or riots in Palestine during the lifetime of Hamas that could be linked directly to the movement." (Hamas: A Beginner's Guide, pp. 90-1)

Third, that "The Jewish minorities have been driven out of virtually every Arab state." Pushed or pulled, Mr Sheridan? Consider the following extract from CIA adviser, Wilbur Crane Eveland, who was in Iraq at the time (early fifties): "Just after I arrived in Baghdad, an Israeli citizen had been recognized...his interrogation led to the discovery of 15 arms caches brought into Iraq by the underground Zionist movement...In an attempt to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the US Information Service Library and synogogues, and soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. Embarrassed, the Iraqi government launched a full-scale investigation, and shared its findings with our Embassy. Iraqi Chief Rabbi Sassoon Khedouri...was urging his people to be calm and remain, remembering that they were native Iraqis first and that Judaism was only their religion, which they could practice freely as always. In spite of our constant reports that the situation in Iraq was exaggerated and artificially inflamed from without, the State Department urged us to intervene with the government to facilitate an air-lift that the Zionists were organizing to 'rescue' Iraqi Jews...Although the Iraqi police later provided our Embassy with evidence to show that the synogogue and the library bombing, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaign, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of Iraqi Jews, whom the Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase the Israeli Jewish population..." (Ropes of Sand (1980) pp. 48-9)

Fourth, the laughable assertion that "the logic of objecting to every Jewish settlement in the West Bank can be seen as endorsing the notion that Israel should bequeath to the Palestinians a state which contains not a single Jew," is like asserting that, because the French objected to the German occupation of France in WW2, they must have been prejudiced against Germans.

Of course, there's more, much more, but let's fast forward to Sheridan's oh so understanding conclusion: "What [Lieberman's] political rise does show is just how weary people are getting of the failure to solve the conflict and how longingly many Israelis are looking to straightforward notions such as separation as their salvation." What the rise (and rise?) of Lieberman actually reveals is the rising racism at the very heart of the Jewish state. As Palestinian-American academic, Saree Makdisi, has pointed out, the only difference between Lieberman and mainstream Israeli politicians is that while they both "agree that a line of concrete and steel ought to be drawn with Jews on one side and as many Arabs as possible on the other," the latter "argue that it is OK to have a few Arabs on the inside, as long as they behave themselves, and don't contribute too heavily to what Israelis refer to as 'the demographic problem'." (http://www.counterpunch.org/makdisi03312006.htm)

Partisan journalism doesn't get much better than this.