Benny Morris, Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Under British Bayonets

Further to my last post, and in particular to Arnold Toynbee's reference to interwar Jewish immigration into Palestine being "imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own," legendary US journalist I.F. Stone's 1946 coverage of illegal postwar Jewish immigration into British Palestine, Underground to Palestine, has some interesting light to shed on this subject.

Far from being the hapless survivors of Nazi concentration camps, many of the East European Jewish immigrants described by Stone were heavily indoctrinated Zionist youth, in short the ideal type to take on the British and/or the Palestinian Arabs militarily:

"As soon as the train began to move, everybody began to sing. The first song whose words I could make out was a Yiddish song written by a young man I was to meet soon. It was called 'Khalutsim, Gretan Zikh Far Eretz Israel' [Pioneers Prepare Themselves for Palestine]. The singing was spontaneous and joyful... Khalutsim means pioneers in Hebrew and is the term for people who have been in training for life in a settlement in Palestine. They are the Zionist elite, dedicated to the building of Palestine. The ten I was with, five boys and five girls, had all trained for several months in the same kibbutz [collective training settlement] in Poland. It was a kibbutz near Lodz called Dror [Freedom], supported by funds of the Poale Zion, the labor Zionist movement." (pp 38-39)

And note here how the immigration process is fully in the hands the leaders of the Zionist yishuv [settlement]:

"We each filled out a blue certificate printed in Hebrew on one side and in English on the other. It was called, 'Permit To Enter Palestine.' We wrote in our name, the names of our parents, the place and date of our birth, and our nationality by birth. The certificate stated that we 'had been found qualified by the representatives of the Jewish Community of Palestine for repatriation to Eretz Israel.'

"The certificate cited four authorities for the Jewish community's action.

"The first was from Ezekiel: 'And they shall abide in the lands that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers abode, and they shall abide therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children, forever.'

"The second was from Isaiah: 'With great mercies will I gather thee.'

"The third was Lord Balfour's Declaration of 2 November 1917, and the last was The Mandate for Palestine." (p 177)

Needless to say, the Palestinian 'natives' and their wishes were nowhere on the minds of Stone's interlocutors.

Britain's Dirty Game in Palestine

One of the best assessments of the origins of the nightmare known as the Palestine problem, and of Britain's responsibility for it, was written in 1968 by the great British historian and philosopher of history Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975):

"The story [of Palestine] is a tragedy, and the essence of this tragedy is that about 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs have now become refugees as a result of the intervention of foreign powers in their country's affairs. The might of these foreign powers has been irresistible, and the evicted Palestinian Arabs have been forcibly deprived of their country, their homes, and their property without having been allowed to have a voice in the determination of their own destiny.

"Though the facts are public, there is widespread ignorance of them in the Western World and, above all, in the United States, the Western country which has had, and is still having, the greatest say in deciding Palestine's fate. The United States has the greatest say, but the United Kingdom bears the heaviest load of responsibility. The Balfour Declaration of 2nd November 1917 was the winning card in a sordid contest between the two sets of belligerents in the First World War for winning the support of the Jews in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and - most important of all - in the United States.

"In promising to give the Jews 'a national home' in Palestine, the British Government was, I believe, using deliberately ambiguous language. As a citizen of the United Kingdom, I declare this belief of mine with feelings of shame and contrition, but I do believe that this is the truth. Throughout the First World War and after it, the Government of the United Kingdom was playing a double game. Perhaps a lawyer might be able to plead plausibly that there was no inconsistency between the respective pledges that Britain gave to the Arabs and the Zionists, or between the inclusion of the Balfour Declaration in the text of the mandate taken by Britain for the administration of Palestine and the classification of this mandate in the 'A' class - a class in which the mandatory power was committed to giving the people of the mandated territory their independence at the earliest date at which they would be capable of standing on their own feet. Whatever the casuists might say, laymen - Arabs or Jews - would, I think, naturally infer, bona fide, from the British Government's various statements and acts that it had made two commitments that were incompatible with each other.

"At the same time when the mandate was drafted, offered, and accepted, the Arab Palestinians amounted to more than 90% of the population of the country. The mandate for Palestine was an 'A' mandate, and, as I interpret the Hussein-McMahon correspondence, Palestine had not been excepted by the British Government from the area in which they had pledged themselves to King Hussein to recognize and support Arab independence. The Palestinian Arabs could therefore reasonably assume that Britain was pledged to prepare Palestine for becoming an independent Arab state. On the other side, the Zionists naturally saw, in the British promise of 'a national home' in Palestine, the entering wedge for the insertion into Palestine of the Jewish state of Israel which was in fact inserted there in 1948.

"To my mind, the most damaging point in the charge-sheet against my country is that Britain was in control of Palestine for 30 years - 1918-1948 - and that during those fateful three decades she never made up her mind, or at any rate never declared, what her policy about the future of Palestine was. All through those 30 years, Britain lived from hand to mouth, admitting into Palestine, year by year, a quota of Jewish immigrants that varied according to the strength of the respective pressures of the Arabs and the Jews at the time. Those immigrants could not have come in if they had not been shielded by a British chevaux-de-frise. If Palestine had remained under Ottoman Turkish rule, or if it had become an independent Arab state in 1918, Jewish immigrants would never have been admitted into Palestine in large enough numbers to enable them to overwhelm the Palestinian Arabs in this Arab people's own country. The reason why the state of Israel exists today and why today 1,500,000 Palestinian Arabs are refugees is that, for thirty years, Jewish immigration was imposed on the Palestinian Arabs by British military power until the immigrants were sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-armed to be able to fend for themselves with tanks and planes of their own. The tragedy in Palestine is not just a local one; it is a tragedy for the World, because it is an injustice that is a menace to the World's peace. Britain's guilt is not diminished by the humiliating fact that she is now impotent to redress the wrong that she has done.

"As an Englishman I hate to have to indict my country, but I believe that Britain deserves to be indicted, and this is the only personal reparation that I can make." (From the Forward to The Palestine Diary by Robert John and Sami Hadawi, 1970)

Churchill's Twisted, Colonial Logic

Further to my previous post on Churchill, I thought some of his other answers to questions put to him in March 1937 by the Peel commissioners might prove instructive.

