Today is Nakba Day, which marks the 65th anniversary of the expulsion of around 85% of Palestine's indigenous Arab population from those parts of the territory overrun by Zionist forces in 1948.
Those expelled, augmented by further mass expulsions in 1967, make up the Palestinian refugee problem which is still with us today. Needless to say, this is because Israel refuses to repatriate these refugees simply in order to maintain a Jewish supremacist state in historic Palestine.
I've often wondered if anyone in Palestine in the years/months immediately prior to the Zionist campaign of ethnic cleansing which began in December 1947 could see, or at least sense, what was coming.
Two unblinkered observers of Palestine's Jewish community at the time, both British, certainly came close.
The following disturbing portrait of the community comes from the novelist, playwright and travel writer Robin Maugham (1916-1981), a nephew of Somerset Maugham, and appears in his 1947 book Approach to Palestine:
"It seemed to me, as I travelled round Palestine that too much time had been spent arguing the rights and wrongs of the business and far too little time in examining dispassionately the facts. Noble perorations to the converted cannot transfer populations or transmute Jews into Arabs. There are probably over 700,000 Jews in Palestine today. They are there - in the wide streets they have built and in the lovely orange groves they have planted on land that was desert. They vary in type from the old, religious gentle Zionist (who settled there before the Balfour Declaration) to the 16 year old, atheist, Russian-trained gangster who joins in a raid within 3 days of his secret landing. There are infinite variations in type and in attitude. All generalisation is bound to be inaccurate. But I found that the Jews I met could be divided into precisely the same categories as the Germans I knew in Berlin before the war.
"I found merchants and doctors who only wanted to get on with their jobs and to be left in peace. These were the moderates. Some approved of illegal immigration. All condemned terrorism. But moderates all over the world are generally the quiet, docile people. The tragedy of moderates is that they are ineffective. I asked these Jews, the friendly shopkeeper and the talkative barman, the old German specialist and the Australian tailor, I asked them why they did nothing to stop terrorism and illegal immigration. 'But what can we do to stop it?' they replied. 'How can we control the Jewish Agency? We're only little people of no importance. There's nothing we can do.' It was the same answer I used to hear in Germany, in Italy, and in Austria.
"Many of the Jews in Palestine went there to escape an evil. They decided to build a new country. For the sake of their friends still in Europe and for the sake of their children they suffered great hardship. Slowly, painfully, the desert was made fertile, the avenues were constructed. And now the evil they sought to escape has come upon them.
"Striding along the roads between the rich groves and over the blue hills of the Holy Land come bands of brown-skinned vigorous boys, flushed and bright-eyed, chanting their patriotic songs. The satchels clamped on the back of lean, healthy bodies clad only in shorts, the defiant gaze, even (surprisingly enough) the curly blonde hair - all is the same as in Hitler's Germany. Buses full of school children bellowing their slogans rush through the streets of Tel Aviv. And the parents cannot control them.
"'I would not even know if my son belonged to the Irgun Zwei a shopkeeper said with tears in his eyes. 'He would not tell me. He tells me nothing.' The old man was leaning across the counter talking to me. As he spoke, three boys of about fourteen walked into the shop, barged violently against me and ran out. I met Jews who were friendly, Jews who were nervous, men and women who openly supported the terrorists, people who said (with a backward glance to make sure that they were not overheard) that they loathed the Jewish Agency and longed to leave Palestine. The adults varied. But every single Jewish child I saw looked at me with unconcealed hatred. And every single one could speak no language except Hebrew. Fascism has come to Palestine. And the Jewish young man is potentially more dangerous than the storm trooper. He is more intelligent." (pp 85-87)
Another equally disturbing snapshot of the community comes from an article in the May 1948 edition of The Nineteenth Century Magazine, Palestine Note-Book. It was written by Bevil John Rudd (1927-2009), an officer in the Coldstream Guards:
"When I took part in the search for arms in the Jordan Valley settlements, I was very impressed with the grim determination and unity that the settlers displayed in the face of guns and bayonets. The communal pattern of their lives became clearer. It was pathetic to see photographs of their children among the parents' precious belongings, up to the age of about five, and then none at all until they were nearly grown up. From six years old they seemed to have been sent away to the child-rearing settlements. There is no such thing as family life. On the roads I have often seen bands of young children slogging along on a settlement route march. I have never seen, in the open, a mother and father with their child, not even with their baby in a pram. The babies live in a communal nursery. Parents were miserable as they told how they were only allowed to see their babies when they have come in after twelve hot hours work in the fields.
"The crudest living arrangement of all seemed to be in the tents, which housed a training company of Hagana. There were six grizly men and one girl sleeping in each tent. None of these ferocious youths had any belongings except blankets. They were a hard, pitiless band.
"In an Upper Galilee settlement, there is a Stock farm for human beings. Fine figures of Jewish youths are imported and breeding is accelerated. This blatant method of race production revolted us.
"After all these observations my mind turned against this regime of gaunt, narrow-minded people, pent up with bitterness and cunning. People who suppress a child's wish to own a rattle or a bicycle. However primitive the Arab may be, I thought his individualism worth more than the Jewish modernity and lack of liberty. On the other hand, if the Jewish community plans a struggle - the survival of the fittest - in the Middle East, then mass-produced, tough, settlement stock is the breed they want. Otherwise I do not understand what all this is leading to. Surely some form of master race, so similar, it seems, to the Nazis."
Now lest any Zionist thought police out there mount their high horses to condemn Maugham and Rudd's Zionist-Nazi analogising as mere expressions of rank anti-Semitism, let them first ponder deeply the following diary entry for 17/3/45 by Lord Balfour's niece, Blanche Dugdale:
"Went to the Dorchester and had tea with Chaim [Weizmann] and Vera... [Chaim] painted a dark picture of psychology of rising generation in the Yishuv, said Ben-Gurion is much to blame and is perhaps frightened now of the devils he has failed to discourage." (Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936-1947, 1973, p 219)
And this for 25/3/45:
"After tea I walked with [Chaim] in Hyde Park, he poured out things that made him uneasy about the youth in the Yishuv. He said Ben-Gurion was largely responsible and had much on his conscience." (ibid, p 220)
Showing posts with label Blanche Dugdale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blanche Dugdale. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 15, 2013
Sunday, May 12, 2013
The Battle of Hanita 1
Continued from the previous post...
'The Jews Would Not Take No for an Answer'*
"It was in 1938 that the Jewish National Fund acquired several hundred dunums of land in the north western corner of Upper Galilee near the borders of Lebanon and notified the British administration of its intention to establish an agricultural colony on the newly purchased territory. A beginning was to be made with the redemption of the Galilean province of the Holy Land, once the most densely settled and most flourishing agricultural area of Palestine, now for the most part a howling wilderness of rock and treeless solitude.
"The Palestine administration at once vetoed the project. The High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, based his objection on the argument that colonists taking up residence in so remote and isolated a district would present a constant temptation to Bedouin raiders both from across and inside the borders of Palestine. The nearest Jewish inhabitants were in eastern Galilee, too far for their settlers to come to the aid of an establishment in western Galilee in the event of danger. If the Jews, the High Commissioner intimated, instead of starting in the extreme northern wilds of Galilee, would establish colonies in the south of that province and then gradually push northward, establishing colonies chainwise or rather like stepping-stones in the direction of the frontier, something might perhaps be said for the reclamation of Galilee. But to establish the first settlement at the extreme limit of no man's land, was a too hazardous enterprise for which he, Sir Harold, would not assume responsibility.
"The directors of the Jewish Agency replied that they would be glad enough to establish an entire chain of colonies but that the administration's land-buying regulations had so far precluded the purchase of sites that might serve as steppingstones on the road to the north. They must therefore start where they could - that is, on the spot which had just recently become the property of the Jewish people. Sir Harold proved adamant. His interpretation of the mandate which charges Britain with facilitating 'the close settlement of Jews on the land' works out in practice in placing, by order of the government of Great Britain, of course, as many obstacles in the way of the purchase of land by Jews as possible and after that, if the Jews still succeed in getting hold of a plot of barren, rocky, desert land on which no human being in his right sense would live, in discouraging them from settling on it.
"Only, the Jews would not take no for an answer. They could not abide by the High Commissioner's decision. In withholding his official fiat, the High Commissioner may well have been carrying out his duty in that he acted in the spirit of those restrictive measures designed against and imposed upon Jewish Palestine by a narrow-minded, anti-Jewish bureaucracy in the sole interests not of the British Empire, but of a handful of feudalistic Arab landowners. The Palestinian Jews, on the other hand, could not do otherwise than what they did. They insisted again and again that the High Commissioner's decision be revoked and that the colony be opened up - that particular colony and others, always more colonies and settlements by hook or by crook. For the Palestinian Jews feel behind their backs the ever-growing anguish and desperate pressure of the homeless and hopeless Jewish masses in Europe still seeking a way out of what had become to millions of them a gruesome deathtrap or a living hell after Hitler's advent to power...**
"After months of wearisome palaver, pleading and insisting on the one side, haggling and quibbling on the other, with references to the Colonial Office in London going to and fro, the High Commissioner finally, reluctantly gave in. The Jews were permitted to establish that colony on their own land in their own country. They could go out there to that desolate spot in Galilee if they wanted to, but they must not blame the administration if disaster should overtake them on the pioneer trail.
"Mi yivne ha-Galil? Who will build Galilee? the young people sang that night all over Palestine, when the government's decision became known. El yivne ha-Galil! God will build Galilee! came the answering chorus." (pp 208-211)
Will the valiant White Man succeed in carving out Godzone in the howling wilderness of Upper Galilee or will he succumb to the onslaught of the savages who infest its trackless wastes? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of The Battle of Hanita.
[* Heading and emphases are mine; **Van Paassen is rewriting 1938 in light of later, wartime developments. Here's the real motive for 'reclaiming' the Galilee: "Re Palestine: Chaim [Weizmann] and the Palestinians [i.e. Palestine's Jewish leadership] hold the view that the turn of the Yishuv to be sold to the Arabs is very near. We cannot yet resist by arms - we can only work by every means, fair and foul (all is kosher now) to buy land, bring in men, get arms. And in 2-3-4 years we will bring the Jewish State into being." (Blanche Dugdale, Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947, 1973; entry for 1/10/38, page 110]
'The Jews Would Not Take No for an Answer'*
"It was in 1938 that the Jewish National Fund acquired several hundred dunums of land in the north western corner of Upper Galilee near the borders of Lebanon and notified the British administration of its intention to establish an agricultural colony on the newly purchased territory. A beginning was to be made with the redemption of the Galilean province of the Holy Land, once the most densely settled and most flourishing agricultural area of Palestine, now for the most part a howling wilderness of rock and treeless solitude.
"The Palestine administration at once vetoed the project. The High Commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, based his objection on the argument that colonists taking up residence in so remote and isolated a district would present a constant temptation to Bedouin raiders both from across and inside the borders of Palestine. The nearest Jewish inhabitants were in eastern Galilee, too far for their settlers to come to the aid of an establishment in western Galilee in the event of danger. If the Jews, the High Commissioner intimated, instead of starting in the extreme northern wilds of Galilee, would establish colonies in the south of that province and then gradually push northward, establishing colonies chainwise or rather like stepping-stones in the direction of the frontier, something might perhaps be said for the reclamation of Galilee. But to establish the first settlement at the extreme limit of no man's land, was a too hazardous enterprise for which he, Sir Harold, would not assume responsibility.
"The directors of the Jewish Agency replied that they would be glad enough to establish an entire chain of colonies but that the administration's land-buying regulations had so far precluded the purchase of sites that might serve as steppingstones on the road to the north. They must therefore start where they could - that is, on the spot which had just recently become the property of the Jewish people. Sir Harold proved adamant. His interpretation of the mandate which charges Britain with facilitating 'the close settlement of Jews on the land' works out in practice in placing, by order of the government of Great Britain, of course, as many obstacles in the way of the purchase of land by Jews as possible and after that, if the Jews still succeed in getting hold of a plot of barren, rocky, desert land on which no human being in his right sense would live, in discouraging them from settling on it.
"Only, the Jews would not take no for an answer. They could not abide by the High Commissioner's decision. In withholding his official fiat, the High Commissioner may well have been carrying out his duty in that he acted in the spirit of those restrictive measures designed against and imposed upon Jewish Palestine by a narrow-minded, anti-Jewish bureaucracy in the sole interests not of the British Empire, but of a handful of feudalistic Arab landowners. The Palestinian Jews, on the other hand, could not do otherwise than what they did. They insisted again and again that the High Commissioner's decision be revoked and that the colony be opened up - that particular colony and others, always more colonies and settlements by hook or by crook. For the Palestinian Jews feel behind their backs the ever-growing anguish and desperate pressure of the homeless and hopeless Jewish masses in Europe still seeking a way out of what had become to millions of them a gruesome deathtrap or a living hell after Hitler's advent to power...**
"After months of wearisome palaver, pleading and insisting on the one side, haggling and quibbling on the other, with references to the Colonial Office in London going to and fro, the High Commissioner finally, reluctantly gave in. The Jews were permitted to establish that colony on their own land in their own country. They could go out there to that desolate spot in Galilee if they wanted to, but they must not blame the administration if disaster should overtake them on the pioneer trail.
