The militarisation of the Australian mind marches on:
"Ninety-five years after the Australian Light Horse led the charge of Beersheba to claim a pivotal victory in the Middle East theatre, Australians will once again charge through the desert sands. This time they ride in peace. As commemorations gear up to mark the decisive battle, a group of 40 Australians will today start their journey to Egypt, Turkey and Israel in the footsteps of the Light Horse. Members of the Australian Light Horse Association, including descendants of WW1 veterans, will re-enact the charge on the 95th anniversary of the battle on October 31... 'We're keeping the tradition alive,' [ALHA director Barry Rodgers] said. 'One of the reasons we're doing this is to raise the profile of the Middle East campaign. It has been very much overshadowed by Gallipoli and the Western Front'. The charge on Turkish positions and on to Beersheba was regarded as a success that ultimately led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire." (Men of peace cheer charge of the Light Horse brigade, Rosanne Barrett, The Australian, 15/10/12)
One aspect of the Light Horse's sojourn in Palestine that's unlikely to be mentioned on the ALHA's 'In the Steps of the Light Horse' Tour 2012 is the post-armistace massacre of the defenceless inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Sarafand (often transliterated as Surafend) in November 1918. I've dealt with this particular war crime before (simply click on the AIF label below) but in light of the above and what is sure to follow by way of uncritical ms media attention, and as an antidote to the sickening tendency in this mercenary nation of ours to glorify all things military, it warrants revisiting.
Perhaps the most useful analytical commentary on the matter, which led to the British commander of the campaign against the Turks, General Allenby, writing off the AIF as "cold-blooded murderers," and denying them battle honours, is to be found in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory & Indigenous Australia (2010) ed. by Peters-Little, Curthoys & Docker:
"In 1923, H.S. (Henry) Gullett, as part of Australia's official war history under the general editorship of Charles Bean, published The Australian Imperial Force in Sinai and Palestine 1914-1918, where he constructs what we might call the ur-narrative of the Surafend massacre, inscribing the strange mix, part exculpatory, part condemnatory, that provides the motifs, images and tropes for almost all succeeding purported descriptions of what occurred. Post armistace, in their camps at Tripoli and on the Philistine plain, after a very successful campaign that secured the defeat of the Ottoman forces in Sinai, Palestine and Syria, the light horsemen, Gullett writes, participated in an 'unfortunate incident' that was destined to throw a 'shadow' over their last days in Palestine. It has to be recognised, however, he adds, that they were intolerably provoked, by the indigenous inhabitants in one way, and the British high command in another; indeed, they should be regarded as victims of both. Next to the camps of the Anzac Mounted Division of Australians and New Zealanders lay 'the native village of Surafend,' which elicits the following racial typing from Gullett: 'All the Arabs of western Palestine were thieves by instinct.' The 'natives of Surafend,' he continues, 'were notorious for their petty thieving.' At night, the Australians and New Zealanders, 'sleeping soundly were a simple prey to the cunning, barefooted robbers, and night after night men lost property from their tents.' In this image, the Light Horse are 'prey' to shoeless Arabs perceived as stealthy predatory scavengers...
"Gullett's official history provides the template description of how the Surafend massacre occurred. As is often the case with massacres or scenes of violent retribution, a single individual of one's own group is injured or killed. In this case, a New Zealand soldier is shot by a Bedouin, 'the native' who had been stealing in his tent. The New Zealanders, their whole camp immediately aroused, and 'working with ominous deliberation, then trace the 'footsteps of the Arab' to Surafend. The New Zealanders throw a 'strong cordon' around the village, no Arab being allowed to leave. All day, Gullett says, the New Zealanders 'quietly organised for their work in Surafend, and then, early in the night, marched out 'many hundreds strong' and surrounded the village. In his narrative, Gullett stresses that only male Bedouin were harmed. When they entered the village, the 'New Zealanders grimly passed out all the women and children,' and then, 'armed chiefly with heavy sticks, fell upon the men and at the same time fired the houses.' Many Arabs, Gullett tells us, were killed and few escaped injury; the village was demolished and set on fire, and the flames from the 'wretched houses lit up the countryside.' The Anzacs next 'raided and burned the neighbouring nomad camp,' and then went 'quietly back to their lines.'
"Gullett concedes that what happened 'cannot be justified,' and affirms that Surafend 'should not be forgotten.' Nonetheless, he insists, 'in fairness to the New Zealanders and to the Australians who gave them hearty support,' we have to consider that the soldiers 'were the pioneers and the leaders in a long campaign.' They had just lost a 'veteran comrade,' at the hands of a race they despised'; consequently, he feels, they became 'angry and bitter beyond sound reasoning.'" (pp 56-57)
Just for the record, here are two 2 other references to the Sarafand massacre not available on the internet. The first, by our Palestine policeman Douglas V. Duff (click on the label below), reprises (derives from?) Gullett's colonial portrayal of Palestinian Arabs as instinctual thieves. Duff, you'll notice, 'improves' on Gullett in several respects.
