I don't know about you but I find the ABC's Geraldine Doogue profoundly irritating. This is primarily because, on those occasions - alas too frequent - when she discusses the Palestine/Israel conflict, little more than Israeli talking points emerge.
The latest example came on last Sunday night's Compass program - Why I'm still... Jewish - when she talked with 4 members of Australia's Jewish community:
"Can I raise the issue," she chirped at one point, "and it's amazing that I am raising this, but what about the rockets, what about Hezbollah, what about Hamas?"
So Doogue was amazed that none of her interlocutors had thus far started banging on about Palestinian fireworks - these, of course, being the be-all and end-all of the conflict in her view. (Hers was no mean feat actually: not only did she reduce the conflict to the level of a Zionist cliche but managed to stereotype her guests as knee-jerk Zionist propagandists at the same time.)
Doogue's unblushing invocation of this particular propaganda trope came like the proverbial shot-in-the-arm for the show's beleaguered (because terminally smug) Zionist ultra, Timmy Rubin. "Thank you. Thank you, Geraldine," she gushed, as Doogue babbled on: "In other words if you are going to give it [the West Bank] back..."
Until, that is, she was interrupted by the sharpest of the four, Ronni Kahn, who labelled her nonsense "scare-mongering."
To which an incredulous Doogue could only retort: "Is it?"
The thing is, Doogue of all people has no excuse whatever for such ignorance.
In January 1991, at the time of the First Gulf War, she presented a current affairs slot on ABC television called The Gulf Report. For expert opinion on events as they unfolded, the program turned to Macquarie University Arabist Dr Robert Springborg, a move which angered reigning Prime Minister (and uber-Zionist) Bob Hawke and catapulted Doogue and her colleagues, particularly Peter Manning, head of ABC News & Current Affairs, into the centre of a political storm. As a result, Doogue underwent something of a learning curve which she described in the Spring 2003 issue of The Griffith Review. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
"It was on! Day after day, new criticism turned up. We learned there was a 'war room' in Parliament House where the prime minister, with his widely acknowledged emotional attachment to Israel at full throttle, and several Cabinet colleagues, including future opposition leader Kim Beazley, pored over every detail. I became aware for the first time of the Israel/Jewish lobby and its power. Naive little me had never experienced organised opposition in my previous reporting life. In an odd way, it was enthralling to watch in practice what I had read and heard about. I just wish I hadn't been at the centre of it. This campaign was conducted in public and private. Letters arrived by the dozen, plus phone calls to the program (including utterly sexist diatribes directed at me; I was after all, one of the first Australian women to be allowed to report a war on television)."
Unfortunately, while Peter Manning, whose courage under fire Doogue acknowledged in her essay - "Peter Manning, I salute you," is her concluding sentence - has since gone on to study the Middle East conflict in some depth, even writing a book on the subject, Us & Them: A Journalist's Investigation of Media, Muslims & the Middle East (2006), Doogue, it seems, has not only failed to build on her initial awareness of the power of the Israel lobby by developing a real understanding of the Palestinian case, but has actually moved in the other direction, and now simply recycles Zionist talking points and cliches as the occasion demands.
Laziness? Self-protection? The price of retaining a perch at the ABC? Who knows? Perhaps it's time for her to pen another piece for The Griffith Review.
Showing posts with label Peter Manning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Manning. Show all posts
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Bend It Like Benny
I referred in my last post to a letter by Israeli revisionist historian Benny Morris, originally written to The Irish Times. An edited version had been used by The Australian in an effort to counter the views, published in the Sydney Morning Herald (29/4/08), of Australian academic and author Peter Manning on the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist forces in 1948
What follows is a dissection and discussion of the content of Morris' letter in its original, unedited Irish Times version. Given that 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), as the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is called in Arabic, and that Morris' views will no doubt be advanced by propagandists of Zion as the last word on the subject, it is appropriate that his summation in The Irish Times be carefully analyzed. Morris' paragraphs, in italics, are followed by my analyses of same:
"Israel-haters are fond of citing - and more often, mis-citing - my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections. [The responsibility of] the Palestinian Arabs... for what befell them in 1948... was very direct and simple. In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947 (No 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes."
I dealt in my last post with the flagrant injustice and illegality of UNGA Resolution 181, which recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, and examined, in my post of 14/3/08 (The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3), the Machiavellian process that led to its passing. I will not go over that here. Suffice it to say that, in light of the above and Israel's track record of contempt for the will of the international community, Morris' phrase, "in defiance of the will of the international community," couldn't possibly ring more hollow. Was Israel's takeover of west Jerusalem (alloted neither to the Jewish or the Arab state) not "defiance of the international community"? And what of its grab for territory beyond the area alloted to the Jews and its expulsion en masse of the Palestinians? And as for the Palestinians' "defiance," wasn't that to be expected? Were the Palestinians supposed to take the partition of their ancestral homeland by the white mob in the UN, lying down? Or on the chin perhaps? The logic of Morris' schoolmasterly tone is outrageous: the Palestinians should have just copped it sweet! Maybe he's spent a little too long in the dark bowels of the Zionist archives. The architect of Palestine's ethnic cleansing, David Ben-Gurion, would have found Morris' views laughable: "Were I an Arab," Ben-Gurion said, "I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule."