"Mi yivne ha-Galil? Who will build Galilee? the young people sang that night all over Palestine, when the government's decision became known. El yivne ha-Galil! God will build Galilee! came the answering chorus." (pp 208-211)
Will the valiant White Man succeed in carving out Godzone in the howling wilderness of Upper Galilee or will he succumb to the onslaught of the savages who infest its trackless wastes? Stay tuned for the next exciting episode of The Battle of Hanita.
[* Heading and emphases are mine; **Van Paassen is rewriting 1938 in light of later, wartime developments. Here's the real motive for 'reclaiming' the Galilee: "Re Palestine: Chaim [Weizmann] and the Palestinians [i.e. Palestine's Jewish leadership] hold the view that the turn of the Yishuv to be sold to the Arabs is very near. We cannot yet resist by arms - we can only work by every means, fair and foul (all is kosher now) to buy land, bring in men, get arms. And in 2-3-4 years we will bring the Jewish State into being." (Blanche Dugdale, Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947, 1973; entry for 1/10/38, page 110]
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Labor's Zeitgeist Error & Other Bruises
Labor has got Israel all wrong, contends Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan in his latest opinion piece in The Weekend Australian, Carr and Rudd completely wrong on Israel (9/3/13).
"The sad case of Ben Zygier, the Mossad agent who committed suicide... brings to the fore the strange pathologies in Australian opinion concerning Israel [and] also underlines just how badly the Labor government has gone off course in its conception of Israel, and Israel's place in the world... the whole case has been used, characteristically, to paint Israel as a secretive, militaristic, national security state."
Israel militaristic - no way! A national security state - perish the thought!
Ah, but as much as I read and savour every word that Greg writes, nay because I read and savour same, I have to point out that he did write last month that "Mossad secrets, including secrets involving Australians, are very hard to crack." (Mystique of Mossad its greatest weapon, 14/2/13)
Still, are such contradictions not a sign of the man's greatness? Greg need only quote the very great Walt Whitman here: "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes)"
Now just because Ozraeli Ben Zygier worked for Mossad and had a rather unusual hobby - collecting Australian passports - that certainly doesn't justify Labor's "two dominant foreign policy figures, Kevin Rudd and Bob Carr" dumping on Israel thus: "This week Rudd demanded that Israel say what Zygier was charged with" and Carr proclaimed that if Israel had used Australian passports for intelligence purposes "Australia would be outraged and, absurdly, Australians would be put at risk."
Admonished Greg wisely: "When dealing with a friendly nation surely it is reasonable to wait for evidence of an offence before throwing the switch to outrage."
Now I agree wholeheartedly with him here. It's called the presumption of innocence. After all, some people collect stamps and others passports, OK? It's called FREEDOM and if you don't like it, you can bloody well bugger off to North Korea!
How, wonders Greg, has it come to this? (Parenthetically, need I remind you that it wasn't always so. Try to remember the kind of September... sorry, I got carried away there for a moment. Remember the good old days, when Kevin had support for Israel in his DNA and Israel's 60th was celebrated in federal parliament? Remember the fabulous Kevin Rudd Roadshow to Israel and back? Remember when Julia, Tim and Albert were an awesome threesome? All but a passing memory now I'm afraid.)
"Beyond Zygier," writes Greg as he chugs upstream into Labor's heart of foreign policy darkness, "let me offer some examples of where Labor has got it so wrong on Israel and then suggest the analytical mistake at the root of these missteps."
And there, lurking in the rank, tangled undergrowth, what does he see? Why it's the very spawn of Bill Hartley himself - Gareth Evans!
"Under the baleful influence of Gareth Evans, a tremendously negative force on on contemporary Labor foreign policy who offers only a bureaucratic version of conventional wisdom (and conventional wisdom is often wrong)," Canberra not only abstained on the vote to elevate the status of Palestinian Authority to observer status at the UN but showered it with "millions of dollars" of aid money.
And this, of course, has taught those layabout Palestinians - the Middle Eastern equivalent of our dole bludgers - that they can get "something for nothing," that they don't need to compromise or negotiate with Israel because "the international community will do their job for them."
Too right, Greg! If only these bludgers would give a little. Take Jerusalem for example. Let the Israelis have East Jerusalem - all of it. They're beautiful. They deserve it. What's wrong with Ramallah for a Palestinian capital? Or, better still, Amman? Baghdad even! Or Lakemba? Why not? Think Israelaterally for a change.
But that shameful Australian abstention in the UN, which had the PA popping Australian-funded champagne corks, isn't all. Did you know that "in the Australia-UK Ministerial Meeting in January, Carr ratcheted up Australia's rhetoric on Israel"? 'Fraid so. "For the first time, [Carr's] office was describing all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal."
Just imagine, describing illegal settlements as illegal! Next thing you know he'll be calling the West Bank occupied Israeli territory. And Gaza a concentration camp!
"To simply call all Israeli settlements illegal," declared Greg, "is simplistic, reductionist, almost childish."
Absolutely! After all, just because a "Jewish suburb" of East Jerusalem is full of illegal Jewish settlers doesn't mean you can call it a 'settlement', right? And if those PA hens have been dumb enough to let "large settlement blocks [sic]" slip through in their 'negotiations' with Israeli foxes, so can the rest of us, right?
Now in addition to that, "Australia's position is also wrong in international law [because] Jordan, which formerly controlled the territory, is not the sovereign power..."
Yes, just because Israel is the only country in the world which reckons the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an Occupying Power from transferring its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, don't apply to it because Jordan's claim to the West Bank (1948-1967) was dodgy anyway, doesn't mean it isn't right, right? After all, hasn't Greg already declared that "conventional wisdom is often wrong"?
Devastating, eh? But Greg's only just getting started. Here's our bronzed ANZAC kicking sand in Nancy boy Carr's eyes:
"But why take this position at all, except to kick sand in the Israelis' eyes? China claims all of the South China Sea almost right up to the Philippines shore, yet Canberra maintains a strict neutrality. If Israel is a friend why the gratuitous aggro?"
Brilliant analogy! As Jimmie de Rothschild told another Gentile Zionist's Zionist (Blanche Dugdale if you really must know), back in '41: "I had lived so much among Jews that I was taking a Jewish point of view, and could not see things in proportion."*
But there's more! Greg's like a demon dentist whose root canal treatments just go on and on:
"The demand that Obama urgently seek a peace settlement betrays the deeper analytical flaw by Carr and Rudd."
And here's the proof: Syria's finito. Egypt's kaput. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided. How therefore can Israel - which is to peace what a heat-seeking missile is to heat - possibly be expected to make peace under such circumstances?
But all of the above is merely symptomatic of a deeper malaise according to Greg:
"Underlying this is the cardinal doctrine of conventional wisdom among Guardian readers, UN habitues, European think tank staff and the like, and that is the implausible notion Israel is at the heart of Middle East disputes and the West's trouble with Islam."
Now welcome as this news was to me, I must admit to wondering whether or not we have a bit of a 'one hand/other hand' problem here. I mean, on the one hand Israel can't possibly be expected to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians because Syria and Egypt and the rest are exploding all around it, but on the other the Palestinians' trials and tribulations have got nothing whatever to do with the rest of the Middle East or the wider Muslim world. But hey, Greg hasn't been well of late what with his bypasses and all, so we'll cut him some slack, OK? And anyway, he's got lovely quote from "the respected Jeffrey Goldberg, a senior editor at The Atlantic" to back him up, so there.
Lay back, relax, open your mouth wide, just a little bit more:
"Carr, Rudd and Evans add to this zeitgeist error the subsidiary error that Australia seriously damages its reputation by supporting Israel at the UN, a proposition for which there is no evidence. But even if it were true, this would be a price worth paying [because] Israel is Australia's friend and ally."
Yes, Australia, all of Australia, every man, woman and child, should wear it as a badge of pride that, of all the world's passports at its disposal, Israel should choose ours to help it do what all right-thinking people agree had to be done in Dubai. Right-thinking people like union supremo Paul Howes for example, who once wrote: "I'm proud that our nation has played a small and accidental role in the removal of the terrorist al-Mabhouh from the planet."** Any Australian tourists or travellers in the Middle East who come to grief because they're suspected by the locals of being Mossad agents can just be written off as collateral damage, OK?
[*Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947, 1973, p 183; **See my 8/5/10 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw.]
"The sad case of Ben Zygier, the Mossad agent who committed suicide... brings to the fore the strange pathologies in Australian opinion concerning Israel [and] also underlines just how badly the Labor government has gone off course in its conception of Israel, and Israel's place in the world... the whole case has been used, characteristically, to paint Israel as a secretive, militaristic, national security state."
Israel militaristic - no way! A national security state - perish the thought!
Ah, but as much as I read and savour every word that Greg writes, nay because I read and savour same, I have to point out that he did write last month that "Mossad secrets, including secrets involving Australians, are very hard to crack." (Mystique of Mossad its greatest weapon, 14/2/13)
Still, are such contradictions not a sign of the man's greatness? Greg need only quote the very great Walt Whitman here: "Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes)"
Now just because Ozraeli Ben Zygier worked for Mossad and had a rather unusual hobby - collecting Australian passports - that certainly doesn't justify Labor's "two dominant foreign policy figures, Kevin Rudd and Bob Carr" dumping on Israel thus: "This week Rudd demanded that Israel say what Zygier was charged with" and Carr proclaimed that if Israel had used Australian passports for intelligence purposes "Australia would be outraged and, absurdly, Australians would be put at risk."
Admonished Greg wisely: "When dealing with a friendly nation surely it is reasonable to wait for evidence of an offence before throwing the switch to outrage."
Now I agree wholeheartedly with him here. It's called the presumption of innocence. After all, some people collect stamps and others passports, OK? It's called FREEDOM and if you don't like it, you can bloody well bugger off to North Korea!
How, wonders Greg, has it come to this? (Parenthetically, need I remind you that it wasn't always so. Try to remember the kind of September... sorry, I got carried away there for a moment. Remember the good old days, when Kevin had support for Israel in his DNA and Israel's 60th was celebrated in federal parliament? Remember the fabulous Kevin Rudd Roadshow to Israel and back? Remember when Julia, Tim and Albert were an awesome threesome? All but a passing memory now I'm afraid.)
"Beyond Zygier," writes Greg as he chugs upstream into Labor's heart of foreign policy darkness, "let me offer some examples of where Labor has got it so wrong on Israel and then suggest the analytical mistake at the root of these missteps."
And there, lurking in the rank, tangled undergrowth, what does he see? Why it's the very spawn of Bill Hartley himself - Gareth Evans!
"Under the baleful influence of Gareth Evans, a tremendously negative force on on contemporary Labor foreign policy who offers only a bureaucratic version of conventional wisdom (and conventional wisdom is often wrong)," Canberra not only abstained on the vote to elevate the status of Palestinian Authority to observer status at the UN but showered it with "millions of dollars" of aid money.
And this, of course, has taught those layabout Palestinians - the Middle Eastern equivalent of our dole bludgers - that they can get "something for nothing," that they don't need to compromise or negotiate with Israel because "the international community will do their job for them."
Too right, Greg! If only these bludgers would give a little. Take Jerusalem for example. Let the Israelis have East Jerusalem - all of it. They're beautiful. They deserve it. What's wrong with Ramallah for a Palestinian capital? Or, better still, Amman? Baghdad even! Or Lakemba? Why not? Think Israelaterally for a change.
But that shameful Australian abstention in the UN, which had the PA popping Australian-funded champagne corks, isn't all. Did you know that "in the Australia-UK Ministerial Meeting in January, Carr ratcheted up Australia's rhetoric on Israel"? 'Fraid so. "For the first time, [Carr's] office was describing all Israeli settlements in the West Bank as illegal."
Just imagine, describing illegal settlements as illegal! Next thing you know he'll be calling the West Bank occupied Israeli territory. And Gaza a concentration camp!
"To simply call all Israeli settlements illegal," declared Greg, "is simplistic, reductionist, almost childish."
