Benny Morris, Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Education of Ilhan Omar

Outspoken rookie Democrat congressperson, Ilhan Omar, has just had an opinion piece - We must apply our universal values to all nations. Only then will we achieve peace - published in the Washington Post on March 17. Unfortunately, it's really little more than a collection of imperial and liberal Zionist cliches.

Some excerpts:

"I witnessed how our continuous involvement in foreign conflicts - even those with the best of intentions - can damage our reputation abroad."

Since when has imperialism, US or otherwise, ever had good intentions?

"Valuing human rights... means applying the same standards to our friends and our enemies. We do not have the credibility to support those fighting for human rights in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua if we do not also support those fighting for human rights in Honduras, Guatemala and Brazil. Our criticisms of oppression and regional instability caused by Iran are not legitimate if we do not hold Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to the same standards. And we cannot turn a blind eye to repression in Saudi Arabia - a country that is consistently ranked among the worst of the human rights defenders."

"... those fighting for human rights in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua... " = US proxies for regime change.

There is no sign of any awareness here of the US-engineered coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and Honduras (2009), and their ongoing impact in those countries. Nor do the US wars of regime change in Iraq, Libya and Syria rate a mention.

"This vision also applies to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. US support for Israel has a long history. The founding of Israel 70 years ago was built on the Jewish people's connection to their historical homeland, as well as the urgency of establishing a nation in the wake of the horror of the Holocaust and the centuries of anti-Semitic oppression leading up to it. Many of the founders of Israel were themselves refugees who survived indescribable horrors."

Omar's swallowed a Zionist primer here. To clarify briefly:

*There are Jews, a faith community, but no such entity as "the Jewish people."

*Palestine is not the historical homeland of this Zionist concoction. Palestine is the homeland, first and foremost, of the dispossessed Palestinian Arab people, whether they be in exile, under military occupation, or just hanging on as second-class citizens in what is billed as the 'Jewish' state.

*Israel was not a product of the Holocaust, but rather the result of a determined, settler-colonial project, run by Zionist fanatics given a foothold in Palestine by British imperialism in World War I.

*The "founders of Israel," such as David Ben-Gurion, were not "refugees who survived indescribable horror." Rather, they were seasoned Zionist ideologues and operatives who perpetrated the "indescribable horror" of ethnic cleansing on the indigenous Palestinian population from 1948-9. Ben-Gurion, for example, the architect of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, was a Polish Jew who migrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1906.

"We must acknowledge that this is also the historical homeland of Palestinians. And without a state, the Palestinian people live in a state of permanent refugeehood and displacement. This, too, is a refugee crisis, and they, too, deserve freedom and dignity. A balanced, inclusive approach to the conflict recognizes the shared desire for security and freedom of both peoples. I support a two-state solution, with internationally recognized borders, which allows for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination. This has been official bipartisan US policy across two decades and has been supported by each of the most recent Israeli and Palestinian leaders, as well as the consensus of the Israeli security establishment... "

OFFS, the two-state mantra... trotted out by every hack Western politician on the planet, including our own.

So what is going on here?

Essentially, Omar is in the process of being made aware that in the US Israel is not a foreign policy issue, but a domestic one. The process began when she backtracked from her factually impeccable comment that US politicians were essentially in the pay of the Israel lobby, tweeting that "Anti-Semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes."

Just who these "Jewish allies and colleagues" are we do not know, but one can be forgiven for thinking that they are unlikely to be anti-Zionists.

The pressure on Omar to conform to a liberal Zionist consensus on Palestine/Israel can only be imagined. Some idea may be had from this observation on the US by Edward Said:

"In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a conjuncture of powerful institutions and interests - the press, the liberal intelligentsia, the military-industrial complex, the academic community, labor unions - for whom uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their domestic as well as international standing." (The Question of Palestine, 1979, p 58)

Omar could do no better than read Said's seminal work.

Malcolm Turnbull's Moshe Dayan Moment

The truth, as they say, will out:

"Campaigning in Perth, [PM Malcolm] Turnbull agreed with the description of invasion for the first arrival of the First Fleet in 1788... 'Well, I think it can be fairly described as that and I've got no doubt... our first Aboriginal Australians describe it as an invasion... But, you know, you are talking about an historical argument about a word. The facts are very well-known. This country was Aboriginal land. It was occupied by Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years - 40,000 years'." (PM faces renewed push for a treaty, Tom McIlroy, Sydney Morning Herald, 15/6/16)

And even, on the odd occasion, from a Zionist leader - in this case, the late Moshe Dayan:

"We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country [the total area was about 6%] we bought the lands from the Arabs. Jewish villages were built on the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal [Dayan's own village] arose in the place of Mahalul, Gevat - in the place of Jibta, [Kibbutz] Said - in the place of Haneifs and Kefar Yehoshua - in the place of Tell Shaman. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population. [Ha-Aretz, April 4, 1969]"

Edward Said used that quote of Dayan's in his seminal work, The Question of Palestine (1979), but added, by way of explanation: "Even Dayan's terminology, frank as it is, is euphemistic. For what he means by 'the Arab villages are not there either' is that they were destroyed systematically." (p 14)

Edward Said on Intellectuals Who Turn Away

Following on from my 27/4/16 post on John Haldane, it's worth recalling these words of the late, great Edward Said, as quoted by Omar Barghouti:

"Nothing in my mind is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position that you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political, you want to keep a reputation of being balanced, moderate, objective. Your hope is to remain within the responsible mainstream. For an intellectual these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual."

The Question of Palestine

"Why is it right for a Jew born in Chicago to immigrate to Israel, whereas a Palestinian born in Jaffa is a refugee?" (The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, 1979, p 234)

Zionism: The Devil in the Detail

"Under pressure to restart negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israeli government continues to expand settlements deeper into occupied territory, today announcing 380 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem." (Israel approves 380 new settlement homes in East Jerusalem, Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 24/12/14)

 "It was dark when we drove out to Shari Zwi, a communal settlement for orthodox Jews, fifteen minutes out in the wilds, right down by the Jordan. The road was a track, and after some miles we bumped and stuck in the mud... We were rescued by a police truck, which bumped us for three-quarters of an hour and then dumped us outside a stockade. Suddenly strange men with beards crowded round us. It was the orthodox Jews greeting us in Hebrew, and I soon realized this was to be the sole language. Through thick mud and past simple shacks we were taken to the dining-room where a delicious meal stood ready. But immediately we had to listen to a two-hour explanation in Hebrew of the graphs and charts all round the wall, showing ten years' progress of Shari Zwi. The fields are interlaced with Arab fields, and land acquisition is the great aim. I was assured that the Arabs were delighted to sell their land, and that the only way to stop Arab nationalism was to abolish restriction on the sale of land.

"These were very good religious people, mostly from Germany, but also from Poland, Rumania, and eleven other countries; a community of some 300 living by the Talmud, and very critical of the secular Zionists who run the Agency. But as far as I could see this made absolutely no difference to their politics.

