Arab Rejectionism of UN Resolutions and the Fiction of a "Palestinian Right of Return"

The Case of UNGA Resolution 194 (1948)

In My Israel Question, Antony Loewenstein asks “Why do we constantly hear about Israel’s need for ‘security’ as though that justifies erecting walls, checkpoints and barricades?”[1] Why have you raised ‘security’ in the previous sentence, and why the ‘scare quotes’ around ‘security?’ Of course to those of us who have actually read Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation, AL’s plagiarism is once more transparent. Fisk asks


Israel’s ‘security’ - or supposed lack thereof - became the yardstick for all negotiations, all military threats and all wars. The injustice done to the Palestinians, the dispossession, the massacres…the occupation…and the bloody suppression of any…Palestinian resistance: all this had to take second place to Israel’s security.[2]


Perhaps Norman Finkelstein will wrote his next book exposing the Loewenstein-theft of Fisk as he did in his book on Dershowitz and Peters? Or perhaps, like Peters herself, Fisk will not be miffed at all by AL’s plagiarism?

Let us quickly revise some of the Israeli security concerns. They started the day the state of Israel was formed. The first occurred after Israel, Egypt, and Transjordan signed a cease-fire in March 1949 and the admission of the state of Israel to the United Nations two months later on 11 May 1949. While Israeli soldiers had succeeded in occupying twenty percent more of British Mandated Palestine than the United Nations 1947 partition, Israel insisted on a comprehensive peace treaty with the Arab states. The Arab states refused and so Israel refused to return to the 1947 borders, and would not permit Arab refugees to return to their homes in Israel. For their part the Arab states refused diplomatic recognition of Israel. AL ramps up his anti Israel-security riff later by fuming


A 1987 UNGA resolution, opposed by Israel and the USA, provided insight into the ongoing ability of the Jewish state to conduct itself without rebuke, and with continued support, in the occupied territories…The resolution condemned ‘terrorism wherever and by whomever committed’, noting that peoples under ‘colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation’ have the right ‘to struggle’ for self-determination, freedom and independence.’[3] (emphasis added).



AL never informs whence this ‘right’ springs, nor why this "right" seems to apply only to those under ’colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation.’ Does that mean for the “right to struggle” the oppressed have the burden of proof that the alleged oppressors are ’colonial and racist regimes?’ Dear reader, we may never know as AL has not told us what this alleged Resolution was called or from where he sourced it.

To understand why, by 1987, Israel, or indeed any member of the United Nations, might not give a fig what UNGA Resolutions say, we need to go back to the 1940s. Of course, notions of international law and particularly UN Resolutions pepper AL’s ‘Israel Question.’ Ah yes, the UN General Assembly. In this phase of U.S. involvement in the Palestinian refugee issue the central institutional authority was the United Nations. In fact, in the early years the U.S. tried to be as even-handed, and even not involved, in the refugee issue.[4]


The armistice agreement following the 1948 War based on UN Resolutions 194 set the parameters for the next 18 years. However 194 did not resolve issues of water-sharing among the parties nor the return of the refugees. The U.S., Britain and France, worried about their future influence and strategic interests in the region, sought to limit further conflict through a Tripartate Agreement that limited the sales of arms to either side.

In this phase there was no official recognition of the unique identity of the Palestinians, even by the Arab world itself.[5] There was not even a Security Council Resolution. General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 11, 1948 called upon the Arab states and Israel to resolve all outstanding issues through negotiations either directly, or with the help of the Palestine Conciliation Commission established by this resolution. Furthermore, Point 11 resolves:

that refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which under principles of international law or in equity should be made good by Governments or authorities responsible. Instructs the Conciliation Commission to facilitate the repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation of refugees and payment of compensation... (emphasis added).…[6]



The emphasized words demonstrate that the UN was not satisfied that the cease-fire "borders" were sufficient, and that some of the refugees would have to be resettled like refugees in any conflict. Thus claims that Resolution 194 provides a universal "right of return" are wrong, especially as they ignore the similar number of Jewish refugees from the surrounding Arab and wider Muslim world. Thus, the refugee issue was but one of many to be negotiated.

The Arabs, however, started a pattern that continued to thwart them for decades. THey simply refused to compromise or negotiate.

As Hanan Ashrawi so tragically admitted

the rejection of the 1947 UN partition plan as “with the benefit of immaculate hindsight the worst plunder we made was not accepting the 1947 UN petition.

Thus the Arabs once more unanimously rejected the UN resolution. The General Assembly voted, on November 19, 1948 to establish the United Nations Relief For Palestinian Refugees (UNRPR) to dispense aid to the refugees. The UNRPR was replaced by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) on December 8, 1949, and given a budget of $50 million. However all this is moot as the Resolution was never a legal resolution bestowing “rights” on anybody.

Palestinians have always cited 194 as their “right” of return.[7] Putting aside the fact that 194 does not mention the word “right,” or “Palestinians,” unlike Chapter Six and Seven Resolutions of the Security Council, Chapter Four Resolutions of the UN General Assembly were never designed to have the force of law. The UNGA is empowered to refer to the Security Council, matters it thinks require a judicial decision; no such referral was ever made regarding 194. And even if it were, among other criticisms, the Israelis have always maintained that the refugees do not want “to live in peace with their neighbours.”[8] And just quietly, I defy anybody to provide evidence to the contrary!