Absolutely! After all, just because a "Jewish suburb" of East Jerusalem is full of illegal Jewish settlers doesn't mean you can call it a 'settlement', right? And if those PA hens have been dumb enough to let "large settlement blocks [sic]" slip through in their 'negotiations' with Israeli foxes, so can the rest of us, right?
Now in addition to that, "Australia's position is also wrong in international law [because] Jordan, which formerly controlled the territory, is not the sovereign power..."
Yes, just because Israel is the only country in the world which reckons the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an Occupying Power from transferring its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, don't apply to it because Jordan's claim to the West Bank (1948-1967) was dodgy anyway, doesn't mean it isn't right, right? After all, hasn't Greg already declared that "conventional wisdom is often wrong"?
Devastating, eh? But Greg's only just getting started. Here's our bronzed ANZAC kicking sand in Nancy boy Carr's eyes:
"But why take this position at all, except to kick sand in the Israelis' eyes? China claims all of the South China Sea almost right up to the Philippines shore, yet Canberra maintains a strict neutrality. If Israel is a friend why the gratuitous aggro?"
Brilliant analogy! As Jimmie de Rothschild told another Gentile Zionist's Zionist (Blanche Dugdale if you really must know), back in '41: "I had lived so much among Jews that I was taking a Jewish point of view, and could not see things in proportion."*
But there's more! Greg's like a demon dentist whose root canal treatments just go on and on:
"The demand that Obama urgently seek a peace settlement betrays the deeper analytical flaw by Carr and Rudd."
And here's the proof: Syria's finito. Egypt's kaput. The Palestinians are hopelessly divided. How therefore can Israel - which is to peace what a heat-seeking missile is to heat - possibly be expected to make peace under such circumstances?
But all of the above is merely symptomatic of a deeper malaise according to Greg:
"Underlying this is the cardinal doctrine of conventional wisdom among Guardian readers, UN habitues, European think tank staff and the like, and that is the implausible notion Israel is at the heart of Middle East disputes and the West's trouble with Islam."
Now welcome as this news was to me, I must admit to wondering whether or not we have a bit of a 'one hand/other hand' problem here. I mean, on the one hand Israel can't possibly be expected to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians because Syria and Egypt and the rest are exploding all around it, but on the other the Palestinians' trials and tribulations have got nothing whatever to do with the rest of the Middle East or the wider Muslim world. But hey, Greg hasn't been well of late what with his bypasses and all, so we'll cut him some slack, OK? And anyway, he's got lovely quote from "the respected Jeffrey Goldberg, a senior editor at The Atlantic" to back him up, so there.
Lay back, relax, open your mouth wide, just a little bit more:
"Carr, Rudd and Evans add to this zeitgeist error the subsidiary error that Australia seriously damages its reputation by supporting Israel at the UN, a proposition for which there is no evidence. But even if it were true, this would be a price worth paying [because] Israel is Australia's friend and ally."
Yes, Australia, all of Australia, every man, woman and child, should wear it as a badge of pride that, of all the world's passports at its disposal, Israel should choose ours to help it do what all right-thinking people agree had to be done in Dubai. Right-thinking people like union supremo Paul Howes for example, who once wrote: "I'm proud that our nation has played a small and accidental role in the removal of the terrorist al-Mabhouh from the planet."** Any Australian tourists or travellers in the Middle East who come to grief because they're suspected by the locals of being Mossad agents can just be written off as collateral damage, OK?
[*Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947, 1973, p 183; **See my 8/5/10 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw.]
Friday, March 8, 2013
The Ultimate Zionist Whinge
O dear! O dearie, dearie me!
"A song broadcast on ABC Classic FM has drawn the ire of the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) for content it says endorses genocide and the destruction of the State of Israel. Hosted by Margaret Throsby, Midday offers guests the opportunity to share their stories and request musical pieces that are significant to them. On Monday, February 25, Egyptian writer and political and cultural commentator Ahdaf Soueif was Midday's guest, and selected Jerusalem, Flower of Cities by Lebanese singer Fairuz as the final song to be played. The Arabic lyrics, in part, go as follows: 'The striking fury is on its way, and I am full of faith! The striking fury is on its way, and I will overcome the sadness.' ADC chairman Dr Dvir Abramovich told The Australian Jewish News that the song 'denies the Jewish relationship with Jerusalem... [and] speaks of 'striking' the Jews, which is a poetic synonym for killing them.' Abramovich has since written to Throsby stating that Jerusalem, Flower of Cities 'anticipates and prays for the destruction of the State of Israel.' 'It gives credibility to all those who deny any Jewish right to the land of Israel,' he said. 'While I understand that the ABC seeks to respect the choices made by its guests for musical items, I must assume that it has guidelines in this regard. I am sure, for example, that it would not play a song calling for the destruction of Australia's indigenous people.'" (The ADC vs the ABC, The AJN, 8/3/13)
*Sigh* Where to begin?
In the scholarly tradition of 'context is everything', let's start with the complete lyrics of Fairuz' beautiful song of loss and resistance, written in the wake of the Israeli seizure and occupation of Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.
The translation is my own:
For you, city of prayer,
I pray.
For you, beautiful city, flower of cities,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city of prayer,
I pray.
Our eyes travel to you every day,
Roaming the porticoes of the temples,
Embracing the old churches,
Sweeping away the sadness from the mosques.
Night of the Isra',
Path of he who ascended to the heavens,
Our eyes travel to you every day.
I pray.
The child and his mother Mary in the grotto,
Two crying faces,
Crying for the refugees,
For the children without homes,
For those who defended you, martyred at your gates.
Peace itself was martyred in the nation of peace,
And justice too died at your gates.
When Jerusalem fell,
Love retreated,
And war took root in the hearts of the world.
The child in the grotto and his mother Mary,
Two crying faces.
I pray.
That's the first, more lyrical part of the song. The lyricism then gives way to martial strains, heralding the theme of resistance to the occupiers and usurpers, and it is here that Abramovich's translation above comes unstuck. In true MEMRI fashion, he mistranslates the Arabic adjective saati' (which qualifies the noun 'anger') as 'striking' when it in fact means 'radiant, brilliant, shining'. It is perhaps best translated here as 'blinding':
A blinding anger is coming -
This I believe.
A blinding anger is coming,
Transcending the sadness.
On every road it is coming.
The steeds of fear and terror are coming,
Like the overpowering face of God.
Coming, coming, coming.
The door to our city shall not be closed.
For I am coming to pray.
I'll be knocking on all the doors,
Opening all the doors.
O River Jordan cleanse my face with your sacred waters,
Wipe out all traces of barbarian footprints.
A blinding anger is coming,
Riding on steeds of fear and terror,
Overcoming the occupying power.
Jerusalem is ours, it belongs to us.
We will celebrate its splendor.
We will bring it peace.
The wholly natural and completely legitimate tendency of dispossessed Palestinians to remember and yearn for what has been lost, and to strive to recover, by force if necessary, that which has been taken from them by force, is reduced by Abramovich to nothing more than an expression of genocidal intent.
That he lives in an ideological fantasy world where colonizers and colonized have swapped places is all too evident in his absurd assertion that the song is akin to "a song calling for the destruction of Australia's indigenous people."
Clearly, neither Fairuz, Soueif, Throsby, nor the ABC's Classic FM have a case to answer here.
But there's more! Back on April 3, Throsby aired another song about Jerusalem, chosen by her then guest, Professor Jack Rakove, a professor of history at Stanford University. The song was Jerusalem of Gold by Israeli singer Naomi Shemer. I ignored it at the time - one does have a life - but if Abramovich insists on doing a song and dance over Fairuz's song now, why not put on a show over Shemer's?
Jerusalem of Gold is mostly just padding, but the following lyrics are a real worry:
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs translation):
The wells ran dry of all their water,
Forlorn the market square,
The Temple Mount dark and deserted,
In the Old City there...
And in the caverns in the mountain,
The winds howl to and fro,
And no one takes the Dead Sea highway,
That leads through Jericho...
The wells are filled again with water,
The square with joyous crowds,
On the Temple Mount within the City,
The shofar rings out loud...
Now if that little comprehensive erasure of Palestine's indigenous Arab population doesn't smack of the genocidal (Aboriginal? What aboriginal?) colonial doctrine of terra nullius (empty land), I don't know what does. Can't have Ms Throsby getting away with that now, can we?
"A song broadcast on ABC Classic FM has drawn the ire of the B'nai Brith Anti-Defamation Commission (ADC) for content it says endorses genocide and the destruction of the State of Israel. Hosted by Margaret Throsby, Midday offers guests the opportunity to share their stories and request musical pieces that are significant to them. On Monday, February 25, Egyptian writer and political and cultural commentator Ahdaf Soueif was Midday's guest, and selected Jerusalem, Flower of Cities by Lebanese singer Fairuz as the final song to be played. The Arabic lyrics, in part, go as follows: 'The striking fury is on its way, and I am full of faith! The striking fury is on its way, and I will overcome the sadness.' ADC chairman Dr Dvir Abramovich told The Australian Jewish News that the song 'denies the Jewish relationship with Jerusalem... [and] speaks of 'striking' the Jews, which is a poetic synonym for killing them.' Abramovich has since written to Throsby stating that Jerusalem, Flower of Cities 'anticipates and prays for the destruction of the State of Israel.' 'It gives credibility to all those who deny any Jewish right to the land of Israel,' he said. 'While I understand that the ABC seeks to respect the choices made by its guests for musical items, I must assume that it has guidelines in this regard. I am sure, for example, that it would not play a song calling for the destruction of Australia's indigenous people.'" (The ADC vs the ABC, The AJN, 8/3/13)
*Sigh* Where to begin?
In the scholarly tradition of 'context is everything', let's start with the complete lyrics of Fairuz' beautiful song of loss and resistance, written in the wake of the Israeli seizure and occupation of Arab East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967.
The translation is my own:
For you, city of prayer,
I pray.
For you, beautiful city, flower of cities,
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, city of prayer,
I pray.
Our eyes travel to you every day,
Roaming the porticoes of the temples,
Embracing the old churches,
Sweeping away the sadness from the mosques.
Night of the Isra',
Path of he who ascended to the heavens,
Our eyes travel to you every day.
I pray.
The child and his mother Mary in the grotto,
Two crying faces,
Crying for the refugees,
For the children without homes,
For those who defended you, martyred at your gates.
Peace itself was martyred in the nation of peace,
And justice too died at your gates.
When Jerusalem fell,
Love retreated,
And war took root in the hearts of the world.
The child in the grotto and his mother Mary,
Two crying faces.
I pray.
That's the first, more lyrical part of the song. The lyricism then gives way to martial strains, heralding the theme of resistance to the occupiers and usurpers, and it is here that Abramovich's translation above comes unstuck. In true MEMRI fashion, he mistranslates the Arabic adjective saati' (which qualifies the noun 'anger') as 'striking' when it in fact means 'radiant, brilliant, shining'. It is perhaps best translated here as 'blinding':
A blinding anger is coming -
This I believe.
A blinding anger is coming,
Transcending the sadness.
On every road it is coming.
The steeds of fear and terror are coming,
Like the overpowering face of God.
Coming, coming, coming.
The door to our city shall not be closed.
For I am coming to pray.
I'll be knocking on all the doors,
Opening all the doors.
O River Jordan cleanse my face with your sacred waters,
Wipe out all traces of barbarian footprints.
A blinding anger is coming,
Riding on steeds of fear and terror,
Overcoming the occupying power.
Jerusalem is ours, it belongs to us.
We will celebrate its splendor.
We will bring it peace.
The wholly natural and completely legitimate tendency of dispossessed Palestinians to remember and yearn for what has been lost, and to strive to recover, by force if necessary, that which has been taken from them by force, is reduced by Abramovich to nothing more than an expression of genocidal intent.
That he lives in an ideological fantasy world where colonizers and colonized have swapped places is all too evident in his absurd assertion that the song is akin to "a song calling for the destruction of Australia's indigenous people."
Clearly, neither Fairuz, Soueif, Throsby, nor the ABC's Classic FM have a case to answer here.
But there's more! Back on April 3, Throsby aired another song about Jerusalem, chosen by her then guest, Professor Jack Rakove, a professor of history at Stanford University. The song was Jerusalem of Gold by Israeli singer Naomi Shemer. I ignored it at the time - one does have a life - but if Abramovich insists on doing a song and dance over Fairuz's song now, why not put on a show over Shemer's?
Jerusalem of Gold is mostly just padding, but the following lyrics are a real worry:
(Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs translation):
The wells ran dry of all their water,
Forlorn the market square,
The Temple Mount dark and deserted,
In the Old City there...
And in the caverns in the mountain,
The winds howl to and fro,
And no one takes the Dead Sea highway,
That leads through Jericho...
The wells are filled again with water,
The square with joyous crowds,
On the Temple Mount within the City,
The shofar rings out loud...