Remember, as you read them, that the Palestinian Arabs - Muslims and Christians - constituted over 90% of Palestine's population when the Balfour Declaration, giving British backing to a Jewish National Home in Palestine, was issued in 1917, and that, despite the mass immigration of European Jews into Palestine from 1918 on, under the protection of British bayonets, they were still the overwhelming majority in their ancestral homeland in 1937.

Remember, also, that despite Britain's other myriad colonial crimes, stretching from the very beginnings of the empire 'upon which the sun never set and the blood never dried', no other colonised people that I am aware of were subjected to anything like the Kafkaesque nightmare of having their independence indefinitely postponed by a ruling colonial power with the express purpose that they would one day be superseded by another, 'superior' people, bent on the formation of an exclusive, ethnocratic, settler-colonial state.

Behold the Churchillian 'logic' behind this cruel experiment (or as one of the commissioners put it: 'a thing unheard of in history').

Q: What was the meaning and aim of the Jewish National Home?

A: The conception... was that, if the absorbtive capacity over a number of years and the breeding over a number of years... gave an increasing Jewish population, that population should not in any way be restricted from reaching a majority position.

Q: What arrangements would be made to safeguard the rights of the new minority - the Arabs?

A: That obviously remains open, but certainly we committed ourselves to the idea that some day... subject to justice and economic convenience, there might well be a great Jewish State there, numbered by millions, far exceeding the present inhabitants of the country and to cut them off from that would be a wrong... We said there should be a Jewish Home in Palestine, but if more and more Jews gather to that Home and all is worked from age to age, from generation to generation, with justice and fair consideration to those displaced... certainly... it was intended that they might in the course of time become an overwhelmingly Jewish State.

Q: When you said [in your 1922 White Paper] that the Jewish National Home in Palestine... may become a centre in which the Jewish people may take a pride, what did you mean??

A: If more Jews rally to this Home, the Home will become all Palestine eventually, provided that at each stage there is no harsh justice done to the other residents.

Q: Would this not constitute an injustice to the Palestinian Arabs?

A: Why is there harsh injustice done if people come in and make a livelihood for more and make the desert into palm groves and orange groves? Why is it injustice because there is more work and wealth for everybody? There is no injustice. The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be a desert for thousands of years.*

Q: Isn't continuing Jewish immigration a creeping invasion and conquest of Palestine spread over half a century, which is a thing unheard of in history?

A: It is not a creeping invasion. In 1918 the Arabs were beaten and at our disposition. They were defeated in the open field. It is not a question of creeping conquest. They were beaten out of the place. Not a dog could bark. And then we decided in the process of the conquest of these people to make certain pledges to the Jews. Now the question is how to administer in a humane and enlightened fashion and certain facts have emerged.

I could go on, but I'm sure you've got the idea.

[*Shades of Tony Abbott's words of 15/11/14: "As we look around this glorious city, as we see the extraordinary development, it's hard to think that back in 1788 it was nothing but bush."]

Q & A with Tony Abbott

If you're a Young Liberal, and you find yourself under siege by Bolshevik and Maoist academics, to whom should you turn for advice and guidance?

Silly question. Tony Abbott of course!

"Recently, some Liberal students asked me what might they do to armour themselves against their left-wing lecturers. My response: familiarise yourselves with the bigger story of which we Australians are but part. And a good place to begin is to read and regularly re-read the New Testament (it's our core document) and to read cover to cover Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples, because you can't understand us without knowing that." (Covert brainwashing of our kids is taking its toll, The Australian, 9/3/19)

And why is our Suppository of Wisdom - Tony's own words, you'll remember - recommending dear old Winston to the troops? Could it be because, deep down, he shares Churchill's colonial, supremacist mindset?

Many examples of this mindset may be adduced from Churchill's long history of racism, but my particular favourite emerged in the context of the 1937 Palestine Royal Commission, aka the Peel Commission. Palestine at the time, of course, was in the throes of a full-scale rebellion against Zionist immigration and colonisation - imposed on the indigenous Palestinians by British bullets and bayonets:

Lord Peel:

"[Do you think] Britain might have some compunction if she felt she was downing the Arabs year after year when they wanted to remain in their own country?"

Churchill:

"I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place." (Churchill & The Jews, Martin Gilbert, 2007, p 120)

Churchill's testimony, btw, was kept secret by the commissioners.

Spinning Israel's Jewish Nation-State Law

Editorial commentary in support of each and every Israeli turn of the screw is, to say the least, conspicuous by its presence in Murdoch's Australian, yet on the subject of the apartheid state's latest addition to its 50+ apartheid laws, the nation-state law, The Australian's editor has so far said zip.

Yesterday, however, The Australian published an opinion piece (Illiberalism lies with the critics of Jewish nation-state law, 23/7/18) in defence of the legislation by one, Eugene Kontorovich, described as "a scholar at the Jerusalem think tank Kohelet Policy Forum." (This outfit describes itself on its website as "striving to secure Israel's future as the nation-state of the Jewish people, strengthening representative democracy, and broadening individual liberty and free market principles in Israel.")

Kontorovich would have us believe that:

"... Israel's Basic Law would not be out of place among the liberal democratic constitutions of Europe - which include similar provisions that have not aroused controversy... Consider the Slovak constitution, which opens with the words, 'We the Slovak nation', and lays claim to 'the natural right of nations to self-determination'."

What he omits to mention, of course, is that, unlike Slovakia, there is nothing 'natural' about Israel or its political evolution. Slovakia's emergence as a nation was a natural progression following the breakup of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I and was based on the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. The same natural process should have been applied to Palestine under Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations: "Certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognised subject to the rendering of administrative advice... by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone. The wishes of these communities must be a principal consideration in the selection of the Mandatory."