It is true that from 1948 until the late 1970s the United States never accorded the Palestinians themselves any diplomatic status. Truman’s Secretary of State, John Dulles, made it clear that, for the U.S., the legitimate negotiating party was the Arab states: not the refugees themselves. In December, 1948 Dulles was emphatic that Israel‘s establishment was an “historical inevitability“ that would inevitably


Involved certain injustices to the Arab States. The situation was not one where there was any solution that was totally just to all concerned…Nevertheless, there had to be a solution and, we believed, a peaceful solution…Therefore our [policy] could be looked upon…as completing one phase of a historical development which, when completed, would permit of better relations than ever before with the Arab States.[9] (emphasis added)

However, neither the Arab states nor Arab lobby/political groups thought that the refugees were a distinct entity to bargain on behalf of either. On the other hand, the Palestinian’s belief in their “right” of return has over time evolved to transcend strict legalistic interpretations of “rights.”[10] One of the top handful of misdirections taken by the Palestinians are those western advocates who have expended so much puff and wind telling the refugees they have a “right of return.”[11]

Coming Up: UNSC Resolution 242 has nothing to do with the Palestinians.

[1] AL p.xi
[2] Fisk , R. The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East Harper Collins: London 2005 p.463
[3] AL p.89
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8] Shavit Uriya and Bana Jalal “Everything you wanted to know about the right of return but were afraid to ask.” Ha’aretz 6/7/2001.
[9] U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS): 1948, Vol.V (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1976), 13 December 1948, pp. 1660-61, emphasis added. Quoted in Christison, K., “Bound by a Frame of Reference, Part II: U.S. Policy and the Palestinians, 1948-88” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol 27, No.3 (Spring, 1998), p.20
[10]
[11] Include Said and two others

Islamists whinge to Press Council over Griffith U. "Wikigate" scandal.

Thanks to one of the more sensible Muhammadans among us CWW has a copy of a chain petition currently doing the rounds drafted by serial Muhammadan whinger, Daud Batchelor. In October, 2006 the APC dismissed a complaint by Dr. Batchelor

Dr Batchelor said that, by starting the time line on 25 June and omitting the death of seven civilians on Gaza Beach on 9 June, the newspaper had committed a "clear abuse of responsible reporting under Press Council principles ... and misled its readers...The Australian states that it does not believe that it has breached any Press Council principles. The Press Council agrees.".

In particular the Islamists want the APC to order The Australian to

guide The Australian to provide enlightenment to the Australian public of the many positive contributions of Muslims to Australian society, and to enhance the building of social unity and harmony among all Australians.

What Dr. Batchelor and his fellow Muhammadans need to understand is the difference between a free press reporting on a university's academic and ethical failures and a society silenced by fatwas. if Dr. Batchelor et. al can not or will not understand this difference, there are plenty of other places on earth that share their willful ignorance. Perhaps they should relocate.

Draft 24/04/08 12:30pm COMPLAINT TO THE AUSTRALIAN PRESS COUNCIL

A. Complainant Information

Name: Daud Batchelor on behalf of ….

B. Publication Details

Publication 1: The Australian Newspaper
Date: 22/04/08
Headline: Top uni ‘begged’ for Saudi funding

Publication 2: The Australian Newspaper
Date: 23/04/08
Headline: Uni ‘an agent of extreme Islam’

Publication 3: The Australian Newspaper
Date: 23/04/08
Headline: Editorial: Independence Matters

C. Contact with Publication

Contact Details: Letter to the Editor [to be] sent to The Australian today with CC: to Nick Cater, Editor, Weekend Australian.

D. Principles Breached

Principle 1. Newspapers should not publish what they know or could reasonably be expected to know is false, or fail to take reasonable steps to check the accuracy of what they report.

Principle 5. Publications are free to advocate their own views and publish the views of others on controversial topics, as long as readers are readily able to recognize what is fact and what is opinion…

Principle 7. Publications should not place any gratuitous emphasis on the race, religion, nationality…of an individual or group.

Principle 8. Where individuals or groups are singled out for criticism, the publication should ensure fairness and balance in the original article. Failing that, it should provide a reasonable and swift opportunity for a balancing response in the appropriate section of the publication.
Note that we are seeking publication of a Letter to the Editor as a balancing response from the Queensland Muslim Community. If in the event such letter is not published, The Australian would be in breach of Principle 8 and its own undertaking to publish Draft 24/04/08 12:30pm
letters related to its attacks on the Australian Muslim community, as per Nick Cater’s letter of September 26, 2007 to Jack Herman, Executive Secretary, APC.

E. Specific Reasons for the Complaint

The Muslim Community in Queensland unfortunately has to register another complaint to the Australian Press Council regarding further ongoing misrepresentation and unfounded smears by The Australian against a Muslim institution, this time the respected Griffith University Islamic Research Unit of Griffith University (GIRU).

The Muslim Community is appalled by this ‘below the belt’ and slanted reporting, particularly Kerbaj’s articles of April 22 and 23 in respect of a donation of $100,000 by the Saudi embassy to GIRU. GIRU’s work is fully supported by the Queensland Muslim Community as it is addressing issues and seeking solutions to enable the smooth integration of Muslims into Australian society. Its programs form a significant component of the Government’s National Action Plan to Build on Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security. Specific research is being conducted for example, on the peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, prevention of domestic violence and ethics in Islamic finance.

