Dave Sharma's Inspiration

For earlier generations of useful fools for Israel it was Leon Uris' propaganda novel Exodus that did the trick. For Dave Sharma, it was obviously Senor & Singer's 's Start-Up Nation.

Read on:

"The people of Wentworth's loss is the corporate world's gain. Aspiring Liberal politician Dave Sharma has just joined the advisory board of ParaZero, a drone safety business. While listed on the ASX, ParaZero is headquartered in Israel where Sharma was previously the Australian ambassador. The ongoing pipeline of tech businesses run out of Israel but listed Down Under look to keep Sharma busy until his political career gets going proper. Another similar firm Sharma chairs, Shekel Brainweigh - which makes weighing technology for grocery self-check-outs and is headquartered in a kibbutz in northern Israel - has just completed its $10m fundraising." (He's at it again, Margin Call, The Australian, 9/11/18)

The US Love Affair with Arabophobic Hate Speech

We hear a lot these days about 'hate speech', that is, to borrow from at least one definition, "speech capable of instilling or inciting hatred of, or prejudice towards, a person or group of people on a specified ground [such as] race, nationality, ethnicity, country of origin, ethno-religious identity, religion or sexuality."*

Correct me if I'm wrong but the term seems to have been largely monopolised by supporters of apartheid Israel to malign and marginalise anyone who questions not just the criminal behaviour of that entity, but the legitimacy of the Zionist project in Palestine and the ideology of political Zionism which underpins it.** The implication is that this latter group in particular - anti-Zionists - are borderline, if not actual, anti-Semites, and, ipso facto, engaged in hate speech.

By contrast, the blatant Arabophobia, which set in in the US following the creation of Israel in 1948, is generally overlooked, and rarely recognised for what it is: hate speech

By way of illustration, read this passage from Leon Uris' best-selling Zionist propaganda novel, Exodus (1958):

"[The final disaster in Arab history] was brought about by fellow Moslems as the mighty Ottomans gobbled up their lands. Five centuries of corruption and feudalism followed. A drop of water became more precious than gold or spices in the unfertile land. The merest, most meager existence was a series of tortured, heartbreaking struggles from birth to death. Without water the Arab world disintegrated into filth; unspeakable disease, illiteracy, and poverty were universal. There was little song or laughter or joy in Arab life. It was a constant struggle to survive. In this atmosphere cunning, treachery, murder, feuds, and jealousies became away of life. The cruel realities that had gone into forming the Arab character puzzled outsiders. Cruelty from brother to brother was common. In parts of the Arab world thousands of slaves were kept, and punishment for a thief was amputation of a hand, for a prostitute, amputation of ears and nose. There was little compassion from Arab to Arab. The fellaheen who lived in abysmal filth and the Bedouin whose survival was a day-to-day miracle turned to the one means of alleviating misery. They became Muslim fanatics..." (p 228)

Now read these words from the trailer of thriller/horror story director Brad Anderson's latest film, Beirut***:

"Two thousands years of revenge, vendetta, murder. Welcome to Beirut."

Nothing has changed in 60 years! Strange place, the US where trenchant criticism of Israel is deemed hate speech, but few, it seems, bat an eyelid at rampant Arabophobic hate speech.

*This definition comes from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) website. It differs, however, in one respect from other definitions of hate speech on the web (legaldictionary.net, merriam-webster.com, and dictionary.cambridge.org) in its inclusion of the term 'ethno-religious identity'. Try as I might I can only think of one group that conflates religion and ethnicity. Guess who;

**It is worth keeping in mind here Israeli anti-Zionist activist Uri Davis' distinction between Judaism as a confessional preference and Zionism as a political programme: "Judaism is not Zionism. Judaism, as a confessional preference, should be strictly an individual matter, and, generally speaking... should not be the concern of the law. Zionism, as a political programme, is a matter of public debate. As noted already... the political Zionist school of thought and practice is committed to the normative statement that it is a good idea to establish and consolidate in the country of Palestine a sovereign state, a Jewish state, that attempts to guarantee in law and in practice a demographic majority of the Jewish tribes in the territories under its control. Such individuals and bodies as are, for instance, committed to the values of open society, democracy and the separation of religion from the state; who, therefore, disagree with the political aims of this particular political programme, and who regard this programme to be a negative political programme, are anti-Zionist in the same sense that those who for many decades opposed the political programme of apartheid South Africa (which ended in 1994) were, and it is to be hoped remain, anti-apartheid." (Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within (2003), pp 11-12)

***Also on this film, see my 1/8/18 post One Movie Hollywood Will Never Make.

The Weinstein Saga Takes a Turn for the Worse

With sordid revelation after sordid revelation, could the Harvey (Gimme a massage NOW!) Weinstein saga get any worse?

Of course!

Read on:

"Oscar-winning film producer Harvey Weinstein expressed his deep love and appreciation for the Jewish state on Monday, saying, 'I am an Israeli in my heart and mind.' Speaking on the red carpet at The Algemeiner's fourth annual gala in New York City, Weinstein emphasized, 'I love that country, I love what it stands for, I am proud to be Jewish.'... He also spoke of his upcoming movie 'Mila 18,' an adaption of Leon Uris' acclaimed novel on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. 'When people see 'Mila 18,' they can subtitle it 'Jews with guns,' because this is not about going into the night quietly,' Weinstein said. 'This is the birth of the modern Israelis, these were the guys in the ghetto who said we are not going to walk into concentration camps and get herded like cattle. They said, we're going to kill some Germans instead.'" (Oscar-winning producer Harvey Weinstein at Algemeiner gala: 'I am Israeli in my heart and mind', algemeiner.com, 20/9/17)

The Conroy Conundrum

Don the sackcloth and ashes now!

Stephen Conroy, 53, has up and resigned... and, thanks to 20 years 'service' in the Senate, this great man will be getting a cool annual pension of $200,000. Nice.

I know... WTF?! right?

But wait, it gets worse:

In his Diary of a Foreign Minister, Bob Carr described Conroy as "the firebrand of the Victorian Right with an umbilical attachment to the cause of Israel." (p 233)

I know... OMFG!! right?

But what I want to know is why, O why, anyone in their right mind, in the 21st century, other than maybe a certifiably mad Christian Zio, would have such a thing as "an umbilical attachment to Israel"?

I mean, if Conroy wore a pith helmet everywhere, or a monocle, or a Davy Crockett hat, wouldn't you want to know why?

Is it Christian Zionism? Is it parental blah? Priestly blah? Is it Leon Uris? Morris West? Is it patronage? Is it some unholy combination of these? What is it?

Seriously, I'd really, really love to know what IT is.

Blogging the Zionist Bookshelf

First the good news. A new (2013) and youthful (1982) federal Labor MP (Gellibrand), Tim Watts, not only reads books but blogs about them on a website called Blogging the Bookshelf. In fact, all the books he's read from 2013 -2015. He's even got a handy rating system for you: BUY, BORROW, TOSS

But how does Tim choose the books he reads? Does he just walk into a bookshop (or St Vinnies?) and pick them up at random? Does he just read books others have passed on to him or recommended? Does he gravitate towards some subjects rather than others?

