The Australian's holy war against the demonic forces of the pro-Palestinian BDS movement in Australia took a most unusual turn today with an opinion(ated) piece by columnist Cassandra Wilkinson, Boycott continues centuries-old hatred.
Described at the Australian as a "strategy consultant," an adviser to ex-NSW Labor politicians, Michael Costa and Christina Keneally, and a "regular SkyNews commentator on political issues," Wilkinson has never before, so far as I'm aware, broken into print on the subject of Palestine/Israel. Nor, it appears, has she ever been rambammed. And as for Exodus - that'd be the second book of the Bible, right?
Still, there exists at least one sign that the lady's for turning. Here she is, for example, discoursing on "20th century security":
"The history of 20th century security shows that when the West turns a blind eye to trouble around the world, things get worst [sic]. When the French and British ran out of Suez, the Middle East got less safe..." (Sky News, The Nation with Helen Dalley, Kerry Chikarovski, Cassandra Wilkinson & Ed Husic, scottryan.com.au, 8/11/12)
Wowee, break out the pith helmets and the puttees NOW!
Apparently, back in '56, the Britz and the Frogz should've told Eisenhower to go get stuffed, shocked and awed Cairo, pursued Nasser all the way to his spiderhole in the sticks, put him on trial for stealing the Suez Canal, pronounced him guilty and strung him up. The fact that they didn't means the Middle East's been all down hill since then.
A recent (23/5) twitter exchange yields another insight. Make of it what you will:
Glenn Barling: great article this morning in the australian.
Cassandra Wilkinson: thanks - small gesture of solidarity from a Bondi girl to her neighbours.
And so to Wilkinson's column:
She's deeply troubled about something she calls "the bonds of convenience growing between elements of the Left and anti-Semitism."
Her beloved UNSW, in particular, is a real worry:
"The student activists who tried to prevent the University of NSW from allowing Mr Brenner [!] to open on campus, claimed the BDS campaign was initiated in 2005. Such sloppy referencing and fact-checking wouldn't pass muster on their exams, I hope. As it happens, I studied history at UNSW - something the protesters could profit from before they graduate. A basic grasp of history shows us the boycotting of businesses is a longstanding tactic in the campaign of hate against the Jewish people."
Let me get this straight, Wilkinson's study of history at UNSW taught her that boycotts of Jewish businesses have always been, are now, and will always be nakedly anti-Semitic. Right...
Maybe, if that's what is being dished out as history at UNSW, our 'offending' student activists would do well to ignore her advice.
It's painfully obvious here that however much 'history' Wilkinson actually studied at UNSW she still does not have the wherewithal to distinguish between Jews as Jews and Jews as Zionists.
Never mind, she still has the wherewithal (UMURDOCH?) to con her readers into thinking of the Israeli corporation which owns the Max Brenner brand as just a sweet little man standing behind a counter against a backdrop of yummy chocolate allsorts.
The only alternative explanation is that she really does believe that to be the case. Hell, maybe she's the kind of person - poor thing! - who walks into, say, a Dick Smith outlet expecting to see the guy in person.
That Ms Wilkinson has a 'way' with history becomes appallingly apparent at the start of her next paragraph:
"Boycotts of Jewish merchants were practised in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire and later across eastern Europe..."
Let's focus, shall we, just on the Ottoman Empire? Unless she's prepared to cite a source or two for the assertion that boycotting Jewish shops was a feature of life under the Ottomans, I think we can safely dismiss it as garbage.
For my part, however, having read the fascinating study Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (2011) by Michelle U. Campos, Assistant Professor of the Modern Middle East at the University of Florida, the only reference to a boycott I could find was a joint Muslim/Christian/Jewish Ottoman citizen boycott of Austro-Hungarian products following the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Just one quote should suffice: "Importantly, Muslims were not the only participants in the imperial boycott, and in many locations Christians and Jews were also active as organizers, mobilisers, and participants. When the mass demonstrations spread inland to Jerusalem, they were led by the Mufti Taher al-Husayni, but he was joined by Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian representatives who were elected to serve alongside him on a boycott committee." (p 104)
On the general status of Ottoman Jews, Campos writes as follows:
"For the Ottoman state... population diversity was a product of, and a powerful testament to, successful empire building. The eponymous founder of the dynasty, Osman, had consolidated his power in Asia Minor in the late 13th century through alliance with local Turkic tribes and Christian principalities. As the empire spread throughout Asia, Europe, and Africa, later sultans continued to integrate their diverse subjects into the state... After the conquest of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium, Sultan 'Fatih' Mehmet ('the Conqueror') retained the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and strategically moved Jews into the city to replace the fleeing Byzantines. Decades later, in 1492, when the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, Sultan Beyazit II famously welcomed the exiles to Ottoman shores.
"The point of this recounting is not to argue that the Ottoman Empire was a multicultural paradise, for it surely was not. As an Islamic empire it maintained an 'institutionalized difference' between Muslims and non-Muslim subjects which was accentuated - or indeed erupted - in times of crisis. Non-Muslim populations were organized, counted, taxed, legislated, and otherwise 'marked' according to their confessional or ethno-confessional communities. At the same time, however, non-Muslim communities were allowed a tremendous degree of self-governance and autonomy in the realms of communal institutions and religious law, and comparatively speaking, the status of non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire was far better than that of non-Christians in Europe." (pp 8-9)
To say that Wilkinson's grasp of history is shaky is to indulge in understatement:
"In 1922, the Fifth Palestine Arab Congress called for a boycott of all Jewish businesses."
An Arab Congress meeting in Nablus in 1922 resolved to boycott the elections for a proposed gerrymandered Legislative Council. This had nothing whatever to do with 'Jewish businesses'.
"In 1943, the Arab League banned the purchase of 'products of Jewish industry'."
The Arab League was not founded until 1945.
"Note I have passed over here the not insignificant events of 1933-45 lest I fall foul of politicians such as Greens MP David Shoebridge..."*
When it comes to the subject of boycotts, I certainly won't be passing over the Nazi era. The fact is that when American Jews called for a boycott of German goods in 1933, the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) opposed the idea: "It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers." (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Lenni Brenner, 1983, p 59)
Now let me draw Wilkinson's attention to the Zionist anti-Arab boycott: "But this [Zionist] craze for the possession of [Palestinian] land did not prevent the [British] Government from attempting to protect [Palestinian Arab] cultivators against displacement through the sale of land over their heads. It was no secret that no Arab could be employed on land purchased by the Jewish National Fund. In fact clause 23 of the lease agreement [Jewish] settlers are required to sign, makes it incumbent on the lessee 'to execute all works connected with cultivation of the holding, only with Jewish labour." (Palestine Through the Fog of Propaganda, M.F. Abcarius, 1946, p 131)
Ah, but why bother with the real facts or the actual dynamics of the colonial struggle still underway in Palestine, when you're just a cog in the machinery of the Australian's holy war against defenders of Palestinian rights? Just get on with it and smear to your heart's content:
"In reality [the BDS] is the most recent name for a centuries-old economic persecution of Jews for having the temerity to become educated and entrepreneurial despite their exclusion from many occupations, geographies and institutions."
Wilkinson's grasp on the present is equally shaky.
She is shocked that NSW Labor MLC Shaoquett Moselmane** "disgraced the house by accusing Israel of running torture camps..."
Moselmane was, of course, referring to the notorious Khiam Prison in Israeli-occupied south Lebanon (1982-2000), and his disgraceful accusation just happens to be supported by Human Rights Watch. (See Torture in Khiam Prison: Responsibility & Accountability, 27/10/99.)
Wilkinson is also shocked by Moselmane's claim that "Israel is driven by a 'craving to take over other people's lands'," seemingly oblivious to Israel's 65 years of territorial expansion, aka wiping Palestine (and chunks of Syria and Lebanon) off the map. She then has the gall to accuse him of being "particularly guileless in his views"!
Finally, Wilkinson spruiks the thoroughly bogus London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism*** as though it's the only thing capable of preventing the seemingly "trivial or childish" BDS protest at UNSW from morphing into something - Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean? - more "potent."
"The Left," she cries, must "stand with those who educate women, stand with those who let gays serve openly in the military, stand with those who allow free speech and political activism. Stand, in short, with the Jewish people and their state of Israel."
It's hard to believe she's even read the declaration, which calls on its signatories to legislate against hate crime, essentially Zio-speak for criticism of the Zionist project and its manifold crimes against the Palestinian and other Arab peoples.
Doesn't it say somewhere in the Old Testament that 'It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt'?
[*Yet another indication of Wilkinson's shoddy journalism. This 'Correction' appeared in The Australian on 24/5: "Cassandra Wilkinson's opinion article in The Australian yesterday... incorrectly attributed a quote, which accused supporters of Israel of 'using the Holocaust for political purposes', to NSW Greens MLC David Shoebridge. In fact, the statement was made by fellow Greens MLC John Kaye. The Australian apologises to Mr Shoebridge for the error."; **See my 3/4/13 post Doing the Donkey in the NSW Knesset 10; ***See my 17/5/13 post The Tel Aviv Declaration on Combating Criticism of Israel.]
Showing posts with label Lenni Brenner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lenni Brenner. Show all posts
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Monday, January 28, 2013
Ben Elton's 'Two Brothers': A Quibble
I've just finished reading Ben Elton's latest novel Two Brothers. Like all of his novels it's a great read and I highly recommend it.
One thing, however, jarred a little, and it's that I wish to focus on here.
But first a modicum of scene-setting. Two Brothers is set in the Germany of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and its Nazi successor (1933-45). The three main characters are Paulus and Otto Stengel, the twin brothers of the title, and the irresistably beautiful Dagmar, with whom both boys are in love. All three are German Jews (although there's a qualification here I won't be going into as it's not relevant to the subject of this post).
The discordant note comes in a chapter called Beached Dolphin, Berlin, 1935, midway through the novel. Bit by bit, the Nazis have been ramping up the pressure on Germany's Jews. Our teenage protagonists had earlier been subjected to segregation in school and now find themselves banned from using public swimming pools. This particular measure has hit the spirited and athletic Dagmar, the beached dolphin of the chapter, hard, and the conversation unsurprisingly turns to the subject of emigration:
"'They say we'll spread lies about them so they're not going to let us go,' Dagmar explained miserably.
'Well, maybe it'll work out for the best in the end, eh?' Otto said, still lying on his back while bench-pressing Dagmar's dressing-table chair, 'because you can come with me to Palestine.'
'Palestine?' Dagmar asked in some surprise, having never heard Otto even mention the place before.
'Oh yes,' Paulus said with heavy sarcasm, 'haven't you heard? Otto's a Zionist now. Fuck, Otto, you don't even know where Palestine is!'
'Yes I do!' Otto protested. 'It's the next one down after Turkey - sort of. Isn't it?'
'It's in the Middle East and it's already full of Arabs,' Paulus said.
Otto's recent announcement that he had decided to become a Zionist had both amused and frustrated his brother. Lots of Jews in Berlin had begun talking about trying to get to Palestine. The Nazis themselves even raised the idea as a possible way of dealing with their 'problem'.
'It's our homeland,' Otto continued defiantly, 'that's all I need to know about it. Next year in Jerusalem!'
Even Dagmar giggled at this. In the past there could have been no less political individual than Otto Stengel. And no less a religious or spiritual one either for that matter. Otto was an archetypal teenage boy. His interests were sports, machines, food, music and Dagmar... Now, having picked up a few illegal pamphlets in Jewish coffee shops, Otto had suddenly begun using the language of Zionist politics.
'Homeland!' Paulus protested. 'Homeland? Two thousand years ago, Otts! Believe it or not, mate, things have moved on. Palestine is now the homeland of - who? Oh, let me see. Oh yes, I remember: the Palestinians. Get it? The Palestinians live in Palestine. There's a clue in the names. And I don't think they will take very kindly to a fifteen-year-old German Jew boy turning up and saying he owns the place.'
'We'll take it back,' Otto said darkly. 'We have no choice.'
'Great!' Paulus snapped. 'And when you do maybe you can ban all the Arabs from using the parks and swimming pools.'" (pp 255-256)
The problem here is that while Elton reads the Zionist project in Palestine correctly, with Otto picking up "a few illegal Zionist pamphlets" he unwittingly conveys the false impression that German Zionists were putting up some kind of resistance to the Nazis at the time. The simple fact of the matter is that Otto wouldn't have needed to pick up "illegal Zionist pamphlets" when all he had to do was purchase a copy of the perfectly legal weekly organ of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD), the Judische Rundschau. And if he'd done so, he would have seen just how accommodating of Nazi racism the Zionists were.
As Lenni Brenner has written in his must-read 1983 classic, Zionism in The Age of the Dictators:
"Not even the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 challenged the basic German Zionist belief in an ultimate modus vivendi with the Nazis... The goal of the ZVfD became 'national autonomy'. They wanted Hitler to give Jews the right to an economic existence, protection from attacks on their honour, and training to prepare them for migration. The ZVfD became absorbed in trying to utilise the segregated Jewish institutions to develop a Jewish national spirit. The tighter the Nazis turned the screw on the Jews, the more convinced they became that a deal with the Nazis was possible. After all, they reasoned, the more the Nazis excluded the Jews from every aspect of German life, the more they would have need of Zionism to help them get rid of the Jews. By 15 January 1936 the Palestine Post had to make the startling report that: 'A bold demand that the German Zionist Federation be given recognition by the government as the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life was made by the executive of that body in a proclamation today.'