Schoolmasters of course are hardly ever concerned with the context of a playground spat. They just want to know who hit who first: "[The Palestinians] launched hostilities..." He says the same in his 2004 magnum opus on the subject, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (hereafter Birth Revisited): "The UNGA resolution... triggered haphazard Arab attacks against Jewish traffic. The first roadside ambushes occurred... the following day, when 2 buses were attacked and 7 Jewish passengers shot dead. The same day, snipers in Jaffa began firing at passers-by in Tel Aviv. The Arab Higher Committee, which flatly rejected the resolution and any thought of partition, declared a 3-day general strike, beginning on 1 December, thus releasing the urban masses for action." (p 65) Yep, the Palestinians swung first. Or did they? In his footnote, Benny is not so sure: "Traditionally, Zionist historiography [!] has cited these attacks as the first acts of Palestinian violence against the partition resolution. But it is probable that the attacks were not directly linked to the resolution - and were a product... of a retaliatory cycle..." (p 139) Then there's the jolly Bring it On! lads of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. When exactly did they start swinging?" Morris writes vaguely, "[T]he IZL and LHI... beginning already in early December [?] 1947, reverted to their 1937-1939 strategy of placing bombs in crowded markets and bus stops. The Arabs retaliated... " (p 66) [Speaking of that lot, Michael Palumbo notes in his 1987 book, The Palestinian Catastrophe, "The Irgun leader Menachem Begin later explained his attitude during this period: 'My greatest worry in those months was that the Arabs might accept the UN plan. Then we would have had the ultimate tragedy, a Jewish state so small that it could not absorb all the Jews of the world'. Irgun terrorism however would make sure that no agreement would be possible." (pp 34-35)] The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, certainly didn't toe the Morris line: "The initial Arab outbreaks were spontaneous and unorganized and were more demonstrations of displeasure at the UN decision than determined attacks on Jews. The weapons initially employed were sticks and stones and had it not been for Jewish recourse to firearms, it is not impossible that the excitement would have subsided and little loss of life be caused." (Quoted in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, 2004, p 268)
And what are we to make of the words, "in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community?" This is how Morris spins Cunninham's "spontaneous and unorganized Arab outbreaks." And that glib sentence with its euphemistic ending, "But they lost; and one of the results [of their losing] was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes," glossing over entirely the question of what it was that caused their "displacement," is a sure sign that Morris has moved from history to propaganda.
"It is true, as Erskine Childers pointed out long ago, that there were no Arab radio broadcasts urging the Arabs to flee en masse; indeed, there were broadcasts by several Arab radio stations urging them to stay put. But, on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22, plead with them to stay, to no avail."
Ergo, the Palestinians were responsible for their own dispossession! But let us look in detail at the situation in Haifa, Palestine's only major port, which had been alloted by the UN to the Jews.
Here is a summary of Pappe's account of Haifa's cleansing (pp 93-96): Its Palestinian inhabitants had been subjected to a "Jewish campaign of terrorization" since December 1947, including "heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, [which] went on for the first months of 1948," before intensifying in April. The British then informed the Zionists that their troops were pulling back to the port area in preparation for their final withdrawal from Palestine in May, leaving the Palestinians who hadn't already fled to face the coming Zionist onslaught (known as Operation Cleansing the Leaven after the Jewish practice of removing all traces of bread and flour from homes on the eve of the Passover) unprotected. The Palestinians, according to Pappe, were the bread and the flour to be cleansed, and the operation was launched on Passover's eve, 21 April. The British advised the Palestinian community's remaining leaders [described by Pappe as "a group of 4 exhausted men, who became the Arab community's leaders for the hour"] to persuade their people to leave the city. Given that the British were not prepared to protect Haifa's Palestinians from expulsion, their leaders told the British that "they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The [Haganah's] Carmeli Brigade [however] made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. On their way to meet the British commander, [the Palestinian leaders] could already hear the Jewish loudspeakers urging the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. In other parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a diametrically opposing message from the town's Jewish mayor... who beseeched the people to stay... But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not [Mayor] Levi, who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign [with the orders:] 'Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives'." Thousands of Palestinians fled to the market area adjacent to the port, from which they hoped to flee by boat. Terrorised by Zionist mortar barrages falling around them, they broke through into the port itself and were literally driven into the sea.