He doesn't say. His lists seem pretty much random. Some clarity here would be welcome.

Now for the bad news. Of all the books Tim could have read to gain some idea - which after all is the point of reading books, right? - about WTF is going on in Palestine/Israel he's chosen Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor & Saul Singer* and My Promised Land by Ari Shavit.

The first is about how enforcing an occupation produces budding entrepreneurs. Tim gives it a BORROW rating.

So if I were to write a book suggesting that maybe Australia should introduce conscription and invade, occupy and police PNG because this will turn us into a start-up nation, Tim would rate it BORROW as opposed to TOSS?

The second is about how wonderful Israelis are, and how they created "something unique and quite endearing" in a tough (Arab) neighborhood. Tim gives it a BUY rating.

So if I were to write a self-congratulatory book called My Promised Land about how wonderful Australians are, and how we created 'something unique and quite endearing' in a tough (Aboriginal) neighborhood, Tim would rate it BUY as opposed to TOSS?

Can we detect a pattern here then? An unfortunate predilection for Zionist potboilers?

Why so? Well, this is the Labor Party, and if you want to get ahead there...

And, significantly, he's been rambammed - 2014:

"Watts said he was impressed by the objectivity of the Rambam program, which he said exposed him to a diverse range of views and the space to develop his own views on Israel without intrusion or interference." (See my 9/6/14 post Israeli-Occupied Labor.)

LOLOLOLOL

But I'm curious: where did these two books come from? Michael Danby? AIJAC? Israel's Foreign Ministry?

And I'm also curious as to how a bloke who's declared in parliament that "multiculturalism is important to me" can give the thumbs-up to sales brochures for an ethnocratic, apartheid state.

[*See my 23/4/10 post Creative Destruction.]

PS: Check out his reading list for 2001: Wall-to-wall Leon Uris, including EXODUS. So that's when the Ziobug first bit. It's like the herpes virus, once it's in your system it's there forever!

A Tale of Massacre & Theft

If the following extracts from Stephanie Bunbury's interview with Israeli-American actress and director, Natalie Portman, are anything to go by, it looks like Australian moviegoers are in for a massive dose of Zionist propaganda:

"A Tale of Love & Darkness [2015] is adapted from a childhood memoir by Amos Oz*, the Israeli writer whose prominence on the world literary stage has him regularly tipped to win a Nobel prize." ('You need a great deal of ignorance to take on a a great challenge', Sydney Morning Herald, 24/10/15)

Question: Is there any Israeli writer out there not strutting around on "the world literary stage," or on the cusp of winning a Nobel prize?

Grumble: I do wish journalists would put quotation marks around the hype they lift from press releases.

"A Tale of Love & Darkness recalls the 5 years between 1945 and 1950. A Jewish state was re-established in what had been the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948."

Re-established?

Now that's straight out of the Zionist catechism! I refuse to believe that that word came unaided from Bunbury's pen. From a Portman press release, yes, but not from Bunbury herself. Be that as it may, Bunbury's responsible for its recycling.

I mean, does she seriously believe that a bunch of Russo-Polish nutters, such as Benjamin Miliekowsky, Ariel Scheinerman, David Grun and Chaim Weizmann (or Amos Klausner for that matter), to name but the top dogs, and their ugly little apartheid project in Palestine, are seriously connected to some fabled Palestinian kingdom, so lost in the mists of time that, try as they might, no archaeologist of repute can find any compelling evidence for it? If so, you've got to ask, does she also believe in the tooth fairy?

"As young Amos remembers that time, cocooned in a right-wing Zionist family,..."

OMG, Give me Guantanamo Bay any day!

"... the mood of elation and hope was only faintly shadowed by the angry despair of the Arab Palestinians outside that circle of nationhood."

Now WTF does that mean? Let me guess: Amos's Mum and Dad, their minds cocooned in a right-wing Zionist ideology, drank a toast to Menachem Begin and the boyz on hearing about their deeds of derring-do at Deir Yassin.

"[Portman] certainly understood the wide European antipathy to Israel, particularly over West Bank settlements; she has not held back on her own condemnation of Benjamin Netanyahu... With Oz, however, she clearly thought she was on safe moral ground; his central role in the peace movement and sustained opposition to the settlements have made him a hero of the Israeli left."

Oh did she now? So Portman has a problem with post-1967 Zionist settlers, but not with pre-1967 Zionist settlers? If so, could she please explain the subtle difference between, say, the Hebron massacre of 1994 and the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948? The simple fact is that, as far as indigenous populations are concerned, all European settlers, Zionist or otherwise, have only ever talked to the natives through the barrel of a gun.

"In Portman's film, the spirit of Zionism is intermittently represented in visions of a fit young man. He is simultaneously shown to be the kind of man Fania failed to marry - strong, determined, practical, cheerful - and a symbol of the nation's future."

Shouldn't that be a fit young man... carrying a gun?

"... the Zionists in this film are idealists, the good guys..."

Say no more. Is this the new Exodus? Is Portman the new Otto Preminger? God help us!

[*On Oz, see my 28/8/08 post Amos Oz, Oz, Oz, Oi! Oi! Oi!.]

Cowboys & Arabs Ride Again at Israeli FF

I notice that the "closing night event" of Albert Dadon's (AICE) Israeli Film Festival (13-28 August) in Sydney will be the screening of Otto Preminger's 1960 adaptation of Leon Uris' Zionist propaganda novel of 1958, Exodus.

Billed on the Palace Cinemas' website as merely "a lavish, ambitious chronicle of the formation of the State of Israel," Exodus, the original Zionist western (eastern?), takes the propaganda of Uris' novel to new heights - or should that be depths?

The very fact that this load of old Zionist cobblers is being dusted off for a festival such as this is a telling indication of the retrograde, colonial mindset of the festival's organisers. Try to imagine, if you can, a 2013 American film festival concluding with the quintessential 'cowboys & Indians' film They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 take on Custer's last stand.