Instead, the Palestinians were deliberately denied their 'natural right to self-determination', first by the British on behalf of the Zionist settlers who were allowed to flood into Palestine from 1918 on, and then by the Zionist settler state of Israel following the military takeover and ethnic cleansing of most of Palestine by Zionist terror gangs in 1948. As Britain's foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour (of Balfour Declaration infamy) wrote in 1919: "The contradiction between the letters of the Covenant and the policies of the Allies is even more flagrant in the case of the 'independent nation' of Palestine... For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country..."

But there's more. Why are we all up-in-arms about Israeli settlements? After all, they had the blessing of the - wait for it! - League of Nations:

"Another controversial provision of the law declares 'the development of Jewish settlement' to be a national value that the government should promote. It is understood to refer to encouraging population dispersion into the periphery of the country. This essentially restates policy adopted by the international community in 1922 in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which sought to 'encourage... close settlement by Jews'."

More sins of omission:

1) The League of Nations, from its inception, was little more than a rubber stamp in the hands of the two post WWI imperial powers, Britain and France.

2) The Palestine Mandate was given to Britain... by Britain. As to its composition, the great J.M.N. Jeffries revealed: "The Mandate followed the precedent of the Balfour Declaration [which was incorporated into the text of the Mandate]. It was drafted in quiet between the [British] Government and the Zionists, mostly by the Zionists, and then it was issued under the cover of the League of Nations, as though it were the result of the collected debates of the world's lawgivers."  (Palestine: The Reality (1939), pp 522-23)

Note also the angry words of Britain's then foreign secretary Lord Curzon, who said of the draft Mandate: "Acting upon (? against) the noble principle of self-determination and ending with a splendid appeal to the League of Nations, we then proceed to draw up a document which reeks of Judaism in every paragraph and is an avowed constitution of a Jewish state - and the poor Arabs are only allowed to look through the keyhole as a non-Jewish community. It is quite clear that this mandate has been drawn up by someone reeling under the fumes of Zionism." (A.L.Tibawi, Anglo-Arab Relations & The Question of Palestine 1914-1921 (1977), pp 427-28)

Neither Forgotten Nor Forgiven

Words such as 'mealy-mouthed', 'circumlocution', and 'prevarication', hardly begin to do justice to this appalling sentence:

"Prince William is visiting a region where three decades of British rule between the two world wars helped establish some of the fault lines of today's Israeli-Palestinian conflict." (Prince on 'delicate' tour of fault lines, AP, agencies/Sydney Morning Herald, 26/6/18)

Helped? Some? You're joking.

The simple fact of the matter is that there were no "fault lines in Palestine" in 1917 when the British issued the Balfour Declaration. The British, without help from anyone else, created them by flooding the country with fanatical Zionist colonisers from eastern Europe, bent on turning the place into a Jews-only, utopian state. Britain, and Britain alone, is responsible for creating today's 100-year-old Palestine problem. It was an own goal.

Britain's exclusive role in laying the foundations for the dispossession of the Palestinian Arab people should never be forgotten. Nor forgiven.

It Seemed Like a Jolly Good Idea at the Time

I introduced Thursday's post, Erin Go Brath, with a quote from Ronald Storrs (1881-1955), the British governor of Jerusalem from 1920-26. As indicated, the quote comes from his highly-regarded memoir Orientations (1937). It is obvious from the passage that, at the time of writing his book, Storrs was a starry-eyed admirer of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine. But, as the bloody reality of that project inevitably became apparent, the penny began to drop for him, as those wonderful, enterprising Zionist chappies of the 20s turned on Britain in the late 40s and went for its jugular.

Here's how Zionist historian Rory Miller concludes his essay Sir Ronald Storrs & Zion: the dream that turned into a nightmare (Middle East Studies, July 2000):

"For the Zionists the story [of British involvement in Palestine] concluded well with the birth of the State of Israel. For Storrs the story did not have such a happy ending. By the time of Israel's founding in 1948, Storrs' long-time interest in Palestine had crystallized into a loathing of Zionism. It had even turned into paranoia with Storrs concerned lest his public pronouncements on Zionism might result in his assassination by Zionist extremists and get him 'sterned off', as he liked to phrase it... Entries into his diary such as 'Palestine news is heartbreaking' and 'Palestine is worse than ever... I wish I could let my anxiety, even despair lapse into... indifference' evoke the bitterness, hostility and resignation of a man who had involved himself in the Palestine question for over 30 years. Indeed it is a private note made by Storrs when he was contemplating adding an addendum to the 1948 reprint of the final and definitive edition of Orientations that emotionally and eloquently best sums up the totality of his opposition to Zionism and his belief in the harm wrought by the Zionist experiment in Palestine by this time: 're-reading these chapters I compared what Britain had done for Zionism with what Zionism had done to the British, to the peaceful inhabitants of the Holy Land and to the Middle East, to Judaism and ultimately to world Jewry, to the fair name of the United Nations, to the Anglo-American relationship, upon which the future of humanity depends - then, in the speech of our book of common prayer - 'I held my tongue and spake nothing. I kept silence, yea even from God's* words, but it was pain and grief to me'."

[*The Book of Common Prayer actually says, 'good words'.]

You Must Read These Books!

Here's a review by novelist, Selma Dabbagh, at Electronic Intifada, of two books that should be read by every serious student of Palestinian history:

You are here

https://electronicintifada.net/content/putting-balfour-trial/23076

Time for Heads to Roll?

This is surely not just negligence. It looks more as though operatives of the Tory governments of prime ministers Cameron and May are on a mission to sanitise Britain's colonial past: 

"Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country's National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter - in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced. Other missing files concern the British colonial administration in Palestine... " (Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives, Ian Cobain, theguardian.com, 26/12/17)

Nor is this new - see my 6/8/16 post Too Many Skeletons in the Cupboard.

Since we may well be witnessing a cliocidal campaign here, a commission of inquiry would seem to be in order.