"A mile away [from Ramleh] is the village of Sarafand, a place that suffered severely from the Australians during the military occupation. A set of thieving, murderous, cowardly curs are these men of Sarafand; sand-rats who preyed upon the soldiers, and ended by treacherously murdering several. The Australians, maddened by the deaths of their comrades, surrounded the village, sacked it, and killed some of the worst characters who lived there - a lesson that Sarafand has never forgotten. They are no longer active criminals, but any brigand, highway robber, or fugitive from justice, is assured of a welcome from them, always supposing that the Government has not offered a price for his capture, in which case he is certain of betrayal." (Palestine Picture, 1936, p 192)
Much closer to the time comes this brief, teasing reference from the Regimental Medical Officer to the 39th Royal Fusiliers, the 2nd Judean Battalion, Redcliffe Salaman. Salaman is writing to his wife from Ludd (Lydda/Lod) Palestine on 18 December, 1918:
"When I get home I will tell you a rather terrible tale concerning the way that Australians avenged a murder of one of their men here. It was an ordered lynch law - a mixture of chivalry and sternest justice, absolutely spontaneous..." (Palestine Reclaimed, 1920, pp 143-144)
Showing posts with label Redcliffe Salaman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Redcliffe Salaman. Show all posts
Monday, October 15, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
No History, Just Mythology, Ideology & Indoctrination
"In essence, Palestine was 'empty' because it could be easily emptied of its population." (M. Shahid Alam, Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, 2009, p 77)
Israeli historian, Tom Segev, is coming to Australia as a guest of Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
The Australian's Middle East correspondent, John Lyons, has written a welcome profile of Segev, which focuses on a matter which has rarely, if ever, disturbed the complacent Zionist orthodoxy of Murdoch's Australian flagship: the primacy of mythology, ideology and indoctrination over the historical record in Israel, particularly in relation to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.
Lyons writes that Segev "is one the 'New Historians' from the 1980s when Israel released its first wave of archival documents. 'You could take out a document and say, 'Wow, this is not how we learnt it at school. It was less heroic, less noble than we had learnt at school. Until then we had no history, we had mythology, we had ideology and we had a lot of indoctrination.' Children were taught that when Israel was established in 1948 it had been empty - it was a land without people for a people without land. These historians demolished that myth with documents showing almost half the Arabs who left were forced out, many violently." (Israeli widows reveal the reality of land built on myths, 11/8/12)*
This kind of plain-speaking, of course, is like a red rag to a bull for those who've made it their business to patrol ms media discourse on the subject of Palestine/Israel lest it deviate in any way from Israel's official line, that is from Israeli mythology and ideology. Hence the following letter from Tzvi Fleischer of the Australia-Israel Review, published in The Australian on August 14:
"John Lyon's article on historian Tom Segev... made the absurd claim that before the 'new' historians such as Segev, Israeli 'children were taught that when Israel was established in 1948 it had been empty - it was a land without people for a people without land'. This is not true. There has certainly been criticism of past Israeli curriculums for having paid insufficient attention to the 1948 Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian plight generally, but students were never taught that the land was completely empty. Indeed, the line about 'a land without people for a people without' has nothing to do with the 1948 refugees. It is the core of a twisted criticism of the whole Zionist movement from 1895 onward by Edward Said and his followers. The misrepresentation is two-fold. First, while there was a slogan used by a small part of the Zionist movement for a few years after 1900 that spoke of 'a land without a people for a people without a land', this is materially different from 'a land without people'. The early Zionists were aware that Palestine had Arab inhabitants but noted they were not considered a separate nationality or people at that time."
To interrupt Fleischer's letter here and draw out his meaning:
What he's saying is that the early political Zionists were certainly aware of the existence of Arabs in Palestine but believed that, unlike the Jews, they did not rate as 'a people'. They saw them, if you will, as generic Arabs, equally at home in other parts of the Middle East where Arabic was spoken and Islam practised. In other words, they were eminently portable, or transferable (to adapt the Zionist buzzword 'transfer' - in use in back rooms whenever Palestine's pre-state Zionists met to discuss their 'Arab problem').
On the other hand, these same Zionists took very seriously indeed the idea that Jews were 'a people', at a time when being part of a people, separate from other people, seemed so terribly important. With religion, including Judaism, generally on the skids at the time, and tribalism and nationalism all the go, these Jewish nationalists conned themselves, and the rest of the world, into believing that being a Jew meant so much more than just being the adherent, to a lesser or greater degree, of the Jewish faith. It meant, they believed, belonging to 'a people' who had once had a glorious past in the land of Palestine, which was cruelly terminated by the Romans, and were now living in doleful 'exile' outside Palestine (or the the Land of Israel as they preferred to call it), a state of affairs which could only be relieved by the reconstitution of ancient Israel in today's Palestine.
Mind you, some of them, and they were all European Jews you'll note, really had to wrestle with the idea of finding a common identity with non-European, Arab, Jews, so concerned were they with matters of pedigree:
"The Jaffa colonists outclass the Halukah Jerusalemites as a shire stallion would a worn-out coster's pony. The Yemenites are for the most part undersized and rather poor-spirited natives. They are not racially Jews. They are black, long-headed, hybrid Arabs." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, Redcliffe N. Salaman, 1920, p 28) [Italics in the original.]