An indication of just how outrageously Preminger misrepresents events in Palestine in 1947-1948 may be found in the study Our Exodus: Leon Uris & the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story (2010), by Israeli scholar M.M. Silver. Silver zeroes in on the film's very American Lone Ranger/Tonto relationship between Zionist hero Ari Ben Canaan (Paul Newman) and his Arab sidekick Taha:

"The Taha-Ari friendship has a frontier quality of emergency patronage and rustic indebtedness. Taha swears that he owes everything to the Ben Canaans. 'When the Syrian Arabs murdered my father in his own mosque, Ari's father saved my life and my heritage,' exclaims Taha. 'Ari and I used to live together in Yad El. We shared the same room. Now to think that my house could become his tomb.' [Wounded during a jailbreak in Acre, Ari is nursed back to life in Taha's village.] Taha might owe his 'heritage' to the Zionist Ben Canaans, but owing to the wild logic of the frontier he is also forced to lodge the Jews' most vile nemesis. An old Nazi is in Taha's house plotting the deployment of his own 'personally trained' 80 Arab storm troopers and 300 newly recruited Abu Yesha villagers in a ruthless attack on the Jewish children's village Gan Dafna. Not willfully duplicitous, Taha appears as an honorable but weak Indian chief who is unable to keep both the good guys and the bad guys off his lands. Taha pleads, earnestly but ineffectually, with the Nazi. 'I am the mukhtar of Abu Yesha, and I will not attack Gan Dafna,' he implores. When he points out that there are 650,000 Jews in Palestine, his ghoulish Nazi guest replies 'temporarily.'

"Few of the details in this sequence make sense when removed from the binary oppositions and emotional expectations of a cowboy movie. There is no historical validity to the gruesome account provided by Taha's Nazi guest regarding his meddling. 'The Grand Mufti was our guest in Berlin during the war. Since we are now his guests, we have placed our experience in handling Jews entirely at his disposal,' the Nazi guest states. He explains that the strategic plan for the attack on Gan Dafna is to clear out the Jezreel Valley to guarantee passage for Haj Amin on his way to Safad, which will serve as the Mufti's 'provisional capital until every last Jew in Palestine is exterminated.' Handicapped by outrageous errors of geography and fact, this Nazi speech does more on its own to delegitimize the Palestinian side of the 1948 struggle than anything Uris ever attempted. As we will see, in his novel Uris pointed to real-life connections between the Mufti and Nazism, and he also indulged scathingly prejudicial descriptions of the Jews' Arab antagonists in the 1948 war. However, Uris never manipulated historically invalid devices to portray the fight as an updated and Palestine-transplanted chapter of the Nazi plot to exterminate the Jews.

"The late sequence in Taha's home is juxtaposed against jubilant scenes from central Israel, where a city crowd throngs on a summery night supposedly in late December 1947 to hear Barak Ben Canaan announce the UN vote in favor of the partition of Palestine and the establishment of a free Jewish state. Barak's oratory implicitly recognizes Palestinian sensitivities and grievances as being at the heart of the brewing dispute: 'We implore you,' the veteran Zionist diplomat addresses Palestine's Arabs, 'remain in your homes and shops, and we shall work together as equals in the free state of Israel.' The oration is a central plot event in the film narrative... As Taha, Kitty [Ari's American lover], and Ari listen to a radio broadcast of the elder Canaan's peroration, the mukhtar candidly spells out Palestinian objections to the land's newly approved dispensation. 'You have won your freedom, and I have lost mine,' Taha laments. Ari attempts to correct his friend: 'We've never had freedom. All our lives we've been under British rule. Now we will be equal citizens in the free state of Israel.' Taha's rejoinder conceptualizes the impending war as a fight for political power. If, as Ari insists, it makes no difference whether a group is a majority or a minority in a free democracy, why have the Zionists fought so hard to create a Jewish state, asks Taha.

"That is a good question, and it can be addressed cogently by an examination of the twists and turns of Jewish history.* But the climactic sequence of the Exodus film engages neither a serious investigation of history nor a serious political discussion of the causes of the 1948 war. Neither the nomenclature, the dates, or much else is accurate; the scene offers absurdly divergent explanations of the Palestinian cause in 1948 as either a Nazi plot or as a nationalist campaign for political power. The scene, in short, is not history in cinema, but cinema transmogrifying history as a western showdown.

"At the end of his blood-curdling interview with the Nazi, Taha dutifully pays obeisance to Middle East hosting rituals by promising his hateful guest dinner. Taha then rushes to Ari's room to warn him to get the Jewish children out of the Gan Dafna village by midnight the following day, the showdown hour designated for the attack by the Nazi-trained Arab storm troopers. Wrapped in traditional white headdress, Taha comes on as a film cliche when he conveys this vital intelligence to Ari - the good native of the cowboy western genre, he personifies a conflict between the demands of blood-brother friendship with a white man and tribal honor... After successfully evacuating Gan Dafna's small children, Ari leads a united Haganah-Irgun attack on Abu Yesha (he has no compunction leading the charge on the home village of his blood brother, because the Mufti's men are understood to have gained control of Abu Yesha). After winding through the alleys of the deserted village with his small force, Ari stops to behold what has happened to his lifetime friend, Taha. The camera follows his gaze down a straight alley; a swastika is smeared on a side wall to herald the handiwork of the Nazi agent. Looking straight ahead, Ari spots Taha, hanging dead from a noose with a blood red Star of David branded onto his chest. The form of execution, a hangman's noose, has relatively little meaning in the terrorized landscape of the modern Middle East. But its resonance as a token of justice, or lack thereof, in the epic frontier of the western knows no bounds." (pp 142-145)

So, on Wednesday night, August 28, at Paddington's Palace Cinema, festival-goers will be able to - ahem - screen out the valiant, scholarly efforts of Israeli historians such as Morris, Sternhell and Pappe to uncover the brutal truth behind the Zionist blitzkrieg in 1948 Palestine, and revert once again to the 'innocent' days of the 50s and 60s when the fantasy Exodus narrative of heroic Zionist pioneers battling impossible odds to avoid being driven into the sea reigned supreme.

[*I don't think so.]

[In a similar vein, you might like to reread my 12/5/13 post Israel: The Movie? and the 3 Battle of Hanita posts which follow.]

Howler 2

"People will die. They died the last time the navy forced boats back to Indonesia and they will die the next. They have always died. That's why the navy hates these operations and that loathing is deep in the DNA of the service. It goes back to the violent blockade carried out by the Royal Navy before and after the Second World War to prevent Jews reaching Palestine. Jews were trapped in Europe. Jews and sailors died at sea. The film is called Exodus." (Turn the boats back & people will die - Abbott knows this)

These are the opening two paragraphs of David Marr's otherwise relevant and accurate analysis in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald of the latest twist in the LibLab muscle-flexing competition over which party can be tougher on asylum seekers - Tony Abbott's declaration that, if elected prime minister at the next election, he'll order the Navy to turn refugee boats back to Indonesia.

Unfortunately, Marr has once before put his foot in his mouth with this Exodus-asylum seeker analogy, but, presumably in the absence of anyone (MERC excepted) having drawn his attention to what amounts essentially to a caricature of postwar events off the Palestinian coast, he's gone and done it again. Getting it wrong once may be excusable, but this reappearance of his initial howler does no credit to his reputation as a serious scholar. (See my 29/12/10 post Howler)

The sad fact is that Marr obviously still believes - in 2012! - that Exodus (1958), Leon Uris' best-selling Zionist propaganda novel, and the Otto Preminger film (1960) of the same name based on it, is historically supportable.