"After supper I proposed a discussion on Arab-Jewish relations, and the whole community crowded into the dining-hall and stood round while the executive and I debated, sitting at the table. They stood motionless and tense for three hours' discussion. I described to them the Arab village I had seen that morning a hundred yards from a superb Jewish settlement, and said that I thought that illustrated the central problem. Then they were off. And what they gave me was the simple propaganda line about the Jewish right to every foot of Palestine, and how the Arabs had benefited. They seemed to assume that the Jews had the right to the country and that the Arabs were inferior people whom the Jews, when they got their state, would tolerate and permit to exist as a minority. I think they enjoyed the discussion a lot, and when it ended the bearded mukhtar shook my hand and said: 'We deeply appreciate it that a member of the Committee* thought us important enough to come and teach us about Arabs and Jews'!" (Palestine Mission, Richard Crossman, 1946, pp 159-60)

"[T]he success of Zionism did not derive exclusively from its bold outlining of a future state, or from its ability to see the natives for the negligible quantities they were or might become. Rather, I think, Zionism's effectiveness in making its way against Arab Palestinian resistance lay in its being a policy of detail, not simply a general colonial vision. Thus Palestine was not only the Promised Land, a concept as elusive and as abstract as any that one could encounter. It was a specific territory with specific characteristics, that was surveyed down to the last millimeter, settled on, planned for, built on, and so forth, in detail. From the beginning of the Zionist colonization this was something the Arabs had no answer to, no equally detailed counterproposal. They assumed, perhaps rightly, that since they lived on the land and legally owned it, it was therefore theirs. They did not understand that what they were encountering was a discipline of detail - indeed a very culture of disciple by detail - by which a hitherto imaginary realm could be constructed on Palestine, inch by inch and step by step, 'another acre, another goat,' so Weizmann once said. The Palestinian Arabs always opposed a general policy on general principles: Zionism, they said, was foreign colonialism (which strictly speaking it was, as the early Zionists admitted), it was unfair to the natives (as some early Zionists, like Ahad Ha'am, also admitted), and it was doomed to die of its various theoretical weaknesses. Even to this day the Palestinian political position generally clusters around these negatives, and still does not sufficiently try to meet the detail of Zionist enterprise; today [1978] there are, for example, 77 'illegal' Zionist colonies on the West Bank and Israel has confiscated about 27% of the West Bank's Arab-owned land, yet the Palestinians seem virtually powerless physically to stop the growth or 'thickening' of this new Israeli colonization. The Palestinians have not understood that Zionism has been much more than an unfair colonialist master against whom one could appeal to all sorts of higher courts, without any avail. They have not understood the Zionist challenge as a policy of detail, of institutions, of organization, by which people (to this day) enter territory illegally, build houses on it, settle there, and call the land their own - with the whole world condemning them." (The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, 1978 pp 94-5)

[*See my 8/12/14 post Children of a Lesser God 1.]

Sheridan Sheds Tears for Middle East Christians 1

Uncharacteristically, the Australian's foreign editor, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, hasn't uttered a word in defence of Israel for almost 6 months now, which must be some kind of record for him. Until now that is. His latest thumbs-up for Jewish State in the Levant (JSIL) comes in the guise of a lament for the plight of the Middle East's Christians:

"Pope Francis was in Istanbul this week to draw attention to the plight of Christians in the Middle East. The Pope leads 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. With Bartholomew, Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox, who leads 300 million Orthodox Christians, the Pope said: 'We cannot resign ourselves to a Middle East without Christians who have professed the name of Jesus there for 2000 years.' You would think the world might take notice of this. If so, you would be wrong. This week the Catholic Church has dedicated itself to making society aware of the dire straits in which their co-religionists suffer in the Middle East. Yet there has been no interest in Australia." (We can but mourn for the voiceless Christians of the Middle East, 4/12/14)

So who's to blame here? Why, Edward Said, of course! But let Sheridan explain:

"The nonsensical Edward Said popularised the idea that the West dehumanises the 'other' by making it exotic. Thus we are warned in every part of our culture not to demonise the other. That is quite right, so far as it goes. But this translates into a weird reflex in which any group at war with the West is presumed to be, at least in part, virtuously the 'other'. We demonise ourselves, and we especially demonise anything which smacks of Western civilisation in any part of the world which was once colonised. Middle East Christians suffer from this prejudice in the West. Israel does, too. As part of Western civilisation, it earns whole layers of extra hostility. Hating Israel is part of hating Western civilisation, the default position of the inheritors of the detritus of Marxism in successor ideologies like the Greens."

OK, so if I've got him right, the Catholic Church, Middle Eastern Christians and Israel, are all representatives or extensions of what he calls "Western civilisation" vis-a-vis Said's Muslim 'other'. Now let's, for the sake of argument, assume he's right, OK? Wouldn't that make them all, so to speak, family then? One big, happy Judeo-Christian family?

Since Sheridan's introduced the subject of Israel, let's explore the above idea in relation to Palestinian Christians.

As the representatives of 'Western civilisation' already in Palestine when those exemplary agents of 'Western civilisation', the Zionists, first arrived, wouldn't you have expected them to put out the welcome  mat?

Well, guess what? The buggers failed dismally to stick to Sheridan's script:

"On behalf of my brethren, the Christian heads of the different Arab Christian Communities, I speak in the name of the Arab Christian Churches in Palestine. I am an Arab and my connections with the Byzantine Church do not deprive me of being an Arab with Arab blood running in my veins - just as an Englishman is English whether he is Roman Catholic or Anglican. We have confined our statement to three main points: 1. The Christian Arabs in Palestine have everything in common with their Moslem brethren. Religious beliefs do not in any way make them two peoples. They cherish the same hopes and fears and they strive for one goal - freedom and independence. 2. Zionism is a menace to the Christian as well as to the Moslem population in Palestine. A Jewish state in Palestine would result in a gradual decrease in the Arab population and as a consequence the holy places will become lifeless skeletons of stones guarded by monks and devoid of believers. 3. Lastly, the claim of the Zionists to Palestine is based on Biblical promises in the Old Testament. These promises were abrogated by the New Testament; and all promises given to the people of Israel in the Old Testament have been annulled by the advent of Christ." (The Melkite Archbishop of Galilee quoted in the Report of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, Palestine, 1946)

And once the new Judeo-Christian dispensation known as Israel was established in Palestine in May, 1948, wouldn't you have expected church bells to begin ringing throughout the land? Jews and Christians dancing together in the streets? Inter-faith celebrations lasting well into the night?

Alas, only if, like Tony Abbott, Sheridan's your 'Suppository of All Wisdom':

"Yaacov [Herzog, head of the department of Christian Communities in the Ministry of Religious Affairs] had to devote much of his time to an unpleasant problem that arose during the War of Independence - namely, the desecration of churches and monasteries by IDF soldiers, the looting of their properties, and offensive misuse of their premises. Such abuse had occurred in many places throughout the [1948] war..." (Yaacov Herzog: A Biography, Michael Bar-Zohar, 2003, p 90)

"The neighborhoods of West Jerusalem that were once predominantly Christian - including the German Colony, Talbiya, and Qatamon - were seized by Israel in the war in 1948. The families that fled the fighting were never permitted to return. After the armistice agreement, their homes were seized by Israel's 'Custodian of Absentee Property,' and the Jewish Agency turned them over to new Jewish immigrants." (The Body & the Blood: The Middle East's Vanishing Christians & the Possibility for Peace, Charles M. Sennott, 2001, p 24)

"During the Arab-Israeli war last June [1967] there was much concern about the fate of the holy places in the Old City of Jerusalem. In fact, apart from the church of St Anne, damage to Christian shrines was slight. This was not, however, the case with other Christian property in the Israeli-occupied sector of Jerusalem, belonging to the three major sects, the Latins, Greeks and Armenians. The annexation of the Old City to west Jerusalem, and the return of buildings and cemeteries belonging to them on Mount Sion after a lapse of 20 years, has revealed that these have been extensively desecrated by the occupying forces, and have fared far worse than anything in the Old City during the war. These Christian properties are on the summit of Mount Sion, just outside the city walls to the south. From 1948 until 1967 they were technically in Israel, but the general public was forbidden access to them, and they were under the direct control of the Israeli army.