Now if that little comprehensive erasure of Palestine's indigenous Arab population doesn't smack of the genocidal (Aboriginal? What aboriginal?) colonial doctrine of terra nullius (empty land), I don't know what does. Can't have Ms Throsby getting away with that now, can we?
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Was Israel Born of the Holocaust? 2
"I had gone to see Ephraim Sneh, a white-haired veteran Labour Party politician. He points to a picture on the back wall of his office. It is of 2 Israeli F-15 fighters flying over Auschwitz. 'When we didn't have F-15s, we had Auschwitz,' he says." (Deep inside the plucky country, Greg Sheridan, The Australian, 19/1/08)
One of the greatest myths of our time is that, in the words of former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, "the establishment of the state of Israel begins with the unimaginable tragedy of the Holocaust."*
The myth that Israel was born of the Holocaust, a product of Israel's 24/7 propaganda mill, is trotted out again and again to justify robbing the Palestinian people of their homeland and to silence critics of Israel's crimes in Palestine. The simple fact of the matter is that the Zionist movement and its implantation and entrenchment in Palestine predated the Holocaust by decades and was an entirely separate phenomenon from the campaign of ethnic cleansing unleashed by the Nazis against European Jewry.
Whatever Jews qua Jews felt about the fate of their co-religionists in central and eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s, the issue was far from a major concern of the Zionist leadership in London or the Yishuv.
This particular truth struck home as I was reading Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947 (1973). Blanche - Baffy - was the niece of Lord Balfour and the most devoted of gentile Zionists. So much so that she became one of the members of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann's London Political Committee, even chairing it at one stage. To describe Baffy as obsessed by the Zionist project and smitten by Weizmann would be a gross understatement. (Those irresistable Zionist pheromones again!) As a key insider and Weizmann confidant, her testimony in regard to this matter deserves to be taken seriously.
The following references are listed in chronological order:
Despite Hitler's persecution of German Jewry beginning in earnest in 1933, the first of Baffy's references was to the fate of 2 Austrian Zionists in the wake of the 1938 Austrian anschluss:
8/4/38: "Walked away with Sir Wyndham Deedes [an old friend of Chaim's], who goes to Vienna for us next week. But he will not be able to get the Zionists Stricker and Friedman out of Dachau. They helped Schuschnigg with money for the plebiscite."* (p 89) [*Kurt Schuschnigg - Federal Chancellor of Austria from July 1934 until the German occupation of Austria in March 1938 Following Hitler's ultimatum to Schuschnigg on 12 February, Schuschnigg decided to hold a plebiscite on 13 March by which the Austrian people would decide whether or not to accept Hitler's terms. This was the act which led to the German occupation of Austria.]
There is only one reference to the US-initiated Evian Conference, convened to find solutions for the German Jewish refugee problem, which was boycotted by the Zionists:
24/6/38: "[Chaim] put several ideas about Evian into [Lord Winterton's*] head - notably to tell the Germans that if they want to get rid of the Jews, they must leave them some of their own money." (p 91) [*Chief British delegate at Evian conference, July 1938.]
Presumably, Weizmann was referring to money for passage to Palestine.
11/10/38: "November 11th... Armistice Day! And the news of the pogrom in Germany, as bad or worse than I dreaded and expected." (p 115)
That pogrom was of course Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, but all Weizmann could think about was funneling young, committed Zionist Pioneers (HeChalutz) into Palestine:
15/11/38: "[W]hen Chaim went to see the PM this afternoon... [he] demanded an immediate Children's Aliyah [immigration] of 1,500, and a large number of the trainees in Germany." (p 116)
For the Zionists, concern for refugees always came second to Zionist designs on Palestine:
2/12/38: "Then I went to lunch, and a long talk, with Mr Ruskin at the Dorchester... His activities are now two-fold. The organizing of a huge Refugee Loan, in conjunction with Wolf, a Dutch Jew new millionaire, is genuine, but a screen for the real thing... Ruskin has arranged for a force of 15 planes - the training of pilots - mostly near his home in Chicago - and other things against The Day." (p 117)
Perhaps the most damning reference is this:
12/12/38: "After lunch to Zionist Office where Chaim reported to us his interview with [Colonial Secretary] Malcolm [MacDonald] this morning. It seems to have been lively! Malcolm offered to take the [10,000 German Jewish] children here, but without a guarantee that they should go on. Chaim refused. He said to Malcolm 'We shall fight you from here to San Francisco and when I say fight I mean fight." (p 118)
Even Baffy couldn't help but object to Weizmann's tunnel vision: 1/2/39:
1/2/39: "Also to try to make Chaim talk of the Jewish people, and not of Zionists." (p 121)
And this, according to Baffy, was Mrs Weizmann's saddest moment: 9/10/41:
9/10/41: "[W]ent to Chaim's room for a cup of tea. Poor Vera terribly sad, the Germans are approaching her home town [of Rostov]." (p 188)
How should we interpret the word 'heavily' here?:
18/12/41: "Chaim spoke heavily today in the Yeshiva [sitting] about the spread of anti-Semitism and the measure of Hitler's success in that sphere. He has shown the humiliations to which man can subject his fellow-men, and the civilized world keeps comparative silence. This is a terrible blow to morality." (p 189)
Here's as succinct and unambiguous a statement as you could possibly ask for of Weizmann's focus at this time:
20/1/42: "Chaim warned us that effort spent on improving the lot of the Galuth [exile/diaspora] will be more or less wasted. Palestine is the only hope and future. (p 191)
Token gestures were OK though:
28/11/42: "[R]eports received from the Polish Government about the latest atrocities against Jews in Poland. It is an extermination policy now, but what can one do? All protests must be made (Palestine is organizing days of fasts and mourning) but what can be done? One or two small things only." (p 198)
Palestine only!:
15/2/43: "Busy day at Zionist Office mostly the appeal for funds for Youth Aliyah to bring the 25,000 to Palestine (if they can be collected) out of the various Balkan countries and Hungary." (p 201)
Not every Zionist was happy with Weizmann's lack of concern. This was clear at the Zionist Conference in London in August, 1945:
1/8/45: "What I chiefly felt today was the great gulf fixed between the Europeans who have actually suffered and the Americans and British. There is great (and perhaps unreasonable) feeling that the latter have not done enough." (p 223)
I rest my case.
[*See my 14/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3.]
One of the greatest myths of our time is that, in the words of former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, "the establishment of the state of Israel begins with the unimaginable tragedy of the Holocaust."*
The myth that Israel was born of the Holocaust, a product of Israel's 24/7 propaganda mill, is trotted out again and again to justify robbing the Palestinian people of their homeland and to silence critics of Israel's crimes in Palestine. The simple fact of the matter is that the Zionist movement and its implantation and entrenchment in Palestine predated the Holocaust by decades and was an entirely separate phenomenon from the campaign of ethnic cleansing unleashed by the Nazis against European Jewry.
Whatever Jews qua Jews felt about the fate of their co-religionists in central and eastern Europe in the 30s and 40s, the issue was far from a major concern of the Zionist leadership in London or the Yishuv.
This particular truth struck home as I was reading Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale, 1936-1947 (1973). Blanche - Baffy - was the niece of Lord Balfour and the most devoted of gentile Zionists. So much so that she became one of the members of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann's London Political Committee, even chairing it at one stage. To describe Baffy as obsessed by the Zionist project and smitten by Weizmann would be a gross understatement. (Those irresistable Zionist pheromones again!) As a key insider and Weizmann confidant, her testimony in regard to this matter deserves to be taken seriously.
The following references are listed in chronological order:
Despite Hitler's persecution of German Jewry beginning in earnest in 1933, the first of Baffy's references was to the fate of 2 Austrian Zionists in the wake of the 1938 Austrian anschluss:
8/4/38: "Walked away with Sir Wyndham Deedes [an old friend of Chaim's], who goes to Vienna for us next week. But he will not be able to get the Zionists Stricker and Friedman out of Dachau. They helped Schuschnigg with money for the plebiscite."* (p 89) [*Kurt Schuschnigg - Federal Chancellor of Austria from July 1934 until the German occupation of Austria in March 1938 Following Hitler's ultimatum to Schuschnigg on 12 February, Schuschnigg decided to hold a plebiscite on 13 March by which the Austrian people would decide whether or not to accept Hitler's terms. This was the act which led to the German occupation of Austria.]
There is only one reference to the US-initiated Evian Conference, convened to find solutions for the German Jewish refugee problem, which was boycotted by the Zionists:
24/6/38: "[Chaim] put several ideas about Evian into [Lord Winterton's*] head - notably to tell the Germans that if they want to get rid of the Jews, they must leave them some of their own money." (p 91) [*Chief British delegate at Evian conference, July 1938.]
Presumably, Weizmann was referring to money for passage to Palestine.
11/10/38: "November 11th... Armistice Day! And the news of the pogrom in Germany, as bad or worse than I dreaded and expected." (p 115)
That pogrom was of course Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, but all Weizmann could think about was funneling young, committed Zionist Pioneers (HeChalutz) into Palestine:
15/11/38: "[W]hen Chaim went to see the PM this afternoon... [he] demanded an immediate Children's Aliyah [immigration] of 1,500, and a large number of the trainees in Germany." (p 116)
For the Zionists, concern for refugees always came second to Zionist designs on Palestine:
2/12/38: "Then I went to lunch, and a long talk, with Mr Ruskin at the Dorchester... His activities are now two-fold. The organizing of a huge Refugee Loan, in conjunction with Wolf, a Dutch Jew new millionaire, is genuine, but a screen for the real thing... Ruskin has arranged for a force of 15 planes - the training of pilots - mostly near his home in Chicago - and other things against The Day." (p 117)
Perhaps the most damning reference is this:
12/12/38: "After lunch to Zionist Office where Chaim reported to us his interview with [Colonial Secretary] Malcolm [MacDonald] this morning. It seems to have been lively! Malcolm offered to take the [10,000 German Jewish] children here, but without a guarantee that they should go on. Chaim refused. He said to Malcolm 'We shall fight you from here to San Francisco and when I say fight I mean fight." (p 118)
Even Baffy couldn't help but object to Weizmann's tunnel vision: 1/2/39:
1/2/39: "Also to try to make Chaim talk of the Jewish people, and not of Zionists." (p 121)
And this, according to Baffy, was Mrs Weizmann's saddest moment: 9/10/41:
9/10/41: "[W]ent to Chaim's room for a cup of tea. Poor Vera terribly sad, the Germans are approaching her home town [of Rostov]." (p 188)
How should we interpret the word 'heavily' here?:
18/12/41: "Chaim spoke heavily today in the Yeshiva [sitting] about the spread of anti-Semitism and the measure of Hitler's success in that sphere. He has shown the humiliations to which man can subject his fellow-men, and the civilized world keeps comparative silence. This is a terrible blow to morality." (p 189)
Here's as succinct and unambiguous a statement as you could possibly ask for of Weizmann's focus at this time:
20/1/42: "Chaim warned us that effort spent on improving the lot of the Galuth [exile/diaspora] will be more or less wasted. Palestine is the only hope and future. (p 191)
Token gestures were OK though:
28/11/42: "[R]eports received from the Polish Government about the latest atrocities against Jews in Poland. It is an extermination policy now, but what can one do? All protests must be made (Palestine is organizing days of fasts and mourning) but what can be done? One or two small things only." (p 198)
Palestine only!:
15/2/43: "Busy day at Zionist Office mostly the appeal for funds for Youth Aliyah to bring the 25,000 to Palestine (if they can be collected) out of the various Balkan countries and Hungary." (p 201)
Not every Zionist was happy with Weizmann's lack of concern. This was clear at the Zionist Conference in London in August, 1945:
1/8/45: "What I chiefly felt today was the great gulf fixed between the Europeans who have actually suffered and the Americans and British. There is great (and perhaps unreasonable) feeling that the latter have not done enough." (p 223)
I rest my case.
[*See my 14/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3.]
Sunday, February 24, 2013
'Worse Than Amritsar'
In the Zionist lexicon, the word massacre can mean just about anything from a scratch on up - so long as we're talking about Israeli Jews. But when it comes to Palestinians, no matter how many are gunned down, shelled or bombed to smithereens by Israeli terrorists, the 'm' word simply does not apply.
You may, for example, remember the Israeli government swearing blind that the massacre of Palestinians by Israeli troops in the West Bank city of Jenin in April 2002 was nothing of the sort:
"Had the United Nations investigators who were standing by in Geneva, been allowed to enter Israel to carry out a proper investigation, perhaps the real truth would be a bit clearer. But, there was no independent investigation. Just as in Tiananmen Square, the power of the gun and the tank ensured there was no proper body count or accounting. Just as happened in Tiananmen Square, the uninformed and those with their own agenda, are now claiming there was no massacre. There was a massacre, a considerable number of human beings were indiscriminately and unnecessarily slaughtered. The truth was the other victim." (Correspondents Report - UN report on Jenin massacre flawed, Peter Cave, abc.net.au, 4/8/02)
So why raise the matter of Zionist semantics now?