Whatever the worth of his expert opinion on the history and plight of asylum seekers heading by boat to these shores from Indonesia, Marr's portrayal of the 1940s Exodus phenomenon as a simple matter of desperate Jews with nowhere else to go up against an implacable British government presumably presided over by some earlier British incarnation of Tony Abbott is nothing more than an ill-considered retrojection of the Australian present into the Palestinian past. Had these same Exodus Jews been off the coast of England, knocking on England's door, Marr's analogy might have been on surer footing, but, in that event, it would have been the Zionist movement, not the British Navy, resisting their entry.

Hypothetical historical scenarios aside, what Marr's simple-minded Exodus version of history overlooks is the then Zionist leadership's cruel and cynical campaign to use displaced European Jews as a propaganda weapon in their violent struggle to dislodge their former ally, Britain, from Palestine and gain the upper hand there over the majority indigenous Palestinian Arab population.

Now I've dealt with this matter before, particularly in my 17/6/10 post Cannon Fodder for Zion: Exodus 1947, but seeing Marr's specifically referenced the film Exodus this time, I can do no better than clarify the matter by quoting from M.M. Silver 's recent study, Our Exodus: Leon Uris & the Americanization of Israel's Founding Story (2010):

"The Exodus incident, in its real and fictionalized guises, was about politics. Throughout the real-life saga of the Exodus, the Zionist leadership grasped its political implications. 'From the very start', writes Tom Segev, the Exodus ship affair 'was intended as a public-relations tool for the Zionist movement'. For instance, throughout the... affair Palmach chief Yigal Allon displayed a keen awareness of its political and public relations utility. Allon cabled Palmach comrades in Europe, saying 'it's inconceivable that Jews can be expelled from Eretz Israel without their doing the utmost to resist deportation'. Much like the fictional Ari Ben Canaan, Allon understood that while Jews would need to fight to win political independence, the value of this particular battle over Exodus was not to be measured in terms of what actually happened on the boat. Its worth was the way waves lapped from the ship in public consciousness. Resistance to the British, Allon explained in his June 21, 1947, cable, "should make the process of deportation as difficult as possible, since this, anyway, is one of the less pleasant tasks an oppressive administration has to fulfill. Now and then resistance has to rekindle the support of our people in the Diaspora, who might be able to help us and to awaken the conscience of those nations of the world who have not yet lost theirs'.

"In the battle for public perception, one of the Zionists' strongest cards was the ship's name. A brilliant, and highly deliberate, designation chosen by Moshe Sneh, the head of Mossad le-Aliyah Bet (the organization that spearheaded the illegal Jewish immigration to Palestine), the name Exodus reinforced a contemporary understanding that the Jewish campaign for survival and rebirth had universal implications... In the annals of illegal Zionist immigration to Eretz Israel, the name Exodus was uniquely rooted in biblical ground recognizable to Christians and Jews alike. The name powerfully associated the age-old Jewish struggle for freedom with the uplifting sense of democratic triumph in the postwar world. 'The name is a stroke of genius', noted the highly communicative director of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, Moshe Shertok (Sharett). 'This name by itself says more than anything which has ever been written about it [the boat's story]'.

"Few parties connected to the Exodus affair questioned the morality of relating to the 4,500 DPs as instruments operated to promote political visions of Mandatory Palestine's future. Few wondered whether it was cynical to exploit the fate of Holocaust survivors for political purposes. In this important respect, fiction followed real life. In Uris's fictional Exodus, Kitty Freemont remonstrates here and there about how Ari Ben Canaan is an 'inhuman beast', after the Yishuv partisan orchestrates an 85-hour hunger strike to stir world sympathy for the boat... Overall, however, Ari's act is lauded in the book as consummate politics, and Kitty, his American admirer, comes to accept the necessity of his methods. Similarly, in the real-life Exodus episode, the political and public relations effects of the DPs plight took precedence over their actual suffering - virtually nobody among the Zionists or their supporters identified this tendency as cynicism... The Jewish Agency, functionally the government of prestate Israel, was a political institution, and the politics of the Exodus affair were inextricably tied to calculations about world public opinion. The intensity of the Exodus ha'apalah struggle was calibrated strictly in line with public responses. As soon as Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders judged that UNSCOP's officials had turned the corner and were formulating recommendations in favor of a Jewish state, they knew that the time had come to scale back the Exodus struggle." (pp 78-80)

David, no third time, please!

The Rambamming of Jose Ramos-Horta

East Timor's President, Jose Ramos-Horta, was recently in Israel, supposedly to "seek support for agricultual self-sufficiency, food security and maritime security." (East Timor president seeks agricultural, security support, Greer Fay Cashman, The Jerusalem Post, 15/2/11)

Praised by Israeli president Shimon Peres as "representing the highest order of morality," Ramos-Horta returned the compliment by describing Peres as "the best of the Jewish people," and revealed that "he had first become aware of Israel and the Jewish people as a teenager in the 1960s when he read Exodus." (ibid)

In Reflections on a visit to Israel & Palestine (8/3/11), published at The Huffington Post, the "international voice of the Timorese people" during Indonesia's 24-year occupation (1975-1999) of East Timor and Nobel Peace Prize winner (1996) reveals how impressed he was by everything he'd seen and heard in the Jewish state.

Strangely, for all his post-Exodus experience of struggle (admittedly diplomatic, but no less important for that) against the brutal Indonesian occupation of his homeland, Ramos-Horta's understanding of the Zionist project in Palestine seems hardly to have progressed beyond the colonial vision of Leon Uris' trashy propaganda novel. Indeed, the word occupation appears nowhere in this account of a journey to a land now in its 63rd year of Zionist occupation. And why should it? Essentially, as the East Timorese president argues, the Palestinians have never had it so good:

"I recently completed my first State Visit to Israel and Palestine... During my 5-day visit I met with the elder Statesman Nobel Laureate President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin, President Mahmud Abbas and senior advisers and ministers. I was surprised by the state of peace and economic prosperity prevailing in Israel and the West Bank. Israelis and Palestinians alike are pleased that not one single attack has been launched from the West Bank into Israel in 4 years... Visiting the West Bank I envied the relative prosperity of the Palestinians and the progress being made in their State-building exercise. Palestinians in the West Bank are far ahead of most Sub-Sahara African States, and indeed well ahead of my own country, in economic well-being and the development of the State institutions. Israelis were not bestowed with the same resources available to much of the Arab world. Yet Israelis are ahead of their neighbors, and of many European countries in such fields as humanities, science, food security, information technology, and medicine. They have harvested more Nobel prizes than any other individual country of its size. That this tiny country struggling with water scarcity is a major exporter of high quality agriculture [sic] goods to Europe and Russia illustrates the well-known Jewish resilience and creativity in the face of extreme adversity. Palestinians living in the West Bank, who have been much less fortunate in life [!] than Israelis, are yet ahead of their Arab brothers and sisters in the critical areas of higher education, and serve in key positions in government, business and academia throughout the region, in the US and Europe. In my conversations with Israeli leaders I was struck by the respect I heard for President Abu Maz [sic] and other Palestinian leaders. From the Palestinian side, in spite of decades of betrayal and suffering, I did not hear much animosity towards Israelis and Americans. In spite of obvious long-standing American bias towards Israel, the Palestinians I spoke to continue to favor US mediation. Prime Minister Netanyahu says that he is anxious to restart face-to-face dialogue. He appears to be firmly committed to the two-State concept, to a truly independent Palestinian State, one that is economically prosperous. Yes, the settlements remain a complex issue, but it is a mistake to make them the central issue. The Israelis know that once a final settlement is achieved the settlements have to go. They did it in Gaza and they are prepared to do it in the West Bank with 'minor border adjustments' from both sides."