If the concept of 'a people' has more than a touch of arbitrariness and artificiality about it, how much more so that of concocting a people out of a religion? The simple fact is that anybody today who can't bring himself to acknowledge (and celebrate) our hybridity has a problem with reality. And so, for Zionist true believers in such bunkum, whether they be the first Zionists or the likes of Fleischer today, to pose as authorities on who is or who is not worthy of the designation 'a people' is rich indeed, and to be honest, entirely misses the point.
Whether the Arabs of Palestine, especially the majority fellahin, regarded themselves as 'a people' or not, they had been rooted in the land of Palestine for centuries and had prior occupancy of it. The simple fact of the Palestinian Arab's native title to Palestine may not be quite as entertaining as Zionist mythology, but at the end of the day it is one of those basic moral and legal principles we reject at our peril. Upholding it means, quite simply, that Palestine was, still is, and always will be the land of the Arabs who lived there (and in some parts, against incredible odds, still do).
Returning to the rest of Fleischer's letter:
"But for those dedicated to Israel's destruction, such as Said, it is more convenient to dishonestly rewrite the slogan to pretend that the 'racist' Zionists declared Palestinians were not people. Moreover, to characterise Zionist and Israeli history on the basis of this single slogan, employed by a few Zionists for only a few years more than 100 years ago, is to indulge in the crudest form of propaganda."
Fleischer should be careful of accusing others of dishonesty. If he had any respect for its converse, he'd acknowledge that the early Zionists, whether they used the 'land without people' slogan or not, acted as if it were true:
"The fact of an overwhelming indigenous Arab majority confronted the Zionists with an imposing ethical problem, which for the most part they chose not to acknowledge. The earlier Zionist writings almost entirely ignored the Arab issue, forwarding the idea of a Jewish national revival in Palestine without regard to the reality that an exclusively Jewish state would entail the expulsion of the existing population. What reference there was to the Palestinian Arabs was generally derogatory and detached, denying their claim to the land and status as a people. The dehumanized image of the Palestinians which the Zionists developed and propagated was instrumental in displacing the moral issue and establishing an aura of legal justification around Zionist goals and activity." (The Zionist Mind: The Origins & Development of Zionist Thought, Alan R. Taylor, 1974, p 48)**
A more ethical (and therefore marginal) Zionist, Judah Magnes, speaking of Palestine's Arab population, warned in 1930 that '[t]he fact is that they are here in their overwhelming numbers in this part of the world, and whereas it may have been in accord with Israelitic needs in the time of Joshua to conquer the land and maintain their position in it with the sword, that is not in accord with the desire of plain Jews or with the long ethical tradition of Judaism..." (The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis & Reader, Arthur Hertzberg, 1997, p 449)
Another, the armchair Joshua and ideological father of today's dominant Likud strain of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, recognised the Arab claim to Palestine, but only to dismiss it by asserting (in 1937) that, although "there is no question of ousting the Arabs," they had better get used to the idea of being a minority in the coming Jewish state because their claim on Palestine "is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation." (ibid, p 562)
Needless to say, those actual Joshuas who followed, the Ben-Gurions and the Begins, having the advantage of a Zionist army, trained and armed over the previous decades for the coming confrontation with Palestine's indigenous Arab majority, had no qualms whatever about "ousting the Arabs," and transforming them, in Zionist parlance, into 'absentees', a term that sits cosily with the old 'land without people' slogan.
Finally, here's a most interesting response to Fleischer, published the next day, 15 August:
"Tzvi Fleischer claims history is being dishonestly misrepresented on the basis of a 'single slogan' used by a few Zionists for only 'a few years more than 100 years ago'. In 1935, my husband (then a teenager, now deceased) spent 6 months in a training camp for German Jews being prepared to work on kibbutzim in Palestine. He was told the land of Palestine was empty except for a few nomadic Arabs down in the desert. Similar 'indoctrination' (my husband's word for the training) must have been practised on Australian Jewish youth in that period, as I've heard older Australians born and educated here reciting similar untruths. Funnily enough, another slogan I've heard recalled implicitly admits the land was already occupied and farmed: 'Yard by yard, goat by goat'." (Robyn Walton, Toorak, Vic)
[*Segev, author of One Palestine, Complete: Jews & Arabs Under the British Mandate (2000), 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East (2006), and other books, also made the following points in Lyons' report: 1) "Demographically, the Arab population and the ultra-orthodox population in Israel are growing. What that means is that the Zionist element is becoming weaker. In Jerusalem now, in first grade, a majority of children are either Arab or ultra-orthodox. This means Israel is rapidly losing on the front of being Jewish and democratic." 2) "Israel is still trying to project the 'fiction' that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is temporary. 'It is almost 50 years on since we took the territories. The official policy of the Israeli government is a two-state solution but I don't think that the present government actually believes in a two-state solution'... Politically it was 'very clever' of Netanyahu to publicly commit to a two-state solution. 'it enabled him to play for time'..."]
[**For JMN Jeffries' commentary on Zionism's wilful blindness, see my 7/11/11 post None So Blind.]