In contravention of APC Principles Nos. 1, 2 and 7, the Australian’s journalistic standards have demonstrably sunk when a journalist and its editor can imply that GIRU and the Griffith University have been taken over by a foreign power when a small donation is provided without strings attached. Such funds for Islamic educational institutions in the West are often provided by Muslim benefactors and governments as a normal source of support. The failure of The Australian’s editor to adhere to APC principles is further demonstrated by broadcasting slanders by judge Clive Wall, who provided not a shred of evidence for his statements such as Griffith Uni has become ‘an agent of extreme Islam’.

This complaint against The Australian is in addition to three others brought to the attention of APC in August 2007, and follows the upholding of our complaint against The Australian for exaggerated negative reporting of a Muslim institution in the APC’s Adjudication No. 1382. It seems however with the latest attack that The Australian believes it has a green light from the APC to proceed further with publishing slander and innuendo against Muslim institutions in Australia. We believe the APC should reprimand The Australian for repeated breaches of its Statement of Principles, and guide The Australian to provide enlightenment to the Australian public of the many positive contributions of Muslims to Australian society, and to enhance the building of social unity and harmony among all Australians.

Partition and Deir Yassan

The number of refugees and the reasons for their flight in 1948 have long been a source of fractious historiographic debate and negotiations starting points. One fact is reasonably agreed upon; on 27 November 1947, the Arab Palestinian authorities - the Arab Higher Committee led by the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Hussein - rejected the UN General Assembly’s partition resolution 181. Israel’s subsequent military victory resulted in what the Palestinian narrative calls al-Nakba - the disaster; a passable Arabic transliteration of the Hebrew, Shoah. This victim identity permeates Palestinian historiography, and indeed, much of the post-Zionist or “new” Israeli historiography. It also colludes in attempts to co-opt the real Holocaust narrative for the Palestinian Nakba.

M&W insist that “the history of these events is well-understood.”[1] For two celebrated scholars of international relations the sloppy recourse to the claim that Israel started a long-planned war in 1948 in order to “ethnically cleanse” its land of Palestinians is disappointing. M&W, like countless Israel-haters, repeat the mantra “Israeli officials have long claimed that the Arabs fled because their leaders told them to, but careful scholarship (much of it by Israeli historians like Morris) have demolished this myth.”[2] But the history of these events is far from “well-understood.” The data are complex, sometimes robust, other times patchy, and often conflicting. And of course the elephant in the room is that it is only the governments of Israel, the U.S., U.N. and UK who have declassified documents from the period; we still know relatively little about the states and militaries of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Saud Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria.

Even when there is a degree of civilised consensus on the archival data, there are many informed differences of interpretation even among historians and scholars of integrity. So we can only cringe when M&W insist that Israel was always intent on ridding its land of all Arabs and that the “opportunity came in 1947-48, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile.”[3] No such academic consensus exists. On the contrary the issue is complex, the pattern of events chaotic. After all, this was a war! Indeed the top scholars do adduce evidence that some Arab leaders did urge Arab Palestinians to flee their homes in Israel. Nor does the Israeli historian Benny Morris say anything resembling what M&W cite him as saying. Here is what Morris actually wrote:

In some areas Arab commanders ordered the villagers to evacuate to clear the ground for military purposes or to prevent surrender. More than half a dozen villages — just north of Jerusalem and in the Lower Galilee — were abandoned during these months as a result of such orders....there was no Zionist policy to expel the Arabs or intimidate them into flight..[4]


Why would M&W risk their credibility by arguing “the only remaining debate of real significance regarding the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland was whether it was ‘born of war,’ as Morris argues, or by design, and Norman Finkelstein argues.”[5] Why must they corrupt their reputation as scholars by laying the decision of “expulsion” right from the get-go? Quelle surprise, because the source for this specious claim is Norman Finkelstein himself, writing in 2005, “the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948”[6] except “few pockets of scholarly dispute remain: e,g., whether or not the Zionist leadership intended from early on to “transfer” the Palestinians out of Palestine.”[7] While this is the mainstream mantra of the orthodox postmodern historiography that AL had been seeped in, it is by no means a consensus and is conclusively rejected by the evidence. Finkelstein is a handy polemicist and crack footnote-checker of people such as Alan Dershowitz and Joan Peters. And to the extent he exposed shoddiness in some parts of Dershowitz and Peters’ polemics, Finkelstein is to be applauded. However, he has not done any of the archival research that Morris and several other notable historians have; Morris himself has rejected Finkelstein’s interpretations of Morris’ scholarship.[8]

AL and M&W mercilessly crib, rehash, and plain plagiarize from a carousel of opinions and interpretations found in books and newspaper articles by Finkelstein, Pappe, and, of course, AL’s eponomously-named pooch, Chomsky. A more coarse commentator might argue they pass each other’s lines around like a two-bob tart. Arab-Israeli historian Nur Masalha comes close to the state-of-play bemoaning “the impression that these discourses are basically the outcome of a debate among Zionists which unfortunately has little to do with the Palestinians themselves.”[9] In fact AL provides a rawer reality that it is overwhelmingly a sectarian debate among Jews, both actual Jews and Fair-weather Jews a la AL. Oh, and a heads-up to Masalha, these debates affect me and my non-Muslim/Jewish/Middle eastern world as well!

