'A Bacillus Which Every Gentile Carries With Him'

In case you didn't already know, there's a slomo coup currently underway in the UK against the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, two of whose supporters, Naz Shah and Ken Livingstone, are being smeared by the usual suspects as anti-Semites.

For an overview of the anti-Corbyn campaign, see How Israel lobby manufactured UK Labour Party's anti-Semitism crisis (Asa Winstanley, electronicintifada.net, 28/4/16), and Ken Livingstone: gobshite yes, antisemite no (Jamie Stern-Weiner, jaimiesternweiner.wordpress.com).

What is happening in the UK, it goes without saying, has nothing whatever to do with genuine anti-Semitism - hatred of Jews as Jews.

As the historic influence of the Zionist movement within Britain's Labour Party wanes, and particularly since the election of the pro-Palestinian Corbyn as its leader, Zionists, both inside and outside the Party, are increasingly resorting to false accusations of anti-Semitism to smear anyone in the Party who speaks out in fundamental opposition to political Zionism. Their aim is to sow discord, and, if possible, bring down Labour's most pro-Palestinian leader ever.

What should be understood, however, is that this smear tactic is integral to the ideology of political Zionism. Zionist logic dictates that a Jewish state in Palestine is necessary because Jews simply cannot live alongside non-Jews, who are, one and all, innately and incurably anti-Semitic.

As UK Labour's foremost Zionist dupe, Richard Crossman MP (1907-1974), recorded in his 1960 pen-portrait of Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader who secured the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and went on to become Israel's first president:

"Antisemitism, [Weizmann] used to say to me, is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him, wherever he goes and however often he denies it. Like other bacilli, it may remain quiescent and harmless for years. But, once the right conditions are created, the bacilli multiply and the epidemic breaks out. The condition for an outbreak of overt antisemitism in any nation is that the number of Jews should rise beyond the safety level of that particular nation. Hence the only radical cure for antisemitism is the creation of the Jewish State. At our first meeting... Weizmann outlined this theory to me and asked me whether I was antisemitic. When I said, 'Of course', I felt that our friendship had begun. For, if a Gentile denied his latent antisemitism, Weizmann concluded that he must either be lying or, even worse, deceiving himself." (A Nation Reborn: The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin & Ben-Gurion, pp 21-22)

Mad, utterly mad, I know, but that's political Zionism for you.

The smear is therefore as predictable as night and day, and non-Jews should not be spooked by its use or take it too seriously. Instead of suspending Shah and Livingstone, pending an investigation, Corbyn should simply have used the opportunity to patiently explain the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism and charge the authors of the smear with cheapening the coin of anti-Semitism.

Reviewing the Review

Nicely nailed by reviewer Richard King:

"The first thing you find when you open Anti-Semitism is an errata slip informing you that its author, Frederic Raphael, has mistaken D.H. Lawrence for T.E. Lawrence, Arthur Koestler for Arthur Schnitzler and the figure of 16,000 for 1600 (the number of Jews killed in Jedwabne, Poland, in 1941). This is not a great start; one is entitled to expect a little more care, especially given the gravity of the subject and the brevity with which it is treated here. But none of these confusions, or all of them together, is a patch on the central confusion of this book, which is the equation of determined criticism of Israel with historical anti-Semitism." (The flawed equation at the heart of a timely analysis, Sydney Morning Herald, 16/1/16)

However:

"For while it is undoubtedly true that the miasma of anti-Semitism surrounds much dark talk about the Israel 'lobby', and true too that many liberals and left-wingers are apt to downplay the anti-Semitism extant within the Muslim community..."

So, Richard, some talk about the "Israel 'lobby'" is OK, but not other? Can you give me examples? And why is the word 'lobby' in inverted commas?  What's that about?

May I suggest that maybe, if you'd taken the time and trouble to read Mearsheimer & Walt's The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy, as every informed person should, I really don't think you'd have used inverted commas in this context.