So says Ramos-Horta today, but in a 1999 interview, he could almost have been talking about Palestine when he said of the Indonesian occupation:

"I don't think it has been their intention to wipe out the entire population but at least to reduce it to a minority. Through the killings, through forced sterilization of women, through transmigration, you achieve precisely that aim: you turn the local people into a minority in their own land. Then you resolve the problem. Similar to the Chinese approach in Tibet." (A profile of East Timor's Jose Ramos-Horta, Conan Elphicke, solidarity-us.org)

Back then, he would, you'd assume, have been aware of Israel's support for that occupation:

"Officially, [Indonesia] is... a country with a hostile attitude toward Israel. Unofficially, however, things are different. According to the CIA (1979), the Mossad has a station in Jakarta operating under a commercial cover. A British journalist reported that Israel has had 'major military contracts' with Indonesia (Coone, 1980). And an Israeli journalist stated that Israeli arms were used in the war Indonesia waged against the people of East Timor (Baram, 1982b). In 1979, the United States arranged the sale of 14 Skyhawk planes from Israel to Indonesia (Klich, 1982a). An American journalist reported at the same time that 'the US government is fronting an arms deal in which Israel, without being publicly identified as the source, is selling Indonesia used warplanes obtained from the United States. Pentagon officials confirmed yesterday that Israel is shipping Indonesia 16 A4 fighters, bought for $25.8 million in the first such third-country sale of US warplanes' (Wilson, 1979, p. A10). In 1983, another squadron was said to be in the process of delivery (Melman, 1983b)." (The Israeli Connection: Who Israel Arms & Why, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, 1987, p 32)

And you'd also assume that he was aware of the devastating aerial bombing campaigns waged against the East Timorese resistance and people beginning in 1977:

"Detailing events in Natabora, in the south, a refugee described how: 'Three aircraft - I think they were Skyhawks - bombed the region, killing thousands of people. In particular, women, children and old people were killed, people who couldn't run for cover. They were killed in large numbers. All we could do was pray for God's protection. The planes came in low and sprayed the ground with bullets, with their machine guns killing many people'. Bombing was followed by a campaign of encirclement in which the population was surrounded by concentric circles of troops, with Timorese youths and men forced to march in front of them." (Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor, John Taylor, 1991, p 87)

Of course Ramos-Horta knew about all this: "Ninety per cent of the weapons and equipment that the Indonesians use are American, including the low flying jets that blew apart Ramos-Horta's sister before his mother's eyes, and broke the back of Falantil in the late '70s." (A profile of...)

Yet, speaking during his visit at the Hebrew University's Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations on Peace-Building, State-Building & Reconciliation: Experiences & Perspectives, Ramos-Horta is reported to have said: "We have reconciled with all those who have occupied us, and today we have exemplary relations with Indonesia." (East Timor president seeks...)

Presumably, this reconciliation applies also to those who aided and abetted Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. Would he, I wonder, be so forgiving if East Timor were still under Indonesia's thumb, as Palestine is still under Israel's?

To another matter. While in Israel, the deeply reconciled, cap-in-hand East Timorese president is reported to have perfomed his own version of one of those famous Israeli shrugs: "While keen to enhance relations with Israel, he admitted that the fruits of friendship would be a one-way street because there is very little that East Timor can do that will benefit Israel." (East Timor president seeks...)

How very cute! Now just watch how East Timor votes in the UN General Assembly when an Israel-related matter next arises.

Howler

Whose homeland?

"Mayhem, riots, death threats and sabotage attempts followed when the 230 Iraqis on board were told they were being taken back to Indonesia. People shouldn't behave this way, but they do. This was a lesson the Royal Navy learnt blockading Palestine to prevent Jews reaching their homeland* in the 1940s." (Arms are extended but backs are turned: Compassion is the likely loser after the tragedy at Christmas Island, David Marr, Sydney Morning Herald, 18/12/10)

[* See my 17/6/10 post Cannon Fodder for Zion: Exodus 1947]

This is a monumental howler by one of Fairfax's better journalists.

When even the best of them recycle Zionist mythology in this way, you've got to wonder what's going on. Was Marr channeling Leon Uris' 1958 propaganda novel Exodus, presumably read decades ago? Does this mean he hasn't read a corrective account of that event since? If so, what does his recourse to mythologised history tell us about the quality of his critical faculties, which, until reading the above, I had held in high regard?

Marr is the biographer of Australian novelist Patrick White (1912-1990), the first Australian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1943, White, an RAF intelligence officer, was stationed in Haifa*. He wrote of the time:

"Looking back at the year I spent in Palestine I see a highly coloured, degrading collage: murders committed by the Stern Gang, adulteries between the Allied Forces and their Jewish mistresses, bribery, slander [...] Night after night the cabaret churned into action under the windows of the Hotel where we were billeted [...] Down the Carmel The Warsaw Concerto was belted out on a piano as we ate our vegetable stews. By day boatloads of European refugees who had escaped through Romania could be seen coming ashore, their few possessions squeezed into shoddy suitcases. Nightly again, at another club, another orange diva, this time Berlin, seduced us with You Walked Out of a Dream [...] and the dream in which we were all walking - of true love, peace, permanence, an Israel visualised by all the Jews, from the tragic European forced settlers, the bloodiest Stern Gangsters, to the tough new race of sabras born in the land of their forbears." (Why bother with Patrick White? abc.net.au)

White, like so many Europeans at the time, was caught up in the Zionist dream, while blind to the Palestinians' nightmare. White may have had some excuse; it was 1943, and the Stern Gangsters hadn't yet been unleashed on the natives. It's now almost 2011, Marr has no such excuse.

[* On the fate of Haifa, see my 7/5/08 post Bend It Like Benny]

McGeough's Good, But...

Paul McGeough, one of Fairfax's Middle East correspondents and author of Kill Khalid: Mossad's Failed Hit... & the Rise of Hamas, is no hack, let alone a Zionist propagandist in journalist's clothing - which accounts for his relative absence in this blog, largely devoted to exposing the latter.