"German Zionist hopes for an arrangement faded only in the face of the ever-mounting intimidation and terror. Even then there was no sign of of any attempts at anti-Nazi activity on the part of the ZVfD leaders. Throughout the entire pre-war period there was only a tiny Zionist involvement in the anti-Nazi underground. Although the [Zionist] HeChalutz and Hashomer youth movements talked socialism, the Nazis were not concerned. Yechiel Greenberg of Hashomer admitted in 1938 that 'our socialism was considered merely a philosophy for export'. But almost from the beginning of the dictatorship the underground Communist Party of Germany (KPD), always looking for new recruits, sent some of their Jewish cadre into the youth movements and, according to Arnold Paucker - now the editor of London's Leo Baeck Institute Year Book - some Zionist youth became involved with the resistance at least to the extent of some illegal postering in the early years of the regime. How much of this was due to the influence of the Communist infiltrators, and how much was spontaneous is impossible to estimate. However, the Zionist bureaucracy vigorously attacked the KPD. As in Italy, so in Germany: the Zionist leadership sought the support of the regime for Zionism and resisted Communism; in neither country could it be thought of as part of the anti-Fascist resistance." (pp 53-54)
One thing, however, jarred a little, and it's that I wish to focus on here.
But first a modicum of scene-setting. Two Brothers is set in the Germany of the Weimar Republic (1919-33) and its Nazi successor (1933-45). The three main characters are Paulus and Otto Stengel, the twin brothers of the title, and the irresistably beautiful Dagmar, with whom both boys are in love. All three are German Jews (although there's a qualification here I won't be going into as it's not relevant to the subject of this post).
The discordant note comes in a chapter called Beached Dolphin, Berlin, 1935, midway through the novel. Bit by bit, the Nazis have been ramping up the pressure on Germany's Jews. Our teenage protagonists had earlier been subjected to segregation in school and now find themselves banned from using public swimming pools. This particular measure has hit the spirited and athletic Dagmar, the beached dolphin of the chapter, hard, and the conversation unsurprisingly turns to the subject of emigration:
"'They say we'll spread lies about them so they're not going to let us go,' Dagmar explained miserably.
'Well, maybe it'll work out for the best in the end, eh?' Otto said, still lying on his back while bench-pressing Dagmar's dressing-table chair, 'because you can come with me to Palestine.'
'Palestine?' Dagmar asked in some surprise, having never heard Otto even mention the place before.
'Oh yes,' Paulus said with heavy sarcasm, 'haven't you heard? Otto's a Zionist now. Fuck, Otto, you don't even know where Palestine is!'
'Yes I do!' Otto protested. 'It's the next one down after Turkey - sort of. Isn't it?'
'It's in the Middle East and it's already full of Arabs,' Paulus said.
Otto's recent announcement that he had decided to become a Zionist had both amused and frustrated his brother. Lots of Jews in Berlin had begun talking about trying to get to Palestine. The Nazis themselves even raised the idea as a possible way of dealing with their 'problem'.
'It's our homeland,' Otto continued defiantly, 'that's all I need to know about it. Next year in Jerusalem!'
Even Dagmar giggled at this. In the past there could have been no less political individual than Otto Stengel. And no less a religious or spiritual one either for that matter. Otto was an archetypal teenage boy. His interests were sports, machines, food, music and Dagmar... Now, having picked up a few illegal pamphlets in Jewish coffee shops, Otto had suddenly begun using the language of Zionist politics.
'Homeland!' Paulus protested. 'Homeland? Two thousand years ago, Otts! Believe it or not, mate, things have moved on. Palestine is now the homeland of - who? Oh, let me see. Oh yes, I remember: the Palestinians. Get it? The Palestinians live in Palestine. There's a clue in the names. And I don't think they will take very kindly to a fifteen-year-old German Jew boy turning up and saying he owns the place.'
'We'll take it back,' Otto said darkly. 'We have no choice.'
'Great!' Paulus snapped. 'And when you do maybe you can ban all the Arabs from using the parks and swimming pools.'" (pp 255-256)
The problem here is that while Elton reads the Zionist project in Palestine correctly, with Otto picking up "a few illegal Zionist pamphlets" he unwittingly conveys the false impression that German Zionists were putting up some kind of resistance to the Nazis at the time. The simple fact of the matter is that Otto wouldn't have needed to pick up "illegal Zionist pamphlets" when all he had to do was purchase a copy of the perfectly legal weekly organ of the Zionist Federation of Germany (ZVfD), the Judische Rundschau. And if he'd done so, he would have seen just how accommodating of Nazi racism the Zionists were.
As Lenni Brenner has written in his must-read 1983 classic, Zionism in The Age of the Dictators:
"Not even the Nuremberg Laws of 15 September 1935 challenged the basic German Zionist belief in an ultimate modus vivendi with the Nazis... The goal of the ZVfD became 'national autonomy'. They wanted Hitler to give Jews the right to an economic existence, protection from attacks on their honour, and training to prepare them for migration. The ZVfD became absorbed in trying to utilise the segregated Jewish institutions to develop a Jewish national spirit. The tighter the Nazis turned the screw on the Jews, the more convinced they became that a deal with the Nazis was possible. After all, they reasoned, the more the Nazis excluded the Jews from every aspect of German life, the more they would have need of Zionism to help them get rid of the Jews. By 15 January 1936 the Palestine Post had to make the startling report that: 'A bold demand that the German Zionist Federation be given recognition by the government as the only instrument for the exclusive control of German Jewish life was made by the executive of that body in a proclamation today.'
"German Zionist hopes for an arrangement faded only in the face of the ever-mounting intimidation and terror. Even then there was no sign of of any attempts at anti-Nazi activity on the part of the ZVfD leaders. Throughout the entire pre-war period there was only a tiny Zionist involvement in the anti-Nazi underground. Although the [Zionist] HeChalutz and Hashomer youth movements talked socialism, the Nazis were not concerned. Yechiel Greenberg of Hashomer admitted in 1938 that 'our socialism was considered merely a philosophy for export'. But almost from the beginning of the dictatorship the underground Communist Party of Germany (KPD), always looking for new recruits, sent some of their Jewish cadre into the youth movements and, according to Arnold Paucker - now the editor of London's Leo Baeck Institute Year Book - some Zionist youth became involved with the resistance at least to the extent of some illegal postering in the early years of the regime. How much of this was due to the influence of the Communist infiltrators, and how much was spontaneous is impossible to estimate. However, the Zionist bureaucracy vigorously attacked the KPD. As in Italy, so in Germany: the Zionist leadership sought the support of the regime for Zionism and resisted Communism; in neither country could it be thought of as part of the anti-Fascist resistance." (pp 53-54)
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Yitzhak Shamir, His Gang & Their Nazi Flirtation
This is how Murdoch's Australian spins the newly deceased leader of Israel's infamous Stern Gang. Its sheltered readers could surely do no other than conclude: What a mensch!
"Yitzhak Shamir was a fighter for the Jews long before Israel's creation, an underground leader who led militias against the Arabs and the British. He made no apologies and no compromises - not as an underground fighter, an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis, and as one of Israel's longest-serving prime ministers who refused to bargain for land." (Israel mourns 'brave warrior' Shamir, AP, 2/7/12)
And this is how Fairfax handles him. Dare I say a marked improvement on the above, but grossly deficient nonetheless. Not only is there no mention of the Stern Gang, but take a look at the headline:
"The man the British Foreign Office once described as 'among the most fanatical terrorist leaders', who went on to become a senior Mossad spy and Israel's second-longest serving prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir has died aged 96. The lifelong hawk and advocate of the aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr Shamir served as Israel's prime minister from 1983-84, and from 1986-92. He was also foreign minister from 1980-83." (Death of Shamir: Israeli statesman, militant and spy, Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 2/7/12)
These two pieces tell us in microcosm all we really need to know about these two alleged sources of quality journalism. The first, an unabashed apologist for Israeli terrorism and war crimes; the second, a model of self-censorship.
Given their sanitised versions of Yitzhak Shamir's career, you'd never know, for example, that our valiant warrior/militant/statesman was one of the leaders of an outfit (Stern Gang? What Stern Gang?) that once sought an alliance with the Nazis. But you will read, at least in The Australian's account, that he's described as "an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis."
Now when smearing indigenous Palestinian resistance to the Zionist takeover of their homeland, it's a favourite ploy of Zionist propagandists to cite the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with Adolf Hitler. Predictably, however, these same elements are mum on the subject of the Stern Gang's overtures to Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War (as they are on Zionism's cosy accommodation with the Nazis in general).
Needless to say, given the hold over Western mainstream media opinion and reportage on Palestine by Israel lobbyists, it would be an exercise in futility to expect this particular inconvenient truth to surface in the wash of misleading information currently circulating in the form of reports and obituaries on Shamir's death.*
To remedy this unforgivable dereliction of duty, I've decided to post the final chapter of Lenni Brenner's groundbreaking 1983 study Zionism in the Age of the Dictators in its entirety:
"Until Begin's election victory in 1977, most pro-Zionist historians dismissed Revisionism as the fanatic fringe of Zionism; certainly the more extreme 'Stern Gang', as their enemies called Avraham Stern's Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, were looked upon as of more interest to the psychiatrist than the political scientist. However, opinion toward Begin had to change when he came to power, and when he eventually appointed Yitzhak Shamir as his Foreign Minister it was quietly received, although Shamir had been operations commander of the Stern Gang.
"On the night of 31 August/1 September 1939 the entire command of the Irgun, including Stern, was arrested by the British CID. When he was released, in June 1940, Stern found an entirely new political constellation. Jabotinsky had called off all military operations against the British for the duration of the war. Stern himself was willing to ally himself with the British so long as London would recognise the sovereignty of a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. Until then, the anti-British struggle would have to continue. Jabotinsky knew that nothing would make Britain give the Jews a state in 1940, and he saw the creation of another Jewish Legion with the British Army to be the main task. The two orientations were incompatible and by September 1940 the Irgun was hopelessly split: the majority of both the command and the ranks followed Stern out of the Revisionist movement.
"At birth the new group was at its greatest strength for, as Stern's policies became clearer, the ranks started drifting back into the Irgun or joined the British Army. Stern or 'Yair', as he now called himself, (after Eleazer ben Yair, the commander at Masada during the revolt against Rome) began to define his full objectives. His 18 principles included a Jewish state with its borders as defined in Genesis 15: 18 'from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates', a 'population exchange', a euphemism for the expulsion of the Arabs and, finally, the building of a Third Temple of Jerusalem. The Stern Group was at this time a bare majority of the military wing of Revisionism but by no means representative of the middle class Jews of Palestine who had backed Jabotinsky. Still less was the fanatic call for a new temple attractive to ordinary Zionists.
"The war and its implications were on everyone's mind and the Stern Gang began to explain their unique position in a series of underground radio broadcasts: 'There is a difference between a persecutor and an enemy. Persecutors have risen against Israel in all generations and in all periods of our diaspora, starting with Haman and ending with Hitler... The source of all our woes is our remaining in exile, and the absence of a homeland and statehood. Therefore, our enemy is the foreigner, the ruler of our land who blocks the return of the people to it. The enemy are the British who conquered the land with our help and who remain here by our leave, and who have betrayed us and placed our brethren in Europe in the hands of the persecutor.'
"Stern turned away from any kind of struggle against Hitler and even began to fantasise about sending a guerilla group to India to help the nationalists there against Britain. He attacked the Revisionists for encouraging Palestinian Jews to join the British Army, where they would be treated as colonial troops, 'even to the point of not being allowed to use the washrooms reserved for European soldiers'.
"Stern's single-minded belief, that the only solution to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was the end of British domination of Palestine had a logical conclusion. They could not defeat Britain with their own puny forces, so they looked to her enemies for salvation. They came into contact with an Italian agent in Jerusalem, a Jew who had worked for the British police, and in September 1940 they drew up an agreement whereby Mussolini would recognize a Jewish state in return for Sternist co-ordination with the Italian Army when the country was to be invaded. How seriously either Stern or the Italian agent took these discussions has been debated. Stern feared that the agreement might be part of a British provocation. As a precaution, Stern sent Naftali Lubentschik to Beirut, which was still controlled by Vichy, to negotiate directly with the Axis. Nothing is known of his dealings with either Vichy or the Italians, but in January 1941 Lubentschik met two Germans - Rudolf Rosen and Otto von Hentig, the philo-Zionist, who was then head of the Oriental Department of the German Foreign Office. After the war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself a 'Proposal of the National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvi Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany.' (The Ankara document is dated 11 January 1941. At that point the Sternists still thought of themselves as the 'real' Irgun, and it was only later that they adopted the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel - Lohamei Herut Yisrael - appellation.) In it the Stern Group told the Nazis:
'The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries...
'The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and
3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
'Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side.
'This offer by the NMO... would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.
'The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive-radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.'
"The Sternists again emphasised: 'The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.'
"Lubentschik told von Hentig that if the Nazis were politically unwilling to set up an immediate Zionist state in Palestine, the Sternists would be willing to work temporarily along the lines of the Madagascar Plan. The idea of Jewish colonies on the island had been one of the more exotic notions of the European anti-Semites before the war, and with France's defeat in 1940 the Germans revived the idea as part of their vision of a German empire in Africa. Stern and his movement had debated the Nazi Madagascar scheme and concluded that it should be supported, just as Herzl had initially backed the British offer, in 1903, of a temporary Jewish colony in the Kenya Highlands.
"There was no German follow-up on these incredible propositions, but the Sternists did not lose hope. In December 1941, after the British had taken Lebanon, Stern sent Nathan Yalin-Mor to try to contact the Nazis in neutral Turkey, but he was arrested en route. There were no further attempts to contact the Nazis.