As for slandering Liberals, Left and Muslims in one fell swoop, I could ask you for chapter & verse on this, but, to take another tack: are you aware that, when all is said and done, for a Zionist, you yourself are actually an anti-Semite? As Chaim Weizmann, who should know a thing or two about Zionism, once declared: "Anti-Semitism... is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him, wherever he goes and however often he denies it." (Richard Crossman, A Nation Reborn: The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin & Ben-Gurion, 1960, p 21)

"Disproportionate our emphasis on Israel may be..."

Hello? "Our emphasis on Israel"?

What with Zionists blowing their own trumpets on every conceivable occasion when they're not crying anti-Semitism; and the media taking extra-special care not to tread on Israel's toes for fear of coming under Israel lobby pressure (Look, Ma, no inverted commas!) or being smeared as anti-Semitic; and our politicians and journalists, so-called, streaming over to the apartheid state for pro-Israel programming; and Israel routinely testing state-of-the-art weaponry on Palestinian guinea-pigs before exporting it to every conceivable trouble spot around the world; and Israeli-PMs twirling US presidents around their little fingers; and... we're placing a disproportionate emphasis on Israel?!

"Though Raphael is right to say that anti-Semitism and 'anti-Zionism' cannot always be neatly separated..."

No, he's not. He's dead wrong.

Look, it's really not that hard, Richard. If you support the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine, you're a Zionist. If you don't, you're an anti-Zionist.  You are either someone who believes that it is right and proper to have a sectarian, ethnocratic state in Palestine, or you aren't.

Richard King btw is the author of a book titled On Offence. I haven't read it, but let me say that if those who make a show of being offended are his subject, and he hasn't got a chapter or two or three on the mob who have made a career out of taking offence at anyone who looks sideways at Israel, aka the Israel lobby, then he needs to do his homework and put out a revised version NOW.

Be that as it may, I'll forgive him for that great intro. above.

As for Frederic Raphael, who, on investigation, turns out to be a novelist and screenwriter, I thought I'd listen to Phillip Adams' interview with the guy (Anti-Semitism then & now, Late Night Live, 26/11/15)

*...*

I heard him [Raphael] say that "Israel has behaved badly," which is based on the incredible assumption that a colonial-settler state which has taken someone else's land, sent its people packing, and refuses them re-entry because it'd mess with the preferred demographic, has the capacity to behave in any other way than badly.

And - *...* - I heard him refer to the "so-called occupied territories."

Without Phillip Adams, who just had to slip in at one point that he was a "philo-Semite," pulling the bugger up, FFS!

Zionism: The Devil in the Detail

"Under pressure to restart negotiations with the Palestinians, the Israeli government continues to expand settlements deeper into occupied territory, today announcing 380 new settlement units in occupied East Jerusalem." (Israel approves 380 new settlement homes in East Jerusalem, Jason Ditz, antiwar.com, 24/12/14)

 "It was dark when we drove out to Shari Zwi, a communal settlement for orthodox Jews, fifteen minutes out in the wilds, right down by the Jordan. The road was a track, and after some miles we bumped and stuck in the mud... We were rescued by a police truck, which bumped us for three-quarters of an hour and then dumped us outside a stockade. Suddenly strange men with beards crowded round us. It was the orthodox Jews greeting us in Hebrew, and I soon realized this was to be the sole language. Through thick mud and past simple shacks we were taken to the dining-room where a delicious meal stood ready. But immediately we had to listen to a two-hour explanation in Hebrew of the graphs and charts all round the wall, showing ten years' progress of Shari Zwi. The fields are interlaced with Arab fields, and land acquisition is the great aim. I was assured that the Arabs were delighted to sell their land, and that the only way to stop Arab nationalism was to abolish restriction on the sale of land.