Now compare Pappe with Morris. Despite the latter's fog of detail, prevarification and excuses, it is impossible to conclude from his account of the same events that the Zionist forces were engaged in anything other than good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing in Haifa, Mayor Levy notwithstanding: "By 21 April, when the Haganah launched its onslaught, the remaining population was in great measure primed for evacuation." (p 187) "Operation Passover Cleansing aimed at 'breaking the enemy'... not... the conquest of most of Arab Haifa." (p 189) "Haganah Radio announced that 'the day of judgment had arrived' [and] called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately..." (p 191) "The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with firebombs 'all objectives that can be set alight'..." (pp 191-192) "The [Arab] notables' announcement of evacuation on the evening of 22/4 was not a bolt from the blue. Tens of thousands... had departed during December 47-early April 48. On 21-22 April, the [4 Palestinian] notables had the fresh example of Arab Tiberius before their eyes [In Tiberius the British army encouraged and protected a Palestinian evacuation]. And by the evening of 22/4, thousands had already voted with their feet, first by fleeing... to the harbour and the boats to Acre... The Hagganah mortar attacks... were primarily designed to break Arab morale in order to bring about a swift collapse of resistance and speedy surrender. There is no evidence that the commanders involved hoped or expected that it would lead to mass evacuation... But clearly the offensive, and especially the mortaring, precipitated the exodus." (pp 199-200) "The local Jewish civilian leadership initially sincerely wanted [the remaining] Arabs to stay... But the offensive of 21-22/4 had delivered the Arab neighborhoods into Haganah hands, relegating the civil leaders to the sidelines... At the same time, the attitude of some of these local leaders radically changed as they took stock of the historic opportunity offered by the exodus to turn Haifa into a Jewish city." (p 201-202) "After 4-5 days of Haganah rule [over the occupied Palestinian neighborhoods, involving curfews, searches, interrogations, arrests, beatings and looting], 'the Arabs were not interested in staying', an American diplomat reportedly told the Haganah." (p 204) "But were the Haganah actions [23/4-early May] motivated by a calculated aim to egg on the evacuation? At the level of Carmeli headquarters, no orders, as far as we know, were ever issued to the troops to act in a manner that would precipitate flight... But if this was official policy, there was certainly an undercurrent of expulsive thinking akin to the IZL approach." (p 207) "The Hagana attacked [the nearby town of] Balad ash Sheikh on 24/4... Whether the Haganah intended to trigger the evacuation of Balad ash Sheikh is unclear, but the method of attack... seems to have been designed to achieve it." (p 207)
By mid May the systematic destruction of Palestinian houses had begun. By mid July the remaining 4,000 Palestinians of Haifa had been coralled into a single area. Demolitions were completed in October. And Mayor Levy? Once he'd been reassured that the destruction was purely for military reasons and that his municipality would therefore not be liable, he was happy. In context, Haifa's Jewish mayor offers Morris cold comfort. By citing the words of the mayor, without mentioning the actions of the Haganah, Morris, the historian, becomes Morris, the propagandist.
"Most of Palestine's 700,000 'refugees' fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramle, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops."
Notice the euphemism "flail of war." Morris' bracketed words above are pure conjecture. In discussing the ethnic cleansing of Haifa, he writes in Birth Revisited, "Most of the remaining Arab leaders also encouraged the remaining townspeople to leave (perhaps assuring them that they would soon be returning in the wake of victorious Arab armies, but I have found no evidence of this)." (p 198)
"The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became 'refugees' - and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) - was not a 'racist crime'... but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves."
How strange! There are certainly no inverted commas around the word refugees in Birth Revisited. Why now the recourse to petty semantics? Simple - when you're writing propaganda, you'll reach for anything at hand.
I'll deal with the rest of Morris' letter in my next post.
What follows is a dissection and discussion of the content of Morris' letter in its original, unedited Irish Times version. Given that 2008 is the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe), as the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine is called in Arabic, and that Morris' views will no doubt be advanced by propagandists of Zion as the last word on the subject, it is appropriate that his summation in The Irish Times be carefully analyzed. Morris' paragraphs, in italics, are followed by my analyses of same:
"Israel-haters are fond of citing - and more often, mis-citing - my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections. [The responsibility of] the Palestinian Arabs... for what befell them in 1948... was very direct and simple. In defiance of the will of the international community, as embodied in the UN General Assembly Resolution of November 29, 1947 (No 181), they launched hostilities against the Jewish community in Palestine in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost; and one of the results was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes."
I dealt in my last post with the flagrant injustice and illegality of UNGA Resolution 181, which recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state, and examined, in my post of 14/3/08 (The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3), the Machiavellian process that led to its passing. I will not go over that here. Suffice it to say that, in light of the above and Israel's track record of contempt for the will of the international community, Morris' phrase, "in defiance of the will of the international community," couldn't possibly ring more hollow. Was Israel's takeover of west Jerusalem (alloted neither to the Jewish or the Arab state) not "defiance of the international community"? And what of its grab for territory beyond the area alloted to the Jews and its expulsion en masse of the Palestinians? And as for the Palestinians' "defiance," wasn't that to be expected? Were the Palestinians supposed to take the partition of their ancestral homeland by the white mob in the UN, lying down? Or on the chin perhaps? The logic of Morris' schoolmasterly tone is outrageous: the Palestinians should have just copped it sweet! Maybe he's spent a little too long in the dark bowels of the Zionist archives. The architect of Palestine's ethnic cleansing, David Ben-Gurion, would have found Morris' views laughable: "Were I an Arab," Ben-Gurion said, "I would rebel even more vigorously, bitterly, and desperately against the immigration that will one day turn Palestine and all its Arab residents over to Jewish rule."