In a recent newmatilda.com interview, for example, McGeough neatly revealed his awareness of just how dodgy the Zionist narrative is:

7.When was the first time you changed your mind on something important? 1978: On a flight in North Africa I sat next to the first Palestinian I had met to be advised that Leon Uris left some significant elements of the Middle East Crisis out of Exodus. (Storm chaser: 20 questions)

However, I must say that a few things in his feature, Israel's nightmare scenario in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald, irritated me profoundly.

In particular, the title. To put it in context, here's the relevant paragraph: "Palestinian minds have already turned to a calculatedly provocative alternative - collapsing the entire institutional facade of the Palestinian Authority and instead, to campaign for Israel's demographic nightmare of a bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. In such a state the fast-growing Palestinian population would become the majority - ending Israel's right to claim itself as a Jewish state and, in the absence of citizenship rights for all, smashing its claim to be a democracy."

Why is it a nightmare for Israel to become a normal country, that is, a state for all its people, indigenous and non-indigenous, Muslim, Christian and Jew? Would McGeough have described the prospect of black majority rule in South Africa as a nightmare in the days when South Africa was still a state ruled by a white minority regime? Surely, if anyone in Palestine/Israel today (or for the past 62 years) can be described as suffering from nightmares or a nightmare scenario, it is the Palestinians.

And that expression calculatedly provocative. Are Palestinians being provocative in imagining that what had, until 1948, been theirs will once again be theirs? Is their acknowledging the reality of demographic projections being calculatedly provocative? Should they adopt a one-child policy to avoid being seen as provocative? Should their children perhaps be seen not as children but as calculated provocations?

And why does McGeough lapse into Zionist terminology and false equivalence when he writes that "Extremists on both sides - Hamas among the Palestinians and the fundamentalist settler movement in Israel - have laid claim to the land from 'the river to the sea', but each claiming that it be controlled by their side"?

Is it extreme for a dispossessed and occupied people to want to return to the homeland from which they were expelled, and to take up arms in an attempt to do so, but somehow moderate for a colonial-settler movement - and here I'm referring to the Zionist project in all its manifestations, not just its latest fundamentalist settler incarnation - to engage in 'redeeming' a land from its original owners? Far from being extreme, I would have thought that indigenous resistance to such an extremist movement was not only rational but necessary.

And as for fundamentalist Israeli settlers wanting it all, isn't McGeough aware that the ruling Likud Party itself rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, by way of claiming all of Palestine from the river to the sea?

NB: For those interested, an excellent critique of McGeough on Iraq is Alex Miller's Paul McGeough: sustaining the big lie, greenleft.org.au, 17/11/03

Paul Newman: Zionist Dupe

The following is taken from Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (2001), Jack G Shaheen's invaluable compendium of almost one thousand films which portray Arabs as Public Enemy #1:

"Exodus (1960), UA, Otto Preminger Productions. Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Jill Hayworth, John Derek, Lee J Cobb, Sal Mineo. SP: Dalton Trumbo. D: Preminger. Based on Leon Uris's novel. PALESTINIANS, WORST LIST

"In the 1950s, when Americans were largely apathetic about Israel, the eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb was called on 'to create a more sympathetic attitude' toward the newly established state. And so, he sent Leon Uris to Israel to write a novel, which became the bestseller Exodus. 'Uris' novel solidified America's impressions of Israelis as heroes, of Arabs as villains; it did more to popularize Israel with the American public than any other single presentation through the media'.

"Exodus introduced filmgoers to the Arab-Israel conflict, and peopled it with heroic Israelis and sleazy, brutal Arabs, some of whom link up with ex-Nazis. Set in Palestine in 1947, Arabs aligned with ex-Nazis commit atrocities against fellow Arabs and non-Arabs. Jews wearing Arab garb terminate Arabs. Westerners and others, such as Hank, a Greek businessman, supply needed weapons, and fight and die for Israel. The movie's only 'good Arab' becomes a dead Arab.

"Scene: An American woman's bad feelings about Jews dissipate. Kitty Fremont (Saint), a widowed nurse from Indiana, is asked to tend Jewish refugees. Kitty balks, saying, 'I don't know anything about them'. 'In what way?' asks a British officer. Admits Kitty, 'Now that you mention it, I can't think. It's just a feeling I get'. Soon, Kitty befriends Israeli nationalist Ari Ben Canaan (Newman). She warns him, 'The Arabs won't let you keep it [Palestine]. 500,000 Jews against 50 million Arabs! You can't win'. When she learns that Arabs will attack, Kitty tells Ari, 'I'm with you!'

*A British soldier tells an Israeli youth, Dov (Mineo), 'Don't wander into the Arab section. Run into one of the Grand Mufti's gangsters [and] they'll kill you, son. They'll slice your throat'.
*Declares British General Sutherland (Richardson), 'The Arabs simply won't keep the peace... The Arabs are fanatic on the subject of Jewish immigration'.
*The camera reveals Jewish refugees aboard the ship, Exodus. They are warned, 'The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who sat out the war as Hitler's guest in Berlin, has met with representatives of the Arab nations to coordinate action against Palestinian Jews in the event partition is granted'.
*The camera reveals Jewish refugees in British detention camps, a 'barbed wire jungle'.
*Aboard the Exodus, the Star of David flutters in the wind. The ship's 611 refugees go on hunger strike. Mothers are willing to sacrifice themselves and their children for freedom in a Jewish state. Cut to a young couple, elderly men playing chess, and violin players.
*Irgun members bomb the King David Hotel. Declares a radio announcer, '91 bodies have been discovered so far'. Throughout, the Irgun terrorists are tagged 'freedom fighters'. Ari Ben Canaan plans to release '93 Jewish prisoners', including those Irgun bombers who ignited the King David Hotel. When an Irgun member asks Ari, 'What about the 400 Arabs in that prison?' Ari quips, 'If you turn 400 Arabs loose they are going to run in 400 different directions'.
*Believing Arabs will attack a Jewish youth camp, 300 children depart. A Jewish soldier is asked about reinforcements, 'How many men did you bring?' Only a few truckloads, but 'from the Arab side it looks like an army'.
*Ari's men enter a Turkish bath; mute Palestinians promptly surrender.
*Ari's father, Barak (Cobb), and a Hagana community leader, cite the Bible, telling General Sutherland what God said to Moses, 'Go unto Pharaoh and say unto him, thus sayeth the Lord: Let my people go, that they may serve me'.
*Barak addresses Jews, saying, '[We] changed these mosquito-infested swamps into such [fertile] fields. On a quiet night you can hear the corn grow... The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem has asked you [Palestinians] to either annihilate the Jewish population or abandon your homes, and your land, and seek the weary path of exile. We [Jews] implore you, remain in your homes and we shall work together as equals in the state of Israel'. Ari echoes his father's advice, telling the crowd: 'Now, we'll be equal in the free state of Israel. Why should they [the Palestinians] go anywhere. This is their home as well as ours. Don't you see, we have to prove to the world that we can get along together'.
*As Barak dedicates a new kibbutz, he thanks a charitable Arab village leader who donated the land. Next, Taha, the film's token Arab, utters a few words, 'We dwell together as friends. It is natural that we should live in peace'. Cut to Barak. He condemns Arab brutes, explaining that the kibbutz is named after Daphne, a Jewish girl. Daphne 'was a young soldier [only 17]. And the Arabs captured her and they tortured her to find out things from her. But she wouldn't tell. So they sent her back in a sack, tied to the back of a mule. They cut off her hands and feet and they gouged out her eyes'.
*A German wearing a white suit asks Taha to join an attack on a Jewish youth camp. I have '80 Arab storm troopers' under my command, he says. Taha refuses, saying, 'Why must we slaughter defenseless children?'
*Sighs Taha, 'When the Syrian Arabs murdered my father in his mosque, Ari's father saved my life, and my heritage'. Ari warns Taha not to return to his village. Says Taha, 'I am a Moslem; I cannot kill another Arab'. Cut to Taha's body, hanging from a rope, in his deserted Arab village. Painted on a nearby wall, the Star of David.
*At the Jewish camp Dov tells the refugee Karen, 'Stay down, girl, there are Arabs out there'. Later, the Arabs kill young Karen.
*Ari buries in one grave, the Arab, Taha (Derek), and the 15-year old European refugee, Karen (Hayworth). Says Ari, 'The day will come when Arab and Jew will share a peaceful life in this land they have always shared in death'.
*Prior to the Jewish victory, Ari's men say, 'Arabs... have been infiltrating the valley... There have been two ambushes... uprising in progress... We're heavily outnumbered'. Jewish children in the kibbutz are told, 'Arabs have been leaving [their] villages'. At no time does a character say, Jewish troops are terrorizing the Palestinians, forcing them from their homes.
*Never spoken in this movie are these words: 'Palestinian', 'Palestinian Arabs', 'Palestinian village', 'Palestinian state'. Instead, Exodus' Jews, Arabs, and Westerners say: 'Arab', 'Arab village', and 'independent Arab state'. On two ocassions, the phrase, 'Palestinian Jews' is mentioned." (pp 189-191)