"Amongst the buildings is the Armenian church of St Saviour, by tradition built on the house of Caiaphas; it is a 15th-century structure... It belongs to the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, which is also located on Mount Sion, but within the walls of Jerusalem. Since 1948 the prelates of the Armenian church have been unable to visit St Saviour's either from Jordan or Israel. Some years ago a UN truce supervisor was asked about the church, but was unable to get inside it. At the time, he expressed the private opinion that it was being used as an advanced Israeli machine-gun post. "The evidence of recent photographs and reports has proved this conjecture to be correct. The monastery buildings around the church were fortified by the Israelis, and the walls between individual cells demolished to make a continuous passage; the windows were filled with sandbags, and wooden gun emplacements. It is clear that they attached considerable importance to the site, as it commanded the south-west angle of the Old City.

"Less comprehensible was the behaviour of the Israeli soldiers during 20 years of occupation of the buildings. The courtyard of the church of St Saviour is the traditional burying-place of the Patriarchs of the Armenian Church in Jerusalem, and at least 14 of the venerable tombs were smashed open, and their contents desecrated. Two were demolished and excavated to a depth of 6 feet below the ground. "The interior of the church of St Saviour is a scene of total devastation. The carved and gilded altar has been wrecked, and an altar painting lies destroyed on the floor below. The oil paintings that decorated the upper part of the north and south walls have been torn out of their frames leaving only tattered shreds of canvas. Many of the Kutahya tiles, brought specially from Turkey by Armenian pilgrims in the early 18th century, have been ripped from the walls; those that have not been stolen lie smashed on the ground, along with a tangled mass of broken church furniture. The valuable collection of old church vestments has completely disappeared. "So has the well-known Byzantine mosaic, which was in the basement of the monastery. Pere Vincent, the distinguished French scholar, once described it as 'une tres belle mosaique... du IV/V siecle'. It has been expertly lifted and removed. It is common knowledge that the Israeli Minister of Defence, General dayan, has an amateur interest in antiquities; some of his troops would seem to have emulated him.

"Adjacent to the Armenian church is the Greek Orthodox cemetery on Mount Sion, which to judge from the photographs now resembles a film set for the Resurrection. Practically every tomb in the cemetery is smashed. Fragments of marble crosses, angels' wings, and inscriptions lie inextricably mixed with human bones, blackened tree stumps, and the remains of rockets and shells. In contrast to the sack of the Armenian church, the damage could conceivably have been the result of the two wars, in 1948 and 1967, rather than systematic pillage. However, there is no doubt that the cemetery was also occupied by Israeli soldiers; there are well-beaten paths between the tombs, and one of the outhouses is labelled NIGHT CLUB. More graffiti, in Hebrew and English, must have been added by other soldiers to while away their time.

"The state of the third cemetery on Mount Sion, belonging to the Latin church, has been described in a recent issue of the Catholic journal, La Terre Sainte, by the Very Reverend Father Andres. Procureur-General in the Holy Land since 1962, he speaks with authority as he has had the task of supervising the repairs to the damaged cemetery. He begins by deploring the overthrowing of Jewish tombstones by the Arabs of the Mount of Olives - the subject of a recent Israeli White Paper - but observes that they did not, as far as is known, actually drag the corpses out of the tombs, as happened with so many Christian graves. He published several macabre photographs, showing smashed tombs in the Catholic cemetery, with the remains of coffins and the deceased strewn all around. In conclusion he rightly asks why these acts of profanation by the Israelis were not also mentioned in the White Paper.

"As the non-Arab Christian communities are by no means involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, one wonders what possible reason there can have been for the desecration of their cemeteries and churches. It is clear that the pillage and destruction was carried out over a period of years, suggesting that the soldiers' misconduct was condoned by successive generations of Israeli officers. Since the war the Israelis have made it quite clear that whilst some of the recently occupied territories might possibly be negotiable, the Old City is excluded from any bargaining and that they intend to stay. This must give pause for thought to the three major Christian sects in Jerusalem, in light of what has happened to their property during 20 years of occupation; they must surely view the future with apprehension, however much the Israeli government may attempt to reassure them of its benevolence." (The Desecration of Christian Cemeteries & Church property in Israel, Basic Documents Series No. 5, The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1968)

To be continued...

A Shiver Looking for a Spine to Run Up

What an unmitigated disaster this creature is:

"The Palestinian President, in a remarkable assessment delivered on Israeli TV, says the Arab world erred in rejecting the United Nations' 1947 plan to partition Palestine into a Palestinian and a Jewish state. The Palestinian and Arab refusal to accept a UN plan to partition the then British-controlled mandate of Palestine sparked widespread fighting, then Arab military intervention after Israel declared independence the following year. The Arabs lost the war. 'It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole', Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas [Abu Mazen] told Channel 2 TV on Friday, in a rare interview to the Israeli media. 'But do they [the Israelis] punish us for this mistake 64 years?'" (It was our mistake, says Palestinian chief, Amy Teibal, AP/The Sun-Herald, 30/10/11)

Essentially, what he has said to Israeli viewers (assuming he even knows the relevant history) is this:

In 1947, the United Nations, then just a white man's club dominated by a superpower under the thumb of a powerful, fanatical and utterly ruthless domestic lobby, decided to gift over half of my Palestinian homeland, including Safad, the city of my birth, to a recently arrived but powerful, fanatical and utterly ruthless movement of European colons who behaved as if they owned the place but had purchased no more than 6% of it at the time, trashing in the process our right of national self-determination. All that and more, yet the Palestinian and Arab leaderships of the day were mistaken in not accepting such a state of affairs.

What next? The Balfour Declaration was actually a win-win for Jews and Arabs, but we missed that boat too? The Zionist project has actually been character-building for us?

No, not that, because the man is utterly spineless, as the late Edward Said recognised almost a decade ago:

"Perhaps the one thing that strikes me as the low point in Arab inability to grasp the dignity of the Palestinian cause is expressed by the current state of the Palestinian Authority. Abu Mazen, a subordinate figure with little political support among his own people, was picked for the job by Arafat, Israel, and the United States precisely because he has no constituency, because he is not an orator or a great organizer or anything really except a dutiful aide to Yasir Arafat, and because, I am afraid, they see in him a man who will do Israel's bidding. But how could even Abu Mazen stand there in Aqaba to pronounce words written for him, like a ventriloquist's puppet, by some State Department functionary, in which he commendably speaks about Jewish suffering but then amazingly says next to nothing about his own people's suffering at the hands of Israel? How could he accept so undignified and manipulated a role for himself, and how could he forget his self-dignity as the representative of a people that has been fighting heroically for its rights for over a century, just because the United States and Israel have told him he must? And when Israel simply says that there will be a 'provisional' Palestinian state, without any contrition for the horrendous amount of damage it has done, the uncountable war crimes, the sheer sadistic, systematic humiliation of every single Palestinian man, woman, and child, I must confess to a complete lack of understanding as to why a leader or representative of that long-suffering people doesn't so much as take note of it. Has he entirely lost his sense of dignity? Has he forgotten that he is not just an individual but also the bearer of his people's fate at an especially crucial moment? Is there anyone who was not bitterly disappointed at this total failure to rise to the occasion and stand with dignity - the dignity of his people's experience and cause - and testify to it with pride, without compromise, without ambiguity, without the half-embarrassed, half-apologetic tone that Palestinian leaders take when they are begging for a little kindness from some totally unworthy white father?" (Al-Ahram, 26/6/03)