"These were very good religious people, mostly from Germany, but also from Poland, Rumania, and eleven other countries; a community of some 300 living by the Talmud, and very critical of the secular Zionists who run the Agency. But as far as I could see this made absolutely no difference to their politics.

"After supper I proposed a discussion on Arab-Jewish relations, and the whole community crowded into the dining-hall and stood round while the executive and I debated, sitting at the table. They stood motionless and tense for three hours' discussion. I described to them the Arab village I had seen that morning a hundred yards from a superb Jewish settlement, and said that I thought that illustrated the central problem. Then they were off. And what they gave me was the simple propaganda line about the Jewish right to every foot of Palestine, and how the Arabs had benefited. They seemed to assume that the Jews had the right to the country and that the Arabs were inferior people whom the Jews, when they got their state, would tolerate and permit to exist as a minority. I think they enjoyed the discussion a lot, and when it ended the bearded mukhtar shook my hand and said: 'We deeply appreciate it that a member of the Committee* thought us important enough to come and teach us about Arabs and Jews'!" (Palestine Mission, Richard Crossman, 1946, pp 159-60)

"[T]he success of Zionism did not derive exclusively from its bold outlining of a future state, or from its ability to see the natives for the negligible quantities they were or might become. Rather, I think, Zionism's effectiveness in making its way against Arab Palestinian resistance lay in its being a policy of detail, not simply a general colonial vision. Thus Palestine was not only the Promised Land, a concept as elusive and as abstract as any that one could encounter. It was a specific territory with specific characteristics, that was surveyed down to the last millimeter, settled on, planned for, built on, and so forth, in detail. From the beginning of the Zionist colonization this was something the Arabs had no answer to, no equally detailed counterproposal. They assumed, perhaps rightly, that since they lived on the land and legally owned it, it was therefore theirs. They did not understand that what they were encountering was a discipline of detail - indeed a very culture of disciple by detail - by which a hitherto imaginary realm could be constructed on Palestine, inch by inch and step by step, 'another acre, another goat,' so Weizmann once said. The Palestinian Arabs always opposed a general policy on general principles: Zionism, they said, was foreign colonialism (which strictly speaking it was, as the early Zionists admitted), it was unfair to the natives (as some early Zionists, like Ahad Ha'am, also admitted), and it was doomed to die of its various theoretical weaknesses. Even to this day the Palestinian political position generally clusters around these negatives, and still does not sufficiently try to meet the detail of Zionist enterprise; today [1978] there are, for example, 77 'illegal' Zionist colonies on the West Bank and Israel has confiscated about 27% of the West Bank's Arab-owned land, yet the Palestinians seem virtually powerless physically to stop the growth or 'thickening' of this new Israeli colonization. The Palestinians have not understood that Zionism has been much more than an unfair colonialist master against whom one could appeal to all sorts of higher courts, without any avail. They have not understood the Zionist challenge as a policy of detail, of institutions, of organization, by which people (to this day) enter territory illegally, build houses on it, settle there, and call the land their own - with the whole world condemning them." (The Question of Palestine, Edward Said, 1978 pp 94-5)

[*See my 8/12/14 post Children of a Lesser God 1.]

Children of a Lesser God 1

Richard Crossman was a British Labor MP and socialist intellectual. In 1946, he was appointed a member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry - a body charged with finding a solution to Britain's most astonishing own-goal, the Palestine PROBLEM. In his book on the committee's work and findings, Palestine Mission (1946), he wrote as follows:

"I found... that my mind had been made up during our weeks in Palestine, on the conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs. I accepted Dr Weizmann's analysis. The choice was between two injustices, and we had to decide which injustice was the lesser. Looking at the position of the Palestinian Arab, I had to admit that no western colonist in any other country had done so little harm, or disturbed so little the life of the indigenous people. Arab patriotism and Arab self-respect had been deeply affronted and would continue to be affronted by the development of the [Jewish] national home; but if I believed in social progress I had to admit that the Jews had set going revolutionary forces in the Middle East which, in the long run, would benefit the Arabs. It was by reacting to the Zionist invader that the Arab was learning to fend for himself in an industrial world. He had been cheated and duped and imposed on by the west, and he would remain violently resentful for some time to come; but I was convinced that all this was a lesser injustice which must be accepted for the sake of the building of a Jewish Commonwealth. Of course, the injustice must be reduced to a minimum and I rejected for that reason the demand of the Zionists to include in a Jewish state the wholly Arab mountain areas. [MERC: He means today's West Bank.*] I do not think I would have reached this conclusion if the national home had merely been a national home. In Palestine I had come to realize that it was something more - a socialist commonwealth, intensely democratic, intensely collectivist, and strong enough to fend for itself." (pp 176-77)

In keeping with the Eurocentric, colonial mentality which characterised Labor leftists of his ilk, Crossman was obviously so overawed by the collective effort and material progress evident in the immigrant Zionist movement's showcase colonies as to overlook the simple fact that the indigenous Palestinian Arab majority was being prevented from exercising its fundamental right of national self-determination.

His facile assumption that the Palestinian Arabs would somehow "benefit" from Zionist colonisation, a staple of the Zionist propaganda of the day, would not, of course, stand the test of time. Within three years of Crossman penning the above words, the bulk of Palestine's indigenous Arab majority would be expelled from its ancestral homeland by armed Zionist terror gangs. Whether Crossman had anything to say about that after the event I simply do not know.

I leave it to another observer, the British journalist and civil servant, Owen Tweedy, writing in February 1949, to describe the aftermath:

"Meanwhile well over 100,000 Israeli immigrants from Europe have already arrived [in Israel]. Many have been drafted into the fighting forces, and homes for some 40,000 others have been found in vacated Arab towns, villages and farms. The official scale of further arrivals has been announced at the rate of 100,000 a year until the total of the newcomers reaches at least the million mark; and all will require Lebensraum. As a result of all these processes and plans, the old Palestine of the last 30 years is, I am told, being - as it were - rapidly rubbed clean off the slate.. Buoyant Israel has spread over at least two-thirds of the tiny country, and the remaining third... has lost all geographic identity and is now little more than the last refuge in Palestine for some 320,000 Arab refugees from the evacuated Arab towns and villages now in Israeli occupation. A further 480,000 are herded in hundreds of thousands in the Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq.

"The last estimate of the Arab population in Palestine was in the neighbourhood of 1,250,000 persons. Today 800,000 of them have lost their Palestinian homes. Thus in the fruitful nine months since the British Mandate ended last May the State of Israel has been born and, on the other side of the account, the problem of a displaced Palestinian Arab population has been created on a scale reminiscent of the worst of wartime in Europe. This outcome invites a sad reference to the Balfour Declaration of November 2nd, 1917. 'His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of that object, it being understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.' The Declaration was endorsed by the League of Nations and by America. Today, 32 years later, about two-thirds of these non-Jewish (i.e. Arab) communities are homeless and adrift and, to all effect and purpose, stateless.

"Their plight is grim. None of the neighbouring Arab countries where they are camped had the resources or facilities to cater for such a sudden increase of population. Transjordan, for instance, with a population of its own of only 300,000, was called on to feed and house 100,000 refugees. A majority of these derelicts are women and children unaccompanied by men. They come mostly from the ranks of the very poor. They have now lost even the very little they ever had and are helpless and hopeless. Most of their camps, thanks to a timely gift from the British Government, are now tented; but this February is exceptionally severe in the Middle East, and existence in a tent in the bleak highlands of Judaea, Samaria and Transjordan against driving snow must be a terrible ordeal. To relieve day-to-day distress some financial help to buy stores and food has come from the British Government, from funds of the Secretariat of U.N.O. and from charitable organisations here and in the Middle East. The distribution of relief is now undertaken on the spot by the International Red Cross, the American Friends' Service Committee and the League of Red Cross Societies. They are helped magnificently by local volunteer workers - most of them Arab reinforced by British and others. And much has been done. But constructive relief is handicapped by delay - delay in voting Governmental grants from the West; delay in U.N.O. decisions, and local transport delays. The outcome is a woeful shortage - on the one hand of essential supervisory staff; on the other of food itself, and of medical stores, clothing and camp equipment - and disease and illness are taking a heavy toll of life." (The Arab expulsion, Owen Tweedy, The Spectator, 25/2/49)