However, for the real butt-clinching riff we must read Loewenstein, who is what we might helpfully describe as a fair weather fan of Benny Morris…Now if I were a reader who did not know very much about these high-octane times, I would imagine that every single person within coo-ee of Jerusalem, Hebron, Ramallah, Haifa, Cairo, Amman, and Damascus would have been glued to their wirelesses as the findings of UNSCOP cooed across the ether on that November 29, 1947 night. The evening would have shivered with nerves. AL, citing Pappe, interprets the response to the news thus

Palestinian and Arab leaders generally rejected it, perhaps not fully realising the world’s determination to create a Jewish homeland. Hard line elements in the Zionist movement also rejected the partition. Soon after the UN declaration, the mass expulsion of Palestinians began in earnest. Some left after their leaders lost battles against the Zionists, but far more were thrown out during Jewish retaliation against Palestinian attacks on settlements. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ commenced. The desire of the Zionist leadership - transfer - had begun to be fulfilled.[10]


OK, let’s explore what really happened

Note AL once more presents the Palestinian/Arab leaders as poor befuddled dopey “perhaps not fully realising…” Hullo? This issue had been fought for many decades. Is AL suggesting that if the swarthy hooka-smoking magic-carpet flying “leaders” had had expert instruction they might have “realised?” If this is not classic orientalist stereotyping, god knows what is! Yet again we have his complete confusion about what ‘Zionist’ and ‘Jewish’ mean. He has the Arabs leaving after losing battles against Zionists and ‘Jewish retaliation.’ Is he suggesting that the battles lost were lost to non-Jewish Zionists?

These few days would make the plot for a fantastic film. This night would have had as much tension and drama as the announcements of Vatican II did for the world’s Catholics in 1965. Yet AL provides no sources, no personalities, no outpourings of rejoice, sorrow, revenge, no battles, no town names, only the reference of ‘historian’ Ilan Pappe. But by jingo, there was high drama. Let’s take a peep at the truth.

On November 30, the day after the U.N. decision to partition the British Mandate of Palestine, the Arab reaction began - violent, manic, the sword was par for the course. Seven Jews were killed. In the following days stabbings, shootings, beatings coupled the attacks on the consulates of Sweden and Poland (Danish cartoons anybody), torching of synagogues. Molotov cocktails in shops.[11] On December 3 the Palestinian leadership ordered the razing of the Jewish retail precinct in Jerusalem.[12] On December 4 over 100 armed Arabs attacked Kibbutz Efal on the outskirts of Tel Aviv.[13] But what do we get from AL? The unsupported claim that “Hard line elements in the Zionist movement also rejected the partition.”[14] However, it does not take long to find AL’s source, where in Pappe’s book we get violence “was activated by hot-headed youth on both sides,” triggered by the Haganah.[15] Of course, perish the thought that Arabs could get “hot-headed” without Zionist ‘triggers!’



The battle at Deir Yassan

While debate over the events at Deir Yassan is often heated, there are several facts that are not controversial. In the pre-dawn of April 8, 1948, two Zionist irregular para-military groups - Irgun and the Stern Gang - set off for Deir Yassan. Irgun headed by Menachem Begin and the Stern Gang headed by Yitzhak Shamir seized the village and its 750 residents, resulting in the most traumatic massacre of the Arab residents. Deir Yassan was thus a key turning point in the war.

The Haganah’s Operation Nachshon had been launched two days before to open the road to Jerusalem, on which Deir Yassan was strategically located. Convoys of food and supplies had not been able to reach the 2,000 Jewish residents of the Old City due to an Arab blockade placed the day after the U.N. Partition in November,1947. By March, 1948, the Arabs were increasingly successful in blockading road links between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the city's only supply route. Deir Yassan was one of the key strategic vantage points as it was situated on a hill that provided a wide view of the vicinity and was located two kilometres from the suburbs of Jerusalem.

There are also several facts that are more disputed. Begin claimed that 100 Irgun members were involved and that a small open truck fitted with a loudspeaker was driven to the entrance of the village before the attack and broadcast a warning to civilians to evacuate the area, which many did.[16] Most writers say the warning was never issued, some arguing because the truck with the loudspeaker rolled into a ditch before it could broadcast the warning.[17] One of the fighters said the ditch was filled in and the truck continued on to the village.

“One of us called out on the loudspeaker in Arabic, telling the inhabitants to put down their weapons and flee. I don't know if they heard, and I know these appeals had no effect.”[18]

Irgun returned the villagers’ sniper fire with hand grenades through the windows of many houses. Despite the mythologising of the battle as a heartless massacre of innocent civilians, the battle continued for twelve hours. Most of the villagers fled, before Irgun escorted a representative of the Red Cross through the town and held a press conference. The New York Times' subsequent description of the battle was essentially the same as Begin's. The Times said 254 Arabs were killed, 40 captured and 70 women and children were released. No hint of a massacre appeared in the report.[19] And yet, Robert Fisk insists….…….…….……….The two Zionist groups were condemned by the Jewish Agency, whose leader David Ben-Gurion sent a telegram of apology and regret to King Abdullah. Ben-Gurion consequently forced Irgun and Stern to disarm - by force, in June 1948. While Morris[20] has since confirmed that the number was 110 Arabs murdered, this quibbling did nothing to deter the consequent Arab reactions.