"The Stern plan was always unreal. One of the fundamentals of the German-Italian alliance was that the eastern Mediterranean littoral was to be included in the Italian sphere of influence. Furthermore, on 21 November 1941 Hitler met the Mufti and told him that although Germany could not then openly call for the independence of any of the Arab possessions of the British or French - out of a desire not to antagonise Vichy, which still ran North Africa - when the Germans overran the Caucasus, they would swiftly move down to Palestine and destroy the Zionist settlement.
"There is rather more substance to Stern's own self-perception as a totalitarian. By the late 1930s Stern became one of the ring-leaders of the Revisionist malcontents who saw Jabotinsky as a liberal with moral reservations about Irgun terror against the Arabs. Stern felt that the only salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of totalitarianism and make a clean break with Britain which, in any case, had abondoned Zionism with the 1939 White Paper. He had seen the WZO make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the Ha'avara; he had seen Jabotinsky entangle himself with Italy; and he personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists' dealings with Polish anti-Semites. However, Stern believed that all of these were only half measures.
"Stern was one of the Revisionists who felt that the Zionists, and the Jews, had betrayed Mussolini and not the reverse. Zionism had to show the Axis that they were serious, by coming into direct military conflict with Britain, so that the totalitarians could see a potential military advantage in allying themselves with Zionism. To win, Stern argued, they had to ally themselves with the fascists and Nazis alike: one could not deal with a Petliura or a Mussolini and then draw back from a Hitler.
"Did Yitzhak Yzertinsky - rabbi Shamir - to use his underground nom de guerre, now the Foreign Minister of Israel, know of his movement's proposed confederation with Adolf Hitler? In recent years the wartime activities of the Stern Gang have been thoroughly researched by one of the youths who joined it in the post-war period, when it was no longer pro-Nazi. Baruch Nadel is absolutely certain that Yzertinsky-Shamir was fully aware of Stern's plan: 'They all knew about it.'
"When Shamir was appointed Foreign Minister, international opinion focused on the fact that Begin had selected the organiser of two famous assassinations: the killing of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident for the Middle East, on 6 November 1944; and the slaying of Counte Folke Bernadotte, the UN's special Mediator on Palestine, on 17 September 1948. Concern for his terrorist past was allowed to obscure the more grotesque notion that a would-be ally of Adolf Hitler could rise the leadership of the Zionist state. When Begin appointed Shamir, and honoured Stern by having postage stamps issued which bore his portrait, he did it with the full knowledge of their past. There can be no better proof than this that the heritage of Zionist collusion with the Fascists and the Nazis, and the philosophies underlying it, carries through to contemporary Israel." (pp 265-69)
[*Just look at this rubbish from yesterday's obit. in the Herald: "But from his days as a militant in the extreme right-wing Lehi movement before Israel's birth in 1948 Shamir always believed the Jewish state should stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River." Now re-read paragraphs 2 & 3 of Brenner's chapter above.]
"Yitzhak Shamir was a fighter for the Jews long before Israel's creation, an underground leader who led militias against the Arabs and the British. He made no apologies and no compromises - not as an underground fighter, an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis, and as one of Israel's longest-serving prime ministers who refused to bargain for land." (Israel mourns 'brave warrior' Shamir, AP, 2/7/12)
And this is how Fairfax handles him. Dare I say a marked improvement on the above, but grossly deficient nonetheless. Not only is there no mention of the Stern Gang, but take a look at the headline:
"The man the British Foreign Office once described as 'among the most fanatical terrorist leaders', who went on to become a senior Mossad spy and Israel's second-longest serving prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir has died aged 96. The lifelong hawk and advocate of the aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, Mr Shamir served as Israel's prime minister from 1983-84, and from 1986-92. He was also foreign minister from 1980-83." (Death of Shamir: Israeli statesman, militant and spy, Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 2/7/12)
These two pieces tell us in microcosm all we really need to know about these two alleged sources of quality journalism. The first, an unabashed apologist for Israeli terrorism and war crimes; the second, a model of self-censorship.
Given their sanitised versions of Yitzhak Shamir's career, you'd never know, for example, that our valiant warrior/militant/statesman was one of the leaders of an outfit (Stern Gang? What Stern Gang?) that once sought an alliance with the Nazis. But you will read, at least in The Australian's account, that he's described as "an intelligence agent who hunted Nazis."
Now when smearing indigenous Palestinian resistance to the Zionist takeover of their homeland, it's a favourite ploy of Zionist propagandists to cite the collaboration of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, with Adolf Hitler. Predictably, however, these same elements are mum on the subject of the Stern Gang's overtures to Mussolini and Hitler during the Second World War (as they are on Zionism's cosy accommodation with the Nazis in general).
Needless to say, given the hold over Western mainstream media opinion and reportage on Palestine by Israel lobbyists, it would be an exercise in futility to expect this particular inconvenient truth to surface in the wash of misleading information currently circulating in the form of reports and obituaries on Shamir's death.*
To remedy this unforgivable dereliction of duty, I've decided to post the final chapter of Lenni Brenner's groundbreaking 1983 study Zionism in the Age of the Dictators in its entirety:
"Until Begin's election victory in 1977, most pro-Zionist historians dismissed Revisionism as the fanatic fringe of Zionism; certainly the more extreme 'Stern Gang', as their enemies called Avraham Stern's Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, were looked upon as of more interest to the psychiatrist than the political scientist. However, opinion toward Begin had to change when he came to power, and when he eventually appointed Yitzhak Shamir as his Foreign Minister it was quietly received, although Shamir had been operations commander of the Stern Gang.
"On the night of 31 August/1 September 1939 the entire command of the Irgun, including Stern, was arrested by the British CID. When he was released, in June 1940, Stern found an entirely new political constellation. Jabotinsky had called off all military operations against the British for the duration of the war. Stern himself was willing to ally himself with the British so long as London would recognise the sovereignty of a Jewish state on both sides of the River Jordan. Until then, the anti-British struggle would have to continue. Jabotinsky knew that nothing would make Britain give the Jews a state in 1940, and he saw the creation of another Jewish Legion with the British Army to be the main task. The two orientations were incompatible and by September 1940 the Irgun was hopelessly split: the majority of both the command and the ranks followed Stern out of the Revisionist movement.
"At birth the new group was at its greatest strength for, as Stern's policies became clearer, the ranks started drifting back into the Irgun or joined the British Army. Stern or 'Yair', as he now called himself, (after Eleazer ben Yair, the commander at Masada during the revolt against Rome) began to define his full objectives. His 18 principles included a Jewish state with its borders as defined in Genesis 15: 18 'from the brook of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates', a 'population exchange', a euphemism for the expulsion of the Arabs and, finally, the building of a Third Temple of Jerusalem. The Stern Group was at this time a bare majority of the military wing of Revisionism but by no means representative of the middle class Jews of Palestine who had backed Jabotinsky. Still less was the fanatic call for a new temple attractive to ordinary Zionists.
"The war and its implications were on everyone's mind and the Stern Gang began to explain their unique position in a series of underground radio broadcasts: 'There is a difference between a persecutor and an enemy. Persecutors have risen against Israel in all generations and in all periods of our diaspora, starting with Haman and ending with Hitler... The source of all our woes is our remaining in exile, and the absence of a homeland and statehood. Therefore, our enemy is the foreigner, the ruler of our land who blocks the return of the people to it. The enemy are the British who conquered the land with our help and who remain here by our leave, and who have betrayed us and placed our brethren in Europe in the hands of the persecutor.'
"Stern turned away from any kind of struggle against Hitler and even began to fantasise about sending a guerilla group to India to help the nationalists there against Britain. He attacked the Revisionists for encouraging Palestinian Jews to join the British Army, where they would be treated as colonial troops, 'even to the point of not being allowed to use the washrooms reserved for European soldiers'.
"Stern's single-minded belief, that the only solution to the Jewish catastrophe in Europe was the end of British domination of Palestine had a logical conclusion. They could not defeat Britain with their own puny forces, so they looked to her enemies for salvation. They came into contact with an Italian agent in Jerusalem, a Jew who had worked for the British police, and in September 1940 they drew up an agreement whereby Mussolini would recognize a Jewish state in return for Sternist co-ordination with the Italian Army when the country was to be invaded. How seriously either Stern or the Italian agent took these discussions has been debated. Stern feared that the agreement might be part of a British provocation. As a precaution, Stern sent Naftali Lubentschik to Beirut, which was still controlled by Vichy, to negotiate directly with the Axis. Nothing is known of his dealings with either Vichy or the Italians, but in January 1941 Lubentschik met two Germans - Rudolf Rosen and Otto von Hentig, the philo-Zionist, who was then head of the Oriental Department of the German Foreign Office. After the war a copy of the Stern proposal for an alliance between his movement and the Third Reich was discovered in the files of the German Embassy in Turkey. The Ankara document called itself a 'Proposal of the National Military Organisation (Irgun Zvi Leumi) Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany.' (The Ankara document is dated 11 January 1941. At that point the Sternists still thought of themselves as the 'real' Irgun, and it was only later that they adopted the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel - Lohamei Herut Yisrael - appellation.) In it the Stern Group told the Nazis:
'The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historical boundaries...
'The NMO, which is well-acquainted with the goodwill of the German Reich government and its authorities towards Zionist activity inside Germany and towards Zionist emigration plans, is of the opinion that:
1. Common interests could exist between the establishment of a New Order in Europe in conformity with the German concept, and the true national aspirations of the Jewish people as they are embodied by the NMO.
2. Cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed volkish-national Hebrium would be possible and
3. The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.
'Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side.
'This offer by the NMO... would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.
'The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive-radical solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity.'
"The Sternists again emphasised: 'The NMO is closely related to the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure.'
"Lubentschik told von Hentig that if the Nazis were politically unwilling to set up an immediate Zionist state in Palestine, the Sternists would be willing to work temporarily along the lines of the Madagascar Plan. The idea of Jewish colonies on the island had been one of the more exotic notions of the European anti-Semites before the war, and with France's defeat in 1940 the Germans revived the idea as part of their vision of a German empire in Africa. Stern and his movement had debated the Nazi Madagascar scheme and concluded that it should be supported, just as Herzl had initially backed the British offer, in 1903, of a temporary Jewish colony in the Kenya Highlands.
"There was no German follow-up on these incredible propositions, but the Sternists did not lose hope. In December 1941, after the British had taken Lebanon, Stern sent Nathan Yalin-Mor to try to contact the Nazis in neutral Turkey, but he was arrested en route. There were no further attempts to contact the Nazis.
"The Stern plan was always unreal. One of the fundamentals of the German-Italian alliance was that the eastern Mediterranean littoral was to be included in the Italian sphere of influence. Furthermore, on 21 November 1941 Hitler met the Mufti and told him that although Germany could not then openly call for the independence of any of the Arab possessions of the British or French - out of a desire not to antagonise Vichy, which still ran North Africa - when the Germans overran the Caucasus, they would swiftly move down to Palestine and destroy the Zionist settlement.
"There is rather more substance to Stern's own self-perception as a totalitarian. By the late 1930s Stern became one of the ring-leaders of the Revisionist malcontents who saw Jabotinsky as a liberal with moral reservations about Irgun terror against the Arabs. Stern felt that the only salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of totalitarianism and make a clean break with Britain which, in any case, had abondoned Zionism with the 1939 White Paper. He had seen the WZO make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the Ha'avara; he had seen Jabotinsky entangle himself with Italy; and he personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists' dealings with Polish anti-Semites. However, Stern believed that all of these were only half measures.
"Stern was one of the Revisionists who felt that the Zionists, and the Jews, had betrayed Mussolini and not the reverse. Zionism had to show the Axis that they were serious, by coming into direct military conflict with Britain, so that the totalitarians could see a potential military advantage in allying themselves with Zionism. To win, Stern argued, they had to ally themselves with the fascists and Nazis alike: one could not deal with a Petliura or a Mussolini and then draw back from a Hitler.
"Did Yitzhak Yzertinsky - rabbi Shamir - to use his underground nom de guerre, now the Foreign Minister of Israel, know of his movement's proposed confederation with Adolf Hitler? In recent years the wartime activities of the Stern Gang have been thoroughly researched by one of the youths who joined it in the post-war period, when it was no longer pro-Nazi. Baruch Nadel is absolutely certain that Yzertinsky-Shamir was fully aware of Stern's plan: 'They all knew about it.'
"When Shamir was appointed Foreign Minister, international opinion focused on the fact that Begin had selected the organiser of two famous assassinations: the killing of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident for the Middle East, on 6 November 1944; and the slaying of Counte Folke Bernadotte, the UN's special Mediator on Palestine, on 17 September 1948. Concern for his terrorist past was allowed to obscure the more grotesque notion that a would-be ally of Adolf Hitler could rise the leadership of the Zionist state. When Begin appointed Shamir, and honoured Stern by having postage stamps issued which bore his portrait, he did it with the full knowledge of their past. There can be no better proof than this that the heritage of Zionist collusion with the Fascists and the Nazis, and the philosophies underlying it, carries through to contemporary Israel." (pp 265-69)
[*Just look at this rubbish from yesterday's obit. in the Herald: "But from his days as a militant in the extreme right-wing Lehi movement before Israel's birth in 1948 Shamir always believed the Jewish state should stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River." Now re-read paragraphs 2 & 3 of Brenner's chapter above.]
Monday, June 25, 2012
Fairfax Is All Yours, Gina
That's it! One read of the 'opinion piece' by Fairfax journalist Jonathan Swan, Once a refuge, Israel ignores its real origins (22/6/12), and I frankly couldn't give a toss whether Fairfax gets snapped up by mining magnate Gina Rinehart or not.