[*Here's Crossman writing in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (1976), June 5, 1967: "Back from the Chamber in my room I was delighted to have a visit from Remez, the Israeli Ambassador... He gave me a very full and accurate briefing on how hostilities started. I asked him about Israeli intentions towards Jordan and he replied that they intended to occupy the hills of Samaria but gave me an assurance that they would not occupy the whole West Bank because they want King Hussein of Jordan to survive... 'Do you really mean that about the West Bank?' 'Yes,' he said, 'we don't want to get 600,000 Arabs inside Israel. All we need is the triangle and the Samaria hills'." A footnote at the bottom of the page (365, Volume 2) reads: "By the end of the week the Jews had occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem."]

To be continued...

Three Seriously Twisted Men

The first, of course, needs no introduction:

"Only when this Jewish bacillus infecting the life of peoples has been removed can one hope to establish a co-operation amongst the nations which shall be built up on a lasting understanding." (Adolf Hitler's speech in Wilhelmshaven, 1/4/39)

But unfortunately, historical illiteracy being what it is, the other two are less well known.

Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) is the 2nd in Israel's founding trinity (preceded by Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) and succeeded by David Ben-Gurion (1886-1973)). British Labor MP Richard Crossman (1907-1974) was just another of Zionism's useful fools:

"The years at Geneva [1901-1904] were the period when Weizmann's philosophy (as distinct from his policies and programme) reached its full development. Nothing essential was added to it either when he settled in Britain or by his visits to Palestine. From now on he was a 'concrete' revolutionary, set apart from the other Zionist politicians by his conscious dislike of what he contemptuously dismissed as 'abstract internationalism' - under which he condemned not only Eastern Marxism but Western Liberalism as well. Both outlooks he regarded as vitiated by a refusal to face the basic fact on which Zionism is founded - the essential unassimilable Jewishness of the Jew and the hostility which this must arouse so long as the Jew lives in a foreign community.

"Antisemitism, he used to say to me, is a bacillus which every Gentile carries with him, wherever he goes and however often he denies it. Like other bacilli, it may remain quiescent and harmless for years. But, once the right conditions are created, the bacilli multiply and the epidemic breaks out. The condition for an outbreak of overt antisemitism in any nation is that the number of Jews should rise beyond the safety level of that particular nation. Hence the only radical cure for antisemitism is the creation of the Jewish State. At our first meeting, which lasted most of the way through the night, Weizmann outlined this theory to me and asked me whether I was antisemitic. When I said, 'Of course', I felt that our friendship had begun. For, if a Gentile denied his latent antisemitism, Weizmann concluded that he must either be lying or, even worse, deceiving himself. In his view the only honest attitude for a Gentile to adopt was to admit his unconscious prejudice against Jews and to ensure that it did not influence his behaviour by consciously making allowances for it." (A Nation Reborn, Richard Crossman, 1960, pp 21-22)

Shilling for Israel: The Case of Richard Crossman 2

Here Crossman tells the sad story of how his Zionist friends just wanted to play with the Palestinian lads in their sandpit, but the Big Bad Bevin came along and ruined everything:

"When Balfour and Weizmann envisaged the National Home... it was always assumed that Palestine would be inhabited by Jews and Arabs living as intermingled communities and with the Arabs forming the majority of the population. How well I remember the occasion in 1946 when, in the presence of Ben-Gurion* and Sharett, Weizmann showed me a map, on which the partition line recommended by the Jewish Agency was sketched out. Of course it included the Negev, but on the first day of this Jewish State, as defined by Jewish leaders, the Arabs would be in a majority and Jewish immigration would have to proceed extremely rapidly in order to keep pace with the Arab birthrate. Inevitably, such a State, if created under British protection - or, after 1948, under the UN - would have been binational and very soon we should have seen the new, independent Arab-Jewish State of Palestine developing along the lines of Lebanon, where rival racial and religious groups are held together in a balance of power guaranteed by the manipulation of a complex constitution... But would the Arabs of the new binational State have stood by and permitted Jews to introduce half a million new immigrants and thereby achieve an absolute majority?... As things turned out, however, the Israeli can with perfect fairness insist that the reduction of the Arab population of Israel to this inferior status was the result not of anything they willed or did but solely of Ernest Bevin's policy. Even after he had transferred the Palestine problem to the UN and the UNSCOP majority report had been voted in the Assembly by the necessary two-thirds majority, the British Foreign Secretary refused to accept defeat. Instead of helping to divide the country along the frontiers laid down by the UN, the British soldiers and administrators in Palestine were encouraged from London to make the UN decision inoperative. It was with their connivance that hundreds of thousands of Arabs were instructed by their leaders to become temporary refugees, while the Arab armies drove the Jews into the sea. But those 'temporary refugees' have never been able to return to their homes and most of them still live in the UNRWA camps today. Instead of the new Jewish State starting, as UNSCOP intended that it should, with rather more Arab than Jewish inhabitants, Israel is now left with only an insignificant Arab minority, concentrated for the most part in the mountains of Galilee." (A Nation Reborn: The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin & Ben-Gurion, 1960, pp 93-95)

[*Unfortunately for Crossman's little fairytale, we have a letter from Yishuv bully boy, David Ben-Gurion, to his son, Amos, in October 5, 1937, in which he states that unless the Palestinian lads are   prepared to stand aside and let him and his friends take over their sandpit, he'll be kicking sand in their faces big time:

"Let us assume that the Negev will not be allotted to the Jewish state. In such event, the Negev will remain barren because the Arabs have neither the competence nor the need to develop it or make it prosper. They already have an abundance of deserts but not of manpower, financial resources, or creative initiative. It is very probable that they will agree that we undertake the development of the Negev and make it prosper in return for our financial, military, organizational, and scientific assistance. It is also possible that they will not agree. People don't always behave according to logic, common sense, or their own practical advantage. Just as you yourself are sometimes split, conflicted between your mind and your emotions, it is possible that the Arabs will follow the dictates of sterile nationalist emotions and tell us: 'We want neither your honey nor your sting. We'd rather that the Negev remain barren than that the Jews should inhabit it.' If this occurs, we will have to talk to them in a different language - and we will have a different language but such a language will not be ours without a state. This is so because we can no longer tolerate that vast territories capable of absorbing tens of thousands of Jews should remain vacant, and that Jews cannot return to their homeland because the Arabs prefer that the place [the Negev] remains neither ours nor theirs. We must expel Arabs and take their place."]

Shilling for Israel: The Case of Richard Crossman I

The cluelessness of our politicians is a never-ending source of fascination and wonder. And none, I believe, are  quite as clueless as when under the distorting influence of Zionism. In fact, I would go so far as to contend (and this should come as no surprise to readers of this blog) that a politician's intellectual and moral worth is in inverse proportion to his/her support for the Zionist project. To be sure, contemporary politics being what it is, many politicians feel under pressure to pay lip service to that dubious cause. Still, whether they are true believers or merely along for the joy ride, my contention holds true - as, I suggest, this post will demonstrate.