Deja Vu All Over Again

You would think, would you not, that the Syrian army, infamous for its large-scale 'renovation' of the rebellious city of Hama in 1982, would have little need of assistance from Iranian or Hezbollah forces to put down a mass protest? But no, such nefarious elements have indeed been spotted - or so it is claimed:

SBS's World News last night had Al-Jazeera's Anita McNaught reporting that "[Syrian refugee] accounts [of Syrian army massacres in Jisr ash-Shugour] bolster numerous reports of both army mutinies and Iranian involvement in the Syrian crackdown." (Witnesses recount destruction in Syria hotbed)

This was followed by footage of a young man, described as a "former Syrian soldier," saying, "I saw Iranians and Hezbollah members giving us orders to shoot. Those who did not obey were shot immediately in the back. All the soldiers who were killed were hit in the back of the neck. We used to try to fire in the air so as not to kill protesters. Five of my colleagues refused to shoot. They were shot in the back and killed."

It would seem here that, in the words of Yogi Berra, it's deja vu all over again, because weren't Hezbollah and Hamas alleged to have been helping Iran's Revolutionary Guards put down street protests in Tehran in 2009? (See my 23/6/09 post Hezbikies Ho!)

How could it be that the Iranians, now allegedly helping the Syrian army do its dirty work, were back then in need of outside help themselves?

The latest such claim has correctly elicited the following response from the Angry Arab:

"Clearly, Saudi media are following an Israeli propaganda script. Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi state media are now repeating a story that members of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Hizbullah are involved in shooting at protesters in Syria. Why? Why would the Syrian army need help from Iran? I mean, is there a shortage of people in the Syrian security services willing to shoot people? What would a handful of Iranians or Hizbullah fighters, trained to fight Israel, bring to the festival of repression in Syria? This is very much a typical Mossad lie. Have you forgotten that Mossad liars claimed in 2006 that they found the bodies of 3 Iranian revolutionary guards but then failed to produce them? We are used to Israeli lies. The Syrian Muslim Brothers are a tool not just of Saudi Arabia, but of Israel too. Make no mistake about it." (13/6/11)

But this kind of propaganda trope - where national resistance forces allegedly pop up with guns blazing, or worse, far from their home turf, and, ever so conveniently, blacken their own names in the process - was doing the rounds long before 2006, as this extract from a 1980 essay, Iran & the US Press, by Edward Said in Columbia Journalism Review makes clear:

"Another method [to incriminate 'Islam'] was to suggest invisible lines connecting various other Middle Eastern things to Iranian Islam, then to damn them together, implicitly or explicitly, depending on the case... Much of the flamboyant use of suggestion originated in a small front-page item by Daniel B Drooz in The Atlantic Constitution on November 8 [1979], in which it was alleged that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was behind the [US] embassy takeover. His sources were authorities in 'diplomatic and European intelligence'. (Coming in a close second was his November 22 discovery that 'Where there are Shi'ites, there is trouble'.) A month later Goerge Ball stated gnomically in The Washington Post that 'there is some basis to believe that the whole operation is being orchestrated by well-trained Marxists'. Not to be outdone, CBS introduced its Evening News on December 12 with Martin Kalb from the State Department quoting (equally unnamed) 'diplomatic and intelligence experts' as affirming that Palestinian guerillas, Iranian extremists, and Islamic fundamentalists had cooperated at the embassy. The PLO men were the ones who had mined the compound, Kalb said; they were known to be inside, he went on sagely, by virtue of 'the sounds of Arabic' being heard from the embassy. (A brief report of Kalb's 'story' was carried the next day in the Los Angeles Times.) It remained for no less a personage than Hudson Institute expert Constantine Menges to argue exactly the same thesis first in The New Republic of December 15, then twice more on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report. No more evidence was given; it sufficed to conjure up the diabolism of communism in natural alliance with the devilish PLO and satanic Moslems."

A Flaw in the Geometry of Resettlement & Exodus

Jewish supremacist trash-talk is nothing new:

"I've always wanted to boycott the Palestinians for growing a society that celebrates suicide bombers and rewards those who murder Jews. I can't think of a single product which they export, however, besides jihad. I'm already not buying that." (Daniel Lewis, Rushcutters Bay, NSW, Letter, The Australian, 4/4/11)

Edward Said must have had something like the above in mind when he wrote the following resonant words in 1986:

"Identity - who we are, where we come from, what we are - is difficult to maintain in exile. Most other people take their identity for granted. Not the Palestinian, who is required to show proofs of identity more or less constantly. It is not only that we are regarded as terrorists, but that our existence as native Arab inhabitants of Palestine, with primordial rights there (and not elsewhere), is either denied or challenged. And there is more. Such as it is, our existence is linked negatively to encomiums about Israel's democracy, achievements, excitement; in much Western rhetoric we have slipped into the place occupied by Nazis and anti-Semites; collectively, we can aspire to little except political anonymity and resettlement; we are known for no actual achievement, no characteristic worthy of esteem, except the effrontery of disrupting Middle East peace. Some Israeli settlers on the West Bank say: 'The Palestinians can stay here, with no rights, as resident aliens'. Other Israelis are less kind. We have no known Einsteins, no Chagall, no Freud or Rubinstein to protect us with a legacy of glorious achievements. We have had no Holocaust to protect us with the world's compassion. We are 'other', and opposite, a flaw in the geometry of resettlement and exodus. Silence and discretion veil the hurt, slow the body searches, soothe the sting of loss." (After the Last Sky, pp 16-17)

Hating Edward Said

February must have been Put the Boot into Edward Said Month at The Australian.

The charge was led by foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan:

"No intellectual in Western life has had a more doleful influence than that champion of frauds, Edward Said. His animating idea was that all Western scholarship on the Orient, by which he meant the Arab world, was a kind of false consciousness, trapped in a narrative of colonialism and Western superiority. The silliness of the idea has led to its reverse, a kind of reflexive idealising of 'the other', so Arab despots, extremists and millenarian mass murderers are imbued in many progressive circles of the West with all kinds of qualities of wisdom and kindness which they singularly do not possess." (Dictator's useful idiots happy to take his money: Gaddafi is the most absurd example of a monster adored by his ignorant fan club, 24/2/11)

Mere days later, The Australian's turgid trollumnist, David Burchell, weighed in:

"Nowadays the late American literary critic Edward Said passes for a moral authority on the historical relations of the Arab and Western worlds... Like his soulmate Noam Chomsky, Said presented a political perspective of almost child-like simplicity: the West, in its domineering ignorance, was forever doomed to 'other' the Orient, and to treat it as its inferior, even while Said and his disciples blissfully 'othered' the Middle East themselves, as a sepulchre of Arab suffering, in a mirror-image of those they deplored. Said's acolytes are probably less familiar with the articles he wrote over many years for the Egyptian state press* - articles devoid of the criticism of any existing Arab government; (least of all Mubarak's); and which reduce all the problems of the Arab world to the actions of those two familiar pantomime villains, the US and Israel... You can search Said's articles in vain for the words now on the lips of young people across the region: democracy, freedom, women's rights. Instead, like earlier colonialist bromides they are souvenirs of pure social and political reaction." (Libyans failed by Left orientalism, 28/2/11)