If Swan's extraordinary naivete and mind-blowing ignorance is supposed to be a sparkling example of Fairfax's 'quality journalism', vis-a-vis News Limited's relentless, ideologically-driven poison, the field may as well be abandoned to the likes of Rinehart and Murdoch. Too harsh? I don't think so:
With its ridiculous assertion that the creation of Israel was fundamentally about catering for refugees, the very title encapsulates the abysmal ignorance of the piece. Let me make this crystal clear: the political Zionism of Herzl, Wiezmann and Ben-Gurion was first and foremost about the procrustean task of transforming a religious grouping - Jews, in all their diversity - into a racialised, nationalistic entity known as 'the Jewish people' at a time (roughly from the Napoleonic era through to the end of World War II) when ethnically-based nationalism was all the go. Zionism was, like all such European nationalisms of the time, chauvinistic at best, toxic at worst (Nazism). To mistake the rhetoric of 'refuge' and 'rescue' for the substance of the Zionist project, which focused solely on carving out, and shoring up, an ethnically homogeneous Jewish state in Palestine for 'the Jewish people' at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants, is to indicate that you have zero idea of what you're talking about:
"In a museum that exhibits dead children's shoes and photographs of skeletons piled in holes, it was an Australian that angered me most. Printed on a wall inside Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, is a quote by the Australian diplomat Thomas W. White, dated 1938. 'As we have no racial problems,' White told a conference of world leaders, 'we are not desirous of importing one.' And with that, Australia joined the United States and almost every wealthy nation in rejecting Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazis."
The conference referred to here is the Evian Conference of 1938, about which Swan has obviously not taken the trouble to learn, being content with a mere statement (the propaganda value of which escapes him) tacked on the wall of Israel's pre-eminent Holocaust memorial (the propaganda use of which also escapes him). If he had done a little research, he would be aware that neither the Zionists in Palestine nor those elsewhere supported the wholesale rescue of German Jewry; the former because they wanted only the fit Zionist youth among them as potential Arab fighters; the latter for much the same reasons, paradoxically, as White.
In the words of US scholar, Lenni Brenner: "Since [Palestine's Zionists] did not want the bulk of German Jewry in Palestine, it might be assumed that the Zionist movement, at least in America, tried to find other havens for their brethren, but this is not so. Throughout the world, the Jewish bourgeoisie acted timidly out of fear that 'too many' refugees in any country would unleash local anti-Semitism. Sending the refugees to Palestine seemed to be the perfect answer..." (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983, p 146).
Nor does the United States, which initiated the Evian Conference and the Rublee rescue plan which emerged from it, deserve Swan's stick, given that it was deliberately boycotted and sabotaged by the Zionists who preferred instead to work with the Gestapo to channel into Palestine only youthful German Zionists, as recruits for the coming move against Palestine's majority Arab population. (See my 21/11/11 post Laying Siege to German Jews.)
"White's quote is a reminder of Israel's founding purpose: to be a haven for refugees. Israeli leaders have long said with pride that they have reached out, not only to Holocaust survivors, but to desperate people from places such as Vietnam, Kosovo and Darfur."
Swan seems to be confusing Israel with the Statue of Liberty's famous words: Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to be free;/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..." If he wishes to establish what it is exactly that constitutes Israel's founding purpose, he should try looking up its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. If he did, he'd find that Israel's founding purpose is first and foremost about the supposed "right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country," and that the closest it ever gets to his haven for refugees nonsense is this: "The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations." One wonders, what part of for Jews only doesn't Swan understand?
As to Israel's taking aboard Vietnamese, Kosovan and Darfuri refugees, let's look at the facts:
1) Vietnamese: In 1977, 65 Vietnamese boat people were picked up by an Israeli vessel off the Vietnamese coast: "Begin's decision [to admit these people into Israel] was in a way pure theater. Sixty-six Vietnamese were hardly a burden, and in terms of the hundreds of thousands who had fled Vietnam and were looking for a new home, they were less than a drop in a bucket. Nor was Israel threatened with the arrival of more Vietnamese once a first group of them was accepted. The South China seas were far away and their waves were not about to sweep up more boats on Israel's shores." (A shame on Israel, Hillel Halkin, nysun.com, 10/7/07)
2) Kosovans: In 1999, 217 Kosovans received temporary shelter in Israel. (140 Kosovar refugees leave Israel for home, Gil Sedan, jweekly.com, 30/7/99)
3) Darfuris: "Several hundred were granted official refugee status, and with it the right to work." (An open letter to Israel from a Darfur refugee in Tel Aviv, Hamed Sadinden, fugeefridays.blogspot.com, 13/4/09) As for the rest: "[A]ll we ask is the right to live and work in Israel and take care of ourselves while we are here." (ibid)
Whence this feeling of being underwhelmed?
"What to make, then, of the recent vow by Israel's Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, to rid the country of all illegal immigrants within 3 years? Or of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has branded illegal immigrants 'infiltrators' and said he plans to build 'holding facilities' to store tens of thousands of aliens 'until they can be sent out of the country'?"
What to make? Simple: these illegal immigrants aren't Jews and so can't be tolerated in a Jewish state. What part of Jewish State does Swan not understand?
"The most toxic migrants, we are told, come from Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2005, about 60,000 have crossed the Sinai Desert and through the Egyptian border into Israel. Yishai says these Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants are raising Israel's crime levels, and that their numbers need to be quelled. Netanyahu argues that illegal immigrants burden Israel's economy and threaten its Jewish character. Then there are last month's south Tel Aviv protests. Haaretz reported a crowd of residents waving placards and chanting 'the people want the Sudanese deported' and 'infiltrators, get out of our home.' The Likud politician Miri Regev participated in the protest and said that 'the Sudanese were a cancer in our body'. Africans' shops and apartments were attacked. It's this last image, of broken store-fronts and glass, that will knock the wind out of many Holocaust survivors, some of whom fled Europe after Kristallnact - the Night of Broken Glass - where Nazis ran a series of co-ordinated attacks on Jewish homes, shops and synagogues throughout Germany and parts of Austria. At a park in Neve Shaanan, an area of Tel Aviv inflamed by 'infiltrators', a daughter of Holocaust survivors, Orly Feldheim, told a New York Times reporter: 'I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936.' Netanyahu should be chilled by what Feldheim said. Now that the Prime Minister's word - 'infiltrators' - has reached the mouths of violent xenophobes, he has attached himself to scenes that could alienate even his most rusted-on supporters. Netanyahu knows better than most that the Holocaust is never very far from an Israeli's mind. He should also know that many Israelis believe their country has a special responsibility to help those in need, given it was founded as a refuge for survivors."
Notice here how the link between Israel's exalted Jewish character and Netanyahu, the ideological heir of the Irgun terrorists whose bloody hands and knives* were instrumental in creating that Jewish character (of which more later), is missing? It's as though a hitherto fine and upstanding member of the international community had suddenly, inexplicably, become possessed and begun foaming at the mouth and spitting forth racist curses. Then there's the ludicrous suggestion that this uncharacteristic behaviour will only alienate his hordes of prim and proper supporters who are, of course, gobsmacked at the spectacle. The naivete here is nothing short of astonishing. What part of Benjamin Netanyahu does Swan not understand?
"Such faith has been drained by the Palestinian occupation, and Netanyahu's latest announcements may have turned off life support. He has also crushed a key source of pride for liberal Zionists. Like many moderates, Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, and author of Why I am a Zionist, counts Israel's compassion towards refugees as one of the country's greatest achievements. 'To Israel, today's refugee is tomorrow's citizen,' Troy wrote in a Jerusalem post blog. 'In a clear repudiation of the accusation that Zionism is in any way racist, Israel has accepted black, brown, and white refugees... with nearly 80,000 Ethiopian refugees constituting the only welcome migration I know of involving black Africans to a mostly white country.'"
Incredibly, despite Swan's subject, Israel and its treatment of refugees, this is the first time the word Palestinian has cropped up. But only, you'll note, in reference to the occupation. The standout feature of Swan's vacuous opinion piece is that, in an article about Israel and refugees, he makes no mention whatever of the existence, let alone the history and circumstances, of millions of Palestinian REFUGEES, driven out of their ancestral homeland in 1948 to create the Zionist movement's Holy Grail, a Jewish majority in Palestine. This enables him to suggest, through the example of Gil Troy, that Israel's origins were as pure as the proverbial driven snow. Troy is apparently the kind of bloke who can say without blushing that Israel's compassion towards refugees is one of its greatest achievements; and Swan is the kind of bloke who, again, without blushing, believes and reproduces every word. The man reveals himself here as either a complete ignoramus or a shameless propagandist. Whichever shoe fits, it's a mystery how can he be allowed to get away with this.
It's perhaps instructive at this point to compare Swan's performance with a recent piece by an Israeli journalist commemorating Israel's Vietnamese refugees. While Shoshana Bryen deploys a similar propaganda trope to Swan's - "The experience of Jewish refugees and the hopelessness of statelessness made Israel sensitive to the hopelessness of people from another place, another culture, another war, giving the Vietnamese a place to start over" (Israel & the boat people, timesofisrael.com, 6/6/12) - she is only too aware of Israel's original sin, hurrying to add, parenthetically, "(For those rolling their eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees..," before attempting to cover up this inconvenient truth by trotting out yet another Zionist talking point: "It is precisely the Jewish experience with statelessness that impels Israel to continue to seek a mechanism by which Palestinians can achieve the state the Arabs declined on their behalf in 1948 - without losing the state of Israel.)" No rolling of the eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees for Swan, the issue is simply dropped down Orwell's memory hole quicker than you can say, But what about the Palestinian refugees?
"But can Israel still claim this self-image? Vic Alhadaff, the chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, believes it can. Alhadeff defends Israel's immigration policies, arguing that the country has 'absorbed thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Albania, Kosovo and Darfur, and hosts 120,000 illegal foreign workers. Like Australia,' Alhadeff says, 'Israel is attempting to balance humanitarian needs with the need to protect its borders from waves of illegal immigration.'"
Almost 65 years of Palestinians rotting in refugee camps** and Swan is asking, Can Israel still claim this self image? The mind boggles.
"But if Israel genuinely wishes to strike such a balance, it has done a good job in hiding it. It is one thing to have a prime minister who calls illegal migrants 'infiltrators'; it is quite another to have a 'Prevention of Infiltration Law', recently amended to allow Israeli authorities to detain 'infiltrators' for up to 3 years."
OMG! Israel passes laws which discriminate against refugees! Who would have thought?
"While Netanyahu ponders his next assault on illegal immigrants, I hope he pays a visit to Yad Vashem. After he reads the quote by Thomas W. White, Netanyahu will find outside rows of trees honouring the 'righteous among the nations' - those brave souls, Oskar Schindler included, who risked their lives to rescue Jewish refugees."
Oh yes, a simple visit to Yad Vashem (led by Swan?) and Netanyahu will be so overcome by remorse that he'll rush back to the Knesset and deliver a historic and heartfelt speech, softie that he really is, beginning with the words, I don't know what came over me...
Seriously now, could Ms Rinehart do any worse?
[*See my 9/4/12 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw; **Take a look at the latest ANERA report (6/12) on Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon.]
If Swan's extraordinary naivete and mind-blowing ignorance is supposed to be a sparkling example of Fairfax's 'quality journalism', vis-a-vis News Limited's relentless, ideologically-driven poison, the field may as well be abandoned to the likes of Rinehart and Murdoch. Too harsh? I don't think so:
With its ridiculous assertion that the creation of Israel was fundamentally about catering for refugees, the very title encapsulates the abysmal ignorance of the piece. Let me make this crystal clear: the political Zionism of Herzl, Wiezmann and Ben-Gurion was first and foremost about the procrustean task of transforming a religious grouping - Jews, in all their diversity - into a racialised, nationalistic entity known as 'the Jewish people' at a time (roughly from the Napoleonic era through to the end of World War II) when ethnically-based nationalism was all the go. Zionism was, like all such European nationalisms of the time, chauvinistic at best, toxic at worst (Nazism). To mistake the rhetoric of 'refuge' and 'rescue' for the substance of the Zionist project, which focused solely on carving out, and shoring up, an ethnically homogeneous Jewish state in Palestine for 'the Jewish people' at the expense of its indigenous inhabitants, is to indicate that you have zero idea of what you're talking about:
"In a museum that exhibits dead children's shoes and photographs of skeletons piled in holes, it was an Australian that angered me most. Printed on a wall inside Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's Holocaust museum, is a quote by the Australian diplomat Thomas W. White, dated 1938. 'As we have no racial problems,' White told a conference of world leaders, 'we are not desirous of importing one.' And with that, Australia joined the United States and almost every wealthy nation in rejecting Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Nazis."
The conference referred to here is the Evian Conference of 1938, about which Swan has obviously not taken the trouble to learn, being content with a mere statement (the propaganda value of which escapes him) tacked on the wall of Israel's pre-eminent Holocaust memorial (the propaganda use of which also escapes him). If he had done a little research, he would be aware that neither the Zionists in Palestine nor those elsewhere supported the wholesale rescue of German Jewry; the former because they wanted only the fit Zionist youth among them as potential Arab fighters; the latter for much the same reasons, paradoxically, as White.
In the words of US scholar, Lenni Brenner: "Since [Palestine's Zionists] did not want the bulk of German Jewry in Palestine, it might be assumed that the Zionist movement, at least in America, tried to find other havens for their brethren, but this is not so. Throughout the world, the Jewish bourgeoisie acted timidly out of fear that 'too many' refugees in any country would unleash local anti-Semitism. Sending the refugees to Palestine seemed to be the perfect answer..." (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983, p 146).
Nor does the United States, which initiated the Evian Conference and the Rublee rescue plan which emerged from it, deserve Swan's stick, given that it was deliberately boycotted and sabotaged by the Zionists who preferred instead to work with the Gestapo to channel into Palestine only youthful German Zionists, as recruits for the coming move against Palestine's majority Arab population. (See my 21/11/11 post Laying Siege to German Jews.)