The Joy of British Imperialism

What a damning indictment of little britain this finding is:

"The British public are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, according to a new poll. At its height in 1922 the British Empire governed a fifth of the world's population and a quarter of the world's total land area... YouGov found 44% were proud of Britain's history of colonialism while only 21% regretted that it happened. 23% held neither view... The British Empire is not widely taught in detail in British schools, with history lessons tending to focus on other areas." (British people are generally proud of their country's role in colonialism and the British Empire, poll finds, Jon Stone, independent.co.uk, 19/1/16)

Trawling through the 320 comments which follow the report, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of little brits wouldn't even know the Balfour Declaration if it hit them in the face. Staggeringly, only one mentioned Palestine, Britain's worst ever colonial crime, and even then referred to it as 'Israel'.

Some examples of the abysmal ignorance of little brits on the subject of British colonialism in general, and the Middle East in particular, are as follows. The first borders on Trumpian parody:

"British Empire. Fantastic. Winners. Changed the world for the better. And made a fortune while doing it. No sitting idle on benefits for them. Technology, the law, exploration - the Brits were at the forefront. But nice to see so many comments from the heirs of so many losers. Obviously not exterminated. Clearly no genocide. To cap it all, the British were thoroughly nice too, freely handing back countries when the natives had gained some modicum of civility. Best Empire ever." (ScottishDanno)

As for the Middle East:

"The Middle East, to it's (sic) benefit would be seeing the rule of secular law right now rather than the vicious rule of religion." (PGwood)

Simple-minded PGwood is obviously blissfully unaware that his country was single-handedly responsible for transforming unsuspecting multi-sectarian Ottoman Palestine into the viciously mono-sectarian Jewish state of Israel.

The only response to PGwood, from NK, missed the opportunity to point this out, asking merely "Why would you want Britain to meddle in how people run their own countries? If reform is to take place there then let it happen from within. Look at the mess in Iraq and Syria right now because of British and US meddling."

PGwood, clearly oblivious to the fact that the Middle East isn't 'next door' to Britain, replied, apropos of nothing: "If your neighbour is throwing rocks at his wife, do you say something about it. or not?"

Coming closer to Britain's meddling in the Middle East, but nonetheless maddeningly vague, is this effort:

"Those getting all misty-eyed about colonialism would to well to reflect on its enduring legacy. No, not cricket and railway networks but the mess that is now the Middle East and North Africa and the human wave that is only starting to rebound on Europe. Empire is (sic) a very long embrace indeed." (lastflightout)

To which came this blame-it-all-on-the-French, blatantly racist reply:

"It didn't endure. It has no legacy. And actually, the Middle Eastern and African countries with most problems seem to have been French, not British. Regardless, when the civilised Europeans left, the natives returned to their brutal, savage and backward ways." (Brad_Humberside)

Which in turn elicited the following rejoinders: "Saudi Arabia? Israel? Yes? Would you like to have another go at defending British barbarism?" (Kay Parlay); "'civilised Europeans' - yes, so civilised they didn't know to wash their behinds after defecating, or wash their hands after that before eating." (adamcrossphoto)

But back to the "problems" of the Middle East. We've already had Brad_Humberside pointing the finger at the French, now we've got this genius blaming the Ottoman Empire:

"The middle east problems were as much caused by the collapse of Ottoman power (only partially nudged over the line by the British and French) and the ungainly carve up afterwards. Not the Empires finest moment maybe but you can only ever deal with the problems in front of you at the time." (RevCr)

Only partially NUDGED over the line!!!??? But let's focus on "the problems in front of you," shall we?

There was, in fact, no problem for the British and French to deal with in the Middle East during World War I or immediately thereafter. Rather, these two imperialist bovver boys created problems for the people of the Middle East:

Britain, for example, who had promised her Arab allies independence in the 1915 McMahon Treaty, betrayed them by agreeing to divide the Arab world between themselves and the French in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement. It then went on to compound that treachery by supporting, in the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, thus creating the Palestine problem where before there had been no such problem.

Homework, Anyone?

As much as I love Abby Martin, is it too much to expect of her, and other progressives who 'get' Palestine, to bone up on the early history of the Palestine problem? This is her riff on the subject from the same video extolled in my last post:

Martin: They should have created Israel not in the God-damn Middle East. Put it in fucking Australia. Like, what the hell were they thinking? It's insane.

[MERC: Actually, Abby, "they" shouldn't have put it anywhere, neither in Palestine, nor in Australia. The creation of ethnocratic, apartheid states are never a good idea.]

Rogan: I don't know enough about the history of that region...
Martin: I mean, Sykes-Picot, Western empires basically just drew a line through the Middle East and divided all these countries and formed all these borders back, like, 120 years ago and I don't know, like 19... when was Sykes-Picot? I dunno, somewhere around that time.

[MERC: But surely, Abby, you've heard of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, particularly in the year of its centenary?]

So anyway, fast forward to when the Ottoman Empire was colonising this area...

[MERC: Abby, you mean 'rewind'. And also, however bad their repression of the Arabs during World War I was, the Ottomans at least didn't flood Greater Syria with Turkish colons.]

... and the British were occupying what is Palestine, right, and the Zionist lobby was really strong. This is well before the Holocaust, and they were super, super strong and emboldened, and they were negotiating with the Brits about where they can form, like, a Jewish state, and there was really no support until the Holocaust where they were able to sell, like, you know, the fear more and there was even false flag attacks where Zionist organisations were going round different Arab countries and committing terrorism and they're saying, like, the Jews need to come and escape, you guys are being persecuted. Like, they'd actually carry out terrorism in, like, synagogues and stuff and it's all documented.

[MERC: Abby, you've fast-forwarded a tad too far here. The synagogues you mentioned were in early 50s Iraq, after the creation of Israel in 1948.]

But the ethnic cleansing that went on, I mean, it's horrific. There's dozens of massacres that happened in the formation of Israel because even though it was partitioned by the UN - I don't know who gave this international body the authority to partition a country on top of another country, but on top of that there are several massacres that just continued to take more and more of the land as I said, and that was called the Nakba, and so all those people were expelled violently and purged from their land, and we visited some of these refugee camps and the people were, like, literally... our houses are, like, 5 miles away and we're just stuck in these camps and we've been here for 50 years. Yeah, it sucks.

Israeli Fascism? So What Else is New?