Schoolmasters of course are hardly ever concerned with the context of a playground spat. They just want to know who hit who first: "[The Palestinians] launched hostilities..." He says the same in his 2004 magnum opus on the subject, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (hereafter Birth Revisited): "The UNGA resolution... triggered haphazard Arab attacks against Jewish traffic. The first roadside ambushes occurred... the following day, when 2 buses were attacked and 7 Jewish passengers shot dead. The same day, snipers in Jaffa began firing at passers-by in Tel Aviv. The Arab Higher Committee, which flatly rejected the resolution and any thought of partition, declared a 3-day general strike, beginning on 1 December, thus releasing the urban masses for action." (p 65) Yep, the Palestinians swung first. Or did they? In his footnote, Benny is not so sure: "Traditionally, Zionist historiography [!] has cited these attacks as the first acts of Palestinian violence against the partition resolution. But it is probable that the attacks were not directly linked to the resolution - and were a product... of a retaliatory cycle..." (p 139) Then there's the jolly Bring it On! lads of the Irgun and the Stern Gang. When exactly did they start swinging?" Morris writes vaguely, "[T]he IZL and LHI... beginning already in early December [?] 1947, reverted to their 1937-1939 strategy of placing bombs in crowded markets and bus stops. The Arabs retaliated... " (p 66) [Speaking of that lot, Michael Palumbo notes in his 1987 book, The Palestinian Catastrophe, "The Irgun leader Menachem Begin later explained his attitude during this period: 'My greatest worry in those months was that the Arabs might accept the UN plan. Then we would have had the ultimate tragedy, a Jewish state so small that it could not absorb all the Jews of the world'. Irgun terrorism however would make sure that no agreement would be possible." (pp 34-35)] The British High Commissioner in Palestine, Sir Alan Cunningham, certainly didn't toe the Morris line: "The initial Arab outbreaks were spontaneous and unorganized and were more demonstrations of displeasure at the UN decision than determined attacks on Jews. The weapons initially employed were sticks and stones and had it not been for Jewish recourse to firearms, it is not impossible that the excitement would have subsided and little loss of life be caused." (Quoted in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe, 2004, p 268)
And what are we to make of the words, "in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community?" This is how Morris spins Cunninham's "spontaneous and unorganized Arab outbreaks." And that glib sentence with its euphemistic ending, "But they lost; and one of the results [of their losing] was the displacement of 700,000 of them from their homes," glossing over entirely the question of what it was that caused their "displacement," is a sure sign that Morris has moved from history to propaganda.
"It is true, as Erskine Childers pointed out long ago, that there were no Arab radio broadcasts urging the Arabs to flee en masse; indeed, there were broadcasts by several Arab radio stations urging them to stay put. But, on the local level, in dozens of localities around Palestine, Arab leaders advised or ordered the evacuation of women and children or whole communities, as occurred in Haifa in late April, 1948. And Haifa's Jewish mayor, Shabtai Levy, did, on April 22, plead with them to stay, to no avail."
Ergo, the Palestinians were responsible for their own dispossession! But let us look in detail at the situation in Haifa, Palestine's only major port, which had been alloted by the UN to the Jews.
Here is a summary of Pappe's account of Haifa's cleansing (pp 93-96): Its Palestinian inhabitants had been subjected to a "Jewish campaign of terrorization" since December 1947, including "heavy shelling, sniper fire, rivers of ignited oil and fuel sent down the mountain-side, and detonated barrels of explosives, [which] went on for the first months of 1948," before intensifying in April. The British then informed the Zionists that their troops were pulling back to the port area in preparation for their final withdrawal from Palestine in May, leaving the Palestinians who hadn't already fled to face the coming Zionist onslaught (known as Operation Cleansing the Leaven after the Jewish practice of removing all traces of bread and flour from homes on the eve of the Passover) unprotected. The Palestinians, according to Pappe, were the bread and the flour to be cleansed, and the operation was launched on Passover's eve, 21 April. The British advised the Palestinian community's remaining leaders [described by Pappe as "a group of 4 exhausted men, who became the Arab community's leaders for the hour"] to persuade their people to leave the city. Given that the British were not prepared to protect Haifa's Palestinians from expulsion, their leaders told the British that "they wanted to leave in an organised manner. The [Haganah's] Carmeli Brigade [however] made sure they would leave in the midst of carnage and havoc. On their way to meet the British commander, [the Palestinian leaders] could already hear the Jewish loudspeakers urging the Palestinian women and children to leave before it was too late. In other parts of the town, loudspeakers delivered a diametrically opposing message from the town's Jewish mayor... who beseeched the people to stay... But it was Mordechai Maklef, the operation officer of the Carmeli Brigade, not [Mayor] Levi, who called the shots. Maklef orchestrated the cleansing campaign [with the orders:] 'Kill any Arab you encounter; torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives'." Thousands of Palestinians fled to the market area adjacent to the port, from which they hoped to flee by boat. Terrorised by Zionist mortar barrages falling around them, they broke through into the port itself and were literally driven into the sea.