Shaheen's new book is Guilty - Hollywood's Verdict on Arabs after 9/11.

Amos Oz, Oz, Oz, Oi! Oi! Oi!

Not content with his usual paeans about "plucky" little Israel on the opinion(ated) pages of The Australian (See my 20/1/08 post Gullible's Travels) , foreign editor Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan has recently taken to peddling the dubious wares of Israel's most famous literary propagandist, novelist Amos Oz, in its literary supplement, Review.

In Memoirs are made of this (16/8/08), Sheridan spruiks Oz's childhood memoir of growing up in 30s/40s Jerusalem, A Tale of Love & Darkness (2003) as "an incomparably good book. Perhaps... the best I have read." Since Leon Uris' Exodus?

He's mesmerised by Oz's "contrast, indeed conflict, of East European Jews trying to recreate an idealised Europe, one free of anti-Semitism, in the hot, dusty climate of Israel, surrounded by hostile Arabs..."

I thought it was still called Palestine back then, but Palestine, with its "hostile Arabs," malign creatures of the heat and the dust, is just a backdrop for the colonial fantasies of Sheridan, Oz and ilk. According to Sheridan, Oz "mocks his own earnest idealisation of kibbutz pioneers, yet somehow affirms it as well: 'Tough, warm-hearted, though of course silent and thoughtful, young men and strapping, straightforward young women... I pictured these pioneers as strong, serious, self-contained people, capable of sitting around in a circle and singing songs of heart-rending longing, or songs of mockery, or songs of outrageous lust... (people) who could ride wild horses or wide-tracked tractors, who spoke Arabic, who knew every cave and wadi, who had a way with pistols and hand grenades, yet read poetry and philosophy'." Sheridan sees here "a generous human solidarity and understanding for everyone" - everyone, that is, but the 'Indians' wasted by those pistols and grenades. Others, such as Perry Anderson, see merely a "mixture of machismo and schmaltz."

"If I could recommend just one book to tell you something about the human condition, this would be it," Sheridan concludes. Talk about working for The Oz.

But before you rush off to your bookshop to buy, it's worth taking a closer look at Oz the propagandist. Take this passage, for example, from A Tale:

"All the Jewish settlements that were captured by the Arabs in the War of Independence, without exception, were razed to the ground, and their Jewish inhabitants were murdered or taken captive or escaped, but the Arab armies did not allow any of the survivors to return after the war. The Arabs implemented a more complete 'ethnic cleansing' in the territories they conquered than the Jews did: hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled or were driven out from the territory of the State of Israel in that war, but a hundred thousand remained, whereas there were no Jews at all in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip under Jordanian and Egyptian rule. Not one. The settlements were obliterated, and the synagogues and cemeteries were razed to the ground."

Wow, not every Palestinian was ethnically cleansed from "the territory of the State of Israel" (notice how Oz includes the 24% of Palestine occupied by Zionist forces, over and above the 54% allotted by the UN for a Jewish state in 1947) in 1948, but every Jew was ethnically cleansed from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip! What a revelation! And that, folks, is one of the two Zionist talking points (the other being that the Palestinian refugee exodus of 1948, the Nakba, was more than offset by an exodus of Arab Jews to Israel) invariably trotted out whenever the subject of Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine is raised.

Oz's sleight of hand has been beautifully exposed by Israeli poet, author and journalist Yitzhak Laor:

"As the expert propagandist that he is, Amos Oz is well aware of how much more powerful 'absolute ethnic cleansing' is than 'partial ethnic cleansing'. He therefore takes great pains to describe minutely the "extermination of the Jewish nation" in the territories behind the Green Line, without specifying numbers. It is an absolute we're talking about - a veritable genocide, one after which no traces remain of the exterminated nation'. The absence of numbers for Jews is of course paralleled by numbers given for the expelled Arabs, a hundred thousand of whom stayed within Israel. The inevitable inference must be that the Jews committed something far less genocidal than the Arabs, whose deeds, framing this passage, constitute an 'absolute' atrocity. 'This of course is an old trick of salesmanship', Laor remarks. On the one side there is the removal of Kfar Darom by the Egyptian army, and that of Gush Etzion and the Old City of Jerusalem by the Jordanian Arab Legion, on the other the Palestinians are not even specifically mentioned, simply lumped together with the Arabs. The obvious must be stated: 'The ruin of the Palestinian people, four hundred of whose villages were laid waste, who were reduced to numerically negligent, racially discriminated against and poverty-stricken minorities in their own cities, hundreds of thousands of whom lost all they possessed, including the chance of decent human existence, this ongoing destruction, which continued while Oz wrote his book, is turned in the citation above into a not so terrible event, with many far worse than itself, our own fate for instance. Let us be clear. Oz has never employed the term 'ethnic cleansing' in relation to the conduct of the IDF in 1948. Now he does so only in order to say: if it happened, another was perpetrated that was far worse, a real one'." (Quoted in Gabriel Piterberg's The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics & Scholarship in Israel, 2008, pp 231-232)

But Oz's career as an propagandist began much earlier - in 1967 - when he co-edited Siah lohamim (Soldiers Talk), described by Piterberg as "one of the most effective propaganda tools in Israeli history, creating the image of the handsome, dilemma-ridden and existentially soul-searching Israeli soldier, the horrific oxymoron of 'the purity of arms', and the unfounded notion of an exalted Jewish morality." (p 233) Soldiers Talk contained conversations with kibbutz soldiers about their experiences in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. It was translated into 6 languages and received Sheridanesqe adulation from the likes of Golda Meir and Elie Wiesel.