You can search Said's articles in vain... Oh, really? We are talking about the same Edward Said, right? You should have contacted me, David. I could have saved you all that trouble and lent you my copy of Said's collection of essays (including those published in Al-Ahram), From Oslo to Iraq & the Roadmap (2004), in which you'd have found such passages as:

"Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is too dependent on the $2 billion in annual US aid for him so much as to demur at US policy. Like the others, he needs the United States to protect him from his people far too much for him to oppose Clinton and his peacemaking team of former Israeli lobby officials. Meanwhile the sense of Arab anger, humiliation, and frustration continues to build up, whether because the regimes are so undemocratic and unpopular or because all the basic elements of human life - employment, income, nutrition, health, education, infrastructure, transportation, environment - have so fallen beneath tolerable limits that only appeals to Islam and generalized expressions of outrage will do, instead of a sense of citizenship and participatory democracy. This bodes ill for the future, the Arabs' as well as Israel's... Moreover, the old frameworks that survived the cold war have slowly crumbled as the Arab leaderships have aged, without viable successors in sight. Egypt's Mubarak has refused even to appoint a vice-president, Arafat has no clear successor, and as in the case either of Iraq's and Syria's 'democratic socialist' Ba'ath republics or Jordan's kingdom, the rulers' sons have taken or will take over with the merest fig leaf of legitimacy to cover their dynastic autocracy." (London Review of Books, 14/12/00; republished in From Oslo... , pp 7-8)

"Neither a constitution nor an election process has any real meaning if such suspensions of law and justice can take place with the relative acquiescence of an entire people, especially the intellectuals. What I mean is not just that we don't have democracy, but that at bottom we seem to have refused the very concept itself. I became dramatically aware of this 8 years ago when, after a lecture I gave in London in which I criticized the Arab governments for their abuse of human freedoms, I was summoned by an Arab ambassador to apologize for my remarks. When I refused even to speak to the man, a friend interceded and arranged for me to have tea with the offended ambassador at my friend's house. What transpired was profoundly revealing. When I repeated my comments, the ambassador lost his temper (he happened also to be a member of the ruling party) and told me in no uncertain terms that, as far as he and his regime were concerned, democracy was little more than AIDS, pornography and chaos. 'We don't want that', he kept repeating with almost insensate rage." (Al-Ahram, July 19-25, 2001, republished in From Oslo..., pp 80-81)

Edward Said wrote in his 1978 classic, Orientalism:

"The modern Orientalist was, in his view, a hero rescuing the Orient from the obscurity, alienation, and strangeness which he himself had properly distinguished." (p 121)

He must have seen Burchell coming:

"[A]bout how to create such a country, beyond toppling statues and setting fire to police stations, [young Libyans] have been left almost totally in the dark - partly through the agency of their own rulers, and partly by us."

However, just in case Burchell is thinking of taking up the White Man's burden and rushing off to Libya to tutor these "half-devil & half-child" natives on what to do after they've toppled Qaddafi's statues and torched his police stations, maybe someone should tell him that "Hafiz Ghoga, the spokesman for the newly formed National Libyan Council in the rebel-controlled eastern city of Benghazi, said 'foreign intervention' would not be welcome. The rest of Libya will be liberated by the people... and Gaddafi's security forces will be eliminated by the people of Libya', Ghoga said at a news conference." (Libyan rebels say they don't want foreign intervention, Will Rahn, dailycaller.com, 27/2/11)

[* Forget the Egyptian press, I've been fascinated by Burchell's apparent familiarity with the entire Egyptian media ever since he admitted to "scouring" it for "lonely coracles of sanity in a vast ocean of paranoia." See my 2/2/11 post Burchell Buffs the Banana.]

On the Nose

As in Australia:

"Voters... can smell a politician who puts self-preservation ahead of the national interest. They can smell it even when they're not sure they fancy the measures needed to advance the national interest. And they're never impressed." (Ross Gittins, Voters censure Labor's lack of principles, SMH, 23/8/10)

So in Palestine, only the smell is worse, much worse, as you'd expect from collusion and betrayal:

"Abbas is fully aware that he goes to Washington with many Palestinians, including some of those closest to the PA, viewing him as having at best surrendered and at worst as being a traitor. He was badly shaken when, in the wake of his initial support for a postponement of the discussion on the Goldstone report, his grandson came to him crying and explained that children at his school had called his grandfather a 'traitor'. And it is well known that Abbas has checked into a Jordanian hospital on more than one occasion suffering from exhaustion and stress brought on by a process he once had faith in but which has delivered only pain to his people." (Abbas: The man & the politician, Lamis Andoni, aljazeera.net, 1/9/10)

"Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told US Jewish leaders on Wednesday that he would never deny Jews their right to the land of Israel, according to participants of the 2-hour roundtable discussion." (Abbas tells US Jews: I would never deny Jewish right to the land of Israel, Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz, 10/6/10)

"Shalom to you in Israel. I know we have disappointed you. I know we have been unable to deliver peace for the last 19 years..." Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat's pitch to Israelis on Israel's Heskem TV, 28/8/10)

But none of this is new. The stench of collusion has been around for years now:

"'Be certain that Yasser Arafat's final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as well that... the promises I made in front of President Bush, I will give my life to keep'. Those words were written by Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose US- and Israeli-backed forces were routed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month [June, 2007], in a 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz and published on Hamas' website on 4 July this year. Dahlan, who despite his failure to hold Gaza, remains a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, outlines his conspiracy to overthrow Arafat, destroy Palestinian institutions and replace them with a quisling leadership subservient to Israel. Dahlan writes of his fear that Arafat would convene the Palestinian legislative council and ask it to withdraw confidence from then prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who had been appointed earlier in 2003 at Bush's insistence in order to curb Arafat's influence. Dahlan wrote that 'complete coordination and cooperation by all' was needed to prevent this, as well as 'subjecting [Arafat] to pressure so that he cannot carry out this step'. Dahlan reveals that 'we have already begun attempts to polarize the views of many legislative council members by intimidation and temptation so that they will be on our side and not his [Arafat's]'. Dahlan closes his letter to Mofaz saying, 'it remains only for me to convey my gratitude to you and the prime minister [Ariel Sharon] for your continued confidence in us, and to you all respect'." (From Overcoming the conspiracy against Palestine, Ali Abunimeh, The Electronic Intifada, 18/7/07)

In fact, the rot set in at least as long ago as 1993 with the launch of the so-called peace process, symbolised by PLO head Yasir Arafat shaking hands with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn at President Bill Clinton's urging. The late Edward Said's damning assessment, written at the time, of Arafat's performance and its fateful consequences for the future of the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and independence has proved prophetic indeed:

"Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, what emerges from the Israeli-PLO agreement is a deal that is more flawed and less favorable for the Palestinian people than many had first supposed. The vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasir Arafat thanking everyone for what, in fact, was the suspension of most of his people's rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton's performance - like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance - all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation. So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles... I doubt there was a single Palestinian who watched the White House ceremony who did not also feel that a century of sacrifice, dispossession, heroic struggle, had finally come to naught. Indeed what was most troubling was that Rabin in effect gave the Palestinian speech, whereas Arafat pronounced words that had all the flair of a rental agreement. Far from being the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians saw themselves being characterized before the world as its now repentant assailants, as if the thousands killed by Israel's bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools in Lebanon, its expulsion of 800,000 people in 1948 (whose descendents now number about 3 million, most of them stateless refugees), the conquest of their land and property, its destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages, the invasion of Lebanon, to say nothing of the ravages of 26 years of brutal military occupation, were reduced to the status of terrorism and violence, to be renounced retrospectively or dropped from reference entirely. Israel has always described Palestinian resistance as terrorism and violence, so even in the matter of diction it received a moral and historical gift. In return for exactly what? Israel's recognition of the PLO, undoubtedly a significant step forward. Beyond that, by accepting that land and sovereignty are being postponed till 'final status negotiations' the Palestinians in effect have discounted their unilateral and internationally acknowledged claim to the West Bank and Gaza: these have now at most become 'disputed territories'. Thus with Palestinian assistance Israel has been awarded at least an equal claim to them. The Israeli calculation is that by accepting to police Gaza - which Begin tried to give Sadat 15 years ago - the PLO would soon fall foul of local competitors, of whom Hamas is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians will grow weaker and more under Israeli control, and thus less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins." (Edward Said, from his October 1993 essay The Morning After in Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, 1995, pp 7/10-11)

More Sewage from Hitchens

"[Edward Said] never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched forward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to pour sewage on his head." (Edward Said, Dead at 66, Alex Cockburn, 25/9/03)

Christopher Hitchens once co-edited a book with Edward Said called Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship & the Palestinian Question (1988). Now, in a recent book review in The Atlantic Monthly (Idealism of an earlier age), recycled in Murdoch's Australian Financial Review (16/4/10), Hitchens is blaming the (Palestinian) victims and putting the spew into spurious scholarship:

"Almost no concession made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it."

There are no Palestinian victims here, no colonised, no occupied - just one of two presumably evenly-matched sides, slugging it out, and, most importantly, refusing to concede an inch to the other.

Yet, in 1996, in his introduction to Said's essays on the bankrupt Oslo 'peace process', Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Processs, Hitchens couldn't have been clearer on the subject of who was wielding the hammer:

"Consider merely the question of Gaza. If the Belgians or the Dutch or the British had ever dared run a conquered territory in this way, in the period after 1945, it can be hoped (and it may even be believed) that a torrent of international condemnation would have descended. Nobody has ever visited this part of the projected 'Greater Israel' and come away with anything but the most decided revulsion. Having shamed themselves beyond description in this little strip of former Palestine, the Israeli authorties smilingly decided to make a present of it to their former subjects. I should here like to quote from an interview I conducted, in the week of the White House handshake, with Ilan Halevi of the PLO delegation. (Mr Halevi is a Palestinian Jew and was at the time the ambassador of the PLO to the Socialist International, as well as a strong supporter of the Arafat-Rabin accord.) 'When they offered us Gaza as a beginning', he told me, 'I suggested that we say, 'Sure. But what will you give us in exchange?' It may or may not be significant that the only decent Jewish joke to come out of the whole affair was told by a member of the PLO. The offer was, in other words, always understood at some level as a sordid trap. On the day of the White House accords, I also dined with a senior American diplomat who had once had charge of Israel-Palestine negotiations. He told me of a previous occasion, when the late Gen. Moshe Dayan had suggested a 'Gaza first' ploy. Instructed to wait upon Dayan and tell him that such an offer was too transparent by half, my vis-a-vis had found him no whit abashed. 'Never mind', said the hero of 1967, 'We'll still double-cross that bridge when we come to it'." (p xvi-xvii)

But it gets worse. According to the Hitchens of 2010, not only does he entertain the notion that the victims of Zionist aggression should have been in the business of making concessions to their aggressors, but that they should also have been owning up to their hand in... the Nazi Holocaust no less:

"There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust* might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past... The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure."

If only the Palestinian victims had damned one of their own for daring to sup with the devil of the day in defence of his people and homeland (conveniently overlooking, of course, the fact that Zionist ultras were actively seeking the same devil's blessing in their war with the British), a heart or two might have softened!?

Here's the spew in Hitchen's spurious scholarship: 1) The mufti's doings in Nazi Germany and the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 are on a par and a mutual apology is therefore in order; 2) Ben-Gurion and his successors had a heart.

At two points in Said's introduction to Blaming the Victims, it's almost as though, in relation to this particular bucket of Hitchens', he had his co-editor in mind:

"Almost from the moment that the state of Israel came into being in 1948 - and although the preparations were made well before that time - the West was deluged with a whole series of narratives and images that acquired the solidity and the legitimacy of 'truth'. In spite of the presence of a comfortable 67% majority of Palestinian Arabs who owned over 90% of the land in 1948 (this was after decades of Jewish immigration and settlement) the world heard of an 'empty' territory whose inhabitants brutishly opposed Jewish settlement in Zion even after the Holocaust had occurred. Thereafter the myths proliferated and formed a system which, in the West at least, it became inordinately difficult to deny. The 'Arabs' left Palestine because their leaders told them to; the Arabs were out to destroy the Jewish state, and since they were already in league with Hitler, their opposition to Israel was essentially racist and fascist..." (pp 3-4) And, further on: "Most of all the Palestinian has suffered because he or she has been unknown, an unacknowledged victim, and worse, a victim blamed not only for his or her disasters, but for those of others as well." (p 6)

Said had expanded on this idea in an earlier work, After the Last Sky (1986):

"There has been no misfortune worse for us than that we are ineluctably viewed as the enemies of the Jews. No moral and political fate worse, none at all, I think: no worse, there is none. With so much discussion recently of the Holocaust, I am centrally aware of the fact of the destruction of European Jews, an abomination which nevertheless I find hard to consider separately; there is always the connection made between Israel and the Holocaust, how one makes restitution for the other. I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, but without the terrifying grandeur and sacriligeous horror of what it did to the Jews. Seen from the perspective provided by the Holocaust, we are as inconsequential as children on a playground; and yet - one more twist in the reductive spiral - even at play we cannot be enjoyed or looked at simply as that, as children playing games that signify little. Just by virtue of where we stand, every playground is seen as a 'breeding ground for terrorists', every pastime a 'secret plan for the destruction of Israel', as if our own destruction was not a great deal more probable. Something either pernicious or negligible can be attributed to us, no matter what we do, wherever we are, however we think or act." (p 134)

Hitchens' obscene suggestion that the victims of the Zionist project in Palestine should be apologising for their alleged part in the Hitlerian Holocaust would have Said turning in his grave.