Israeli historian, Tom Segev, is coming to Australia as a guest of Monash University's Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
The Australian's Middle East correspondent, John Lyons, has written a welcome profile of Segev, which focuses on a matter which has rarely, if ever, disturbed the complacent Zionist orthodoxy of Murdoch's Australian flagship: the primacy of mythology, ideology and indoctrination over the historical record in Israel, particularly in relation to the Palestinian Nakba of 1948.
Lyons writes that Segev "is one the 'New Historians' from the 1980s when Israel released its first wave of archival documents. 'You could take out a document and say, 'Wow, this is not how we learnt it at school. It was less heroic, less noble than we had learnt at school. Until then we had no history, we had mythology, we had ideology and we had a lot of indoctrination.' Children were taught that when Israel was established in 1948 it had been empty - it was a land without people for a people without land. These historians demolished that myth with documents showing almost half the Arabs who left were forced out, many violently." (Israeli widows reveal the reality of land built on myths, 11/8/12)*
This kind of plain-speaking, of course, is like a red rag to a bull for those who've made it their business to patrol ms media discourse on the subject of Palestine/Israel lest it deviate in any way from Israel's official line, that is from Israeli mythology and ideology. Hence the following letter from Tzvi Fleischer of the Australia-Israel Review, published in The Australian on August 14:
"John Lyon's article on historian Tom Segev... made the absurd claim that before the 'new' historians such as Segev, Israeli 'children were taught that when Israel was established in 1948 it had been empty - it was a land without people for a people without land'. This is not true. There has certainly been criticism of past Israeli curriculums for having paid insufficient attention to the 1948 Palestinian refugees, and Palestinian plight generally, but students were never taught that the land was completely empty. Indeed, the line about 'a land without people for a people without' has nothing to do with the 1948 refugees. It is the core of a twisted criticism of the whole Zionist movement from 1895 onward by Edward Said and his followers. The misrepresentation is two-fold. First, while there was a slogan used by a small part of the Zionist movement for a few years after 1900 that spoke of 'a land without a people for a people without a land', this is materially different from 'a land without people'. The early Zionists were aware that Palestine had Arab inhabitants but noted they were not considered a separate nationality or people at that time."
To interrupt Fleischer's letter here and draw out his meaning:
What he's saying is that the early political Zionists were certainly aware of the existence of Arabs in Palestine but believed that, unlike the Jews, they did not rate as 'a people'. They saw them, if you will, as generic Arabs, equally at home in other parts of the Middle East where Arabic was spoken and Islam practised. In other words, they were eminently portable, or transferable (to adapt the Zionist buzzword 'transfer' - in use in back rooms whenever Palestine's pre-state Zionists met to discuss their 'Arab problem').
On the other hand, these same Zionists took very seriously indeed the idea that Jews were 'a people', at a time when being part of a people, separate from other people, seemed so terribly important. With religion, including Judaism, generally on the skids at the time, and tribalism and nationalism all the go, these Jewish nationalists conned themselves, and the rest of the world, into believing that being a Jew meant so much more than just being the adherent, to a lesser or greater degree, of the Jewish faith. It meant, they believed, belonging to 'a people' who had once had a glorious past in the land of Palestine, which was cruelly terminated by the Romans, and were now living in doleful 'exile' outside Palestine (or the the Land of Israel as they preferred to call it), a state of affairs which could only be relieved by the reconstitution of ancient Israel in today's Palestine.
Mind you, some of them, and they were all European Jews you'll note, really had to wrestle with the idea of finding a common identity with non-European, Arab, Jews, so concerned were they with matters of pedigree:
"The Jaffa colonists outclass the Halukah Jerusalemites as a shire stallion would a worn-out coster's pony. The Yemenites are for the most part undersized and rather poor-spirited natives. They are not racially Jews. They are black, long-headed, hybrid Arabs." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, Redcliffe N. Salaman, 1920, p 28) [Italics in the original.]
If the concept of 'a people' has more than a touch of arbitrariness and artificiality about it, how much more so that of concocting a people out of a religion? The simple fact is that anybody today who can't bring himself to acknowledge (and celebrate) our hybridity has a problem with reality. And so, for Zionist true believers in such bunkum, whether they be the first Zionists or the likes of Fleischer today, to pose as authorities on who is or who is not worthy of the designation 'a people' is rich indeed, and to be honest, entirely misses the point.
Whether the Arabs of Palestine, especially the majority fellahin, regarded themselves as 'a people' or not, they had been rooted in the land of Palestine for centuries and had prior occupancy of it. The simple fact of the Palestinian Arab's native title to Palestine may not be quite as entertaining as Zionist mythology, but at the end of the day it is one of those basic moral and legal principles we reject at our peril. Upholding it means, quite simply, that Palestine was, still is, and always will be the land of the Arabs who lived there (and in some parts, against incredible odds, still do).
Returning to the rest of Fleischer's letter:
"But for those dedicated to Israel's destruction, such as Said, it is more convenient to dishonestly rewrite the slogan to pretend that the 'racist' Zionists declared Palestinians were not people. Moreover, to characterise Zionist and Israeli history on the basis of this single slogan, employed by a few Zionists for only a few years more than 100 years ago, is to indulge in the crudest form of propaganda."