Deir Yassan has been used iconically and mercilessly for propaganda ever-since. Many, such as Edward Said, have appallingly described Deir Yassan as the Palestinians’ Auschwitz. Many of the Deir Yassam dead were women, because Arab fighters dressed as women and shot Israelis to whom they had “surrendered”[21] Hizbollah, circa 2006 anybody? The Arabs immediately circulated rumours that women had been raped, even though this was a lie. As Hussein Khalidi, a Palestinian leader, said, “We have to say this, so the Arab armies will come to liberate us from the Jews.”[22] On the other hand, the men of Deir Yassan had little compunction in dressing as women, pretending to surrender before attacking.[23] Hazam Nusseibi, who was a journalist at the time, told the BBC years later that the deliberate fabrication of the rape charge


was our biggest mistake…as soon as they heard that women had been raped at Deir Yassin, Palestinians fled in terror. [24]

Thus, the chilling and tragic reality is that it was Arab lies about Deir Yassan that were largely to blame for their subsequent plight. On the other hand, Morris provides unconfirmed evidence that Irgun men “raped a number of Arab girls, then murdered them afterwards.”[25] And yet Robert Fisk ignores all this to insist…………………………….However, AL manages to weasel the “rape” issue. He even has the gall to quote Morris, but omitting Morris’ insistence that the rape allegations have never been verified.[26]

Three nights following Deir Yassan, something we do not find in AL or M&W is the Arab retaliation. A civilian convoy of doctors, nurses, medical school professors, and patients headed toward the Hadassah hospital to treat the sick, was ambushed by Haj-Amin Al-Husseini-directed Arabs, murdering seventy of the yishuv medicos.[27] To ensure there were no survivors, the Arabs doused the buses and cars containing the medical personnel with gasolines, “setting them alight.”[28] And then there is the grizzly revelation that British forces prevented Haganah from defending the Jewish medical convoy.[29] Not only does AL neglect all these thoroughly accepted facts, he appallingly repeats the lie that ruined Ilan Pappe’s academic career: the fabricated Tantura “massacre.”[30] MUP director, Lois Adler has yet to be called on her decision to include this lie; she must be called to account.

It is only later in AL’s book that the scandal of his either ignorance or indifference to the real source of genocidal tendencies in this dispute is revealed. “When the first Palestinian uprising occurred in 1987, it had been a long time in the making.”[31]. Actually Ant it was merely a continuation of the real first uprising which took place in 1921 before moving on to the massacres of Jews that took place during a two week orgy of Islamist-violence, nearly sixty years previously, in the summer of 1929: all choreographed by Yasser Arafat’s distant uncle - the grand-mufti of Jerusalem - Haj-Amin al-Husseini.[32] It started in Jerusalem and on Friday August 24, sixty Jews were massacred in Hebron, with a further hundred injured. On Thursday 30 August a further twenty Jews were murdered in Safed. During the two week jihad “133 Jews were killed and more than 300 wounded in the violence across the country.”[33] The ’Palestinian’s Auschwitz’ indeed! In the great tradition of Islamic genocide of Jews started by Mohammad in Medina, the slaughter has not stopped. Now many of AL’s ilk would describe this as “genocide” if the perpetrators had been English settlers in early nineteenth century Tasmania, Jenin, etc. Or perhaps AL might plea the Lyndall Ryan defence, “oh, historians are always making up numbers.”[34]

Of Morris’ exhaustive research Loewenstein takes away this……..AL suddenly has us at Israel’s entry into the United Nations in 1949.. . But we are given no idea that a little war involving five surrounding Arab armies invading Israel, and being thoroughly trounced by Israel for their effort! He offers this bizarre half-sentence “Israel had consumed much of Palestine, except the West Bank and East Jerusalem (control by Jordan) and Gaza (administered by Egypt).”[35] What is the difference between “controlled by” and “administered by?” And note he can’t wait to tell us how Israel has “consumed much of Palestine.”

But notice what he slyly omits? Transjordan had invaded and illegally stolen seventy percent of the allotted Arab state, with Egypt similarly illegally taking another ten percent in Gaza! To omit this dynamic, which forms the root of the whole situation of the Palestinians to this very day, is sloppy at least; downright malicious more likely. Also, the areas illegally annexed by Transjordan had been known as Judea and Samaria for 2,500 years, right up to 1959. Why has AL not acknowledged this? For somebody who claims to be “proud of my Jewish heritage” how can he delete 2,500 years of continuous Jewish urban civilisation by choosing the name substituted by a foreign non-Jewish illegal usurper?

Jordan’s annexation of Judea and Samaria was never internationally-recognised, except the seemingly odd de facto, though not de jure, recognition by Britain of Jordan’s sovereignty. Also, how can AL the “proud Jew” not raise a peep over the forced evacuations of all the Jews of East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria following Transjordan’s theft of the area partitioned for the Arab state?[36] AL tells us “by now, only 20% of Israel’s populations was non-Jewish.”[37] Yet he seems not to care that the Jewish population of the newly-expanded Jordan to be zero! Damn, if only the proportion could have been reduced to the same level as post-Germany, eh?