You can blame serendipity in the form of an opinion piece in The Australian on the occasion of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's visit to the Indian city of Amritsar, and a reference to Amritsar in a near-forgotten set of diaries, both, as it happens, read within 24 hours of each other.
The first, originally published in The Times on the occasion of Cameron's recent visit to the city of Amritsar, part of a current 3-day trip to India, focused on an infamous massacre perpetrated in the city by British colonial troops in 1919. I reproduce it here in full:
"Indians have been waiting almost a century for the British to apologise for the massacre in Amritsar. All the signs are that they will have to be patient for some years yet. The Queen, visiting the Jallianwala Bagh memorial in 1997, spoke of regret and sadness; David Cameron has described it as shameful. But 'sorry' remains elusive because it would acknowledge the moral shortcomings of British efforts to keep its empire together by force.
"Nowhere was this force quite as naked as in Amritsar on an April afternoon in 1919. Revolt had been in the air for months and the British were on edge. When an Anglican woman missionary was attacked in an Amritsar lane, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered Indians using that thoroughfare to crawl on all fours. News that there would be a meeting in the Jallianwala Park convinced him it could lead to insurrection. Dyer arrived with 90 soldiers, most of them Gurkhas, and positioned two armoured cars at the main entrance. About 15,000 people were gathered, tightly packed. He did not order them to disperse and waited barely 30 seconds before ordering the soldiers to fire. There was a howling as some bullets penetrated two people. The firing lasted 10 minutes. According to the British estimate, 379 died; Indians put the figure at close to a thousand. Dyer, asked in a subsequent inquiry why he had not arranged for the wounded to be treated in hospital, replied 'It was not my job'. Instead, the dead lay on the ground through the night, gnawed, reports said, by jackals. Dyer told another inquiry: 'I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back again and laughed and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself.'
"The massacre sowed decades of resentment. Some 21 years later, an independence activist assassinated Lieutenant Governor Michael Dwyer, who had backed Dyer's order to shoot. The activist was hanged but hailed as a hero by the Nazis. 'Will the historians of the future have to record that it was not the Nazis but the British ruling class which destroyed the British Empire?' wrote the New Statesman in 1940." (Sorry seems to be the hardest word, Roger Boyes, 22/2/13)
So, I'm pretty sure you'd agree. If it's massacre you're talking about, Amritsar 1919 is as good an example as any, right?
The second reference to Amritsar and its massacre came in Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936-1947, edited by N.A. Rose, 1973. You may remember the gentile-Zionist ultra, Baffy, niece of Lord Balfour and one of the habitues of London's Zionist Office, featured in my 3 posts The Jeffries-Dugdale Exchange, 6-8/1/13) Here's the Amritsar reference in her diary entry for January 15, 1941 - London:
"Wet snow. Zionist Office. Heard about some progress in the Army negotiations, and most sickening and horrible reports sent by Moshe [Shertok], therefore reliable, about atrocities committed on the refugees who were torn away from Athlit camp and sent to Mauritius. I refused to read the evidence, but Lewis [Namier] said worse than 'Amritsar'." (p 181)
So there you go, according to Lewis Namier, a leading British Zionist official and influential historian, the push and shove entailed in the removal of illegal Jewish refugees in December 1940 from the British prison camp at Athlit, just south of Haifa, to the island of Mauritius, constituted a massacre 'worse than Amritsar'.
One of the key lessons to be learnt from a close study of the history of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine (1917-?) is that you can believe almost nothing that a Zionist ideologue or propagandist says. Given the movement's propensity for bare-faced lies, endless spin and semantic quibbling - one always needs to penetrate the fog of propaganda and observe with clear eyes its actions on the ground.
"Had the United Nations investigators who were standing by in Geneva, been allowed to enter Israel to carry out a proper investigation, perhaps the real truth would be a bit clearer. But, there was no independent investigation. Just as in Tiananmen Square, the power of the gun and the tank ensured there was no proper body count or accounting. Just as happened in Tiananmen Square, the uninformed and those with their own agenda, are now claiming there was no massacre. There was a massacre, a considerable number of human beings were indiscriminately and unnecessarily slaughtered. The truth was the other victim." (Correspondents Report - UN report on Jenin massacre flawed, Peter Cave, abc.net.au, 4/8/02)
So why raise the matter of Zionist semantics now?
You can blame serendipity in the form of an opinion piece in The Australian on the occasion of UK Prime Minister David Cameron's visit to the Indian city of Amritsar, and a reference to Amritsar in a near-forgotten set of diaries, both, as it happens, read within 24 hours of each other.
The first, originally published in The Times on the occasion of Cameron's recent visit to the city of Amritsar, part of a current 3-day trip to India, focused on an infamous massacre perpetrated in the city by British colonial troops in 1919. I reproduce it here in full:
"Indians have been waiting almost a century for the British to apologise for the massacre in Amritsar. All the signs are that they will have to be patient for some years yet. The Queen, visiting the Jallianwala Bagh memorial in 1997, spoke of regret and sadness; David Cameron has described it as shameful. But 'sorry' remains elusive because it would acknowledge the moral shortcomings of British efforts to keep its empire together by force.
"Nowhere was this force quite as naked as in Amritsar on an April afternoon in 1919. Revolt had been in the air for months and the British were on edge. When an Anglican woman missionary was attacked in an Amritsar lane, Brigadier General Reginald Dyer ordered Indians using that thoroughfare to crawl on all fours. News that there would be a meeting in the Jallianwala Park convinced him it could lead to insurrection. Dyer arrived with 90 soldiers, most of them Gurkhas, and positioned two armoured cars at the main entrance. About 15,000 people were gathered, tightly packed. He did not order them to disperse and waited barely 30 seconds before ordering the soldiers to fire. There was a howling as some bullets penetrated two people. The firing lasted 10 minutes. According to the British estimate, 379 died; Indians put the figure at close to a thousand. Dyer, asked in a subsequent inquiry why he had not arranged for the wounded to be treated in hospital, replied 'It was not my job'. Instead, the dead lay on the ground through the night, gnawed, reports said, by jackals. Dyer told another inquiry: 'I think it quite possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing, but they would have come back again and laughed and I would have made, what I consider, a fool of myself.'
"The massacre sowed decades of resentment. Some 21 years later, an independence activist assassinated Lieutenant Governor Michael Dwyer, who had backed Dyer's order to shoot. The activist was hanged but hailed as a hero by the Nazis. 'Will the historians of the future have to record that it was not the Nazis but the British ruling class which destroyed the British Empire?' wrote the New Statesman in 1940." (Sorry seems to be the hardest word, Roger Boyes, 22/2/13)
So, I'm pretty sure you'd agree. If it's massacre you're talking about, Amritsar 1919 is as good an example as any, right?
The second reference to Amritsar and its massacre came in Baffy: The Diaries of Blanche Dugdale 1936-1947, edited by N.A. Rose, 1973. You may remember the gentile-Zionist ultra, Baffy, niece of Lord Balfour and one of the habitues of London's Zionist Office, featured in my 3 posts The Jeffries-Dugdale Exchange, 6-8/1/13) Here's the Amritsar reference in her diary entry for January 15, 1941 - London:
"Wet snow. Zionist Office. Heard about some progress in the Army negotiations, and most sickening and horrible reports sent by Moshe [Shertok], therefore reliable, about atrocities committed on the refugees who were torn away from Athlit camp and sent to Mauritius. I refused to read the evidence, but Lewis [Namier] said worse than 'Amritsar'." (p 181)
So there you go, according to Lewis Namier, a leading British Zionist official and influential historian, the push and shove entailed in the removal of illegal Jewish refugees in December 1940 from the British prison camp at Athlit, just south of Haifa, to the island of Mauritius, constituted a massacre 'worse than Amritsar'.
One of the key lessons to be learnt from a close study of the history of the Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine (1917-?) is that you can believe almost nothing that a Zionist ideologue or propagandist says. Given the movement's propensity for bare-faced lies, endless spin and semantic quibbling - one always needs to penetrate the fog of propaganda and observe with clear eyes its actions on the ground.
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
The Jeffries-Dugdale Exchange 3
Jeffries' final riposte in the July 24, 1936 issue of The Spectator:
"SIR,-There is an Arab delegation from Palestine in London at the present moment. It is, I think, the fifth which has come to this country. Certainly it is one of a series of Arab delegations which have been spread over the years since the War and have remained in London, waiting on the Colonial Office, for periods varying from a complete twelvemonth.
"The present delegation, though concentrating on the question of Jewish immigration, is making the same demands its predecessors made. A couple of members, who belonged to previous delegations, are renewing the demands they made as much younger men. Last week a delegate said drily to me that he supposed their sons would come along in due course and repeat the pleas of their fathers to the same deaf walls. That is what I mean when I say that the Arabs have been unheard, a phrase by which Mrs Dugdale is rhetorically puzzled.
"As for their being sidetracked, all that has been said or done, by the Arabs or on their behalf, in Palestine or out of it, during nearly two decades, has achieved what in reply? A succession of essays in verbiage from Whitehall. Public outcry and official enquiries have had the same answer. First one Colonial Secretary explains what the Balfour Declaration means, not to the Arabs, but to the Jews. Then another Colonial Secretary explains the explanation. This process has been continued till now the original Balfour Declaration is in a sort of mathematical situation, a surd surrounded by brackets upon brackets of explanation.
"The final bracket very suitably was put in place by the hands of Mr Ramsay MacDonald. He excelled himself in a letter, a species of White Paper, addressed to Dr Weizmann, who seems more and more to be winning the position of a sovereign State. That document, elicited by the most recent Commission of Enquiry into Palestine's affairs, touched upon all of these and deepened the obscurity surrounding each of them. Only one thing could be inferred with any likelihood, that the recommendations of the Commission would not be carried out. This proved to be true.
"One of the persistent requests of the Arabs is that the recommendations of Commissions and of Reports appointed or instigated by British Governments should be carried out by those same Governments. It is a singular request for them to have to make. But, as Mrs Dugdale would say no doubt, this request has never been sidetracked. The faithful observance, clause by clause, of the recommendations of the Shaw Commission, the Hope Simpson report, the French report, are equally familiar to her. I say nothing of old forgotten far-off things such as the Palin findings, given so widely to the world, and the rapid implementation of Lord Passfield's act of justice.
"I write with scorn, but what other attitude is possible to anyone reviewing the behaviour of British rulers in the Holy Land? There are reasons excusing Mrs Dugdale's advocacy, but into what pitiful artifices she is led. 'The gateway to peace,' she cries, 'is not through numerical calculations.' Does she believe that by calling the process which has placed the House of Commons at the head of the British people a 'numerical calculation' she will hide its true nature? Is a man's vote a right in England and a wrong in Palestine? Is this country to profess itself in Europe as the champion of democracy and in Asia as its enemy? Are we in England to set an example to despots of elective government, and out of England an example to elective governments of despotic control?
"Pro-Zionists prate of the Mandate and of our 'obligations' under it to the world. Is there a man in the world who believes in these 'obligations,' conferred by ourselves upon ourselves and for ourselves. As an honest and admirable writer has said, the San Remo Conference at which mandates were exchanged might have been termed by a cynic the 'Inter-Allied Prize Distribution.' The only obligation at San Remo to be heard of was in the spry tones of Mr Lloyd George and the other national delegates, saying 'Much obliged' as they passed the Mandates over the table one to another. 'The utmost cordiality reigned,' says a despatch of the period, describing the scene.
"For reasons which escape me, we could not say then, nor have said since, that the retention of the adjacencies of the Suez Canal was necessary for the communications of our Empire. We could not straightforwardly proclaim there - as would have been quite proper - a Monroe doctrine of ours akin to the Americans' doctrine at Panama. Instead, under cover of a benevolent Mandate, we instal the 'National Home' violently, believing that its denizens will hold the fort for us.* We refuse the population the freedom, under our guidance, which we had sworn to give them. We confer on Arabs noms-de-plume like 'Palestinian' and proffer them safeguards which we are careful not to define. The tribes which cheered Allenby are fined by his successors, and ten battalions of British troops are in arms against a few devoted wretches where eighteen years ago a single infantryman could have garrisoned a town.
"What is to be said of a policy which has brought us to this?-I am, Sir, yours faithfully, J.M.N. JEFFRIES. Easthayes, Cullompton, Devon."