Fleischer should be careful of accusing others of dishonesty. If he had any respect for its converse, he'd acknowledge that the early Zionists, whether they used the 'land without people' slogan or not, acted as if it were true:
"The fact of an overwhelming indigenous Arab majority confronted the Zionists with an imposing ethical problem, which for the most part they chose not to acknowledge. The earlier Zionist writings almost entirely ignored the Arab issue, forwarding the idea of a Jewish national revival in Palestine without regard to the reality that an exclusively Jewish state would entail the expulsion of the existing population. What reference there was to the Palestinian Arabs was generally derogatory and detached, denying their claim to the land and status as a people. The dehumanized image of the Palestinians which the Zionists developed and propagated was instrumental in displacing the moral issue and establishing an aura of legal justification around Zionist goals and activity." (The Zionist Mind: The Origins & Development of Zionist Thought, Alan R. Taylor, 1974, p 48)**
A more ethical (and therefore marginal) Zionist, Judah Magnes, speaking of Palestine's Arab population, warned in 1930 that '[t]he fact is that they are here in their overwhelming numbers in this part of the world, and whereas it may have been in accord with Israelitic needs in the time of Joshua to conquer the land and maintain their position in it with the sword, that is not in accord with the desire of plain Jews or with the long ethical tradition of Judaism..." (The Zionist Idea: A Historical Analysis & Reader, Arthur Hertzberg, 1997, p 449)
Another, the armchair Joshua and ideological father of today's dominant Likud strain of Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, recognised the Arab claim to Palestine, but only to dismiss it by asserting (in 1937) that, although "there is no question of ousting the Arabs," they had better get used to the idea of being a minority in the coming Jewish state because their claim on Palestine "is like the claims of appetite versus the claims of starvation." (ibid, p 562)
Needless to say, those actual Joshuas who followed, the Ben-Gurions and the Begins, having the advantage of a Zionist army, trained and armed over the previous decades for the coming confrontation with Palestine's indigenous Arab majority, had no qualms whatever about "ousting the Arabs," and transforming them, in Zionist parlance, into 'absentees', a term that sits cosily with the old 'land without people' slogan.
Finally, here's a most interesting response to Fleischer, published the next day, 15 August:
"Tzvi Fleischer claims history is being dishonestly misrepresented on the basis of a 'single slogan' used by a few Zionists for only 'a few years more than 100 years ago'. In 1935, my husband (then a teenager, now deceased) spent 6 months in a training camp for German Jews being prepared to work on kibbutzim in Palestine. He was told the land of Palestine was empty except for a few nomadic Arabs down in the desert. Similar 'indoctrination' (my husband's word for the training) must have been practised on Australian Jewish youth in that period, as I've heard older Australians born and educated here reciting similar untruths. Funnily enough, another slogan I've heard recalled implicitly admits the land was already occupied and farmed: 'Yard by yard, goat by goat'." (Robyn Walton, Toorak, Vic)
[*Segev, author of One Palestine, Complete: Jews & Arabs Under the British Mandate (2000), 1967: Israel, the War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East (2006), and other books, also made the following points in Lyons' report: 1) "Demographically, the Arab population and the ultra-orthodox population in Israel are growing. What that means is that the Zionist element is becoming weaker. In Jerusalem now, in first grade, a majority of children are either Arab or ultra-orthodox. This means Israel is rapidly losing on the front of being Jewish and democratic." 2) "Israel is still trying to project the 'fiction' that the occupation of the Palestinian territories is temporary. 'It is almost 50 years on since we took the territories. The official policy of the Israeli government is a two-state solution but I don't think that the present government actually believes in a two-state solution'... Politically it was 'very clever' of Netanyahu to publicly commit to a two-state solution. 'it enabled him to play for time'..."]
[**For JMN Jeffries' commentary on Zionism's wilful blindness, see my 7/11/11 post None So Blind.]
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The Mind-Forg'd Manacles I Hear
I imagine that most people would agree with the simple proposition that to the extent that one's mind is cluttered with bad thoughts and bad ideas, one can neither think nor see straight. To test this truism allow me to juxtapose two vignettes.
The first was composed by a British Zionist, Redcliffe Salaman, who served in one of the British Army's all-Jewish battalions in WWI Palestine as its medical officer. It's the one off-note in his description of the celebrations staged by British troops following the armistice of 11 November 1918:
"Our transport men, who are Welsh, sang delightfully; the Arab Wallahs of the Camel Corps made their monotonous noises to the rythmic clapping of hands, and danced the can-can. They did me the honour (?)* of doing a special turn outside my tent, but their loathsome and sensuous writhings make me positively sick." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, 1920, pp 112-13)
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the venom expressed here is primarily the product of the racist, colonialist, Zionist lens through which Salaman necessarily views the natives of Palestine.
If, for example, we take another, later scene of celebrations involving native Palestinians - viewed this time other than through the distorting lens of Zionism - we get a very different picture indeed.