Now compare Pappe with Morris. Despite the latter's fog of detail, prevarification and excuses, it is impossible to conclude from his account of the same events that the Zionist forces were engaged in anything other than good old-fashioned ethnic cleansing in Haifa, Mayor Levy notwithstanding: "By 21 April, when the Haganah launched its onslaught, the remaining population was in great measure primed for evacuation." (p 187) "Operation Passover Cleansing aimed at 'breaking the enemy'... not... the conquest of most of Arab Haifa." (p 189) "Haganah Radio announced that 'the day of judgment had arrived' [and] called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately..." (p 191) "The orders of Carmeli's 22nd Battalion were 'to kill every [adult male] Arab encountered' and to set alight with firebombs 'all objectives that can be set alight'..." (pp 191-192) "The [Arab] notables' announcement of evacuation on the evening of 22/4 was not a bolt from the blue. Tens of thousands... had departed during December 47-early April 48. On 21-22 April, the [4 Palestinian] notables had the fresh example of Arab Tiberius before their eyes [In Tiberius the British army encouraged and protected a Palestinian evacuation]. And by the evening of 22/4, thousands had already voted with their feet, first by fleeing... to the harbour and the boats to Acre... The Hagganah mortar attacks... were primarily designed to break Arab morale in order to bring about a swift collapse of resistance and speedy surrender. There is no evidence that the commanders involved hoped or expected that it would lead to mass evacuation... But clearly the offensive, and especially the mortaring, precipitated the exodus." (pp 199-200) "The local Jewish civilian leadership initially sincerely wanted [the remaining] Arabs to stay... But the offensive of 21-22/4 had delivered the Arab neighborhoods into Haganah hands, relegating the civil leaders to the sidelines... At the same time, the attitude of some of these local leaders radically changed as they took stock of the historic opportunity offered by the exodus to turn Haifa into a Jewish city." (p 201-202) "After 4-5 days of Haganah rule [over the occupied Palestinian neighborhoods, involving curfews, searches, interrogations, arrests, beatings and looting], 'the Arabs were not interested in staying', an American diplomat reportedly told the Haganah." (p 204) "But were the Haganah actions [23/4-early May] motivated by a calculated aim to egg on the evacuation? At the level of Carmeli headquarters, no orders, as far as we know, were ever issued to the troops to act in a manner that would precipitate flight... But if this was official policy, there was certainly an undercurrent of expulsive thinking akin to the IZL approach." (p 207) "The Hagana attacked [the nearby town of] Balad ash Sheikh on 24/4... Whether the Haganah intended to trigger the evacuation of Balad ash Sheikh is unclear, but the method of attack... seems to have been designed to achieve it." (p 207)
By mid May the systematic destruction of Palestinian houses had begun. By mid July the remaining 4,000 Palestinians of Haifa had been coralled into a single area. Demolitions were completed in October. And Mayor Levy? Once he'd been reassured that the destruction was purely for military reasons and that his municipality would therefore not be liable, he was happy. In context, Haifa's Jewish mayor offers Morris cold comfort. By citing the words of the mayor, without mentioning the actions of the Haganah, Morris, the historian, becomes Morris, the propagandist.
"Most of Palestine's 700,000 'refugees' fled their homes because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders). But it is also true that there were several dozen sites, including Lydda and Ramle, from which Arab communities were expelled by Jewish troops."
Notice the euphemism "flail of war." Morris' bracketed words above are pure conjecture. In discussing the ethnic cleansing of Haifa, he writes in Birth Revisited, "Most of the remaining Arab leaders also encouraged the remaining townspeople to leave (perhaps assuring them that they would soon be returning in the wake of victorious Arab armies, but I have found no evidence of this)." (p 198)
"The displacement of the 700,000 Arabs who became 'refugees' - and I put the term in inverted commas, as two-thirds of them were displaced from one part of Palestine to another and not from their country (which is the usual definition of a refugee) - was not a 'racist crime'... but the result of a national conflict and a war, with religious overtones, from the Muslim perspective, launched by the Arabs themselves."
How strange! There are certainly no inverted commas around the word refugees in Birth Revisited. Why now the recourse to petty semantics? Simple - when you're writing propaganda, you'll reach for anything at hand.
I'll deal with the rest of Morris' letter in my next post.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Insatiable
I've written before about the mainstream media's tendency to self-censor opinion pieces on Palestine by caving in to the Israel lobby's spurious demand for what it calls 'balanced reporting' (see Doppelganger, 28/1/08; Anticipatory Compliance, 28/4/08). This demand, superficially plausible, is in reality a demand for a faux balance, based on the absurd notion that every presentation of the victim's story, unless 'balanced' by a presentation of the perpetrator's story, is ipso facto guilty of being unbalanced.
On those rare occasions when the Fairfax press actually gets around to publishing a Palestinian story, and in so doing risks the ire of the Israel lobby, faux balance becomes its principle defence mechanism against the confected outrage of Israel lobbyists.
A classic example of this came with the publication of an opinion piece by Australian author and academic Peter Manning in the Sydney Morning Herald of 29/4/08. In Redress the balance on Palestine, Manning argued that, in commemorating Israel's 60th anniversary in federal parliament, prime minister Rudd ignored the ethnic cleansing and mass expulsions of Palestinians perpetrated by Zionist forces at the time, which Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
Manning wrote about "the Israeli propaganda narrative that the Palestinians had simply abandoned their country, not fought enough for it and left for friendly Arab countries," and pointed out that this myth had been "demolished" by the research of Israeli historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev and Benny Morris. He ended his piece with the forlorn hope that Rudd might "redress the balance" in May, the 15th of which is hyped as Israel's 'Independence' (from what?) day. All pretty straightforward, nothing controversial. Leon Uris' 1958 propaganda novel, Exodus, still echoed by Zionist propagandists whenever the subject of 1948 arises, had to succumb eventually to the ravages of genuine historical inquiry.