"[Israeli] Opposition leader and Zionist Union chairman Isaac Herzog warned on Saturday that Israel was headed toward fascism..." ('Israel is becoming a fascist state, US can't save the day', Joy Bernard, jpost.com, 24/6/17)

Was headed toward fascism?

Israel has always been fascist:

"April slid into May in a crescendo of heat. Down the lanes, the mimosa trees were powdered with yellow pollen, and the fragrance hung sweetly in the still air. May Day itself was a blaze of luxurious sunshine. I spent it leaning over my parapet watching the many processions of colony boys and girls marching along, singing, bearing gay blue-and-white banners - the Zionist colours - with the Shield of David and Hebrew lettering embroidered in scarlet and gold. The banners were carried with the dignity and precision of a regiment bearing the colours. And the marching of the children, whose ages ranged from 7 or 8 to near the enlistment age, was as faultless as well-drilled infantry...

"Rising on the clear air above the rooftops came the sound of Hebrew songs as the children marched past, and the rhythmic shouting as they kept impeccably in step. On either side, the road was lined with people from the village - parents, friends of the children who cheered as the columns went by.

"Ruth, the hotel help, who came up to my rooftop to watch, said: 'Ah, but it is beautiful...' And she leant over the parapet with an intense air of satisfaction.

"I shook my head. The picture was certainly gay and colourful. But to me there was something deeper which made the May Day processions a symbol of militant Zionism. I wished that the three-abreast marching could become rigged, that just one small boy or girl would straggle out of the ranks and break the immaculate neatness of the columns.

"Why, I asked myself, were the Jewish settlements bringing up their children in a free land in a way that emulated one of the worst practical expressions of a doctrine they had fled? In conversations with British Government officials and with Arabs, I had heard the Jews condemned for teaching their children to become militant, and I had been told by the Arabs that such training was deliberate because the colonies were preparing for the day when they should rise and seize Palestine by force; that together with this military preparation there was an equally careful mental training designed to convince the children that Palestine was their lawful heritage, that they had only to reach out and take it and Britain and America, faced with a fait accompli, would not interfere. They would, in fact, be satisfied that the Palestine problem had solved itself. Arabs had assured me that this was the Zionist educational policy and that already Jewish children born and brought up in Palestine sincerely believed that the Arabs had no right to the country and that only those who had reclaimed the soil, like the colonists, were the legitimate inheritors of the land.

"'It reminds me,' I told Ruth, as I watched with unhappy fascination another column passing along the road, 'of a procession of boy Blackshirts I once saw marching over the cobbles of Trieste - kindergarten children carrying Fascist banners and moving faultlessly along the waterfront past the Town Hall'." (Reporting from Palestine: 1943-1944, Barbara Board, 2008, pp 45-46)

The ALP: Neither Principles Nor Brains

God I'm tired of the Australian Labor Party. We all know it's as devoid of principles as a fish is of feathers. But principles aside, what about brains?

OK, wrack yours and come up with just one ALP politician since Whitlam who could be said to have even the proverbial half-a-brain.

Struggling?

Maybe Barry Jones, former Science Minister (1983-90) of 'Knowledge Nation' fame, two-time National President of the ALP (1992-2000; 2005-2006, and now Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne comes to mind. Certainly, he's probably the nearest thing to Einstein to emerge from the ranks of the ALP, which, BTW, he joined in 1950.

I note that he recently (2015) appeared on The Conversation arguing that our political system was in crisis in part because of our politicians' refusal to analyse and explain complex problems. So what happens when Labor's supposed Einstein analyses the modern Middle East, which is one of the things he sets out to do in his 2016 book Knowledge, Courage, Leadership, under the heading Middle Eastern horrors?

Short answer: he screws up.

Some examples:

"After Islam swept through the Middle East, then North Africa and Spain... Christian Europe had limited understanding of the Muslim world, and failed to comprehend deep divisions between Sunnis (and the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect) and Sh'ites [sic], sectarian feuds about organisation and authority in Islam and interpretation of the Qu'ran [sic], which began in the generation after Muhammad's death (632)." (p 154)

Hello? The Wahhabis originated in 18th century Arabia.

"Britain resisted attempts to settle in Palestine large numbers of Jews displaced... from Europe in the 1930s, anxious to avoid offering [sic] Arabs and jeopardising access to oil." (p 155)

This statement is wholly incorrect. Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Britain oversaw the flooding of Palestine with Zionist settlers from Europe. She only sought to restrict the flow in 1939, after 3 years of Arab rebellion. In the words of the MacDonald White Paper of that year: "[T]he fear of the Arabs that this influx will continue indefinitely until the Jewish population is in a position to dominate them [has] made possible disturbances which have given a serious setback to economic progress, depleted the Palestine exchequer, rendered life and property insecure, and produced a bitterness between the Arab and Jewish populations which is deplorable..." The White Paper announced, therefore, that Jewish immigration into Palestine would henceforth be restricted to 75,000 over the next 5 years, and that after that, Jewish immigrants would only be allowed in with the acquiescence of the Palestinian Arabs.

"The creation of Israel (1948)... was a reaction to the horror and moral abyss of the Holocaust... Israel has been subject to constant threat ever since 1948, but it survives." (p 155)

This is patent nonsense. The Zionist movement had been scheming for the creation of 'Israel' from its inception in the 1890s, long before the Holocaust. The leadership of Palestine's armed Zionist gangs in late 40s Palestine were only interested in Holocaust survivors in so far as they could be used as cannon fodder to help wrest control of Palestine from its majority Arab population. 

And as for "constant threat" and "survival", one merely has to ask:

a) if you muscle in on someone else's patch, what the hell do you expect you're going to get in return, hugs and kisses?

b) if integrity of life and limb are really what matters to you (and who would deny it?) would you rather be an Israeli Jew or a Palestinian Arab?

"The Suez conflict (1916) in which Britain and France invaded Egypt to reclaim the Suez Canal, which had been nationalised by President Nasser." (p 156)

This is like a summary of World War II which mentions only Italy and Japan on the Axis side. The 1956 aggression against Egypt was the result of an Israeli-French-British conspiracy. On October 29, 1956, Israeli forces crossed into Sinai and raced towards the Suez Canal. A combined Anglo-French paratroop unit was dropped onto Port Said a week later, on November 4, prior to a planned advance on Ismailia and Suez.