The following vignette was penned by a young British archaeologist, Thomas Hodgkin, working in Palestine in 1932. Because Hodgkin's vision, unlike Salaman's, is clear and unblinkered by toxic ideological obsessions of the 'your land is really my land' variety, his description conveys an objectivity and a sense of shared humanity completely lacking in Salaman's:
"I gave a dinner to about a dozen of the most charming workmen when digging ended on Wednesday night. We had a sheep roasted whole, truly Arab. Not a very large sheep though, but a beautiful meal, cooked in boiled rice and flavoured with pine - very rich. They played pipes and sang sad love-songs and danced (at least the Egyptians did) odd dances which used the bottom in a wonderful way - waggling it grotesquely - and half falling down and pulling themselves together again. A happy evening - and they cheered me like a House Supper at the end. Sad to see the last of them." (Letters from Palestine: 1932-36, 1986, p 26)
Reading Salaman's forthright anti-Arab bile (of which there are many instances in his little book), and noting the more carefully concealed anti-Arab animus of later Zionist writers, is to be irresistably reminded of William Blake's powerful lines in his poem London:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
Few mind-forg'd manacles are quite as encumbering and crippling as those of political Zionism.
[*The bracketed question mark is indeed Salaman's.]
The first was composed by a British Zionist, Redcliffe Salaman, who served in one of the British Army's all-Jewish battalions in WWI Palestine as its medical officer. It's the one off-note in his description of the celebrations staged by British troops following the armistice of 11 November 1918:
"Our transport men, who are Welsh, sang delightfully; the Arab Wallahs of the Camel Corps made their monotonous noises to the rythmic clapping of hands, and danced the can-can. They did me the honour (?)* of doing a special turn outside my tent, but their loathsome and sensuous writhings make me positively sick." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, 1920, pp 112-13)
It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the venom expressed here is primarily the product of the racist, colonialist, Zionist lens through which Salaman necessarily views the natives of Palestine.
If, for example, we take another, later scene of celebrations involving native Palestinians - viewed this time other than through the distorting lens of Zionism - we get a very different picture indeed.
The following vignette was penned by a young British archaeologist, Thomas Hodgkin, working in Palestine in 1932. Because Hodgkin's vision, unlike Salaman's, is clear and unblinkered by toxic ideological obsessions of the 'your land is really my land' variety, his description conveys an objectivity and a sense of shared humanity completely lacking in Salaman's:
"I gave a dinner to about a dozen of the most charming workmen when digging ended on Wednesday night. We had a sheep roasted whole, truly Arab. Not a very large sheep though, but a beautiful meal, cooked in boiled rice and flavoured with pine - very rich. They played pipes and sang sad love-songs and danced (at least the Egyptians did) odd dances which used the bottom in a wonderful way - waggling it grotesquely - and half falling down and pulling themselves together again. A happy evening - and they cheered me like a House Supper at the end. Sad to see the last of them." (Letters from Palestine: 1932-36, 1986, p 26)
Reading Salaman's forthright anti-Arab bile (of which there are many instances in his little book), and noting the more carefully concealed anti-Arab animus of later Zionist writers, is to be irresistably reminded of William Blake's powerful lines in his poem London:
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
Few mind-forg'd manacles are quite as encumbering and crippling as those of political Zionism.
[*The bracketed question mark is indeed Salaman's.]
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Israel: Jewish, Democratic... & White
Anti-African pogrom in Israel? What anti-African pogrom? To my knowledge, the only Australian ms media reference to Tel Aviv's anti-African refugee pogrom of May 23 came on SBS' World News program.
Briefly, after attending a rally in south Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighbourhood addressed by Likud MKs, one of whom described Israel's African refugees as a 'cancer in our society', a Jewish mob went on the rampage, smashing shop and car windows, and beating up any Africans they could find.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier set the scene by referring, at a cabinet meeting, to the refugees as "illegal infiltrators flooding the country," and adding that, "[i]f we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state." (Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state, Harriet Sherwood, guardian.co.uk, 20/5/12)
After viewing some of the video footage of the pogrom, I couldn't help but notice that the most frequent insult on the lips of the mob was the word kushi, generally translated from the Hebrew as 'nigger'. Written, web-based accounts, corroborate this:
"I went to a demonstration led by MK Michael Ben-Ari 2 days ago... and was joined by my girlfriend, Galina. Ben-Ari, a Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn't take it any longer, and shouted something back. Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about 20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face. Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again, people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at her point blank that what she needs is a 'nigger's cock'..." (Thoughts on an attack by a Jewish mob, Yossi Gurvitz, 972mag.com, 24/5/12)