"White's quote is a reminder of Israel's founding purpose: to be a haven for refugees. Israeli leaders have long said with pride that they have reached out, not only to Holocaust survivors, but to desperate people from places such as Vietnam, Kosovo and Darfur."
Swan seems to be confusing Israel with the Statue of Liberty's famous words: Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to be free;/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore..." If he wishes to establish what it is exactly that constitutes Israel's founding purpose, he should try looking up its Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948. If he did, he'd find that Israel's founding purpose is first and foremost about the supposed "right of the Jewish people to national rebirth in its own country," and that the closest it ever gets to his haven for refugees nonsense is this: "The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people - the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe - was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in Eretz-Israel the Jewish State, which would open the gates of the homeland wide to every Jew and confer upon the Jewish people the status of a fully privileged member of the comity of nations." One wonders, what part of for Jews only doesn't Swan understand?
As to Israel's taking aboard Vietnamese, Kosovan and Darfuri refugees, let's look at the facts:
1) Vietnamese: In 1977, 65 Vietnamese boat people were picked up by an Israeli vessel off the Vietnamese coast: "Begin's decision [to admit these people into Israel] was in a way pure theater. Sixty-six Vietnamese were hardly a burden, and in terms of the hundreds of thousands who had fled Vietnam and were looking for a new home, they were less than a drop in a bucket. Nor was Israel threatened with the arrival of more Vietnamese once a first group of them was accepted. The South China seas were far away and their waves were not about to sweep up more boats on Israel's shores." (A shame on Israel, Hillel Halkin, nysun.com, 10/7/07)
2) Kosovans: In 1999, 217 Kosovans received temporary shelter in Israel. (140 Kosovar refugees leave Israel for home, Gil Sedan, jweekly.com, 30/7/99)
3) Darfuris: "Several hundred were granted official refugee status, and with it the right to work." (An open letter to Israel from a Darfur refugee in Tel Aviv, Hamed Sadinden, fugeefridays.blogspot.com, 13/4/09) As for the rest: "[A]ll we ask is the right to live and work in Israel and take care of ourselves while we are here." (ibid)
Whence this feeling of being underwhelmed?
"What to make, then, of the recent vow by Israel's Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, to rid the country of all illegal immigrants within 3 years? Or of the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has branded illegal immigrants 'infiltrators' and said he plans to build 'holding facilities' to store tens of thousands of aliens 'until they can be sent out of the country'?"
What to make? Simple: these illegal immigrants aren't Jews and so can't be tolerated in a Jewish state. What part of Jewish State does Swan not understand?
"The most toxic migrants, we are told, come from Sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2005, about 60,000 have crossed the Sinai Desert and through the Egyptian border into Israel. Yishai says these Sudanese and Eritrean immigrants are raising Israel's crime levels, and that their numbers need to be quelled. Netanyahu argues that illegal immigrants burden Israel's economy and threaten its Jewish character. Then there are last month's south Tel Aviv protests. Haaretz reported a crowd of residents waving placards and chanting 'the people want the Sudanese deported' and 'infiltrators, get out of our home.' The Likud politician Miri Regev participated in the protest and said that 'the Sudanese were a cancer in our body'. Africans' shops and apartments were attacked. It's this last image, of broken store-fronts and glass, that will knock the wind out of many Holocaust survivors, some of whom fled Europe after Kristallnact - the Night of Broken Glass - where Nazis ran a series of co-ordinated attacks on Jewish homes, shops and synagogues throughout Germany and parts of Austria. At a park in Neve Shaanan, an area of Tel Aviv inflamed by 'infiltrators', a daughter of Holocaust survivors, Orly Feldheim, told a New York Times reporter: 'I feel I am in a movie in Germany, circa 1933 or 1936.' Netanyahu should be chilled by what Feldheim said. Now that the Prime Minister's word - 'infiltrators' - has reached the mouths of violent xenophobes, he has attached himself to scenes that could alienate even his most rusted-on supporters. Netanyahu knows better than most that the Holocaust is never very far from an Israeli's mind. He should also know that many Israelis believe their country has a special responsibility to help those in need, given it was founded as a refuge for survivors."
Notice here how the link between Israel's exalted Jewish character and Netanyahu, the ideological heir of the Irgun terrorists whose bloody hands and knives* were instrumental in creating that Jewish character (of which more later), is missing? It's as though a hitherto fine and upstanding member of the international community had suddenly, inexplicably, become possessed and begun foaming at the mouth and spitting forth racist curses. Then there's the ludicrous suggestion that this uncharacteristic behaviour will only alienate his hordes of prim and proper supporters who are, of course, gobsmacked at the spectacle. The naivete here is nothing short of astonishing. What part of Benjamin Netanyahu does Swan not understand?
"Such faith has been drained by the Palestinian occupation, and Netanyahu's latest announcements may have turned off life support. He has also crushed a key source of pride for liberal Zionists. Like many moderates, Gil Troy, a history professor at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada, and author of Why I am a Zionist, counts Israel's compassion towards refugees as one of the country's greatest achievements. 'To Israel, today's refugee is tomorrow's citizen,' Troy wrote in a Jerusalem post blog. 'In a clear repudiation of the accusation that Zionism is in any way racist, Israel has accepted black, brown, and white refugees... with nearly 80,000 Ethiopian refugees constituting the only welcome migration I know of involving black Africans to a mostly white country.'"
Incredibly, despite Swan's subject, Israel and its treatment of refugees, this is the first time the word Palestinian has cropped up. But only, you'll note, in reference to the occupation. The standout feature of Swan's vacuous opinion piece is that, in an article about Israel and refugees, he makes no mention whatever of the existence, let alone the history and circumstances, of millions of Palestinian REFUGEES, driven out of their ancestral homeland in 1948 to create the Zionist movement's Holy Grail, a Jewish majority in Palestine. This enables him to suggest, through the example of Gil Troy, that Israel's origins were as pure as the proverbial driven snow. Troy is apparently the kind of bloke who can say without blushing that Israel's compassion towards refugees is one of its greatest achievements; and Swan is the kind of bloke who, again, without blushing, believes and reproduces every word. The man reveals himself here as either a complete ignoramus or a shameless propagandist. Whichever shoe fits, it's a mystery how can he be allowed to get away with this.
It's perhaps instructive at this point to compare Swan's performance with a recent piece by an Israeli journalist commemorating Israel's Vietnamese refugees. While Shoshana Bryen deploys a similar propaganda trope to Swan's - "The experience of Jewish refugees and the hopelessness of statelessness made Israel sensitive to the hopelessness of people from another place, another culture, another war, giving the Vietnamese a place to start over" (Israel & the boat people, timesofisrael.com, 6/6/12) - she is only too aware of Israel's original sin, hurrying to add, parenthetically, "(For those rolling their eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees..," before attempting to cover up this inconvenient truth by trotting out yet another Zionist talking point: "It is precisely the Jewish experience with statelessness that impels Israel to continue to seek a mechanism by which Palestinians can achieve the state the Arabs declined on their behalf in 1948 - without losing the state of Israel.)" No rolling of the eyes on behalf of stateless Palestinian refugees for Swan, the issue is simply dropped down Orwell's memory hole quicker than you can say, But what about the Palestinian refugees?
"But can Israel still claim this self-image? Vic Alhadaff, the chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, believes it can. Alhadeff defends Israel's immigration policies, arguing that the country has 'absorbed thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Albania, Kosovo and Darfur, and hosts 120,000 illegal foreign workers. Like Australia,' Alhadeff says, 'Israel is attempting to balance humanitarian needs with the need to protect its borders from waves of illegal immigration.'"
Almost 65 years of Palestinians rotting in refugee camps** and Swan is asking, Can Israel still claim this self image? The mind boggles.
"But if Israel genuinely wishes to strike such a balance, it has done a good job in hiding it. It is one thing to have a prime minister who calls illegal migrants 'infiltrators'; it is quite another to have a 'Prevention of Infiltration Law', recently amended to allow Israeli authorities to detain 'infiltrators' for up to 3 years."
OMG! Israel passes laws which discriminate against refugees! Who would have thought?
"While Netanyahu ponders his next assault on illegal immigrants, I hope he pays a visit to Yad Vashem. After he reads the quote by Thomas W. White, Netanyahu will find outside rows of trees honouring the 'righteous among the nations' - those brave souls, Oskar Schindler included, who risked their lives to rescue Jewish refugees."
Oh yes, a simple visit to Yad Vashem (led by Swan?) and Netanyahu will be so overcome by remorse that he'll rush back to the Knesset and deliver a historic and heartfelt speech, softie that he really is, beginning with the words, I don't know what came over me...
Seriously now, could Ms Rinehart do any worse?
[*See my 9/4/12 post Zionism Red in Tooth & Claw; **Take a look at the latest ANERA report (6/12) on Palestinian Refugees in Lebanon.]
Saturday, December 26, 2009
A Murky Legacy
Bear with me while I marshal the expert evidence:
1) "For Zionists to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky." (Mussolini on Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist* movement, quoted in The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Lenni Brenner, 1984, p 98)
2) "It is a sign of the bitter hostility of Labour Zionism* to the memory of the man [Jabotinsky] that David Ben-Gurion routinely referred to as 'Vladimir Hitler' that the Israeli government did not issue an order [to transfer his remains** to Israel] until July 1964, 16 years after the establishment of the Israeli state." (ibid p 108) [** Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940 but wanted his remains transferred to a future Jewish state in Palestine.]
3) "To some British officials... the atrocity at Deir Yassin [perpetrated by the Revisionist Zionist terror organisations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang] came as a revelation about the nature of the new Jewish state. Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, wrote that 'Deir Yassin is a warning of what a Jew will do to gain his purpose'. On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war the British were apprehensive about its outcome, but virtually no one anticipated the extent of the Arab collapse and the Israeli victory. The British associated themselves with the Arab cause as one that was ultimately compatible with their own sense of mission in the Middle East, and during the course of the war they became convinced that a grave injustice was being perpetrated because of American support of the Israelis. The resentment towards the US still smoulders in the files at the Public Record Office. It existed as the main sentiment underlying official policy, and it was perhaps most indignantly expressed by Troutbeck, who held that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders'." (The Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez & Decolonisation, William Roger Louis, 2006, pp 445-446)
4) "When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organisations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people." Albert Einstein's written response to an American Stern Gang (LEHI) fundraiser on 10/4/09, the day after the Deir Yassin massacre. [Einstein's letter can be viewed at Deir Yassin Remembered, deir.yassin.org]
5) "In September 1948 Churchill was in the South of France... Among those who visited him there was a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, a strong supporter of Zionism, who had written to The Times protesting against the Arab Legion shelling of Jerusalem. Boothby later recalled that when the conversation turned to the future of the Jews then fighting for their survival on the battlefield, 'I said that they were going to win hands down in Palestine, and get more than they ever expected'. To Boothby's remark, Churchill replied: 'Of course. The Arabs are no match for them. The Irgun people are the vilest gangsters. But, in backing the Zionists these Labour people backed the winners; and then ran out on them'. Churchill also told Boothby he was 'quite right' to send his letter to The Times." (Churchill & The Jews, Martin Gilbert, 2007, p 270)
[*Although the difference between the Revisionist and Labour Zionism is more a matter of style than substance, Uri Davis has pointed out that: "Labour Zionism is an attempt to reconcile the basic tenets of political Zionist and colonial practice with the tenets of the Enlightenment. Since these two sets of values are mutually exclusive, Labour Zionist literature has been largely predicated upon obfuscation of Zionist colonial practice, and upon mystification, ignorance and cultivated deception. Revisionist Zionism has largely escaped the Labour Zionist predicament of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. In contra-distinction to Labour Zionism, it has attempted, with considerable success, to locate Zionism ideologically and practically inside the tradition of modern secular racism and imperial colonialism." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003, p 19)]
Hm... gangsters, terrorists, criminals, fascists and Nazis. Well the progeny of this lot, via the mechanism of Irgun leader Menachem Begin's Likud Party, are now in power in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's father was a senior Jabotinsky aide. Ex-Likud, now Kadima leader (reportedly being 'wooed' by Netanyahu) Tzipi Livni is the daughter of Eitan Livni, the Irgun's Chief of Operations. And they're so proud of their legacy of gangsterism, terrorism, criminality, fascism and Nazism that they want Israeli kids to share it:
"The Education Ministry is introducing a study unit on the 12 underground fighters who were hanged or committed suicide in prison during the British Mandate in Palestine. The 12, known as 'Olei Hagardom' ('those hanged on the gallows'), belonged to the pre-state militias Etzel [Irgun] and Lehi [Stern Gang]. The program, intended for eighth and ninth grades, will include lessons plus a national competition for essays, poems and drawings on subjects such as 'an imaginary conversation I had with one of Olei Hagardom in his last moments in prison' or 'the last letter of a condemned man to his family'. The new unit is already proving controversial. 'Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar is advancing ideological matters close to his heart in the education system', a ministry official charged. 'His ideology is entering the curriculum'. 'It's worrying that the education Ministry is conveying a message sanctifying death and portraying it as sublime', added a senior university historian. Until now, details of the 12 Olei Hagardom - 9 Etzel combatants and 3 Lehi fighters - were taught as part of history lessons, ministry sources said. In a letter announcing the new program, Sa'ar wrote, 'I hope the program, recounting Olei Hagardom's devotion to the struggle for Israel's independence, will bolster the students' ties with their people and heritage... and that their devotion will serve as an ideological model for our youth'... The education system intends to mark Jabotinsky Day next week as required by a law enacted in 2005, the Education Ministry said Monday. Schools were instructed earlier this month to prepare ceremonies and special activities, including lessons about Jabotinsky's character and work. Sa'ar himself will give a civics lesson on Jabotinsky in a high school in the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim." (New study unit on pre-state fighters proves controversial, Or Kashti, Haaretz, 22/12/09)
Way to go! Except that Zionist propagandists of whatever stripe are nothing if not hypocritical. Here's David Feith* in the Wall Street Journal on August 21 pondering (in the words of The Australian where I found it) "the murky legacy of Fateh leader Yasser Arafat": "What's Arabic for plus ca change? Because that was the message last week from the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, where the 'moderate' Fateh party held its first general congress since 1989. Fateh - founded by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and led since 2004 by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas - demonstrated that Palestinian national politics remain mired as ever in conspiracy, duplicity and the glorification of terrorists... Fatah's leaders continue to walk in their founder's footsteps... Fatah's demonstration last week that it remains ideologically stuck in the terrorist pleasantries of the 70s ought to be a stark reminder that when it comes to Palestinian 'moderates', moderation remains a highly relative term." (Fatah's 'moderates' still rejoice in their founder's terrorism, 26/8/09) [* That's correct, son of neocon Douglas]
It doesn't get much more pot & kettle than that.