However, in the certain knowledge that Manning's presentation would unleash a Zionist version of the hounds from Hell, the Herald had taken the trouble to pre-emptively notify the hellhounds of their intention to publish Manning, as well as the content of same, such that on the very day of its publication, a flanking response by Colin Rubenstein of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) appeared. Rubenstein's riposte, The time for peace has come, was typically all smoke and mirrors:-
"A scattered, dispossessed people, suffering oppression and having just emerged from history's most heinous genocide [Rubenstein here tries to slip us 2 mega assumptions: 1) the Zionist notion that Jews are 'a people'; and 2) that the entirety of these people, as opposed to European Jewry, were the victims of oppression/genocide], accepted the newly formed UN partition plan [Considering that the Jewish colonizers of Palestine had purchased only 6% of that land by 1947, but (as a result of US arm twisting in the UN) were offered a further 48%, why wouldn't they accept?] and built [after first ethnically cleansing 78% of Palestine of the majority of its non-Jewish majority indigenous population & refusing them the right of return] an enviable [If an apartheid state which privileges Jews over non-Jews is enviable] society in part of their ancestral homeland [Zionist forces occupied a further 24% of Palestine beyond the UN partition line in 1948, including the western half of Jerusalem which was supposed to have come under international control], which now serves as a vibrant cultural centre and beacon for Jewish identity worldwide [All Jews again? The majority of Jews, contrary to Zionist goals, vote with their feet by choosing to live in a variety of open, pluralistic and democratic states such as Australia], including for the Australian Jewish community... While it is understandable that Palestinians remember the suffering of 700,000 Palestinians who fled or otherwise lost their homes in 1948 [What crimes are buried under this little circumlocution. You'd think this were merely the equivalent of losing your keys], it is worth remembering that this tragedy [More a crime against humanity] was completely avoidable [Not really. Once the Zionist movement had determined on a Jewish state in a land with a non-Jewish majority, and secured the services of the British in this endeavour, a God-almighty clash with the Palestinian population was inevitable] had Palestinians and the Arab states heeded the UN's resolution calling for 2 states for 2 peoples [Even if the Palestinians, contrary to every other indigenous people on the planet, had overlooked the injustice* and illegality** of the partition proposal, and shouted their acceptance of it from the rooftops, this would have made no difference whatever to the final outcome given that the Zionist goal was a Jewish state over as much of Palestine as possible with as few non-Jews as possible]. Instead a war to ethnically cleanse the area of Jewish inhabitants was launched [Zionist propagandists routinely project Israel's crimes onto its victims]." Rubenstein goes on to refer to "the so-called unlimited and legally unprecedented 'right of return' to Israel for Palestinian refugees and their descendents [Not only is the right of return for refugees enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) at Article 13, but UNGA Resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, has been reaffirmed by the UN countless times and its acceptance by Israel was a condition of Israel's admittance to the UN as a member state]" as a "maximalist demand" which "would lead to the demographic destruction of Israel as a Jewish state."
* The Partition Plan was unjust because, although the Jewish settlers owned only 6% of the total land area of Palestine and constituted only around one third of its population, they were given over 50% of the most fertile parts of the country, which included 400 Palestinian villages and an almost equal number of Palestinian Arabs (438,000 to 499,000 Jews). Even within the area allocated to a Jewish state, the settlers owned only 11% of the land.
** The partition plan was illegal because it violated "the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples" enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter.
I dealt in an earlier post (The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3, 14/3/08) with the manifestly corrupt process that led to the passing of UNGA Resolution 181 (the Partition Resolution), but given the store placed in it by propagandists such as Rubenstein (who alludes to Evatt's "possibly decisive role in securing [its] passage") and the frequency with which they invoke it as a token of Israel's international legitimacy, it is worth quoting the verdict of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe : "If United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) members [who drew up the partition plan] believed that the 2 political entities [an Arab and a Jewish state] would peacefully exist and therefore not much attention needed to be paid to balances of demography and geography... they were guilty of totally misreading Zionism and grossly underestimating its ambitions... the UN map was an assured recipe for the tragedy that began to unfold the day after Resolution 181 was adopted. As theoreticians of ethnic cleansing acknowledged later, where an ideology of exclusivity is adopted [Zionism] in a highly charged ethnic reality, there can be only one result: ethnic cleansing. By drawing the map as they did, the members who voted in favour of the Partition Resolution contributed directly to the crime that was about to take place." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p 35)
Next day, no doubt in response to the letters of outraged Zionists (how many this time?), the Herald's faux balance defence mechanism kicked in on the letters page with a letter commending Manning's contribution followed by a spray of Zionist paranoia: "... the left will never accept [Israel] as legitimate until it commits demographic suicide or is wiped out in an Islamist version of the Holocaust." This was followed the day after by this doozy of a letter: "I applaud the editors of the Herald in their balanced approach to the expression of opposing views on the Middle East (Opinion, April 29, and Letters, April 30)."
And just as the old, familiar refrain, 'You-couldn't-make-this-up-in-a-million-years', came to mind, I opened The Australian of the same day to find, in the Cut & Paste section at the bottom of the letters page, the following heading above an extract from Manning's Herald piece: "Historical record comes back to bite the Israel-haters: Peter Manning, in The Sydney Morning Herald, cites historian Benny Morris to discredit 'Israel propaganda'."