Piterberg, however, cites an unpublished PhD thesis by Alon Gan of Tel Aviv University, which reveals just how this successor to Leon Uris' propaganda novel Exodus was constructed: conversations with kibbutzniks who evinced a passion for a Greater Israel or gave "voice to their messianic elation, unabashed hatred of the Arabs and trigger-happiness" (p 236) were omitted, and other conversations were manipulated "to intensify the image of the handsome, morally pure soldier, and to render the reasons for his dilemmas and bad conscience less specific..." (p 237) Direct description was replaced with insinuation, ellipses were widely employed and explicit accounts of the war sanitized.

You can see why Sheridan has the otz for Oz.

Benny Revisited

"The Jews have four or five thousand Palmach troops and a paper army of fifty thousand in the Haganah, but they have only ten thousand rifles... The Jews are outnumbered in soldiers forty to one, in population a hundred to one, and in area five thousand to one." Leon Uris in Exodus

I have written several posts this month about Israeli historian Benny Morris. In my last (Benny Diagnosed, 14/5/08), I referred to his forthcoming book 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, and suggested that "it would no doubt be lauded in the Murdoch press here." 1948 was duly reviewed in The Australian on 24/5/08 with the expected hyperbole ("a significant work that is likely to become the standard account of the first Israeli-Arab war") by Abraham Rabinovich whose reports on Israeli affairs routinely rub shoulders in The Australian with those of its Middle East correspondent, Martin Chulov.

Although I haven't read the book, Rabinovich's review suggests that Morris' transition from historian to propagandist, alluded to in my earlier posts, is now all but complete.

Take these two sentences, for example, from the opening paragraph: "...Benny Morris spells out the Arab dysfunction and Jewish cohesiveness that permitted 650,000 Jews to forge a state 60 years ago in the face of a hostile Arab world that outnumbered it 40 to one. In doing so, they belied the confident predictions of the CIA and the British military command that the Jewish state would be stillborn."

Confident predictions of an Arab victory? Pull the other, Benny/Abraham.

What follows is taken from Stephen Green's invaluable 1984 book, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant Israel 1948/1967. Green's data is based "almost entirely on documents available [via FOIA requests] in the Modern Military, General, and Diplomatic branches of the National Archives in Washington":

"The idea that the victory of the Jews in the battle for Palestine was a miracle victory against overwhelming odds is arrant nonsense. More precisely, that idea is unsupported by the documentation. US military and intelligence professionals followed quite closely the preparations for war in the Middle East, as the British Mandate drew to a close... Fortunately, the vast majority of persons engaged in strategic planning for the US at the time were thorough professionals who had little use for legends or myths. They were more concerned with numbers of soldiers, arms and equipment, training, sources of resupply, financial resources, and the like. And in these hard terms, the prospects for the new Jewish state looked bright indeed, before, during, and after the declaration of Israeli independence in May of 1948..."

"The Chiefs of the British Middle East and Palestine commands estimated the Haganah had 'a reasonably well-trained and equipped force of about 65,000 persons with a reserve of perhaps up to 40,000'... The Haganah had 'transport and all the machine guns, rifles, mortars together with ammunition that it needs'..."

"Already in 1945, the composition of the Jewish immigrants into Palestine - legal and illegal - was changing: people of military age, many of whom had already had military training and/or experience in Europe, predominated... And alongside the Haganah, the Jewish settlements had the extremist Irgun ('3000-5000') and Stern group ('several hundred'), which were also very well armed. The British Chiefs thought that the Jews would win a war with the Arabs in the short run, but in the longer run, economic and supply factors would favour the Arabs unless the Jews were resupplied from outside the Middle East..."

"A year and a half later, in November, 1947, the US Army Intelligence Division was asked by the CIA to do the military section for an estimate that the agency was preparing on the 'Consequences of the Partition of Palestine'. The total strength of the Arab forces in Palestine, the Army said, was 33,000, most of whom were members of poorly equipped 'quasi-military organizations'. The largest number of Arabs that would ever be mobilized against the Zionists was between 100,000 and 200,000, including soldiers from all the surrounding Arab states. In an all-out war, however, Army Intelligence estimated that the Jews could mobilize and arm with modern weapons some 200,000 men and women 'who have had some combat and supply experience at one time or another'..."

Although Palestinians outnumbered Jews by over 2 to 1, "Another Army ID document... showed Arab males only outnumber Jewish males in the 20-39 'military' age group by 149,000 to 121,000..."

"On May 13, the day before the end of the mandate, Secretary of State Marshall predicted in his 'Daily Report Palestine' that the combined Arab armies would be no match for the Haganah... the US Consul General reported:'Considerable doubt exists that Arab armies other than [Jordan's] Arab Legion will do more than cross Palestine frontiers and await developments'. And later: 'Jewish Agency would regard invasion of Palestine by Arab armies as releasing Agency from obligations of 29 November [Partition] resolution, replied that Ben Gurion had always said that main aim of Jews was to get all of Palestine'." [So much for Rabinovich's concluding paragraph: "In retrospect, the worst thing that could have happened to the Jewish state would have been Arab acceptance. Partition as envisioned by the UN would have left Israel with only a 50,000-person Jewish majority within its boundaries, a disparity that would have been reversed within a few years by the high Arab birthrate."]

"On May 18, four days after the [Arab] invasion, the Army Intelligence Division... summarized [the fighting thus]: 'Upon the termination of the British Mandate, the proclamation of the Jewish State was countered by the entry into Palestine of the regular armed forces of the Arab League States of Egypt, Transjordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. These forces... total some 20,000 men. The organized Arab guerillas already operating within Palestine number some 13,000. Opposing these forces are over 40,000 full-time Jewish troops, supported by some 50,000 militia.' The Jews had outnumbered the Arab forces, regular and irregular, by nearly 3 to 1."

Green concluded: "In books, movies, and TV shows in the 50s and 60s, the Jewish state was depicted as having defeated the Arabs against overwhelming odds, contrary to virtually every professional strength estimate of the opposing forces that was made at the time of the war itself."(pp 66-73)

If Rabinovich is correct, Morris' 1948 looks more like a throwback to Leon Uris' propaganda novel Exodus than the touted "significant work that is likely to become the standard account of the first Arab-Israeli war."