1) "For Zionists to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky." (Mussolini on Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist Zionist* movement, quoted in The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, Lenni Brenner, 1984, p 98)
2) "It is a sign of the bitter hostility of Labour Zionism* to the memory of the man [Jabotinsky] that David Ben-Gurion routinely referred to as 'Vladimir Hitler' that the Israeli government did not issue an order [to transfer his remains** to Israel] until July 1964, 16 years after the establishment of the Israeli state." (ibid p 108) [** Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940 but wanted his remains transferred to a future Jewish state in Palestine.]
3) "To some British officials... the atrocity at Deir Yassin [perpetrated by the Revisionist Zionist terror organisations, the Irgun and the Stern Gang] came as a revelation about the nature of the new Jewish state. Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, wrote that 'Deir Yassin is a warning of what a Jew will do to gain his purpose'. On the eve of the Arab-Israeli war the British were apprehensive about its outcome, but virtually no one anticipated the extent of the Arab collapse and the Israeli victory. The British associated themselves with the Arab cause as one that was ultimately compatible with their own sense of mission in the Middle East, and during the course of the war they became convinced that a grave injustice was being perpetrated because of American support of the Israelis. The resentment towards the US still smoulders in the files at the Public Record Office. It existed as the main sentiment underlying official policy, and it was perhaps most indignantly expressed by Troutbeck, who held that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by 'an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders'." (The Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez & Decolonisation, William Roger Louis, 2006, pp 445-446)
4) "When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organisations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people." Albert Einstein's written response to an American Stern Gang (LEHI) fundraiser on 10/4/09, the day after the Deir Yassin massacre. [Einstein's letter can be viewed at Deir Yassin Remembered, deir.yassin.org]
5) "In September 1948 Churchill was in the South of France... Among those who visited him there was a Conservative Member of Parliament, Robert Boothby, a strong supporter of Zionism, who had written to The Times protesting against the Arab Legion shelling of Jerusalem. Boothby later recalled that when the conversation turned to the future of the Jews then fighting for their survival on the battlefield, 'I said that they were going to win hands down in Palestine, and get more than they ever expected'. To Boothby's remark, Churchill replied: 'Of course. The Arabs are no match for them. The Irgun people are the vilest gangsters. But, in backing the Zionists these Labour people backed the winners; and then ran out on them'. Churchill also told Boothby he was 'quite right' to send his letter to The Times." (Churchill & The Jews, Martin Gilbert, 2007, p 270)
[*Although the difference between the Revisionist and Labour Zionism is more a matter of style than substance, Uri Davis has pointed out that: "Labour Zionism is an attempt to reconcile the basic tenets of political Zionist and colonial practice with the tenets of the Enlightenment. Since these two sets of values are mutually exclusive, Labour Zionist literature has been largely predicated upon obfuscation of Zionist colonial practice, and upon mystification, ignorance and cultivated deception. Revisionist Zionism has largely escaped the Labour Zionist predicament of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. In contra-distinction to Labour Zionism, it has attempted, with considerable success, to locate Zionism ideologically and practically inside the tradition of modern secular racism and imperial colonialism." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, 2003, p 19)]
Hm... gangsters, terrorists, criminals, fascists and Nazis. Well the progeny of this lot, via the mechanism of Irgun leader Menachem Begin's Likud Party, are now in power in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister and Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu's father was a senior Jabotinsky aide. Ex-Likud, now Kadima leader (reportedly being 'wooed' by Netanyahu) Tzipi Livni is the daughter of Eitan Livni, the Irgun's Chief of Operations. And they're so proud of their legacy of gangsterism, terrorism, criminality, fascism and Nazism that they want Israeli kids to share it:
"The Education Ministry is introducing a study unit on the 12 underground fighters who were hanged or committed suicide in prison during the British Mandate in Palestine. The 12, known as 'Olei Hagardom' ('those hanged on the gallows'), belonged to the pre-state militias Etzel [Irgun] and Lehi [Stern Gang]. The program, intended for eighth and ninth grades, will include lessons plus a national competition for essays, poems and drawings on subjects such as 'an imaginary conversation I had with one of Olei Hagardom in his last moments in prison' or 'the last letter of a condemned man to his family'. The new unit is already proving controversial. 'Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar is advancing ideological matters close to his heart in the education system', a ministry official charged. 'His ideology is entering the curriculum'. 'It's worrying that the education Ministry is conveying a message sanctifying death and portraying it as sublime', added a senior university historian. Until now, details of the 12 Olei Hagardom - 9 Etzel combatants and 3 Lehi fighters - were taught as part of history lessons, ministry sources said. In a letter announcing the new program, Sa'ar wrote, 'I hope the program, recounting Olei Hagardom's devotion to the struggle for Israel's independence, will bolster the students' ties with their people and heritage... and that their devotion will serve as an ideological model for our youth'... The education system intends to mark Jabotinsky Day next week as required by a law enacted in 2005, the Education Ministry said Monday. Schools were instructed earlier this month to prepare ceremonies and special activities, including lessons about Jabotinsky's character and work. Sa'ar himself will give a civics lesson on Jabotinsky in a high school in the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim." (New study unit on pre-state fighters proves controversial, Or Kashti, Haaretz, 22/12/09)
Way to go! Except that Zionist propagandists of whatever stripe are nothing if not hypocritical. Here's David Feith* in the Wall Street Journal on August 21 pondering (in the words of The Australian where I found it) "the murky legacy of Fateh leader Yasser Arafat": "What's Arabic for plus ca change? Because that was the message last week from the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, where the 'moderate' Fateh party held its first general congress since 1989. Fateh - founded by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and led since 2004 by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas - demonstrated that Palestinian national politics remain mired as ever in conspiracy, duplicity and the glorification of terrorists... Fatah's leaders continue to walk in their founder's footsteps... Fatah's demonstration last week that it remains ideologically stuck in the terrorist pleasantries of the 70s ought to be a stark reminder that when it comes to Palestinian 'moderates', moderation remains a highly relative term." (Fatah's 'moderates' still rejoice in their founder's terrorism, 26/8/09) [* That's correct, son of neocon Douglas]
It doesn't get much more pot & kettle than that.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Breathtaking Zionist Hypocrisy
"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core." Hannah Arendt
Whenever Israel boosters open their mouths I am invariably struck by the hypocrisy of their utterances. One such egregious display of this "vice of vices" cropped up on 15 June in Rachael Kohn's introduction to her interview with Aaron Klein, author of Schmoozing with Terrorists, on her ABC Radio National program, The Spirit of Things. I'll be dealing with the interview and its subject in my next post. Ms Kohn's opening remarks, however, merit their own.
Here is how she began: "Recently I returned from Israel, where I met a number of exceptional people, one of whom is the young American-born Aaron Klein, who's the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the news website, worldnetdaily.com. Aaron's claim to fame is that he interviews terrorists, and he's just written a book about it. Now 'terrorist' is a term that I'm well aware has been virtually banned from common parlance, and I asked him about that. Nonetheless, it's his way of naming a threat that's far more real to Israeli citizens, than, say, to academics at Harvard who'd be horrified if they had to be searched by armed guards every time they went onto campus. Or to journalists in comfortable newsrooms who don't live in towns that are continually the object of rocket attacks. They've never known what it's like to do daily tasks that we take for granted, but is [sic] an act of faith for an Israeli, like taking the No. 7 bus on Jaffa Road. Or shopping in the Mahane Yehuda greengrocers market, both popular targets for suicide bombers in Jerusalem."
Overlook Kohn's uncritical use of the 'T' word. Overlook her snide dig at Harvard professor Stephen Walt (who, with co-author of The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, also recently visited Israel). Overlook her attack on journalists who don't uncritically toe the Israeli line. Just focus on those final two sentences, about Israelis still spooked, if Kohn is to be believed, about the prospect of Palestinian suicide bombings in the buses and markets of Jerusalem. What she doesn't tell us is that long before Palestinian groups turned to such terror tactics, Israeli terrorists of the Irgun variety were pioneering them on Palestinian Arab civilian targets back in the 30s. Here's a partial list of same:-
Bombs in Market Places, Cafes, Homes:
17/3/37 Four bombs thrown into Arab cafes in Jaffa; 1 Arab killed, 10 injured. (Palestine and Trans-Jordan, 1937 - Colonial 146, 1938, p 6)
6/7/38 Bomb thrown in Haifa market place results in 8 Arab casualties. (Keesing's Contemporary Archives, III (1937-1940), 3177A)
14/7/38 Bomb explodes in Arab vegetable market, killing 12 and wounding 29, including women and children. (Ibid)
17/7/38 Three Arabs found murdered in Tel Aviv. Police arrest 5 Zionist Revisionists. (Ibid)
25/7/38 Bomb explodes in Arab vegetable market, killing 39 and wounding 64. (Ibid)
25/8/38 Bomb explodes in Jaffa vegetable market, killing 23 Arabs and wounding 30. (Ibid, 3312A)
27/2/39 Bombs explode in Haifa and Jaffa market places, killing 28 Arabs. (Ibid 3513)
2/6/39 Irgun bombs Arab melon market in Jerusalem, killing 5 and wounding 19. (Ibid 3642B)
19/6/39 Bombs explode in Arab market in Haifa, killing 9 and wounding 24. (Ibid)
3/7/39 Bomb thrown into Arab cafe in Haifa. (Ibid)
Attacks on Arab Buses:
20/8/37-26/9/37 Bomb wounds 2 Arabs. Bombs thrown at Arab buses wound 1 woman and kill another. (Palestine and Trans-Jordan 1937 - Colonial 146, 1938, p 8)
14/11/37 Arab bus shot at in Jewish Quarter. 3 Arab passengers, including 2 women dead. (Ibid, p 9)
4/7/38 Bomb thrown at Arab bus in Jerusalem kills 5 and wounds 7. (Keesing's, III (1937-1940), 3177A)
8/7/38 Bomb thrown at Arab bus in Jerusalem kills 4 and wounds 15. (Ibid)
29/6/39 Six attacks on Arab buses on roads near Tel-Aviv, Rehovoth and Petah Tikva result in 11 deaths. (Ibid, 3642B)
Wikipedia's List of Irgun attacks during the 1930s lists 33 incidents resulting in Arab deaths out of "at least 60 operations... during this period."
Here's the Irgun's truncated account from its website:
"After Ben-Yosef's execution [by the British], the Irgun launched a series of operations against the Arabs. The central acts were the explosions in the Arab markets of Haifa and Jerusalem. On July 6, 1938, a member of the Irgun, disguised as an Arab porter, went into the Arab market in Haifa, placed a large parcel beside one of the barrows in the centre of the market and left. Shortly afterwards there was a heavy explosion, which killed 21 Arabs and injured more than 50. A week later a similar incident took place in Jerusalem. A member of the Irgun concealed an electric mine in the Arab market in the Old City. It exploded shortly after the end of the prayer service in the mosque, when a large crowd had emerged onto the street. Eight Arabs were killed and more than 30 injured." http://www.etzel.org.il/
Here's a quote from historian J Bowyer-Bell:
"On July 4, the Irgun attacked Arab quarters, first in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv. Five were killed and 20 were wounded. Two days later an Arab 'porter' carried milk cans into the Haifa fruit and vegetable market. As soon as he found an empty corner, he left his cans and disappeared into the crowd. A few minutes later the cans detonated with a huge roar, spewing fire and fragments into the milling crowd of shoppers. Twenty-three Arabs were killed and 79 wounded. A similar attack in the Arab quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on July 15 killed 10 and wounded 29 more Arabs. The biggest explosion of all came on July 25, again in Haifa, leaving 39 dead and 46 wounded." (Terror Out of Zion, p 42)
Here's American historian Lenni Brenner:
"Early in September 1937, 13 Arabs had been killed, supposedly in retaliation for the deaths of 3 Jews. By 14 November the Irgun went on the offensive. Several Irgunists were determined to act on their own and the Irgun command headed them off by organizing a wave of operations that resulted in 10 Arabs killed and numerous wounded. Thereafter there were innumerable attacks on purely civilian Arab targets with the high point of the campaign coming in the summer of 1938. On 6 July a milk-can bomb went off in the Arab market in Haifa, leaving 21 dead and 52 injured. On 15 July July an electric mine in David Street in the old city of Jerusalem killed 10 and wounded 30. On the 25th another bomb in the Haifa market killed 35 civilians and wounded 70. On 26 August a bomb in Jaffa's market slaughtered 24 and injured 35." (The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, p 100)
And just to humanise:
"... a bomb exploded in the vegetable market in Jaffa. It went off early in the morning, when most housewives were milling round the stalls, squeezing the fruits before buying, accompanied by those of their children who were too young or too poor to go to school... The 'bomb' had been an oil drum, packed tight with old bits and pieces of rusty iron scrap and nails and explosives, rolled into the centre of the market place from a lorry which the authorities never traced, enough for every Arab to know its origin. There was a British officer training the extremist Zionists, who until his arrival had never done this sort of thing." (Soraya Antonius, The Lord, p 206)
To paraphrase Ms Kohn: 'Those Palestinians never knew what it was like to do daily tasks that we take for granted, but were an act of faith for them, like taking the No. X bus in Jerusalem. Or shopping in the Haifa greengrocers market, both popular targets for Jewish terrorists in Palestine'.