[1] p.10. It is hard not smirk at the tired Chomsky strategy here.
[2] M&W p.10
[3] p.10
[4] Benny Morris, Righteous Victims (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 256
[5] p.50
[6] p.3
[7] p.2
[8]
[9] Masalha Nur, “A Critique of Benny Morris,” p.211-220 in Pappe (ed.) p.213.
[10] Pappe, I. A history of modern Palestine: one land, two peoples, Cambridge: 2003 p.130 cited in AL at p.77
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16] Begin, M. The Revolt (NY: Nash Publishing, 1977), pp. xx-xxi, 162-163
[17] Perlmutter, Amos. The Life and Times of Menachem Begin, (NY: Doubleday, 1987), p. 214;
[18] Uri Milstein, History of Israel's War of Independence. Vol.4 (Lanham: University Press of America. 1999), p. 262.
[19]
[20] Morris, B., Righteous Victims: a history of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p.219.
[21] Milstein., Uri, History of Israeli War of Independence, vol. IV ed. By Alan Sacks University press of America 1996, p.262
[22] BBC Report, “Israel and the Arabs: The 50 year Conflict.
[23]
[24] ibid.
[25] Morris, Righteous Vuctims, p.208
[26]
[27]
[28] Morris p.209.
[29]
[30]
[31] AL p.89
[32] Arafat’s mother was a member of the Gazan al-Husseini clan
[33] Elpeleg, Z. The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement. (translated by David Harvey and edited by Shmuel Himelstein) Frank Cass:London 1993 p.22
[34]
[35] AL p.79
[36]
[37] AL p.79

Israel at 60 (Part 2): Zionism and early Palestine

Every anti-Zionst publication devotes some space to Israel’s history. Some accord this history more explanatory power than others. It would be convenient to view the opposition of Truman-era State department officials, particularly Secretary of State Marshall, to the partition of Palestine as having been validated by sixty years of conflict. Truman walked a strategic high-wire before opting to support the U.N. partition, and criticisms of his foreign policy nous are not hard to find. Or as one biographer told it straight up

A simplistic, provincial, at times amazingly ignorant president, highly controversial, toiling arduously to keep the high office he attained because of an accident of history. By his side, a secretary of state who was a renowned general in the last war, and an intelligence agency whose doubts prior to a crisis are swept aside - not least because of political considerations, the president's critics will say. [1]


However, to speculate how things might have turned out had Truman decided otherwise, “if only Israel had not been created,” is to miss the point. What needs to be re-iterated in letters ten feet high is that the state of Israel was not created by the U.N. let alone given to the Jews: rather, the UN recognised and the international community accepted a functioning and prosperous nation-state that the Jews had built and defended. Yes, the UN General Assembly voted for a Partition. But the UN did nothing to effect that Partition. Indeed, as we shall see, events took over, and it was only after the dust settled that Israel was a reality. It is also the failure of the nations and citizens of the broader Muslim world to accept this reality that is at the root of their own dissolution: to state the reality bluntly, a rag-tag of lowly dhimmi, and to add insult to injury Jews, won.

So the question of Truman’s wisdom or counter-factual “what ifs” miss the point. The ongoing misery of the Palestinians is not the fault of U.S. miscalculation, much less perfidy. It is overwhelmingly the fault of the Palestinians themselves and their Arab brethren. Further, there has never really existed anything remotely approaching a consensus of what “problem solved” would entail or look like: the geostrategic threats and ambitions of all the parties - Israel, the various Arab states, and the refugees have all ebb and flowed constantly; and never in-sync.


2.1 What and why is Zionism?

Alarm bells started ringing on AL’s acknowledgements pages where he thanks “Israel’s finest historian, Ilan Pappe, [who] agreed to read the history of Zionism chapter and offered expert advice.”[2] As we shall see, Pappe as ‘expert on Zionism’ folds in with the evidence fabrication that sparked our very own history wars. It also partly explains AL’s own egregious evidence-tampering. There is nothing controversial in AL’s claim that Zionism began in 1895 and was quickly followed, in 1897, by the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. The movement’s founder, Austrian journalist and playwright Theodor Herzl, a secular and assimilated Jew, was so affected by the Dreyfuss Affair in France that he could no longer accept the belief long-held by Europe’s secular Jews that assimilation was the best hope for security. Europe’s Jews needed a homeland of their own, a sanctuary for world Jewry to be rid once and for all, the centuries of persecution they had experienced. With this minor historical narrative correctly recounted, AL quickly spins off into fantasy land.

AL loathes Israel as it is an expression of Zionism’s racist and exclusionary ideology. Hullo? Zionism was a response to the anti-Semitic societies throughout the world. The Jews had very good reasons for needing an exclusive pied a terre! The implication of AL’s riff that a cabal of European Jews suddenly concluded they constituted some biologically superior master race, and barge into some foreign land to spend their days bathing in the glow of the collective racial superiority would be comical if the consequences of the exact opposite were not the reality.

AL thunders “Herzl’s seminal essay on the Jewish state shamefully ignored the indigenous Arabs of Palestine.”[3] There is actually a very good reason for this. For you see, in 1895 Therzl assumed “that we shall go to Argentina,” and that “when we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us.”[4] (emphasis added). Herzl envisioned the future Jewish homeland would have to be built through treaties and voluntary land-purchases. He assumed that the influx of Jewish capital and technical knowledge would bring economic benefits to the indigenous populations. AL could reasonably argue that Herzl was being presumptuous: a more unbiased or even empathetic commentator might argue that Herzl was being whimsical or perhaps naïve. But to accuse Herzl of ignoring the indigenous population when even the sources AL rely on say the exact opposite is not only sloppy; it is unethical. Especially, as he does not present the evolution in Herzl’s thinking as Herzl moved from essayist and pamphleteer to the real world of actually negotiating to seek a Jewish homeland with the world’s leaders.