"In June 1967 ('The Six Day War') Israel defeated invading forces from Egypt, Syria and Jordan." (p 156)

No, this is Israeli folklore. Israel struck the first blow when it attacked the Egyptian air force on the ground in a surprise pre-emptive attack on the morning of 5 June, 1967. This was followed by similar attacks on the Jordanian, Iraqi and Syrian air forces. As Israeli General Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war, wrote on 3 June, 1972 in Le Monde: "All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our 'defence' against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel's existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army."

Finally, there's this complete gibberish:

"In Jordan, the West funded and encouraged Hezbollah (jihadist + clean) to weaken Hamas (pragmatic + corrupt), presumably hoping that a fractured leadership would be helpful for Israel. Jordan had been essentially secularist but jihadism has become a significant force." (p 156)

To which one can only respond by asking, WTF was going on in his head when he wrote that?

Jones has been in retirement on a fat parliamentary pension for decades now. He has had all the time in the world (and supposedly the brains) to get the basics of modern Middle Eastern history right. If this, then, is the best our Einstein manque can do on the subject, what hope can we possibly expect from such intellectual pygmies as Shorten and crew?

Give Me the Sand Any Day

I notice that Bush of Baghdad's Australian poodle, John Howard, is trumpeting the creation of a Centre for Western Civilisation, "[t]he key goal of [which] will be to facilitate the teaching of Western civilisation as a coherent field of study" (Gift from a true champion of Western civilisation, John Howard, The Australian, 14/3/17), and is, moreover, to be the chairman of its board.

'Civilisation' (along with its mate, 'progress') seems to be experiencing something of a revival these days.

It was, of course, under such diverting rubrics as these that the Zionist colonisers of Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, protected by British bayonets, quietly went about preparing for the day when they could snatch Palestine from the hands of its Arab inhabitants.

Many Britons at that time were entranced by such words, and cheered on the Zionist colonial-settler project in their name. But not all.

As one British observer of the Palestinian scene, the Anglican preacher, suffragist and antiwar campaigner Maude Royden (1876-1956), noted in her 1939 book, The Problem of Palestine:

"Before attempting a solution of the Palestinian problem, it is necessary to consider a question which has up to now hardly been raised: it is the question of the meaning of the word 'civilization'.

"Putting aside the promises made by the British to the Arab and to the Jew, putting aside also our right to make some of these promises at all, let us consider the present situation as realists who wish to make the best of a bad business. Englishmen are apt at this point to reflect that, in any case, the Arabs have a great deal to gain by co-operation with the Jews. The Arabs of Palestine are terribly poor. The Jews have brought with them capital, intelligence and a knowledge of Western science which will make much of the fertile places and at least all that can be made of the barren. Moreover they are deeply concerned with all that improves hygiene and are a modern, progressive and enlightened people. If we admit that the Arabs should have been consulted before the promise of a National Home for Jews was made, did we not after all do them a great service when we made it?

"This was, I admit, my own view when I first looked at the problem. I had realized that the old association of ideas by which Palestine and the Jews were one thing in the minds of people brought up on the Bible as I had been was a misleading one. I had grasped the fact that Arabs and Turks were not the same people in spite of their being both Moslems! I had got hold of the fact that the Arabs had been settled in Palestine for thirteen hundred years and were still there, to the extent of over 90% of the population, at the outbreak of war. I was reasonable enough to perceive that, these things being so, it was monstrous of us to have given away their land to the Jews (who had left it 2,000 years ago) without even going through the form of consulting them first.

"I still believed that we had done them a service, even if unintentionally, and that they were, if within their rights resenting it, foolish and shortsighted to do so.

"My position I believe to be that of a large number of my fellow-countrymen and women. It is based on the assumption that the Jews are offering to the Arabs in Palestine 'a higher civilization'.

"What is meant by this phrase? I find that, unconsciously, one is apt to mean by it 'a higher material standard of life'. This phrase (omitting the word 'material') is quoted in the Woodhead Commission Report from a memorandum 'received from a Jewish source'. The memorandum speaks of 'the two different standards of life' in Palestine; 'that of the bulk of the Arab population and the higher one introduced by Jewish... settlers'. The reference is to 'education and standards of life'.

"Before assuming that the Arabs owe gratitude to the Jews for their efforts to raise the Arab standard of life, it necessary to ask whether the civilization which is based on a simple way of living, on a rural foundation, sustained by agriculture and other farming, is necessarily a lower one than that which is urban, commercial and industrial. This question does not seem to have been put; yet it is worth putting. The advantages of Jewish immigration to Palestinian Arabs may then be seen in a different night."

Royden instances the case of the Zionist-conceived and -built city of Tel-Aviv, just to the north of the ancient Arab port city of Jaffa:

"In Palestine [the Jews] have... created Tel-Aviv on a piece of sand. Both the Royal and the Woodhead Commissioners describe this last feat as 'startling', and certainly it is so. Here is a considerable town, full of life and activity and as purely Jewish as a town can be. It is building schools, houses and places of business, and it is already a port of importance."

Be that as it may, she asks rhetorically, "Is a piece of sand such a frightful spectacle?"

And adds:

"There are some who prefer it to Brighton, just as there are many to whom Brighton is a delight and the seashore a horror unless it be lined with piers and esplanades.

"We may enjoy our own preference without condemning the other. When, however, the urbanized and industrialized civilization is described as the 'higher' one, and the farmer and peasant expected to be grateful to those who thrust it upon him, we are entitled to claim that, on the contrary, he has a right to prefer his own." (pp 108-16)

Such critical thinking, however, would be lost on Howard, with his mindless prattle about "the Judeo-Christian ethic" and Australia's "deep-seated tolerance towards people of different backgrounds."