Whenever Israel boosters open their mouths I am invariably struck by the hypocrisy of their utterances. One such egregious display of this "vice of vices" cropped up on 15 June in Rachael Kohn's introduction to her interview with Aaron Klein, author of Schmoozing with Terrorists, on her ABC Radio National program, The Spirit of Things. I'll be dealing with the interview and its subject in my next post. Ms Kohn's opening remarks, however, merit their own.
Here is how she began: "Recently I returned from Israel, where I met a number of exceptional people, one of whom is the young American-born Aaron Klein, who's the Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the news website, worldnetdaily.com. Aaron's claim to fame is that he interviews terrorists, and he's just written a book about it. Now 'terrorist' is a term that I'm well aware has been virtually banned from common parlance, and I asked him about that. Nonetheless, it's his way of naming a threat that's far more real to Israeli citizens, than, say, to academics at Harvard who'd be horrified if they had to be searched by armed guards every time they went onto campus. Or to journalists in comfortable newsrooms who don't live in towns that are continually the object of rocket attacks. They've never known what it's like to do daily tasks that we take for granted, but is [sic] an act of faith for an Israeli, like taking the No. 7 bus on Jaffa Road. Or shopping in the Mahane Yehuda greengrocers market, both popular targets for suicide bombers in Jerusalem."
Overlook Kohn's uncritical use of the 'T' word. Overlook her snide dig at Harvard professor Stephen Walt (who, with co-author of The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, also recently visited Israel). Overlook her attack on journalists who don't uncritically toe the Israeli line. Just focus on those final two sentences, about Israelis still spooked, if Kohn is to be believed, about the prospect of Palestinian suicide bombings in the buses and markets of Jerusalem. What she doesn't tell us is that long before Palestinian groups turned to such terror tactics, Israeli terrorists of the Irgun variety were pioneering them on Palestinian Arab civilian targets back in the 30s. Here's a partial list of same:-
Bombs in Market Places, Cafes, Homes:
17/3/37 Four bombs thrown into Arab cafes in Jaffa; 1 Arab killed, 10 injured. (Palestine and Trans-Jordan, 1937 - Colonial 146, 1938, p 6)
6/7/38 Bomb thrown in Haifa market place results in 8 Arab casualties. (Keesing's Contemporary Archives, III (1937-1940), 3177A)
14/7/38 Bomb explodes in Arab vegetable market, killing 12 and wounding 29, including women and children. (Ibid)
17/7/38 Three Arabs found murdered in Tel Aviv. Police arrest 5 Zionist Revisionists. (Ibid)
25/7/38 Bomb explodes in Arab vegetable market, killing 39 and wounding 64. (Ibid)
25/8/38 Bomb explodes in Jaffa vegetable market, killing 23 Arabs and wounding 30. (Ibid, 3312A)
27/2/39 Bombs explode in Haifa and Jaffa market places, killing 28 Arabs. (Ibid 3513)
2/6/39 Irgun bombs Arab melon market in Jerusalem, killing 5 and wounding 19. (Ibid 3642B)
19/6/39 Bombs explode in Arab market in Haifa, killing 9 and wounding 24. (Ibid)
3/7/39 Bomb thrown into Arab cafe in Haifa. (Ibid)
Attacks on Arab Buses:
20/8/37-26/9/37 Bomb wounds 2 Arabs. Bombs thrown at Arab buses wound 1 woman and kill another. (Palestine and Trans-Jordan 1937 - Colonial 146, 1938, p 8)
14/11/37 Arab bus shot at in Jewish Quarter. 3 Arab passengers, including 2 women dead. (Ibid, p 9)
4/7/38 Bomb thrown at Arab bus in Jerusalem kills 5 and wounds 7. (Keesing's, III (1937-1940), 3177A)
8/7/38 Bomb thrown at Arab bus in Jerusalem kills 4 and wounds 15. (Ibid)
29/6/39 Six attacks on Arab buses on roads near Tel-Aviv, Rehovoth and Petah Tikva result in 11 deaths. (Ibid, 3642B)
Wikipedia's List of Irgun attacks during the 1930s lists 33 incidents resulting in Arab deaths out of "at least 60 operations... during this period."
Here's the Irgun's truncated account from its website:
"After Ben-Yosef's execution [by the British], the Irgun launched a series of operations against the Arabs. The central acts were the explosions in the Arab markets of Haifa and Jerusalem. On July 6, 1938, a member of the Irgun, disguised as an Arab porter, went into the Arab market in Haifa, placed a large parcel beside one of the barrows in the centre of the market and left. Shortly afterwards there was a heavy explosion, which killed 21 Arabs and injured more than 50. A week later a similar incident took place in Jerusalem. A member of the Irgun concealed an electric mine in the Arab market in the Old City. It exploded shortly after the end of the prayer service in the mosque, when a large crowd had emerged onto the street. Eight Arabs were killed and more than 30 injured." http://www.etzel.org.il/
Here's a quote from historian J Bowyer-Bell:
"On July 4, the Irgun attacked Arab quarters, first in Jerusalem and then in Tel Aviv. Five were killed and 20 were wounded. Two days later an Arab 'porter' carried milk cans into the Haifa fruit and vegetable market. As soon as he found an empty corner, he left his cans and disappeared into the crowd. A few minutes later the cans detonated with a huge roar, spewing fire and fragments into the milling crowd of shoppers. Twenty-three Arabs were killed and 79 wounded. A similar attack in the Arab quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem on July 15 killed 10 and wounded 29 more Arabs. The biggest explosion of all came on July 25, again in Haifa, leaving 39 dead and 46 wounded." (Terror Out of Zion, p 42)
Here's American historian Lenni Brenner:
"Early in September 1937, 13 Arabs had been killed, supposedly in retaliation for the deaths of 3 Jews. By 14 November the Irgun went on the offensive. Several Irgunists were determined to act on their own and the Irgun command headed them off by organizing a wave of operations that resulted in 10 Arabs killed and numerous wounded. Thereafter there were innumerable attacks on purely civilian Arab targets with the high point of the campaign coming in the summer of 1938. On 6 July a milk-can bomb went off in the Arab market in Haifa, leaving 21 dead and 52 injured. On 15 July July an electric mine in David Street in the old city of Jerusalem killed 10 and wounded 30. On the 25th another bomb in the Haifa market killed 35 civilians and wounded 70. On 26 August a bomb in Jaffa's market slaughtered 24 and injured 35." (The Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky to Shamir, p 100)
And just to humanise:
"... a bomb exploded in the vegetable market in Jaffa. It went off early in the morning, when most housewives were milling round the stalls, squeezing the fruits before buying, accompanied by those of their children who were too young or too poor to go to school... The 'bomb' had been an oil drum, packed tight with old bits and pieces of rusty iron scrap and nails and explosives, rolled into the centre of the market place from a lorry which the authorities never traced, enough for every Arab to know its origin. There was a British officer training the extremist Zionists, who until his arrival had never done this sort of thing." (Soraya Antonius, The Lord, p 206)
To paraphrase Ms Kohn: 'Those Palestinians never knew what it was like to do daily tasks that we take for granted, but were an act of faith for them, like taking the No. X bus in Jerusalem. Or shopping in the Haifa greengrocers market, both popular targets for Jewish terrorists in Palestine'.
Friday, March 14, 2008
The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3
"The state was born, but the ideals of renaissance, virtue, and peace have not been realized with it. The society it spawned is as parochial, impulsive, and prideful as its architects. It has lived for over rwo decades in enmity with its neighbours, carried away by concerns with its own needs, and out of touch with the broader perspectives of the Jewish world outside. Most basic to its shortsightedness is its inability to engage in the give-and-take of humane dialogue with the two enities which it must ultimately reach: the modern world and the Middle East." Alan R Taylor, Prelude to Israel: An Analysis of Zionist Diplomacy 1897-1947 (1959)
"The problem with Israel...is not...that it is a European 'enclave' in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state' - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism." Tony Judt, Israel: The Alternative, New York Review of Books, 23/10/03
What follows is my critique of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's shameful 12 March parliamentary motion on the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel, the text and discussion of which eluded both The Sydney Morning Herald (with the honorable exception of its Saturday columnist Alan Ramsey) and Melbourne's The Age:-
Rudd moved "That the House: (1) celebrate and commend the achievements of the State of Israel in the 60 years since its inception; (2) remember with pride and honour the important role which Australia played in the establishment of the State of Israel as both a member state of the UN and as an influential voice in the introduction of Resolution 181 which facilitated Israel's statehood, and as the country which proudly became the first to cast a vote in support of Israel's creation; (3) acknowledge the unique relationship which exists between Australia and Israel; a bond highlighted by our commitment to the rights and liberty of our citizens and encouragement of cultural diversity; (4) commend the State of Israel's commitment to democracy, the Rule of Law and pluralism; (5) reiterate Australia's commitment to Israel's right to exist and our ongoing support to the peaceful establishment of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue; (6) reiterate Australia's commitment to the pursuit of peace and stability throughout the Middle East; (7) on this, the 60th Anniversary of Independence of the State of Israel, pledge our friendship, commitment and enduring support to the people of Israel as we celebrate this important occasion together."
In speaking to his motion, Rudd began by falsely claiming that "the story of the establishment of the state of Israel begins with the unimaginable tragedy of the Holocaust." In so doing, he conveniently ignored the fact that the Zionist movement, which created the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, predated the Holocaust by almost 50 years, as well as the fact that the Zionist movement's single-minded obsession with setting up a Jewish state in Palestine was at odds with the interests of European Jews both before and after the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, the Zionists, instead of resisting the rise of fascism and Nazism, sought an accomodation with them, and elements of the Zionist revisionist movement even tried to forge an alliance with the Nazis against the British. [See Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983)]
After the liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps, most Jewish displaced persons (DPs) chose not to go to Palestine, contrary to the expectations and propaganda of the Zionists. And this in spite of the fact that the Zionist movement, totally insensitive to the real needs or wishes of Holocaust survivors, pulled out all stops, including blocking plans to evacuate them to countries other than Palestine, and forcibly, even violently, drafting them in Europe for service in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. [See Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Story of Jews in Displaced Persons Camps and their Forced Role in the Founding of Israel (2004)]
The plight and fate of pre-war European Jewry, and the welfare of Holocaust survivors, always came second to the Zionist movement's goal of bringing as many European Jews as possible to Palestine in order to realise its goal of a Jewish state there. To quote just two examples of this attitude:-
"And this time in Eretz Yisrael, there are comments: 'Don't put Eretz Yisrael in priority in this difficult time, in the time of destruction of European Jewry'. I do not accept such a saying. And when some asked me: 'Can't you give money from the Keren Hayesod [Jewish National Fund] to save Jews in the Diaspora?', I said: no! And again I say no!...I think we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row." Yitzhak Gruenbaum, head of the Jewish Agency's rescue Committee (Brenner, p 234) And this, from David Ben-Gurion, leader of Palestine's Jewish community and first PM of Israel: "If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the US, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism." (Brenner p 149)
Rudd went on to say, "By war's end, 6 million Jews had been murdered. By war's end the international community finally began to look again in earnest at the question of a homeland for the Jewish people."
This again is a distortion of fact. The international community had 2 unrelated problems on its hands:-
1) What to do about Britain's failed Palestine mandate, which had come under armed assault by Zionist forces (referred to by the pro-Zionist Churchill in 1944 as "a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany").
2) What to do about Jewish DPs.
With regard to the second, it is quite clear that the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), set up to examine the Palestine problem in June 1947 (and which included Dr Evatt, Australia's Minister for External Affairs) did not regard Palestine as the solution for displaced Jews: Recommendation 12 of UNSCOP's findings said, "In the appraisal of the Palestine question it should be accepted as incontrovertible that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution for the Jewish problem in general." Despite this, all attempts by the international community to find an international solution for Jewish DPs were anathema to the Zionist movement and were vigorously resisted by it.
Rudd (and his Zionist boosters and sources) loves to trot out the 'glorious' tale of Evatt's role in Israel's creation: "Australia is proud to have played a significant part in the international process that led to the foundation of the state of Israel. Australia's then Minister for External Affairs, Dr Evatt, was part of the UN Special Committee [sic: Commission]on Palestine which recommended in August 1947 the termination of the Mandate for Palestine. And he was chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee meeting on the Palestinian Question that proposed the partition of Palestine [Again Rudd's got his facts wrong. It was UNSCOP which "proposed the partition of Palestine"]. He strongly believed that the fundamental right of self-determination for the Jewish people and for Palestinians could only be achieved by each having their own state."
Let us take a detailed look at this "process" of which "Australia is proud."* UNSCOP was an 11 member body on which only 2 Asian countries (India and Iran) represented the continent directly involved in its deliberations. Inevitably, when submitting its findings in August 1947, it split along continental lines: a majority of 7, all from Europe and North and South America, favoured the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, while a minority of 3 (India, Iran and Yugoslavia - Australia abstained) proposed an independent federal state. In other words, European and American states (Africa did not get a look in) got to dictate the partition of an Asian country. As David Horowitz, the Jewish Agency liaison officer with UNSCOP commented: "The Asiatic bloc was solid and unitedly negative. The fact of our complete isolation on this continent, into whose life we aspired to become integrated, pained me..."