[*Jeffries is perhaps recalling Sir Ronald Storr's famous line about "the [Zionist] enterprise... forming for England 'a little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."]
Jeffries' letter is nothing less than magnificent, such that only a Zionist deadender like 'Baffy' could possibly be immune to its powers of persuasion. Her response of July 31, in particular her second paragraph, with its pious folderol about Arab-Jewish "fellowship", is as fine an example of flying in the face of reality as you could possibly hope for. What a fool for Zion the woman was! Little wonder that Jeffries didn't bother dignify it with a reply:
"SIR,-I hate to confess myself beaten, but the effort to bring Mr Jeffries' version of British rule in Palestine into line with facts is becoming too great by comparison with the results attained.
"I do not understand what he means when he says that the British Government's successive White Papers have been 'addressed not to the Arabs but to the Jews.' These statements of policy are accessible to us all, and I would suggest that Mr Jeffries should study the first of them, issued in 1922, and compare it with the text of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan. He will find that the White Paper restricts the area of the Jewish National Home to Palestine itself, whereas no such limitation is implicit in the Mandate. The reason for this very severe curtailment of Jewish settlement was that Transjordan lies within the boundaries of the territories where certain promises about Arab independence were made by the British Government to King Hussein. (See Survey of International Affairs, 1925, Vol. I, p. 361, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.) Mr Jeffries dismisses all the White Papers as 'essays in verbiage.' It is a point on which he can claim to speak with authority, but it would be interesting to know whether this clause appears to him as redundant as the others. If it does not, then let him remember it next time he spills the vials of his wrath upon the British Government on the score of its alleged indifference to Arab rights.
"Some of the 'scorn' with which he views British policy has descended upon me, and the 'pitiful artifices' with which I express my conviction that peace in Palestine does not depend on the relative numbers of its Arab and Jewish inhabitants. It depends upon the will to live together as neighbours, as both races must do, unless British promises to one or the other are to be disgracefully broken. Even today, Arabs and Jews are working harmoniously side by side in many of the enterprises which are bringing prosperity to the country, and have refused to allow their fellowship to be disturbed by political agitation. Surely it is by acknowledging, and encouraging, that spirit as far as we can that British people can best help to bring to an end the wreckage of hopes which is going on in Palestine at the present moment.-Yours obediently,
BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE.
1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7."
"SIR,-There is an Arab delegation from Palestine in London at the present moment. It is, I think, the fifth which has come to this country. Certainly it is one of a series of Arab delegations which have been spread over the years since the War and have remained in London, waiting on the Colonial Office, for periods varying from a complete twelvemonth.
"The present delegation, though concentrating on the question of Jewish immigration, is making the same demands its predecessors made. A couple of members, who belonged to previous delegations, are renewing the demands they made as much younger men. Last week a delegate said drily to me that he supposed their sons would come along in due course and repeat the pleas of their fathers to the same deaf walls. That is what I mean when I say that the Arabs have been unheard, a phrase by which Mrs Dugdale is rhetorically puzzled.
"As for their being sidetracked, all that has been said or done, by the Arabs or on their behalf, in Palestine or out of it, during nearly two decades, has achieved what in reply? A succession of essays in verbiage from Whitehall. Public outcry and official enquiries have had the same answer. First one Colonial Secretary explains what the Balfour Declaration means, not to the Arabs, but to the Jews. Then another Colonial Secretary explains the explanation. This process has been continued till now the original Balfour Declaration is in a sort of mathematical situation, a surd surrounded by brackets upon brackets of explanation.
"The final bracket very suitably was put in place by the hands of Mr Ramsay MacDonald. He excelled himself in a letter, a species of White Paper, addressed to Dr Weizmann, who seems more and more to be winning the position of a sovereign State. That document, elicited by the most recent Commission of Enquiry into Palestine's affairs, touched upon all of these and deepened the obscurity surrounding each of them. Only one thing could be inferred with any likelihood, that the recommendations of the Commission would not be carried out. This proved to be true.
"One of the persistent requests of the Arabs is that the recommendations of Commissions and of Reports appointed or instigated by British Governments should be carried out by those same Governments. It is a singular request for them to have to make. But, as Mrs Dugdale would say no doubt, this request has never been sidetracked. The faithful observance, clause by clause, of the recommendations of the Shaw Commission, the Hope Simpson report, the French report, are equally familiar to her. I say nothing of old forgotten far-off things such as the Palin findings, given so widely to the world, and the rapid implementation of Lord Passfield's act of justice.
"I write with scorn, but what other attitude is possible to anyone reviewing the behaviour of British rulers in the Holy Land? There are reasons excusing Mrs Dugdale's advocacy, but into what pitiful artifices she is led. 'The gateway to peace,' she cries, 'is not through numerical calculations.' Does she believe that by calling the process which has placed the House of Commons at the head of the British people a 'numerical calculation' she will hide its true nature? Is a man's vote a right in England and a wrong in Palestine? Is this country to profess itself in Europe as the champion of democracy and in Asia as its enemy? Are we in England to set an example to despots of elective government, and out of England an example to elective governments of despotic control?
"Pro-Zionists prate of the Mandate and of our 'obligations' under it to the world. Is there a man in the world who believes in these 'obligations,' conferred by ourselves upon ourselves and for ourselves. As an honest and admirable writer has said, the San Remo Conference at which mandates were exchanged might have been termed by a cynic the 'Inter-Allied Prize Distribution.' The only obligation at San Remo to be heard of was in the spry tones of Mr Lloyd George and the other national delegates, saying 'Much obliged' as they passed the Mandates over the table one to another. 'The utmost cordiality reigned,' says a despatch of the period, describing the scene.
"For reasons which escape me, we could not say then, nor have said since, that the retention of the adjacencies of the Suez Canal was necessary for the communications of our Empire. We could not straightforwardly proclaim there - as would have been quite proper - a Monroe doctrine of ours akin to the Americans' doctrine at Panama. Instead, under cover of a benevolent Mandate, we instal the 'National Home' violently, believing that its denizens will hold the fort for us.* We refuse the population the freedom, under our guidance, which we had sworn to give them. We confer on Arabs noms-de-plume like 'Palestinian' and proffer them safeguards which we are careful not to define. The tribes which cheered Allenby are fined by his successors, and ten battalions of British troops are in arms against a few devoted wretches where eighteen years ago a single infantryman could have garrisoned a town.
"What is to be said of a policy which has brought us to this?-I am, Sir, yours faithfully, J.M.N. JEFFRIES. Easthayes, Cullompton, Devon."
[*Jeffries is perhaps recalling Sir Ronald Storr's famous line about "the [Zionist] enterprise... forming for England 'a little loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."]
Jeffries' letter is nothing less than magnificent, such that only a Zionist deadender like 'Baffy' could possibly be immune to its powers of persuasion. Her response of July 31, in particular her second paragraph, with its pious folderol about Arab-Jewish "fellowship", is as fine an example of flying in the face of reality as you could possibly hope for. What a fool for Zion the woman was! Little wonder that Jeffries didn't bother dignify it with a reply:
"SIR,-I hate to confess myself beaten, but the effort to bring Mr Jeffries' version of British rule in Palestine into line with facts is becoming too great by comparison with the results attained.
"I do not understand what he means when he says that the British Government's successive White Papers have been 'addressed not to the Arabs but to the Jews.' These statements of policy are accessible to us all, and I would suggest that Mr Jeffries should study the first of them, issued in 1922, and compare it with the text of the Mandate for Palestine and Transjordan. He will find that the White Paper restricts the area of the Jewish National Home to Palestine itself, whereas no such limitation is implicit in the Mandate. The reason for this very severe curtailment of Jewish settlement was that Transjordan lies within the boundaries of the territories where certain promises about Arab independence were made by the British Government to King Hussein. (See Survey of International Affairs, 1925, Vol. I, p. 361, published by the Royal Institute of International Affairs.) Mr Jeffries dismisses all the White Papers as 'essays in verbiage.' It is a point on which he can claim to speak with authority, but it would be interesting to know whether this clause appears to him as redundant as the others. If it does not, then let him remember it next time he spills the vials of his wrath upon the British Government on the score of its alleged indifference to Arab rights.
"Some of the 'scorn' with which he views British policy has descended upon me, and the 'pitiful artifices' with which I express my conviction that peace in Palestine does not depend on the relative numbers of its Arab and Jewish inhabitants. It depends upon the will to live together as neighbours, as both races must do, unless British promises to one or the other are to be disgracefully broken. Even today, Arabs and Jews are working harmoniously side by side in many of the enterprises which are bringing prosperity to the country, and have refused to allow their fellowship to be disturbed by political agitation. Surely it is by acknowledging, and encouraging, that spirit as far as we can that British people can best help to bring to an end the wreckage of hopes which is going on in Palestine at the present moment.-Yours obediently,
BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE.
1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7."
Monday, January 7, 2013
The Jeffries-Dugdale Exchange 2
Jeffries wasted no time in responding to Baffy's letter of July 3. The following appeared in the July 10, 1936 issue of The Spectator:
"SIR,-Mrs Dugdale, in your issue of last week, says that she doubts whether I am doing the best service to the cause of peace when I 'encourage Palestinians to consider their racial problems in terms of 'majority' and 'minority' rights.' Firstly, I do not encourage Palestinians. I encourage Arabs. The use of the word Palestinian is prejudicial because it assumes that there is a genuine nation established in the Holy Land, to be distinguished by this adjective from the Arab race which surrounds it. This is not so.
"Secondly, I am not encouraging the Arabs to consider, after any fashion whatsoever, a racial problem of theirs. Here again is a false assumption, but a much graver one. There is no racial problem in Palestine inherited by its inhabitants. We have created one by importing the Zionists. It is bad enough that we should be guilty of the wilful introduction of a problem into the Arabs' land, but that we should go on to describe it as 'their racial problem' passes all bounds.
"Thirdly, it is very significant that Mrs Dugdale, when dealing with Palestine, puts into inverted commas the words 'majority' and 'minority.' I did not employ them and the text does not call for them. Mrs Dugdale, however, inserts them because by those who support our present policy majority cannot be given its plain sense in Palestine. Yet, if one looks into it, the long democratic struggle for free institutions comes to little else than the removal of inverted commas from the words 'majority' and 'minority' and the establishment of each as a practical body, the former enjoying its privileges, the latter its safeguards.
"Today in Palestine, alone in the world, this is reversed. The minority has the privilege, the majority the safeguards. But now, indeed, is a reason for inverted commas: the 'safeguards' of the majority in the Mandate are worded deliberately so that they cannot be accurately defined and enforced.
"In the space of a letter I am not able to answer in full all the issues raised by Mrs Dugdale. The Arabs have been able to give utterance to their grievances, but they never have been listened to. Their perfectly founded appeals against the legitimacy of the 'Balfour Declaration' have been met by mere unproved denials from successive Colonial Secretaries. Mr Winston Churchill, Mr J.H. Thomas, Mr Ormsby-Gore and others, after acting as the witness for the Crown, have then returned to the bench and given judgements in their own favour. On the one occasion upon which it was possible to bring the acts of the Colonial Office before a neutral court of justice, in the matter of the Mavrommatis concessions, the verdict was given by the Court of the Hague against the pretensions of the then Colonial secretary.*
"Economic pleas are irrelevant. The death of British soldiers in Palestine is due to the insistence of Whitehall that the country is one where there are no political issues and that economic issues stand in their place.
"Nor is there any Jewish right in Palestine. The historic claim mentioned by Mrs Dugdale is not so much historic as prehistoric. If we are to engage in extravagant reconstitutions of the world of two thousand years ago, let us instal these enforced pageants amid our own people. I am sorry for the Jews driven from their homes by the tyranny of the Nazis, but we must not impose them on Palestine and try to cure tyranny with tyranny. Let us find room for them in our own Empire, not add to our reputation for hypocrisy by giving them a warm welcome to the shores of another people.-I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully, J.M.N. Jeffries The Bath Club, W.1."
So much sense - but to so little avail. Typically, in exchanges of this kind with those suffering from indelible ideological blindness, Baffy shot back in the following issue (July 17), skirting the substantial matters raised by Jeffries - the deliberate subordination of the rights of an indigenous majority to the dubious claims of an imported minority; the absurdity of attempting to remake the world in accord with ancient tribal mythologies and traditions; and the blatant hypocrisy of European powers palming off European problems on non-European peoples:
"SIR,-Mr Jeffries objects to the use of the term 'Palestinian' because he thinks that it 'assumes that there is a genuine nation established in the Holy Land to be distinguished by this adjective (sic) from the Arab race which surrounds it.' He is evidently not aware that the word 'Palestinian' applies to all persons who were born in Palestine, or who, by fulfilling the necessary legal conditions, have become domiciled in the country, and are therefore entitled to receive a Palestinian Passport. The bulk of these people are Arabs and Jews, and it is in respect of them that I deplore Mr Jeffries' allusions to majorities and minorities, because it is they who must find means of living in peace, side by side, and the gateway to peace is not through numerical calculations.