Gurvitz reflects on the experience:
"And after the shock and fear, an attempt at understanding what took place. The legend that African refugees turned the paradise that was south Tel Aviv into a terrorized crime zone has to be rejected... Statistics proved time and time again the crime wave exists mostly in the minds of the politicians stoking the hatred, of which Ben-Ari is an ambitious competitor. I lived in Hatikva for 2 years; I've seen the people, the despair, the fear at nights, the absence of infrastructure, the flooding every winter when the sewage system collapsed - with my own eyes. Spare me the bullshit about a quiet neighborhood of happy poor workers. First there's the economic hardship, which prevents people from getting an education and getting the hell out of there. Above it, we find Jewish supemacism, the concept of a Chosen People, 'every Jew is the son of a King'. Proud Jews are often people whose Jewishness is the only thing they can be proud of. The blow I received came after I was asked if I am a Jew, and replied in the negative." (ibid)
The 'n' word is apparently in such frequent use that it (and worse) has even been internalised by the refugees themselves:
"I accompanied a group of asylum-seeking children to their homes tonight, as we also do on the days of protests with potential racist developments. As usual we got barraged with swearwords, but policemen advised us about safer routes. The kids sang along the way: 'I'm a nigger, I'm a nigger, nigger, and I clean Israeli homes'. ('What, you don't know it, Rami? Look it up on Youtube'.) Two 12-year-old girls asked me if I know that pretty soon the Sudanese will suffer the same fate as Jews did in Germany. One asked the other to tell her about that man, Korczak, who saved children. They asked if he was Jewish and if he would have saved all the children. One girl asked me: 'What's the opposite of free?' I had trouble finding the word: imprisoned? shackled? She said: 'OK, whatever it is, say shackled, we were born shackled and we'll die shackled'. The girls asked me why the Israelis want to deport them. I asked them: If the streets in your country would suddenly fill up with white people that speak a different language you don't understand, what would you feel? One girl said: 'I'd become a teacher and teach them my language!' Toward the end two 12-year-old girls asked me: 'Say, Rami, if you were in our place, what would you have done?'" (African kids in Tel Aviv: They'll do to us what they did to Jews in Germany, Dimi Reider, 972mag.com, 23/5/12)
Another Israeli, Uri Horesh, explains:
"When I was growing up, kushi was a perfectly neutral term for 'black person', more like 'negro' in the 1960s than 'nigger' ever was. However, nowadays, since more Hebrew speakers in Israel actually know black people, and there are indeed black people living in Israel who speak Hebrew (including migrant African laborers, but of course, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia), the connotations of kushi have shifted towards the negative - perhaps not to the degree of the taboo that is associated with 'nigger' in the American context, but it is gradually moving in that direction." (Kushi didn't always mean 'nigger', tlvphl.blogspot.com.au, 23/5/12)
One might assume from the testimony above that the kind of anti-black/white supremacist racism, which finds vivid expression in the use of the word 'nigger' on the streets of south Tel Aviv today, is a relatively recent development in Zionist history. Not so, apparently. Given that political Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonial power-trip, it should come as no surprise to find that earlier generations of Zionists were far from immune to an obsession with European 'whiteness'.
Here, for example, British Jew and Zionist, Redcliffe Salaman, Regimental Medical Officer to the 39th Royal Fusiliers, 2nd Judean Battalion, writes of the arrival in Cairo on July 13, 1918 of the Jewish Battalions' latest batch of volunteers from Palestine's pre-World War I Jewish colonies. Salaman refers to them as "the Palestinians":
"The moment they rolled into the station I spotted a nigger amongst them, and before the train stopped I cleared that question up - his mother was a negress, his father a Sephardi (these Sephardim are a fearfully mixed lot; give me Ashkenazim for blue blood!). Then the types varied from blue-eyed handsome pseudo-Gentiles to dark, purely semitic Yemenites - and scattered between were a dozen, perhaps, of semi-negroid but often very handsome Moroccan Jews." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, 1920, pp 24-25)
Salaman adds, some pages later, that:
"The Yemenites are for the most part undersized and rather poor-spirited natives. They are not racially Jews. They are black, long-headed, hybrid Arabs. Last Saturday I worked with J. M. in the library and we got hold of every authority we could, and, from the historical evidence, it is at once clear that they have but a trace of Jewish blood in them though they probably have rather more than the Falashas. The real Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I back him against all-comers." (ibid, p 28)
The irony of the Hatikva pogrom is that many of the participants may well have been the descendants of the very Yemeni Jews that Salaman scorned as insufficiently white to be really Jewish.