When Zionists Boycotted Jews in Palestine

You know how it goes whenever the subject of the Boycott Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel comes up - dark references by the usual suspects to 1930s Germany and Nazi attacks on Jewish shops and businesses. As, for example, in this nonsense from the dopey leader of the NSW Labor Party, Luke Foley:

"The call to boycott Jewish commerce is Europe's oldest political appeal. That call today goes under the name of the BDS campaign. I condemn it." (See my 7/4/12 post Where Luke Foley's Coming From)

The next time you hear this kind of crap you might like to recall the following episode from 1940s Palestine when the Zionists there instituted a boycott of a Jewish newspaper:

"That autumn in Jerusalem, I had an insight into another side of life in Palestine - what is loosely called the freedom of the press. There was of course a strict censorship, both government and military, with a close liaison between the two. Opinion, so far as it did not actually inflame the population, was not censorable. But freedom of the press in Palestine during the war was restricted not so much by censorship as by lack of newsprint. Arab and Hebrew newspapers were given only limited supplies. The Palestine Post*, Jewish-owned and controlled - the only English daily in the country - was no exception. It had to reduce itself to a single sheet.

"At such a time, a plan to start a daily in opposition to the Post seemed unfeasible. After many months of negotiations, however, a second English daily was put on the market. It was owned by a Russian Jew, Khasin, who was already printing a weekly English paper on the Sabbath when no Palestine Post appeared. Khasin, with a totally inadequate supply of newsprint, with only two Intertype machines and one Monotype, a couple of stonehands and two reporters, launched his new daily, the Palestine Illustrated News, amid a storm of opposition from official Jewish bodies who began a campaign against the paper, telling influential Jews in the cities of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv to boycott it and sending roundabout instructions to the Jewish newsboys to refuse to sell it on the streets. Into Khasin's possession there came a copy of a circular letter giving reasons why the paper should be boycotted. It stated that Khasin was not working in liaison with Jewish institutions, that his policy was his own, and that as the paper did not officially represent the Jewish outlook in the country, it was not suitable for a Jew to buy.

"The first copies sold in Zion Square created a minor riot. Khasin had engaged special newsboys and the Palestine Post sellers began a free fight in an effort to drive the Illustrated News off the streets. But despite the underground and open war, the circulation increased. Under immense difficulties, the layout of the News - hampered by the inadequacies of staff and machines, both primitive - was gradually improved. Whereas the Palestine Post played up Zionist achievement, and printed all Jewish news available, Khasin tried to devote equal space to both Jewish and Arab news.

"Difficulties, however, were to increase. Khasin, who flouted Jewish religious practice by printing on the Sabbath, wished to produce his paper on such fasts and holy days as the Palestine Post closed down. He received anonymous threatening letters, stating that time bombs would be laid in his offices and in the machine-room; that the compositors and stonehands working for him would be liable to personal attack if they consented to produce a paper on such days. But Khasin was not to be beaten. Already the Sabbath edition was being set and printed in an Arab workshop. There each Friday noon the Palestine News offices transported themselves - and under the direction of the two reporters, the Arab printers, who could read no English, set the paper by hand. They had learnt the letters of the English alphabet and could recognise them - but in reverse. Despite this, their galley-pulls were often cleaner than those of the European compositors working at their Intertypes. throughout Friday night, when devout Jews had ceased to work, the Arab flatbed presses would be groaning at top speed spewing out copies of Khasin's Illustrated News. Within a few weeks of the launching of the paper the Arab press was also publishing the News on special Holy Days in addition to each Sabbath (though the latter was called simply 'weekend' and undated).

"English people who grew to know the opposition with which the paper had to contend bought it in preference to the Post, although its world news coverage was inadequate and much of its grammar quaint. Military camps placed large orders.

"But the boycott, although it had not stopped the sale of the paper, had achieved something far more important. Only a few Jewish firms dared to advertise in it. The Arabs, of course, unless cinema proprietors or restaurateurs, did not normally advertise in a Jewish-owned paper. Khasin struggled on for many months, trying to defeat the unofficial boycott, but except for government advertisements, police notices and the like, the credit side of his accounts was bare. In the end, it was not lack of capital which closed down the News - but lack of newsprint itself." (Reporting from Palestine 1943-1944, Barbara Board**, 2008, pp 119-122)

[*The Palestine Post (1932-1950) was the predecessor of today's Likudnik Jerusalem Post;**Barbara Board (1916-1986)]

JSIL/ISIL: Nothing New Under the Sun

Barbara Board (1916-86) was a British freelance journalist who reported on developments in British Mandate Palestine during the 1930s and 40s for British and Canadian papers. Here she describes the social makeup of that notorious Zionist terrorist outfit, the Stern Gang* - a sort of Jewish State in the Levant (JSIL) if you will:

"From what sections of the Jewish community in Palestine were the gangsters drawn? Under what guise did they masquerade as a cover to their other activities. My Hadera informants gave me varied answers. Many of the gangsters, they told me, had come from the [Zionist] colonies themselves. They were potential criminal types who had avoided joining the armed forces in 1940 and had managed to resist Zionist pressure to enrol at the recruiting centres set up in the following months. These youths, ironically enough already trained in self-defence, found it an easy matter to work out operations for attack. They formed themselves into self-contained gangs. Then, not as individual members but as units, they allied themselves with Stern. Not all the gangsters however were ex-colonists. A large proportion came from the ranks of the unemployed - pitiful groups of derelict young Jews who between the beginning of the war and the opening of War Department installations in Palestine roamed the streets of Tel Aviv and Haifa, penniless and starving. They had provided ripe material for militant propagandists. Yet other members of the gangs, neither colonists nor unemployed, believed in terrorism as their national creed. They were fascists culled from various sections of the Jewish community - sons of wealthy families, clerks, shop assistants, waiters, factory hands, labourers." (Reporting from Palestine: 1943-1944, 2008, p 34)

I was reminded of Board's description by the words of Australia's national counter-terrorism co-ordinator, Greg Moriarty, writing on the subject of so-called 'lone wolf' terrorism, linked to (or inspired by, however tenuously in same cases) today's Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL):

"For some, the attraction is ideological and absolute. They believe in a narrow and extreme interpretation of Islam where there can be no compromise with the West or with other Muslims who do not accept the righteousness of ISIL's cause and submit to its will. But we also face another challenge from those who are not necessarily deeply committed to and engaged with the Islamist ideology but are nonetheless, due to a range of reasons, including mental health issues, susceptible to being motivated and lured rapidly down a dangerous path by the terrorist narrative. For some of these people, the warped views which ISIL propagates can, to their own distorted way of thinking, justify their anger at society and give meaning to their existence." (Security threat review, David Wroe, Sydney Morning Herald, 22/7/16)

[*For an account of the Stern Gang's terror campaign in Britain see my 6/7/12 post Anyone Remember the Stern Gang's London Offensive?]