Next to that The Australian had placed the following: "In a letter to The Irish Times, Benny Morris sets the record straight: Israel-haters are fond of citing my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections." Morris himself then went on to state that: a) "In defiance of the will of the international community" Palestinians "launched hostilities against the Jewish community... in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost," and were "displaced," fleeing their homes "because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders)"; b) "There was no Zionist 'plan' or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'. Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, was the master plan of the Haganah... to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state"; c) "It is true that Plan D gave the regional commanders carte blanche to occupy and garrison or expel and destroy the Arab villages along and behind the front lines and the anticipated Arab armies' invasion routes. And it is also true that midway in the 1948 war the Israeli leaders decided to bar the return of the 'refugees' (those 'refugees' who had just assaulted the Jewish community), viewing them as a potential fifth column and threat to the Jewish state's existence. I for one cannot fault their fears or logic."*
So can we now expect pieces like Manning's - written for the Herald - not only to fall victim to that paper's spinelessness, but also to be mauled in The Australian? And if the Herald is under any illusion that its faux balance routine is enough to satisfy the Zionists, the editorial in the same week's Australian Jewish News (2/5/08) should disabuse it: "What a pity The Sydney Morning Herald published Peter Manning's opinion piece... The fact that next to this unsubstantiated Israel-bashing diatribe, The SMH published a very moderate opinion piece by Dr Colin Rubenstein... calling for peace, did not make a case for balanced reporting... While we would never diminish the value of a free press, we would argue that both sides of the debate are not yet given equal coverage in Australia. The AJN will soon be publishing a regular column... monitoring coverage of Israel... in the mainstream media."
When are the Bambis at Fairfax going to realise that faux balance is not enough, that only when the Fairfax papers become Israel-boosting, Palestine-bashing clones of Murdoch's The Australian will the snarling and snapping cease?
*I'll deal with Morris in my next post.
On those rare occasions when the Fairfax press actually gets around to publishing a Palestinian story, and in so doing risks the ire of the Israel lobby, faux balance becomes its principle defence mechanism against the confected outrage of Israel lobbyists.
A classic example of this came with the publication of an opinion piece by Australian author and academic Peter Manning in the Sydney Morning Herald of 29/4/08. In Redress the balance on Palestine, Manning argued that, in commemorating Israel's 60th anniversary in federal parliament, prime minister Rudd ignored the ethnic cleansing and mass expulsions of Palestinians perpetrated by Zionist forces at the time, which Palestinians call the Nakba (Catastrophe).
Manning wrote about "the Israeli propaganda narrative that the Palestinians had simply abandoned their country, not fought enough for it and left for friendly Arab countries," and pointed out that this myth had been "demolished" by the research of Israeli historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev and Benny Morris. He ended his piece with the forlorn hope that Rudd might "redress the balance" in May, the 15th of which is hyped as Israel's 'Independence' (from what?) day. All pretty straightforward, nothing controversial. Leon Uris' 1958 propaganda novel, Exodus, still echoed by Zionist propagandists whenever the subject of 1948 arises, had to succumb eventually to the ravages of genuine historical inquiry.
However, in the certain knowledge that Manning's presentation would unleash a Zionist version of the hounds from Hell, the Herald had taken the trouble to pre-emptively notify the hellhounds of their intention to publish Manning, as well as the content of same, such that on the very day of its publication, a flanking response by Colin Rubenstein of the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) appeared. Rubenstein's riposte, The time for peace has come, was typically all smoke and mirrors:-
"A scattered, dispossessed people, suffering oppression and having just emerged from history's most heinous genocide [Rubenstein here tries to slip us 2 mega assumptions: 1) the Zionist notion that Jews are 'a people'; and 2) that the entirety of these people, as opposed to European Jewry, were the victims of oppression/genocide], accepted the newly formed UN partition plan [Considering that the Jewish colonizers of Palestine had purchased only 6% of that land by 1947, but (as a result of US arm twisting in the UN) were offered a further 48%, why wouldn't they accept?] and built [after first ethnically cleansing 78% of Palestine of the majority of its non-Jewish majority indigenous population & refusing them the right of return] an enviable [If an apartheid state which privileges Jews over non-Jews is enviable] society in part of their ancestral homeland [Zionist forces occupied a further 24% of Palestine beyond the UN partition line in 1948, including the western half of Jerusalem which was supposed to have come under international control], which now serves as a vibrant cultural centre and beacon for Jewish identity worldwide [All Jews again? The majority of Jews, contrary to Zionist goals, vote with their feet by choosing to live in a variety of open, pluralistic and democratic states such as Australia], including for the Australian Jewish community... While it is understandable that Palestinians remember the suffering of 700,000 Palestinians who fled or otherwise lost their homes in 1948 [What crimes are buried under this little circumlocution. You'd think this were merely the equivalent of losing your keys], it is worth remembering that this tragedy [More a crime against humanity] was completely avoidable [Not really. Once the Zionist movement had determined on a Jewish state in a land with a non-Jewish majority, and secured the services of the British in this endeavour, a God-almighty clash with the Palestinian population was inevitable] had Palestinians and the Arab states heeded the UN's resolution calling for 2 states for 2 peoples [Even if the Palestinians, contrary to every other indigenous people on the planet, had overlooked the injustice* and illegality** of the partition proposal, and shouted their acceptance of it from the rooftops, this would have made no difference whatever to the final outcome given that the Zionist goal was a Jewish state over as much of Palestine as possible with as few non-Jews as possible]. Instead a war to ethnically cleanse the area of Jewish inhabitants was launched [Zionist propagandists routinely project Israel's crimes onto its victims]." Rubenstein goes on to refer to "the so-called unlimited and legally unprecedented 'right of return' to Israel for Palestinian refugees and their descendents [Not only is the right of return for refugees enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) at Article 13, but UNGA Resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, has been reaffirmed by the UN countless times and its acceptance by Israel was a condition of Israel's admittance to the UN as a member state]" as a "maximalist demand" which "would lead to the demographic destruction of Israel as a Jewish state."