AL contradicts himself in the very same sentence insisting “even though it is clear that Herzl realised that the Palestinians would not simply disappear and make way for massive Jewish immigration. It was perhaps the first but certainly not the last time that the Palestinians were treated simply as if they didn‘t exist.”[5] AL qualifies this in a footnote. “Palestinian Israeli writer Nur Masalha has proven that Herzl did not entirely ignore the indigenous population and even hoped some would stay and be grateful for Zionism’s generosity.”[6] (emphasis added). Putting aside the fact that historians do not seek to “prove” anything, is Herzl now redeemed from shame? Well, no. AL continues as though Masalha’s intra-sentence contradiction had never happened. And how could Herzl “realise that the Palestinians would not simply disappear if Herzl “shamefully ignored” them? This editing sloppiness occurs again and again throughout the entire book. Besides I challenge AL to produce Muslim and Arab writers who acknowledged the existence of “Palestinians.”

As PLO executive committee member Zahir Muhsein said on March 31, 1977 in an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw

The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa. While as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.

It is no secret that the book’s publication date was put back several times. Anybody who has visited AL’s blog can see that last minute edits like footnote seven have been inserted by an editorial assistant or proof-reader, maybe “Israel’s finest historian!” Unfortunately, they did not think to let AL know that these edits contradict his earlier, and later, arguments. In this instance, Masahla is a notorious and sloppy polemicist who copied and distorted from a 1972 work that was based on the earlier work of an Israeli scholar.[7] Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan anyone?

Not content with painting Zionism’s founder as an ethnic chauvinist, AL blames the Jews themselves for anti-Semitism. He quotes Herzl as commenting that ‘anti-Semitism served to inhibit the ostentatious flaunting of conspicuous wealth, curb the unscrupulous behaviour of Jewish financiers and contribute in many ways to the education of the Jews.’[8] AL libels the “shameful” Herzl who “was not alone in thinking that Jewish behaviour was directly related to anti-Semitic attitudes and therefore could be altered.”[9] As is so often the case with AL’s prose we are none the wiser whether it is Jewish behaviour or anti-Semitic attitudes that could be altered. Or perhaps he is having a Lady Bracknell moment, who, when asked whether the side of Belgrave Square or its fashion could be changed, boomed “both if necessary!” Will AL next argue that Zionism was born in a handbag?

Distorting Herzl is so endemic among the far left - whether Communist, Stalinist, Trotsky, moggie Marxist, or postmodern - that it no longer raises an eyebrow. As we shall see, we can see where Australia’s own history warriors learnt their lessons. Yet here we have it again in AL and M&W. What is tragic about this is that the same distortions are shamelessly shuffled around from Finkelstein to Tariq Ali to Chomsky, even all the so-called Israel “new historians” Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Benny Morris, and of course the entire cadre of Arab and Palestinian historian get in on it. It is ironic that Finkelstein rose to fame, and made a motza, by pointing out a number of instances of Alan Dershwoitz citing primary sources that had been published with some errors in Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.

AL dutifully repeats the Leftist canard that “the indigenous population of Palestine was regarded as a distraction from Zionism’s grand plan as was ignored. This denial has become a mainstay of Zionist thought.”[10] In fact, Palestine was lightly populated in the late nineteenth century. The entire population of Palestine (defined as current Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip) was probably in the vicinity of half a million at the time of the first Jewish aliyah in the early 1880s.[11] The inclusion of the population of eastern Palestine that was divided and named Transjordan in 1922 - renamed Jordan in 1949 - would have the effect of reducing even further the population impact of early Jewish immigration to Palestine.

However, Palestinian and Arab historians and activists have always tactically rejected classifying Jordan as part of “historic Palestine.”[12] Suspiciously, they are mute on what exactly those who lived in what is today called Jordan were known as before 1949; let alone before 1922. Indeed right up to 1988, Jordanians and Syrians had always maintained they spoke for the “Palestinian people.”[13] The same area today supports a population of nearly 11 million.[14] At the time of the first aliyah, the area that was eventually partitioned into Israel by the United Nations in 1947 contained only a fraction of that number, with estimates varying from 100,000 to 150,000.[15] During that time, Palestine was certainly not a political entity in any meaningful sense.

Between 1516 and 1918 Palestine - or what came to be called Palestine - was part of the Ottoman empire, and ruled from Istanbul. In the 1870s, the Ottomans restructured the empire: the Mediterranean near-east was divided into several districts called sanjaks. These sanjaks were part of larger administrative units called vilayets.[16] A reasonable analogy might be local councils and states in Australia: except the vilayets had nothing like the autonomy that Australian states have. The largest portion of Palestine was part of the vilayet of Syria and was governed from Damascus by a pasha.[17] For centuries Palestine had been known as southern Syria, part of bilad al-sham or Greater Syria.[18] As the Arab Higher Committee said when the UN was discussing the second partition of Mandatory Palestine

Palestine was part of the province of Syria...politically, the Arabs of Palestine were not independent in the sense of forming a separate political identity.