[* See my 22/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 6]

Fatah: From Go to Woe

Woe:
"'I am proud', said Saeb Erekat, a senior aide of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and Fatah's leader. 'Are we fighting? You bet! Are we screaming at each other? You bet!' "

He paused, then added: Are we planning to assassinate Muhammad Dahlan's* critics? You bet! Are we stealing the Palestinian people's money? You bet! Are we collaborating with Israel in its occupation of Palestine? You bet! Are we covering up the assassination of Arafat? You bet! Am I the biggest buffoon on the Palestinian stage since Ahmad Shuqayri? You bet! Do we lie to the Palestinian people? You bet! Do I offer to shine the shoes of Israeli leaders? You bet! Were we proud of Dahlan's gangs when they fled in their underwear from Gaza? You bet! Is Abu Mazen USrael 's chief puppet? You bet! Do the Palestinian people make fun of me when I speak and yell? You bet! Is the Fatah conference the mother of all jokes? You bet!" (angryarab.blogspot.com, 7/8/09)

[*See my 6/3/08 post Mainsewer Media Clueless in Gaza]

Go:
"I could see in 1991... not only that the gains of the [first] intifada were about to be squandered but that Arafat and a few of his closest advisers had already decided on their own to accept anything that the United States and Israel might throw their way, just in order to survive as part of the 'peace process'. The major losses incurred by the misguided policies of the PLO leadership during the Gulf crisis, and by the constant mismanagement of funds and assets that were never accounted for, caused the PLO leadership in panic to concede every single national aim and legal principle to the so-called interim solution proposed by Yitzhak Shamir and seconded by George Bush [senior] and James Baker. We received no acknowledgment of self-determination, no certainty of future sovereignty, no right of representation, no mention of reparations (and this from a state which received billions of dollars from Germany for the Nazi Holocaust). And if that were not bad enough, the Oslo Declaration of Principles celebrated on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, was actually a good deal worse. For the first time in our history, our leadership had simply given up on self-determination, Jerusalem, and the refugees, allowing them to become part of an undetermined set of 'final status negotiations'. For the first time in our recent past, we accepted the division of our people - whose unity we had fought for as a national movement since 1948 - into residents of the Occupied Territories and all the others, who happen today to constitute over 55% of the Palestinian population; they exist in another, lesser category not covered by the peace process. For the first time in the 20thC, an anti-colonial liberation movement had not only discarded its own considerable achievements but made an agreement to cooperate with a military occupation before that occupation had ended, and before even the government of Israel had admitted that it was in effect a government of military occupation. (To this day Israel has refused to concede that it is an occupying power.)" (Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, Edward Said, 1996, pp xxviii-xxix)

[See also my posts The Bigger Picture (4/11/08) & USrael's Palestinian Recruits (12/12/08)]

Sheridan in Love 3

"Israel is also the only Western nation in the Middle East (with the exception of substantial but minority parts of Lebanon). Israel is the only national expression of Western values, and indeed Western power, in today's Middle East. These terms can be confusing. The West aspires to universal values of democracy and human rights..." (Israel still looks good, warts & all, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09)

Yes, as a colonial-settler offshoot of Europe, Israel may be the only "Western nation in the Middle East," but how the hell "substantial parts of Lebanon" make it into the same category is beyond me. That aside, as soon as Sheridan trots out ideological constructs such as 'the West', and so-called "Western values," you know you're in clash-of-civilizations territory, where, in the words of Edward Said, "the personification of enormous entities called 'the West' and 'Islam' is recklessly affirmed, as if hugely complicated matters like identity and culture existed in a cartoonlike world where Popeye and Bluto bash each other mercilessly, with one always more virtuous pugilist getting the upper hand over his adversary." (The Clash of Ignorance, The Nation, 22/10/01) In the reductive, us-and-them world of The Australian's foreign editor and neocon magician, over two centuries of bloody European/US meddling, invasion, domination, and control in the Middle East are spirited away as he conjures up a seductive vision of democracy and human rights, to which an entity dubbed 'the West' is supposed to eternally aspire.

Integral to this fantastic vision is the absurd suggestion that Israel, a settler-colonial ethnocracy, which has been dispossessing and oppressing the indigenous Palestinian Arab people for over 60 years, is acting as some sort of vector for democracy and human rights in the Middle East. It is perhaps useful, at this point, to recall Israel's job description, courtesy of Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British Governor of Jerusalem : "It will form for England a little Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

As US academic Con Hallinan explains: "Storrs' analogy was no accident. Ireland was where the English invented the tactic of divide and rule, and where the devastating effectiveness of using foreign settlers to drive a wedge between the colonial rulers and the colonized made it a template for worldwide imperial rule. Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Menachem Begin normally take credit for creating the 'facts on the ground' policies that have poured more than 420,000 settlers into the Occupied Territories. But they were simply copying Charles I, the English king, who in 1609 forcibly removed the O'Neill and O'Donnell clans from the north of Ireland, moved in 20,000 English and Scottish protestants, and founded the Plantation of Ulster. Protestants were awarded the 'Ulster privilege' which gave them special access to land and lower rents, and also served to divide them from the native Catholics. The 'Ulster privilege' is not dissimilar to the kind of 'privileges' Israeli settlers enjoy in the Territories today, where their mortgages are cheap, their taxes lower and their education subsidized. Prior to the Ulster experiment, the English had tried any number of schemes to tame the restive Irish and build a wall between conqueror and conquered. All of them failed. Then the English hit on the idea of using ethnicity, religion and privilege to construct a society with built-in divisions. It worked like a charm. Once the English hit on the tactic of using ethnic and religious differences to divide a population, the conquest of Ireland became a reality. Within 250 years, that formula would be transported to India, Africa, and the Middle East. It was 'divide and conquer' that made it possible for an insignificant island in the north of Europe to rule the world. Division and chaos, tribal, religious and ethnic hatred, were the secret to empire. It would appear the Israelis have paid close attention to English colonial policy because their policies in the Occupied Territories bear a distressing resemblance to British policies in Ireland." (Divide & conquer: common imperial rules for the 21st century, onlineopinion.com.au, 29/7/04)

No choice but to resist...

Operation Defensive Shield (29/3/02-21/4/02) was Israel's last major military rampage in the West Bank. The Israeli terrorist forces used the most advanced weaponry at their disposal: Merkava tanks, Apache attack helicopters and F-15 fighter jets. When it was over, the economic and social structure of the West Bank lay in ruins, homes were destroyed, 220 Palestinians were dead, hundreds more were injured, and thousands were imprisoned. The following words, from Palestinian writer and academic Edward Said (1935-2003) and poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), written during the operation, are as relevant today as they were then. I dedicate them to the Resistance and people of Gaza:-

"The most important lesson for all of us to understand about ourselves is manifest in the terrible tragedies of what Israel is now doing in the Occupied Territories. The fact is that we are a people and a society, and despite Israel's ferocious attack against the Palestinian Authority, our society still functions. We are a people because we have a functioning society that goes on - and has gone on for the past 54 years - despite every sort of abuse, every cruel turn of history, every misfortune we have suffered, every tragedy we have gone through as a people. Our greatest victory over Israel is that peole like Sharon and his kind do not have the capacity to see that, and this is why they are doomed despite their great power and their awful, inhuman cruelty. We have surmounted the tragedies and memories of our past, whereas such Israelis as Sharon have not. He will go to his grave only as an Arab-killer and a failed politician who brought more unrest and insecurity to his people. It must surely be the legacy of a leader that he should have something behind upon which future generations will build. Sharon, Shaul Mofaz, and all the others associated with them in this bullying, sadistic campaign of death and carnage will leave nothing except gravestones. Negation breeds negation. As Palestinians, I think we can say we have left a vision and a society that has survived every attempt to kill it. And that is something. It is for the generation of my children and yours to go on from there, critically, rationally, with hope and forbearance." (From Thinking Ahead, Al-Ahram, 4/4/02)