* The Partition Plan was unjust because, although the Jewish settlers owned only 6% of the total land area of Palestine and constituted only around one third of its population, they were given over 50% of the most fertile parts of the country, which included 400 Palestinian villages and an almost equal number of Palestinian Arabs (438,000 to 499,000 Jews). Even within the area allocated to a Jewish state, the settlers owned only 11% of the land.
** The partition plan was illegal because it violated "the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples" enshrined in Article 1 of the UN Charter.
I dealt in an earlier post (The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 3, 14/3/08) with the manifestly corrupt process that led to the passing of UNGA Resolution 181 (the Partition Resolution), but given the store placed in it by propagandists such as Rubenstein (who alludes to Evatt's "possibly decisive role in securing [its] passage") and the frequency with which they invoke it as a token of Israel's international legitimacy, it is worth quoting the verdict of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe : "If United Nations Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) members [who drew up the partition plan] believed that the 2 political entities [an Arab and a Jewish state] would peacefully exist and therefore not much attention needed to be paid to balances of demography and geography... they were guilty of totally misreading Zionism and grossly underestimating its ambitions... the UN map was an assured recipe for the tragedy that began to unfold the day after Resolution 181 was adopted. As theoreticians of ethnic cleansing acknowledged later, where an ideology of exclusivity is adopted [Zionism] in a highly charged ethnic reality, there can be only one result: ethnic cleansing. By drawing the map as they did, the members who voted in favour of the Partition Resolution contributed directly to the crime that was about to take place." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p 35)
Next day, no doubt in response to the letters of outraged Zionists (how many this time?), the Herald's faux balance defence mechanism kicked in on the letters page with a letter commending Manning's contribution followed by a spray of Zionist paranoia: "... the left will never accept [Israel] as legitimate until it commits demographic suicide or is wiped out in an Islamist version of the Holocaust." This was followed the day after by this doozy of a letter: "I applaud the editors of the Herald in their balanced approach to the expression of opposing views on the Middle East (Opinion, April 29, and Letters, April 30)."
And just as the old, familiar refrain, 'You-couldn't-make-this-up-in-a-million-years', came to mind, I opened The Australian of the same day to find, in the Cut & Paste section at the bottom of the letters page, the following heading above an extract from Manning's Herald piece: "Historical record comes back to bite the Israel-haters: Peter Manning, in The Sydney Morning Herald, cites historian Benny Morris to discredit 'Israel propaganda'."
Next to that The Australian had placed the following: "In a letter to The Irish Times, Benny Morris sets the record straight: Israel-haters are fond of citing my work in support of their arguments. Let me offer some corrections." Morris himself then went on to state that: a) "In defiance of the will of the international community" Palestinians "launched hostilities against the Jewish community... in the hope of aborting the emergence of the Jewish state and perhaps destroying that community. But they lost," and were "displaced," fleeing their homes "because of the flail of war (and in the expectation that they would shortly return to their homes on the backs of victorious Arab invaders)"; b) "There was no Zionist 'plan' or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'. Plan Dalet of March 10, 1948, was the master plan of the Haganah... to counter the expected pan-Arab assault on the emergent Jewish state"; c) "It is true that Plan D gave the regional commanders carte blanche to occupy and garrison or expel and destroy the Arab villages along and behind the front lines and the anticipated Arab armies' invasion routes. And it is also true that midway in the 1948 war the Israeli leaders decided to bar the return of the 'refugees' (those 'refugees' who had just assaulted the Jewish community), viewing them as a potential fifth column and threat to the Jewish state's existence. I for one cannot fault their fears or logic."*
So can we now expect pieces like Manning's - written for the Herald - not only to fall victim to that paper's spinelessness, but also to be mauled in The Australian? And if the Herald is under any illusion that its faux balance routine is enough to satisfy the Zionists, the editorial in the same week's Australian Jewish News (2/5/08) should disabuse it: "What a pity The Sydney Morning Herald published Peter Manning's opinion piece... The fact that next to this unsubstantiated Israel-bashing diatribe, The SMH published a very moderate opinion piece by Dr Colin Rubenstein... calling for peace, did not make a case for balanced reporting... While we would never diminish the value of a free press, we would argue that both sides of the debate are not yet given equal coverage in Australia. The AJN will soon be publishing a regular column... monitoring coverage of Israel... in the mainstream media."
When are the Bambis at Fairfax going to realise that faux balance is not enough, that only when the Fairfax papers become Israel-boosting, Palestine-bashing clones of Murdoch's The Australian will the snarling and snapping cease?
*I'll deal with Morris in my next post.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)