When the matter came before the UN General Assembly, meeting as an Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, a resolution to refer to the International Court of Justice the question of whether the UN had any competence to enforce partition without consulting, or against the wishes of, the inhabitants of Palestine was lost by only one vote. And when the Committee voted on the partition plan, it mustered only a simple majority when a 2/3rd's majority was required. With the exception of Cuba, all the negative votes were Afro-Asian.
At this point, before partition was voted on in the General Assembly, 6 countries became the target for Zionist and US arm-twisting: Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines, China and Ethiopia were pressured into either abstaining or affirming partition. Wrote Horowitz: "America's line of action had swung in a new direction. As a result of instructions from the President (Truman**) the State Department now embarked on a helpful course of great importance to our interest. The improved atmosphere swayed a number of wavering countries. The US exerted the weight of its influence almost at the last hour, and the way the final vote turned out must be ascribed to this fact." In the case of the Philippines, for example, its delegate had made a strong speech in the GA against partition, describing it correctly as a move towards "political disunion and territorial dismemberment," which would "turn us back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic doctrines of theocratic governments," and away from "the modern trend towards inter-racial co-operation and secular democracy." Three days later the Philippine delegation voted for partition. This is the process of which Rudd (aka "Australia") is "proud."
And this matter of manufacturing UN consent is quite apart from the issue of the legality of partition, given that, in the words of Palestinian lawyer, Henry Cattan, "it constituted a trespass on the sovereignty of the original inhabitants, it gave away to alien immigrants a large part of the territory of the country and it denied to the Palestinians the exercise of their natural right of self-determination [The Palestine Problem in a Nutshell, 1971 p 16]." Or the injustice of assigning more than half of Palestine (57%) to less than 1/3rd of its population, mostly foreign immigrants, who had legal title to only about 6% of the land.
Rudd went on to say that "[o]n 29 January 1949 [Australian PM Ben Chifley] announced that Australia would become one of the first countries to recognise the new state of Israel, describing it as 'a force of special value in the world community' As President of the General Assembly, 'Doc' Evatt then presided over the historic May 1949 vote admitting Israel as the 59th member of the UN."
With regard to the latter, Israeli activist and academic, Uri Davis has pointed out: "As...the discussions at the UN Security Council suggest, the holocaust notwithstanding, the UN would have been reluctant to allow the admission of the Jewish state as a member state had the UN not received formal and solemn assurances from the Government of the State of Israel that Israel would abide by Resolution 181 (II) of November 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine with economic union, and Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948 resolving that the 1948 Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes...should be permitted to do so...It goes without saying that, under the circumstances, had the new state failed to project itself as anything other than an international-law-abiding state, it would have seriously jeopardized the prospects of its admission as a member state in the UN." [Apartheid Israel, 2003, p 38]
Needless to say, neither resolution has been implemented by Israel (181 was violated when Israel went on to illegally extend its borders by a further 20% in the 1948-1949 war, failed to adopt a democratic constitution, and ignored Jerusalem's intended status as a 'corpus separatum'). Israel, of course, has since gone on to break record after record in its defiance of both the UN Charter and UN resolutions.
The rest of Rudd's speech merely retails such Zionist cliches as the Begin/Sadat love-in of 1979 and the Rabin/Arafat love-in of 1993, as well as the usual platitudes about the "establishment of an independent and economically viable Palestinian state" (though, interestingly, there is no mention that it should be 'contiguous'), and Israel's "robust parliamentary democracy" and "vibrant society and economy."
* Based on the account in GH Jansen's Zionism, Israel & Asian Nationalism (1971) pp 197-199
** Truman had once famously declared: "I'm sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I don't have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my consituents."
"The problem with Israel...is not...that it is a European 'enclave' in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a 'Jewish state' - a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded - is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism." Tony Judt, Israel: The Alternative, New York Review of Books, 23/10/03
What follows is my critique of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's shameful 12 March parliamentary motion on the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel, the text and discussion of which eluded both The Sydney Morning Herald (with the honorable exception of its Saturday columnist Alan Ramsey) and Melbourne's The Age:-
Rudd moved "That the House: (1) celebrate and commend the achievements of the State of Israel in the 60 years since its inception; (2) remember with pride and honour the important role which Australia played in the establishment of the State of Israel as both a member state of the UN and as an influential voice in the introduction of Resolution 181 which facilitated Israel's statehood, and as the country which proudly became the first to cast a vote in support of Israel's creation; (3) acknowledge the unique relationship which exists between Australia and Israel; a bond highlighted by our commitment to the rights and liberty of our citizens and encouragement of cultural diversity; (4) commend the State of Israel's commitment to democracy, the Rule of Law and pluralism; (5) reiterate Australia's commitment to Israel's right to exist and our ongoing support to the peaceful establishment of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue; (6) reiterate Australia's commitment to the pursuit of peace and stability throughout the Middle East; (7) on this, the 60th Anniversary of Independence of the State of Israel, pledge our friendship, commitment and enduring support to the people of Israel as we celebrate this important occasion together."
In speaking to his motion, Rudd began by falsely claiming that "the story of the establishment of the state of Israel begins with the unimaginable tragedy of the Holocaust." In so doing, he conveniently ignored the fact that the Zionist movement, which created the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948, predated the Holocaust by almost 50 years, as well as the fact that the Zionist movement's single-minded obsession with setting up a Jewish state in Palestine was at odds with the interests of European Jews both before and after the Holocaust.
Before the Holocaust, the Zionists, instead of resisting the rise of fascism and Nazism, sought an accomodation with them, and elements of the Zionist revisionist movement even tried to forge an alliance with the Nazis against the British. [See Lenni Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators (1983)]
After the liberation of Jews from Nazi concentration camps, most Jewish displaced persons (DPs) chose not to go to Palestine, contrary to the expectations and propaganda of the Zionists. And this in spite of the fact that the Zionist movement, totally insensitive to the real needs or wishes of Holocaust survivors, pulled out all stops, including blocking plans to evacuate them to countries other than Palestine, and forcibly, even violently, drafting them in Europe for service in the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. [See Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Story of Jews in Displaced Persons Camps and their Forced Role in the Founding of Israel (2004)]
The plight and fate of pre-war European Jewry, and the welfare of Holocaust survivors, always came second to the Zionist movement's goal of bringing as many European Jews as possible to Palestine in order to realise its goal of a Jewish state there. To quote just two examples of this attitude:-
"And this time in Eretz Yisrael, there are comments: 'Don't put Eretz Yisrael in priority in this difficult time, in the time of destruction of European Jewry'. I do not accept such a saying. And when some asked me: 'Can't you give money from the Keren Hayesod [Jewish National Fund] to save Jews in the Diaspora?', I said: no! And again I say no!...I think we have to stand before this wave that is putting Zionist activity into the second row." Yitzhak Gruenbaum, head of the Jewish Agency's rescue Committee (Brenner, p 234) And this, from David Ben-Gurion, leader of Palestine's Jewish community and first PM of Israel: "If Jews will have to choose between the refugees, saving Jews from concentration camps, and assisting a national museum in Palestine, mercy will have the upper hand and the whole energy of the people will be channelled into saving Jews from various countries. Zionism will be struck off the agenda not only in world public opinion, in Britain and the US, but elsewhere in Jewish public opinion. If we allow a separation between the refugee problem and the Palestinian problem, we are risking the existence of Zionism." (Brenner p 149)
Rudd went on to say, "By war's end, 6 million Jews had been murdered. By war's end the international community finally began to look again in earnest at the question of a homeland for the Jewish people."
This again is a distortion of fact. The international community had 2 unrelated problems on its hands:-
1) What to do about Britain's failed Palestine mandate, which had come under armed assault by Zionist forces (referred to by the pro-Zionist Churchill in 1944 as "a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany").
2) What to do about Jewish DPs.
With regard to the second, it is quite clear that the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP), set up to examine the Palestine problem in June 1947 (and which included Dr Evatt, Australia's Minister for External Affairs) did not regard Palestine as the solution for displaced Jews: Recommendation 12 of UNSCOP's findings said, "In the appraisal of the Palestine question it should be accepted as incontrovertible that any solution for Palestine cannot be considered as a solution for the Jewish problem in general." Despite this, all attempts by the international community to find an international solution for Jewish DPs were anathema to the Zionist movement and were vigorously resisted by it.
Rudd (and his Zionist boosters and sources) loves to trot out the 'glorious' tale of Evatt's role in Israel's creation: "Australia is proud to have played a significant part in the international process that led to the foundation of the state of Israel. Australia's then Minister for External Affairs, Dr Evatt, was part of the UN Special Committee [sic: Commission]on Palestine which recommended in August 1947 the termination of the Mandate for Palestine. And he was chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee meeting on the Palestinian Question that proposed the partition of Palestine [Again Rudd's got his facts wrong. It was UNSCOP which "proposed the partition of Palestine"]. He strongly believed that the fundamental right of self-determination for the Jewish people and for Palestinians could only be achieved by each having their own state."
Let us take a detailed look at this "process" of which "Australia is proud."* UNSCOP was an 11 member body on which only 2 Asian countries (India and Iran) represented the continent directly involved in its deliberations. Inevitably, when submitting its findings in August 1947, it split along continental lines: a majority of 7, all from Europe and North and South America, favoured the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state, while a minority of 3 (India, Iran and Yugoslavia - Australia abstained) proposed an independent federal state. In other words, European and American states (Africa did not get a look in) got to dictate the partition of an Asian country. As David Horowitz, the Jewish Agency liaison officer with UNSCOP commented: "The Asiatic bloc was solid and unitedly negative. The fact of our complete isolation on this continent, into whose life we aspired to become integrated, pained me..."
When the matter came before the UN General Assembly, meeting as an Ad Hoc Committee on Palestine, a resolution to refer to the International Court of Justice the question of whether the UN had any competence to enforce partition without consulting, or against the wishes of, the inhabitants of Palestine was lost by only one vote. And when the Committee voted on the partition plan, it mustered only a simple majority when a 2/3rd's majority was required. With the exception of Cuba, all the negative votes were Afro-Asian.
At this point, before partition was voted on in the General Assembly, 6 countries became the target for Zionist and US arm-twisting: Haiti, Liberia, the Philippines, China and Ethiopia were pressured into either abstaining or affirming partition. Wrote Horowitz: "America's line of action had swung in a new direction. As a result of instructions from the President (Truman**) the State Department now embarked on a helpful course of great importance to our interest. The improved atmosphere swayed a number of wavering countries. The US exerted the weight of its influence almost at the last hour, and the way the final vote turned out must be ascribed to this fact." In the case of the Philippines, for example, its delegate had made a strong speech in the GA against partition, describing it correctly as a move towards "political disunion and territorial dismemberment," which would "turn us back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic doctrines of theocratic governments," and away from "the modern trend towards inter-racial co-operation and secular democracy." Three days later the Philippine delegation voted for partition. This is the process of which Rudd (aka "Australia") is "proud."
And this matter of manufacturing UN consent is quite apart from the issue of the legality of partition, given that, in the words of Palestinian lawyer, Henry Cattan, "it constituted a trespass on the sovereignty of the original inhabitants, it gave away to alien immigrants a large part of the territory of the country and it denied to the Palestinians the exercise of their natural right of self-determination [The Palestine Problem in a Nutshell, 1971 p 16]." Or the injustice of assigning more than half of Palestine (57%) to less than 1/3rd of its population, mostly foreign immigrants, who had legal title to only about 6% of the land.
Rudd went on to say that "[o]n 29 January 1949 [Australian PM Ben Chifley] announced that Australia would become one of the first countries to recognise the new state of Israel, describing it as 'a force of special value in the world community' As President of the General Assembly, 'Doc' Evatt then presided over the historic May 1949 vote admitting Israel as the 59th member of the UN."
With regard to the latter, Israeli activist and academic, Uri Davis has pointed out: "As...the discussions at the UN Security Council suggest, the holocaust notwithstanding, the UN would have been reluctant to allow the admission of the Jewish state as a member state had the UN not received formal and solemn assurances from the Government of the State of Israel that Israel would abide by Resolution 181 (II) of November 1947 recommending the partition of Palestine with economic union, and Resolution 194 (III) of December 1948 resolving that the 1948 Palestinian refugees wishing to return to their homes...should be permitted to do so...It goes without saying that, under the circumstances, had the new state failed to project itself as anything other than an international-law-abiding state, it would have seriously jeopardized the prospects of its admission as a member state in the UN." [Apartheid Israel, 2003, p 38]
Needless to say, neither resolution has been implemented by Israel (181 was violated when Israel went on to illegally extend its borders by a further 20% in the 1948-1949 war, failed to adopt a democratic constitution, and ignored Jerusalem's intended status as a 'corpus separatum'). Israel, of course, has since gone on to break record after record in its defiance of both the UN Charter and UN resolutions.
The rest of Rudd's speech merely retails such Zionist cliches as the Begin/Sadat love-in of 1979 and the Rabin/Arafat love-in of 1993, as well as the usual platitudes about the "establishment of an independent and economically viable Palestinian state" (though, interestingly, there is no mention that it should be 'contiguous'), and Israel's "robust parliamentary democracy" and "vibrant society and economy."
* Based on the account in GH Jansen's Zionism, Israel & Asian Nationalism (1971) pp 197-199
** Truman had once famously declared: "I'm sorry gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I don't have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my consituents."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)