"Mr Jeffries excuses himself, on grounds of space, from any full reply to my last letter, but he selects from it one question - namely, on what occasions have the Arabs been 'side-tracked' or 'unheard'? In this context he quotes the decisions of the International Court of Justice at the Hague in the matter of the 'Mavrommatis Concessions.' This was a case involving a pure question of law, which turned on the question of whether, under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, certain Concessions granted to a Greek by the Sublime Porte before the War still remained valid. The Concessions were for supplying electricity to Jerusalem and to Jaffa. In the first case the verdict was in favour of M. Mavrommatis, in the other against him. But in neither case were Arab rights or interests in the slightest degree involved.
"I cannot congratulate Mr Jeffries on this choice of an illustration to support his theory that the British Government is deaf to Arab grievances. His general accusations against Mr Winston Churchill, Mr J.H. Thoms and Mr Ormsby-Gore would require to be formulated before he could hope to make them impressive.-I am, Sir, yours obediently, 1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7. BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE."
[*In Palestine: The Reality (1939), Jeffries writes of the Mavrommatis case: "[T]he one real trial, on the rights and wrongs of the case, was that of 1925, and at that trial, the Court of International Justice of The Hague unanimously declared that the British Government had violated its obligations in Palestine by the creation of the monopoly [over industrial projects in Palestine: MERC] which it had granted to the Zionists." He elaborates on the ruling's significance thus: "Who can doubt that if it were possible to cite the incriminated series of Governments for the rest of their deeds in Palestine, as for this one, before the same tribunal, a like verdict would be attained. I draw attention again to the quiet statement of the Hague Court, interpolated in its solitary judgment, that in 1921 'the document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine' was not yet in force.' What caustic appreciation lies in that term 'The document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine'.' It was under the document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine' that between 1920 and 1923 the expropriation of the Arabs, like so may Mavrommatises, from the proprietorial rights granted to them by nature and by contract was thoroughly begun." (pp 594-595)]
The 3rd and final round next...
"SIR,-Mrs Dugdale, in your issue of last week, says that she doubts whether I am doing the best service to the cause of peace when I 'encourage Palestinians to consider their racial problems in terms of 'majority' and 'minority' rights.' Firstly, I do not encourage Palestinians. I encourage Arabs. The use of the word Palestinian is prejudicial because it assumes that there is a genuine nation established in the Holy Land, to be distinguished by this adjective from the Arab race which surrounds it. This is not so.
"Secondly, I am not encouraging the Arabs to consider, after any fashion whatsoever, a racial problem of theirs. Here again is a false assumption, but a much graver one. There is no racial problem in Palestine inherited by its inhabitants. We have created one by importing the Zionists. It is bad enough that we should be guilty of the wilful introduction of a problem into the Arabs' land, but that we should go on to describe it as 'their racial problem' passes all bounds.
"Thirdly, it is very significant that Mrs Dugdale, when dealing with Palestine, puts into inverted commas the words 'majority' and 'minority.' I did not employ them and the text does not call for them. Mrs Dugdale, however, inserts them because by those who support our present policy majority cannot be given its plain sense in Palestine. Yet, if one looks into it, the long democratic struggle for free institutions comes to little else than the removal of inverted commas from the words 'majority' and 'minority' and the establishment of each as a practical body, the former enjoying its privileges, the latter its safeguards.
"Today in Palestine, alone in the world, this is reversed. The minority has the privilege, the majority the safeguards. But now, indeed, is a reason for inverted commas: the 'safeguards' of the majority in the Mandate are worded deliberately so that they cannot be accurately defined and enforced.
"In the space of a letter I am not able to answer in full all the issues raised by Mrs Dugdale. The Arabs have been able to give utterance to their grievances, but they never have been listened to. Their perfectly founded appeals against the legitimacy of the 'Balfour Declaration' have been met by mere unproved denials from successive Colonial Secretaries. Mr Winston Churchill, Mr J.H. Thomas, Mr Ormsby-Gore and others, after acting as the witness for the Crown, have then returned to the bench and given judgements in their own favour. On the one occasion upon which it was possible to bring the acts of the Colonial Office before a neutral court of justice, in the matter of the Mavrommatis concessions, the verdict was given by the Court of the Hague against the pretensions of the then Colonial secretary.*
"Economic pleas are irrelevant. The death of British soldiers in Palestine is due to the insistence of Whitehall that the country is one where there are no political issues and that economic issues stand in their place.
"Nor is there any Jewish right in Palestine. The historic claim mentioned by Mrs Dugdale is not so much historic as prehistoric. If we are to engage in extravagant reconstitutions of the world of two thousand years ago, let us instal these enforced pageants amid our own people. I am sorry for the Jews driven from their homes by the tyranny of the Nazis, but we must not impose them on Palestine and try to cure tyranny with tyranny. Let us find room for them in our own Empire, not add to our reputation for hypocrisy by giving them a warm welcome to the shores of another people.-I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully, J.M.N. Jeffries The Bath Club, W.1."
So much sense - but to so little avail. Typically, in exchanges of this kind with those suffering from indelible ideological blindness, Baffy shot back in the following issue (July 17), skirting the substantial matters raised by Jeffries - the deliberate subordination of the rights of an indigenous majority to the dubious claims of an imported minority; the absurdity of attempting to remake the world in accord with ancient tribal mythologies and traditions; and the blatant hypocrisy of European powers palming off European problems on non-European peoples:
"SIR,-Mr Jeffries objects to the use of the term 'Palestinian' because he thinks that it 'assumes that there is a genuine nation established in the Holy Land to be distinguished by this adjective (sic) from the Arab race which surrounds it.' He is evidently not aware that the word 'Palestinian' applies to all persons who were born in Palestine, or who, by fulfilling the necessary legal conditions, have become domiciled in the country, and are therefore entitled to receive a Palestinian Passport. The bulk of these people are Arabs and Jews, and it is in respect of them that I deplore Mr Jeffries' allusions to majorities and minorities, because it is they who must find means of living in peace, side by side, and the gateway to peace is not through numerical calculations.
"Mr Jeffries excuses himself, on grounds of space, from any full reply to my last letter, but he selects from it one question - namely, on what occasions have the Arabs been 'side-tracked' or 'unheard'? In this context he quotes the decisions of the International Court of Justice at the Hague in the matter of the 'Mavrommatis Concessions.' This was a case involving a pure question of law, which turned on the question of whether, under the terms of the Treaty of Lausanne, certain Concessions granted to a Greek by the Sublime Porte before the War still remained valid. The Concessions were for supplying electricity to Jerusalem and to Jaffa. In the first case the verdict was in favour of M. Mavrommatis, in the other against him. But in neither case were Arab rights or interests in the slightest degree involved.
"I cannot congratulate Mr Jeffries on this choice of an illustration to support his theory that the British Government is deaf to Arab grievances. His general accusations against Mr Winston Churchill, Mr J.H. Thoms and Mr Ormsby-Gore would require to be formulated before he could hope to make them impressive.-I am, Sir, yours obediently, 1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7. BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE."
[*In Palestine: The Reality (1939), Jeffries writes of the Mavrommatis case: "[T]he one real trial, on the rights and wrongs of the case, was that of 1925, and at that trial, the Court of International Justice of The Hague unanimously declared that the British Government had violated its obligations in Palestine by the creation of the monopoly [over industrial projects in Palestine: MERC] which it had granted to the Zionists." He elaborates on the ruling's significance thus: "Who can doubt that if it were possible to cite the incriminated series of Governments for the rest of their deeds in Palestine, as for this one, before the same tribunal, a like verdict would be attained. I draw attention again to the quiet statement of the Hague Court, interpolated in its solitary judgment, that in 1921 'the document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine' was not yet in force.' What caustic appreciation lies in that term 'The document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine'.' It was under the document entitled 'Mandate for Palestine' that between 1920 and 1923 the expropriation of the Arabs, like so may Mavrommatises, from the proprietorial rights granted to them by nature and by contract was thoroughly begun." (pp 594-595)]
The 3rd and final round next...
Sunday, January 6, 2013
The Jeffries-Dugdale Exchange 1
"Dugdale, Blanche Elizabeth Campbell (1890-1948), British Zionist; a niece of Arthur James Balfour. Blanche... Described by Chaim Weizmann as 'an ardent, lifelong friend of Zionism,' 'Baffy', as she was affectionately called, constantly tried to influence cabinet ministers and high commissioners by personal contact and in writing, stressing the justice of the Jewish cause in Palestine. She also addressed public meetings, Zionist conferences, and even World Zionist Conferences and advised Weizmann in his political dealings with the British. From 1940 until a few months before her death she worked daily in the political department of the Jewish Agency. During World War II she served on various committees to aid Jewish refugees. She regularly published articles in the Zionist Review and authored a pamphlet The Balfour Declaration: Origins & Background (1940) and a two-volume biography, Arthur James Balfour (1936). Her diary is preserved in the Weizmann archives in Rehovot. Before she died, on May 15, 1948, relatives and friends told her that the State of Israel had been established... One of the most committed of British 'gentile Zionists', it has been said that she 'thought of [Jewish] Palestine as her second country.'" (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)
With 'Baffy' even more ardently Zionist than her late uncle, would it surprise you to know that she once crossed swords with JMN Jeffries? The stoush took the form of a 6-letter exchange in the pages of The Spectator from June 26 to July 31, 1936.
In his 1939 classic, Palestine: The Reality, Jeffries was scathing of Lord Balfour and Lloyd George, and of their political and bureaucratic successors who stubbornly stood by the former's idiotic promise to the Zionists to establish a National Home for 'the Jewish people' in Palestine.
Britain's near total disregard for the demands of the majority Arab population for an end to mass Jewish immigration and land purchases, and for the establishment of representative government, inevitably gave rise to a series of increasingly violent 'riots and disturbances', culminating in the armed Arab revolt of 1936-1939.
Jeffries, engaged on the writing of his book at the time, and caught up in the drama of events in Palestine, would obviously have been in no mood for propagandist nonsense from Zionists, least of all from one who doubled as Balfour's niece and was devoted to his memory and appalling legacy. Growing more heated the further it progressed, the exchange must have been - or so I like to imagine it - the next best thing to Jeffries' taking on the detested Balfour himself.
I intend to post all 6 letters in 3 successive posts, 2 apiece. Actually, with respect to Jeffries' contributions, you're in for a double treat. Not only do you get to marvel at his command of the subject, but you also get to revel in the elegance and precision of his prose. The highlightings are, of course, mine. The exchange begins with Jeffries' response, in the June 26 Spectator, to a June 19 letter by another British Zionist, Norman Bentwich:
"SIR,-For some seventeen years the Arabs of Palestine have been protesting to the British Government against the situation inflicted upon them. In answer they have received, officially or unofficially, either refusals to discuss the points they have raised or replies which - it is sad to have to say so - have wormed along from one subterfuge to another.
"Perpetually unheard, perpetually side-tracked, the Arabs have now broken into armed revolt in order to gain attention for their cause. It would have been better if they had not done this. None the less, the parallel for their rising is to be found in the uproars which in this country preceded the final Reform Bills, and in the violence which obtained women the vote after all logical pleas had failed them.
"Everyone deplores the death of our soldiers in Palestine; everyone recognises that our authorities there must restore the public order of which they are the guardians. But the responsibility for the bloodshed in the Holy Land lies primarily where the responsibility for the bloodshed in England lay in 1839 - not on the rioters, but on the Cabinet Ministers who had refused consideration and had postponed reform.
"I am afraid that Mr Bentwich's letter in your last issue is of no great service in this crisis. Indeed, it is harmful, for it is only too full of the phrases which for so long have been forcibly fed to the Arabs, which more than anything else have served to goad them into violence. Under each benevolent sentence some reversal of fact or some cold denial of their dues to the Arabs is barely concealed.
"'Arab and Jew,' says Mr Bentwich, 'must live together, neither dominating the other nor being dominated.' How equitable this sounds, yet in plain fact it means that the Arabs are not to have the ordinary majority rights of a population upon its native soil. 'Palestine has been throughout history a bi-national country,' says Mr Bentwich, and thereby limits history to the last twenty years or so. In fact, between the Jews and Palestine there is a vacuum of centuries. Before the Mandate the Arabs were more firmly, longer, and more solely established in Palestine than are most races of Europe in their present habitat. During their long overlordship of Palestine precisely the one thing which the Turks could not achieve was to make the country bi-national. Under its Turkish functionaries it remained integrally Arab. 'It is not economic interests which divide the peoples (in Palestine),' continues Mr Bentwich, 'but political passions.' The maintenance of the British Empire as British is a political necessity to which we all agree; but the maintenance on the same principle of an Arab land as Arab is a demand inspired apparently by political passion!