Briefly, after attending a rally in south Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighbourhood addressed by Likud MKs, one of whom described Israel's African refugees as a 'cancer in our society', a Jewish mob went on the rampage, smashing shop and car windows, and beating up any Africans they could find.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu had earlier set the scene by referring, at a cabinet meeting, to the refugees as "illegal infiltrators flooding the country," and adding that, "[i]f we don't stop their entry, the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000, and that threatens our existence as a Jewish and democratic state." (Israel PM: illegal African immigrants threaten identity of Jewish state, Harriet Sherwood, guardian.co.uk, 20/5/12)
After viewing some of the video footage of the pogrom, I couldn't help but notice that the most frequent insult on the lips of the mob was the word kushi, generally translated from the Hebrew as 'nigger'. Written, web-based accounts, corroborate this:
"I went to a demonstration led by MK Michael Ben-Ari 2 days ago... and was joined by my girlfriend, Galina. Ben-Ari, a Kahanist, was inciting the crowd against the African refugees in a distinctly anti-Semitic manner, peppering his talk with incessant references to excrement and urine. At some point, Galina couldn't take it any longer, and shouted something back. Within minutes we were surrounded by an angry mob of about 20 people, composed mostly of women, who hurled curses at her. Someone pulled out a tear gas canister and waved it at her face. Racist and sexual slurs filled the air repeatedly. Time and time again, people expressed the wish she would be raped by Sudanese, and asked her if she was bedding them. A boy, between 10 and 11 years old, screamed at her point blank that what she needs is a 'nigger's cock'..." (Thoughts on an attack by a Jewish mob, Yossi Gurvitz, 972mag.com, 24/5/12)
Gurvitz reflects on the experience:
"And after the shock and fear, an attempt at understanding what took place. The legend that African refugees turned the paradise that was south Tel Aviv into a terrorized crime zone has to be rejected... Statistics proved time and time again the crime wave exists mostly in the minds of the politicians stoking the hatred, of which Ben-Ari is an ambitious competitor. I lived in Hatikva for 2 years; I've seen the people, the despair, the fear at nights, the absence of infrastructure, the flooding every winter when the sewage system collapsed - with my own eyes. Spare me the bullshit about a quiet neighborhood of happy poor workers. First there's the economic hardship, which prevents people from getting an education and getting the hell out of there. Above it, we find Jewish supemacism, the concept of a Chosen People, 'every Jew is the son of a King'. Proud Jews are often people whose Jewishness is the only thing they can be proud of. The blow I received came after I was asked if I am a Jew, and replied in the negative." (ibid)
The 'n' word is apparently in such frequent use that it (and worse) has even been internalised by the refugees themselves:
"I accompanied a group of asylum-seeking children to their homes tonight, as we also do on the days of protests with potential racist developments. As usual we got barraged with swearwords, but policemen advised us about safer routes. The kids sang along the way: 'I'm a nigger, I'm a nigger, nigger, and I clean Israeli homes'. ('What, you don't know it, Rami? Look it up on Youtube'.) Two 12-year-old girls asked me if I know that pretty soon the Sudanese will suffer the same fate as Jews did in Germany. One asked the other to tell her about that man, Korczak, who saved children. They asked if he was Jewish and if he would have saved all the children. One girl asked me: 'What's the opposite of free?' I had trouble finding the word: imprisoned? shackled? She said: 'OK, whatever it is, say shackled, we were born shackled and we'll die shackled'. The girls asked me why the Israelis want to deport them. I asked them: If the streets in your country would suddenly fill up with white people that speak a different language you don't understand, what would you feel? One girl said: 'I'd become a teacher and teach them my language!' Toward the end two 12-year-old girls asked me: 'Say, Rami, if you were in our place, what would you have done?'" (African kids in Tel Aviv: They'll do to us what they did to Jews in Germany, Dimi Reider, 972mag.com, 23/5/12)
Another Israeli, Uri Horesh, explains:
"When I was growing up, kushi was a perfectly neutral term for 'black person', more like 'negro' in the 1960s than 'nigger' ever was. However, nowadays, since more Hebrew speakers in Israel actually know black people, and there are indeed black people living in Israel who speak Hebrew (including migrant African laborers, but of course, Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia), the connotations of kushi have shifted towards the negative - perhaps not to the degree of the taboo that is associated with 'nigger' in the American context, but it is gradually moving in that direction." (Kushi didn't always mean 'nigger', tlvphl.blogspot.com.au, 23/5/12)
One might assume from the testimony above that the kind of anti-black/white supremacist racism, which finds vivid expression in the use of the word 'nigger' on the streets of south Tel Aviv today, is a relatively recent development in Zionist history. Not so, apparently. Given that political Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonial power-trip, it should come as no surprise to find that earlier generations of Zionists were far from immune to an obsession with European 'whiteness'.
Here, for example, British Jew and Zionist, Redcliffe Salaman, Regimental Medical Officer to the 39th Royal Fusiliers, 2nd Judean Battalion, writes of the arrival in Cairo on July 13, 1918 of the Jewish Battalions' latest batch of volunteers from Palestine's pre-World War I Jewish colonies. Salaman refers to them as "the Palestinians":
"The moment they rolled into the station I spotted a nigger amongst them, and before the train stopped I cleared that question up - his mother was a negress, his father a Sephardi (these Sephardim are a fearfully mixed lot; give me Ashkenazim for blue blood!). Then the types varied from blue-eyed handsome pseudo-Gentiles to dark, purely semitic Yemenites - and scattered between were a dozen, perhaps, of semi-negroid but often very handsome Moroccan Jews." (Palestine Reclaimed: Letters from a Jewish Officer in Palestine, 1920, pp 24-25)
Salaman adds, some pages later, that:
"The Yemenites are for the most part undersized and rather poor-spirited natives. They are not racially Jews. They are black, long-headed, hybrid Arabs. Last Saturday I worked with J. M. in the library and we got hold of every authority we could, and, from the historical evidence, it is at once clear that they have but a trace of Jewish blood in them though they probably have rather more than the Falashas. The real Jew is the European Ashkenazi, and I back him against all-comers." (ibid, p 28)
The irony of the Hatikva pogrom is that many of the participants may well have been the descendants of the very Yemeni Jews that Salaman scorned as insufficiently white to be really Jewish.
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