"This is a war for war's sake, since it has no other aim than its self-perpetuation. Everyone knows this; and once again, the sword will prove incapable of crushing the spirit... In every corner crimes are being committed. On every street lie the bodies of the murdered. On every wall is blood. The living are deprived of the basic right to life, and the martyrs are denied graves in which to rest in peace. Above all, however, what we are now seeing is the expression of the will of a people that has no choice but to resist... Television has made it unecessary to explain ourselves: now our blood is shed in every home and is on every conscience. From this day on, he who does not become Palestinian in his heart will never understand his true moral identity... In the face of the political genocide being offered by the American-funded Israeli occupation of their land, [the Palestinians] offer their steadfast resistance no matter what the cost. Backs against the wall, their eyes fixed upon hope, they show a strength of spirit for which their can be no facile explanation... What concerns us is the defence of our national and human existence - even if our backs are up against the wall. We have absolutely no other option." (From A War for War's Sake, Al-Ahram, 11/4/02)

A New Dawn of American Leadership

The rhetoric: "And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand." (from President-elect Barack Obama's victory speech at Chicago's Grant Park)

The reality: "Why is he asking Rahm Emanuel - 'Rahmbo', one of [Washington's] most in-your-face partisan actors - to be his chief of staff?... [I]n the modern White House, the chief of staff is one of the most powerful posts, the gatekeeper to the president on every issue, the person with the last word... Mr Emanuel... knows the White House, having been a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. In a brief career as an investment banker after that, he made millions and became familiar with Wall Street; in the House, he helped negotiate the government bailout of the financial system... But there's the matter of his temperament - or, as Mr Emanuel says, 'I swear a lot'. He also yells a lot, and in his sentences his favourite expletive can serve as subject, verb or adjective when he is facing down recalcitrant Democrats or Republican opponents... In the Clinton administration, Mr Emanuel raised eyebrows when, as chairman of the 1993 inaugural committee, he rode in the parade in a car emblazoned with his name... Mr Emanuel has worked at good relations with Republicans... Late last week, Mr Emanuel called Ray LaHood, a Republican from downstate Illinois, for advice about his career. 'A chief of staff is sort of the alter ego of the president', Mr LaHood said. 'Philosophically, on principles and values, they just have to be totally in sync'. He thinks Mr Emanuel would be 'a perfect fit'."* (Rahmbo the gatekeeper: he swears by his boss, Jackie Calmes, The New York Times, repub SMH, 7/11/08)

So chief of staff Emanuel is a foul-mouthed, narcissistic, investment banker turned Democrat politician, who pals around with Republicans and whose principles and values Obama shares. How reassuring. But it gets worse: "Emanuel is the son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948." (Sources: Rahm Emanuel accepts Obama offer to be chief of staff, Haaretz, 6/11/08) Irgun terrorists achieved notoriety with the blowing up of Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1946 (88 dead) and the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 (100+ dead), to cite but two of their 'achievements'. The Irgun's leader, Menachem Begin, described by the architect of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and Israel's first prime minister (1948-1963), David Ben-Gurion, as "clearly a Hitler type," went on to lead the Irgun's ideological successor, the Likud, to victory in the Israeli elections of 1977.

But maybe Rahmbo's put this legacy behind him? No such luck. Apparently, he's a real chip off the old block** - after all, Daddy didn't name him Rahm Israel Emanuel for nothing: "Emanuel continued his father's tradition of active support for Israel; during the 1991 Gulf War he volunteered to help maintain Israeli army vehicles near the Lebanon border when southern Lebanon was still occupied by Israeli forces. As White House political director in the first Clinton administration, Emanuel orchestrated the famous 1993 signing ceremony of the 'Declaration of Principles' between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin." (Obama picks pro-Israel hardliner for top post, Ali Abunimeh, The Electronic Intifada, 5/11/08) Of this sealing of the Oslo 'peace process', with its famous Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn, Edward Said lamented at the time: "The vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasir Arafat thanking everyone for what, in fact, was the suspension of most of his people's rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton's performance - like a 20th century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance - all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation... [L]et us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles." (Peace & its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, 1996, p 7)

Not surprisingly, Emanuel has real form as an unabashed apologist in Congress for Israeli brutality: "In June 2003... he signed a letter criticizing Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. 'We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror', Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats wrote to Bush. The letter said that Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders 'was clearly justified as an application of Israel's right to self-defense' (Pelosi supports Israel's attacks on Hamas group, San Francisco Chronicle, 14/6/03). In July 2006, Emanuel was one of several members who called for the cancellation of a speech to Congress by visiting Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki because al-Maliki had criticized Israel's bombing of Lebanon. Emanuel called the Lebanese and Palestinian governments 'totalitarian entities with militias and terrorists acting as democracies' in a 19 July speech supporting a House resolution backing Israel's bombing of both countries that caused thousands of civilian victims."* (Abunimeh)

Finally, "... Emanuel accompanied Obama to a meeting of AIPAC's executive board just after the Illinois senator had addressed the pro-Israel lobby's conference last June. " (Abunimeh) At that conference, Obama swore ritual fealty to Israel: "Our alliance is based on shared interests and shared values. Those who threaten Israel, threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security."

But God help Obama if ever his "unshakeable commitment" to Israel gets the wobbles: "There's the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting 'Dead!... Dead!... Dead! and plunging the knife into the table after every name. 'When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape', one campaign veteran recalls. 'It was like something out of The Godfather'."*** (Forget the Honeymoon: Getting Down to Bizness with Obama, Justin Raimondo, antiwar.com, 7/11/08)

[*Try working these clowns out: LaHood is an Illinois Republican of Lebanese origin. While Rahmbo is using his congressional seat to urge US backing for Israel's 2006 bomb-Lebanon-back-to-the-stone-age rampage (19/7/06), LaHood is "join[ing] with a small group of members of Congress in pressing the State Department to urge Israel to exercise more restraint in its bombing of Lebanon... 'I don't think it's right for [the Israelis] to close the airport, just bomb every runway, I think that's wrong. And I think it's wrong to bomb every major artery out of... Beirut and out of Lebanon. And then to go in and some of these oil refineries they've destroyed and some of the areas of Beirut that were just re-built over the last 10 years were bombed. I just think this is wrong." (LaHood on Lebanon, Mike Dorning, swamppolitics.com, 18/7/08)]
[** And here's a slice of Daddy: "Dr Benjamin Emanuel said he was convinced that his son's appointment would be good for Israel. 'Obviously, he will influence the president to be pro-Israel', he was quoted as saying. 'Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House'." (Emanuel to be Obama's chief of staff, The Jerusalem Post, 6/11/08)]
[*** This quote comes originally from a Rolling Stone article on Rahmbo by Joshua Green, The Enforcer (20/10/05). In it, Green cites Rahmbo as the guy responsible for "beating back the Republican-led impeachment" of Clinton. And who presided over the impeachment vote? Ray LaHood (wikipedia). Curiously, in Green's article, you will find absolutely no mention of Rahmbo's Zionist upbringing, merely: "The second of 3 sons born to a pediatrician father and a civil-rights-activist mother..." Nonetheless, it is well worth reading. Clinton veterans, for example, knew Rahmbo was on the prowl because "... 'he's got this big old pair of brass balls, and you can just hear 'em clanking when he walks down the halls of Congress', says Paul Begala, who served with Emanuel on Clinton's staff."]