Indigenous Terminology (Australia & Palestine)

AUSTRALIA - from the document Indigenous Terminology issued recently by the University of NSW (teaching.unsw.edu.au)

More appropriate

Invasion
Colonisation
Occupation

Australia was not settled peacefully, it was invaded, occupied and colonised. Describing the arrival of the Europeans as a 'settlement' attempts to view Australian history from the shores of England rather than the shores of Australia.

Less appropriate

Settlement

The use of the word 'settlement' ignores the reality of Indigenous Australian peoples' lands being stolen from them on the basis of the legal fiction of terra nullius and negates the resistance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The fact that most settlers did not see themselves as invading the country, and that convicts were transported against their will is beside the point. The effects were the same for Indigenous Australian peoples.

PALESTINE - suggested draft for the University of NSW's next Indigenous Terminology guideline

Appropriate

Invasion
Ethnic-cleansing
Colonisation
Occupation

Palestine was not settled peacefully. It was invaded, occupied, colonised, and ethnically-cleansed from 1918 to 1948 by Zionist immigrants under the protection of British bayonets and with the aim of carving out a Jewish state. Those remnants not ethnically cleansed in 1948 - the West Bank and the Gaza Strip - were invaded, ethnically-cleansed, occupied, and colonised from 1967 on.

Not at all appropriate

Return
Redemption
Land of Israel (Eretz Israel)
Terrorism (unless applied to the ethnic-cleansing operations of Zionist forces)

Describing the invasion of Zionist immigrants as a 'return' to, and 'redemption' of, the 'Land of Israel' (Eretz Israel) panders to political Zionist mythology and ignores the settler-colonial reality of the Zionist project in Palestine. Palestine was never, in Zionist terminology, 'a country without a people.' In 1918, 90% of its population were Arabs (Muslims and Christians), and, up to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist terrorists in 1948, they were still a two-thirds majority in their own land. The use of the terms 'return' and 'redemption' ignores the massive Zionist theft of Palestinian homes and lands which followed the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the Zionist label 'terrorism,' used against the Palestinian Arab people, negates their resistance to Zionist colonisation, a resistance which began in earnest in 1920 and continues to this day. The fact that some Zionist immigrants left their European homes and invaded Palestine in response to anti-Semitic persecution in Europe is beside the point. The effects were the same for the Indigenous Palestinian Arab people.

Invasion Day: 26 January, 2016

A fitting time to recall what the Zionist hero, Winston Churchill, speaking before British Mandate Palestine's 1937 Peel Commission, had to say about Indigenous Palestinians & Australians:

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

First the Smear, Then the Lie

The Guardian, under the new editorship of Zionist Jonathan Freedland, has sunk to new depths with the publication of a blatant propaganda piece by Israel's minister of public security, Gilad Erdan, on the latest surge in Palestinian RESISTANCE to the OCCUPATION of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.

Predictably titled The terror in Jerusalem is based on a lie (16/10/15), Erdan's piece focuses exclusively on desperate acts of Palestinian resistance, while completely ignoring the intolerable and always expanding STATE TERROR of Israeli occupation, colonisation and oppression which spawns them. Two features, both standard fare for Israeli PR, stand out.

First there's the vile smear, originally trotted out by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to the UNGA last September ("Isis & Hamas are branches of the same poisonous tree."):

"Just as Isis murders innocent people because of its extremist jihadi ideology, so is the case with Palestinian terrorism, which is based on the same murderous ideology."

Then there's the big lie:

"Amid all this incitement, the most inflammatory charge is the claim that Israel has some kind of plan to change the arrangements governing access to the area within the Old City of Jerusalem, revered by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif. This is a lie - and an irresponsible lie at that. I can state in no uncertain terms and on behalf of the government of Israel that my country is not seeking to change the status quo regarding the Temple Mount."

That 'assurance', like all Zionist assurances, has about as much credibility as the following whopper by Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936), one of the Zionist architects, along with Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952), of the Balfour Declaration of 1917:

"It has been said, and is still being obstinately repeated by anti-Zionists again and again, that Zionism aims at the creation of an independent 'Jewish State.' But this is wholly fallacious. The 'Jewish state' was never part of the Zionist programme." (History of Zionism 1600-1918, 1919, I, xxiv-xxv)

Keep in mind that Sokolow's lie came just 23 years after the publication of political Zionism's seminal 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), by Theodor Herzl, political Zionism's founding father.

As for Zionist designs on the Haram ash-Sharif these are as old as political Zionism itself. Consider this disclosure by Weizmann:

"I have just remembered another of Samuel's remarks which I have not passed on to you; he said: 'We should rebuild the Temple, as a symbol of Jewish unity.'"

That comes from a letter written to Ahad Ha'am on 14 December 1914, and can be found in the collection The Letters & Papers of Chaim Weizmann, Vol VII, page 82. Herbert Samuel (1860-1963), of course, a British Liberal MP and Zionist Jew, would go on to become British Mandate Palestine's first High Commissioner from 1920 to 1925. 

What Zionists say in public is one thing. What they say in private (or occasionally blurt out) is quite another.

The simple fact of the matter is that the Haram ash-Sharif, with its Al-Aqsa Mosque and golden Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem's crowning glory, is as much at risk from destruction by Jewish State in the Levant (JSIL) as the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra is from that other hideous sectarian entity, Islamic State in the Levant (ISIL).