"It is very adroit of Mr Bentwich to try to substitute for the normal political birthright of peoples a new, uncodified, unlegalised economic birthright. But, however adroit, it is indefensible. In justice to him, though, it must be acknowledged that he is not alone in employing this stratagem, for the Colonial Office already has employed it. Amidst its dicta, in the Palestine Report of 1931, for example, is a statement that Jewish immigration should be 'governed by the principle that it should not be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.'
"Now, it is of the highest importance to grasp what this statement of British policy means. It means that political rights are abolished for the Arab. (In the 'Balfour Declaration' significantly they are promised 'civil' rights, while the Jews are guaranteed in any part of the world against the loss of 'political' rights because of the creation of the 'National Home.')
"The people of Palestine by this statement are shuffled secretly into a new category of human beings, as mechanical, economic units. Only economic reasons are allowed to stop the entrance into Palestine of an indefinite number of extraneous units. It is clear that as Zionist colonisation extends the economic capacity of the country increases, so that inevitably more and more units from outside have to be 'absorbed.' The original Arab units shrink from being nine-tenths of the population to being seven-tenths, and then a half, and presently a quarter.
"Nothing comparable to this has been attempted elsewhere. If men are to be turned from men into economic units, if Great Britain wishes to apply this new theory of statesmanship, evidently she must begin by doing so on her own territory, after the British public has voted in favour of the project.
"But she must not impose the new theory dictatorially on a small, weak population in the Near East by the strength of her aeroplanes and her bayonets and in despite of treaties. -
"I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
The Bath Club, London, W.1. J.M.N. JEFFRIES."
This drew the following response from 'Baffy', in The Spectator of July 3:
"SIR,-It would be interesting if Mr Jeffries would further elucidate his description of the Palestine Arab as 'perpetually unheard, perpetually side-tracked.' Can he point to any occasion on which Arab representatives have been refused the ear of the High Commissioner in Palestine, or, for that matter, of the Colonial Secretary in London?
"I doubt whether Mr Jeffries is doing the best service to the cause of peace when he encourages Palestinians to consider their racial problems in terms of 'majority' and 'minority' rights. But if he must do so, let him reflect which of the two races has most cause to fear being left, or placed, in the position of a minority.
"In the past eight weeks, damage has been done to Jewish property in fields, orchards and plantations, estimated at many tens of thousands of pounds. During this same period, not one Arab fruit-tree has been uprooted, nor one Arab crop burnt, by Jewish hands. Englishmen who have put their labour, their money or their love into the meadows or woodlands of their country can perhaps form some faint idea of the intense provocation, and the iron self-control which such a state of affairs must imply for the Jewish agricultural settlers.
"In the past twenty years, some 300,000 Jews (a number which, incidentally, does not exceed the increase in the Arab population itself during that period) have entered the land, trusting to the British assurance that they are there 'as of right and not on sufferance.' Among their numbers are some 30,000 refugees from the Hitler terror. Palestine, under the Mandate administered by Great Britain, is so far the only country in the world in a position to afford some abiding shelter for the victims of the hideous revival of anti-Semitism now defiling Germany. It is sad to find any Englishman who takes no pride or pleasure in that fact, but who seems to advocate yielding to the demands of the Arab extremists for the stoppage of immigration, which would, while the Arabs display their present spirit, in the end turn the Jewish National Home into a death-trap.
"Lasting peace in Palestine will not come through the breaking of British promises to either section of the population, but its foundation might be laid through the speedy fulfilment of some of those promises which referred to large scale land development, in order to make room for a larger population. According to the experience and calculations of the best experts on Palestinian agriculture, a family scientifically cultivating irrigated land can live on five acres (as compared with a minimum of twenty-five acres of unirrigated land). There are still available at least three-quarters of a million acres of irrigable land which have not yet been developed.
"The future of the great Arab nation is not bound up with that little notch in the vast territories inhabited by their race which Palestine represents. What that future may be - politically or economically - no man can tell. But so far as it is possible to foresee the trend of events, it does appear likely that the Jewish National Home, established by virtue of historic right in the Land of Israel, will provide at any rate a partial solution for the Jewish problem, which is an international problem, and the direct concern of nearly every country in the world.-
"Yours obediently,
BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE. 1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7."
Leaves the letters pages of today's anaemic rags for dead, doesn't it? Stay tuned for round 2...
With 'Baffy' even more ardently Zionist than her late uncle, would it surprise you to know that she once crossed swords with JMN Jeffries? The stoush took the form of a 6-letter exchange in the pages of The Spectator from June 26 to July 31, 1936.
In his 1939 classic, Palestine: The Reality, Jeffries was scathing of Lord Balfour and Lloyd George, and of their political and bureaucratic successors who stubbornly stood by the former's idiotic promise to the Zionists to establish a National Home for 'the Jewish people' in Palestine.
Britain's near total disregard for the demands of the majority Arab population for an end to mass Jewish immigration and land purchases, and for the establishment of representative government, inevitably gave rise to a series of increasingly violent 'riots and disturbances', culminating in the armed Arab revolt of 1936-1939.
Jeffries, engaged on the writing of his book at the time, and caught up in the drama of events in Palestine, would obviously have been in no mood for propagandist nonsense from Zionists, least of all from one who doubled as Balfour's niece and was devoted to his memory and appalling legacy. Growing more heated the further it progressed, the exchange must have been - or so I like to imagine it - the next best thing to Jeffries' taking on the detested Balfour himself.
I intend to post all 6 letters in 3 successive posts, 2 apiece. Actually, with respect to Jeffries' contributions, you're in for a double treat. Not only do you get to marvel at his command of the subject, but you also get to revel in the elegance and precision of his prose. The highlightings are, of course, mine. The exchange begins with Jeffries' response, in the June 26 Spectator, to a June 19 letter by another British Zionist, Norman Bentwich:
"SIR,-For some seventeen years the Arabs of Palestine have been protesting to the British Government against the situation inflicted upon them. In answer they have received, officially or unofficially, either refusals to discuss the points they have raised or replies which - it is sad to have to say so - have wormed along from one subterfuge to another.
"Perpetually unheard, perpetually side-tracked, the Arabs have now broken into armed revolt in order to gain attention for their cause. It would have been better if they had not done this. None the less, the parallel for their rising is to be found in the uproars which in this country preceded the final Reform Bills, and in the violence which obtained women the vote after all logical pleas had failed them.
"Everyone deplores the death of our soldiers in Palestine; everyone recognises that our authorities there must restore the public order of which they are the guardians. But the responsibility for the bloodshed in the Holy Land lies primarily where the responsibility for the bloodshed in England lay in 1839 - not on the rioters, but on the Cabinet Ministers who had refused consideration and had postponed reform.
"I am afraid that Mr Bentwich's letter in your last issue is of no great service in this crisis. Indeed, it is harmful, for it is only too full of the phrases which for so long have been forcibly fed to the Arabs, which more than anything else have served to goad them into violence. Under each benevolent sentence some reversal of fact or some cold denial of their dues to the Arabs is barely concealed.
"'Arab and Jew,' says Mr Bentwich, 'must live together, neither dominating the other nor being dominated.' How equitable this sounds, yet in plain fact it means that the Arabs are not to have the ordinary majority rights of a population upon its native soil. 'Palestine has been throughout history a bi-national country,' says Mr Bentwich, and thereby limits history to the last twenty years or so. In fact, between the Jews and Palestine there is a vacuum of centuries. Before the Mandate the Arabs were more firmly, longer, and more solely established in Palestine than are most races of Europe in their present habitat. During their long overlordship of Palestine precisely the one thing which the Turks could not achieve was to make the country bi-national. Under its Turkish functionaries it remained integrally Arab. 'It is not economic interests which divide the peoples (in Palestine),' continues Mr Bentwich, 'but political passions.' The maintenance of the British Empire as British is a political necessity to which we all agree; but the maintenance on the same principle of an Arab land as Arab is a demand inspired apparently by political passion!
"It is very adroit of Mr Bentwich to try to substitute for the normal political birthright of peoples a new, uncodified, unlegalised economic birthright. But, however adroit, it is indefensible. In justice to him, though, it must be acknowledged that he is not alone in employing this stratagem, for the Colonial Office already has employed it. Amidst its dicta, in the Palestine Report of 1931, for example, is a statement that Jewish immigration should be 'governed by the principle that it should not be so great in volume as to exceed whatever may be the economic capacity of the country at the time to absorb new arrivals.'
"Now, it is of the highest importance to grasp what this statement of British policy means. It means that political rights are abolished for the Arab. (In the 'Balfour Declaration' significantly they are promised 'civil' rights, while the Jews are guaranteed in any part of the world against the loss of 'political' rights because of the creation of the 'National Home.')
"The people of Palestine by this statement are shuffled secretly into a new category of human beings, as mechanical, economic units. Only economic reasons are allowed to stop the entrance into Palestine of an indefinite number of extraneous units. It is clear that as Zionist colonisation extends the economic capacity of the country increases, so that inevitably more and more units from outside have to be 'absorbed.' The original Arab units shrink from being nine-tenths of the population to being seven-tenths, and then a half, and presently a quarter.
"Nothing comparable to this has been attempted elsewhere. If men are to be turned from men into economic units, if Great Britain wishes to apply this new theory of statesmanship, evidently she must begin by doing so on her own territory, after the British public has voted in favour of the project.
"But she must not impose the new theory dictatorially on a small, weak population in the Near East by the strength of her aeroplanes and her bayonets and in despite of treaties. -
"I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
The Bath Club, London, W.1. J.M.N. JEFFRIES."
This drew the following response from 'Baffy', in The Spectator of July 3:
"SIR,-It would be interesting if Mr Jeffries would further elucidate his description of the Palestine Arab as 'perpetually unheard, perpetually side-tracked.' Can he point to any occasion on which Arab representatives have been refused the ear of the High Commissioner in Palestine, or, for that matter, of the Colonial Secretary in London?
"I doubt whether Mr Jeffries is doing the best service to the cause of peace when he encourages Palestinians to consider their racial problems in terms of 'majority' and 'minority' rights. But if he must do so, let him reflect which of the two races has most cause to fear being left, or placed, in the position of a minority.
"In the past eight weeks, damage has been done to Jewish property in fields, orchards and plantations, estimated at many tens of thousands of pounds. During this same period, not one Arab fruit-tree has been uprooted, nor one Arab crop burnt, by Jewish hands. Englishmen who have put their labour, their money or their love into the meadows or woodlands of their country can perhaps form some faint idea of the intense provocation, and the iron self-control which such a state of affairs must imply for the Jewish agricultural settlers.
"In the past twenty years, some 300,000 Jews (a number which, incidentally, does not exceed the increase in the Arab population itself during that period) have entered the land, trusting to the British assurance that they are there 'as of right and not on sufferance.' Among their numbers are some 30,000 refugees from the Hitler terror. Palestine, under the Mandate administered by Great Britain, is so far the only country in the world in a position to afford some abiding shelter for the victims of the hideous revival of anti-Semitism now defiling Germany. It is sad to find any Englishman who takes no pride or pleasure in that fact, but who seems to advocate yielding to the demands of the Arab extremists for the stoppage of immigration, which would, while the Arabs display their present spirit, in the end turn the Jewish National Home into a death-trap.
"Lasting peace in Palestine will not come through the breaking of British promises to either section of the population, but its foundation might be laid through the speedy fulfilment of some of those promises which referred to large scale land development, in order to make room for a larger population. According to the experience and calculations of the best experts on Palestinian agriculture, a family scientifically cultivating irrigated land can live on five acres (as compared with a minimum of twenty-five acres of unirrigated land). There are still available at least three-quarters of a million acres of irrigable land which have not yet been developed.
"The future of the great Arab nation is not bound up with that little notch in the vast territories inhabited by their race which Palestine represents. What that future may be - politically or economically - no man can tell. But so far as it is possible to foresee the trend of events, it does appear likely that the Jewish National Home, established by virtue of historic right in the Land of Israel, will provide at any rate a partial solution for the Jewish problem, which is an international problem, and the direct concern of nearly every country in the world.-
"Yours obediently,
BLANCHE E.C. DUGDALE. 1 Roland Gardens, S.W.7."
Leaves the letters pages of today's anaemic rags for dead, doesn't it? Stay tuned for round 2...
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