One of the most ardent supporters of the Zionist goal of wiping Palestine off the map was the British gentile, Labour politician and socialist intellectual Richard Crossman (1907-1974). Crossman, who went on to became the editor of the influential journal New Statesman after leaving politics, even  authored two books on the subject of Palestine/Israel.

The quotations which follow come from A Nation Reborn: The Israel of Weizmann, Bevin & Ben-Gurion (1960). Hyped on its dust jacket as "pertinent, stimulating, provocative," A Nation Reborn contains passages of such arrant foolishness and casual racism as to cry out for exposure. Hence this post.

Here, for example, is Crossman's exposition of the conflict between the greater and lesser injustice so called. No surprises for guessing which is the lesser injustice:

"The truth is that, throughout the period of the [British] Mandate [1923-1948], Britain was presented not with a choice between right and wrong but with a conflict of obligations. [Chaim] Weizmann was the only Jew or Arab to admit this frankly. Testifying before Commission after Commission, he reiterated that the choice in Palestine was not between right and wrong but between a greater and a lesser injustice. How often he warned successive British Governments and High Commissioners that there was no simple decision which would resolve this conflict. Instead, they would have to do something evil for the sake of a greater good." (pp 60-61)

As George Orwell might have quipped: I see, so all injustices are equal, but some are more equal than others. 

Now here's Crossman, while deploring Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin's post-war support for the 1939 White Paper which advocated halting Jewish immigration into Palestine prior to the eventual  creation of an Arab state with a Jewish minority, lamenting in effect, If only the lesser injustice had been committed at the beginning of the Mandate:

"I believe that the Balfour Declaration could have been fulfilled by building up a Jewish majority very quickly indeed. In order to make this possible, the British Government would have had to appoint a first High Commissioner strong enough to purge his own staff of anti-Zionists, to disregard Arab opposition and encourage large-scale Jewish immigration. Obviously he would have had to be a Gentile, because no Jew selected by a British Government could possibly commit the lesser injustice to the Arabs required to build the National Home in the 1920s." (p 62)

And just to spell it out:

"Even if Providence had arranged for the appointment of a tough, non-Jewish High Commissioner, as well as for the arrival of half a million Russian Jews, that would not have been sufficient without a Government in Westminster conscious of its Imperial destiny and prepared to accept military obligations in order to fulfil it." (p 63)

In other words, the Balfour Declaration's promised "National Home for the Jewish people" (in reality a Jewish state) should simply have been imposed on the Arabs of Palestine by force of British arms at the very beginning of the mandate. Yes, Crossman would have added, that would indeed have been an injustice to the Arabs, but just think of the far greater injustice to the Jews if their National Home had not proceeded as promised.

Wonderful stuff, isn't it? Sort of my injustice is bigger than your injustice.

Now observe Crossman as he perishes the thought of British arms being trained on Palestine's Jewish community:

"At any time during 1946 Ernest Bevin could have smashed Jewish resistance and imposed British rule on Palestine for another 10 or 15 years. In June of that year, for example, the Haganah leaders... decided to demonstrate the strength and efficiency of their forces by blowing up all the Jordan bridges on one night and thus isolating the British forces. The temptation to hit back was very strong, and Mr Bevin's military advisers assured him that the air force and tanks at their disposal were amply sufficient to smash every Kibbutz, while the rest of the Army broke resistance in the cities. It is to the credit of Mr Bevin that he refused to permit the orgy of destruction pressed on him by his military advisers." (p 73)

So here's the deal: smashing Palestinian Arab resistance to the takeover of their homeland by the Zionist movement would merely be a lesser injustice, but smashing the Zionist terrorist gangs out to steal that homeland in the late 40s, why that'd be a veritable orgy of destruction. What a phony the man  was. But no more so than any of the legions of Western politicians who have at one time or another shilled for political Zionism.

One shudders to think how many readers of his day Crossman led up the garden path with this kind of racist shite. But that's just the tip of the Crossman iceberg, to which I'll be returning in future posts.