The Ottoman restructuring was partly prompted by the ten year occupation by Muhammad Ali, the Albanian-born governor of Egypt, in the 1830s. This growing antagonism between the core of the Ottoman Empire and its periphery is conveniently ignored by Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said hilariously describes the eastern Mediterranean as being under the yoke of European imperialism from the mid 1700s.[19]

The vilayet of Beirut was sub-divided into four sanjaks: Beirut, Tyre, Acre, and Nablus. The vilayet of Beirut thus extended along the Mediterranean coast from Lebanon down to Haifa and onward just north of what is now Tel Aviv. Immediately south of the vilayet of Beirut were the sanjaks of Jaffa and Gaza, which in turn were administrative units of the vilayet of Damascus. The sanjak of Jerusalem, which covered roughly from Jaffa to Jerusalem and south to Gaza, Hebron, and Be’er Sheva remained under direct rule of Istanbul. It is fair to say that vague stirrings of regional identity began to form skeletally around these new administrative divisions: an identity that only began to develop muscle during the British Mandate. Arab Israeli historian Brutus Abu-Manneh has, more ambitiously, argued

This administrative act taken by the Ottomans which helped formulate a clearer sense of boundaries and belonging in the land of Palestine, centred around the city of Jerusalem…This enhanced the social position of the leading family in Jerusalem, the Husseinis, who formed the core of the national movement during the British occupation of Palestine.[20]


Abu-Manneh, however, does not explain how this implies a Palestinian identity, particularly as the sanjak of Jerusalem was only one of five sanjaks formed in the region, and Jerusalem was the only one that remained under direct rule from Istanbul. Further, he does not explain why the embryonic regional identities created by the “clearer sense of boundaries” of Acre, Tyre and the vilayet of Syria would not have gravitated more to Syrian or Lebanese identities: identities already much stronger than the non-existent putative Palestinian identity.

It is unclear what it would mean to say that the Palestinians were the people who originally populated the “nation” of Palestine. In fact, Benny Morris concludes “historians have concluded that only ‘several thousand’ families were displaced following land sales to Jews between the 1880s and the late 1930s.[21] Even Ilan Pappe, “Israel’s finest historian,” is adamant that that there was no nation of Palestine prior to Jewish emigration, or even such as thing as a ‘Palestinian identity.’ Pappe rather argues that the inhabitants of mandate Palestine identified primarily with towns and villages rather than the ‘country’ of ‘Palestine.’

Basically, as long as the ruling Turkish Empire was Muslim and Islamic in civilisation and nature, most of the Arabs saw themselves as part of it. Until 1908, if you look at what most of the Arab nationalist intellectuals talk about, they talk about the Austro-Hungarian model of sharing the empire with the Turks. was no Palestine, no Syria or Iraq. [22]


Morris convincingly shows that the quantity of Arab land offered for sale was far in excess of the Jewish ability to purchase.”[23] Further, between 1880 and 1948 three-quarters of the plots purchased by Jews were from Arab mega-landowners rather than from those Arabs who worked those lands. It is reasonable to describe the society and economy of nineteenth century Palestine as feudal. Even Arab-American historian Rached Kalidi - a descendant, and current patriarch, of one of these feudal aristocratic clans - acknowledges the widespread land sales by “absentee landlords”[24] The claims of Palestinian and countless other scholars, activists and ratbags on Jews stealing land, and the alleged continuous habitation of Palestine by Arabs for hundreds and even thousands of years really is insupportable.[25]

The first aliyah in 1882 comprised ten thousand or so Russian and eastern European Jews who were fleeing tsarist pogroms. Even during the 1830s, during the Egyptian occupation of Jerusalem, under Muhammad Ali, the Jewish indigenes were subjected to merciless persecution by Muslims. During this period of repression, Jews fled to western Europe, Asia, and the United States as well. Indeed, contrary to au courant anti-globalisation doomsayers and MacDonald’s trashers, globalisation was all the rage in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It must be remembered that this was a period of immense immigration world-wide with Irish people fleeing the potato-famine as well as Italians, Greeks, polish, German, Chinese and Japanese settling in the “new world” and South America. During this period approximately 10,000 eastern European Jews immigrated to Palestine, while nearly one million settled in the United States.[26]

The extent to which this 10,000 unsettled the existing populace is much debated. In March 2006, Phillip Adams on his LNL repeated the decades-old mantra of Israel‘s enemies that the Zionists fled Europe and Russia to claim “a land without people, for a people without a land.” Of the fifty or so people AL mentions in his acknowledgements here is what the most prominent historians and scholars have argue. One of the last-remaining granddaddies Trotskists, Tariq Ali, in one of his characteristically sleazy misquotes inveighs against “a fundamental Zionist myth: Palestine as ‘a land without people’ designed for Jews, ’people without a land.’”[27] Note his deliberate omission of the indefinite article before the first “people?” In fact, there in not the slightest morsel of evidence that any of the Zionists ever thought this was the case. As we shall see, fraudulent omissions and insertions of articles (definite and indefinite) has become a mainstay of leftist anti-Zionists in this debate. AL cites Norman Finkelstein arguing that “From the British in North America to the Dutch in South Africa, from the Nazis in Eastern Europe to the Zionists in Palestine, every conquering regime has invoked the same claim the territory appointed for conquest was deserted.”[28]


In fact it was not Zionist Jews who coined the phrase; rather the British Lord Shaftsbury in his 1884 memoir. Lord Shaftsbury opined, of the homeless Hebrews, that Palestine could be “a country without a nation for a nation without a country.”[29] His comment did not imply there being no individuals, families, towns, villages, etc: he meant ‘a nation’ in the unique ethnic sense, such as ‘Maori,’ ‘German,’ ‘Persian,’ ‘Karen,’ ‘Aztecs,’ ‘Murri,” ‘Chinese,’ ‘Malays,’ etc; nevertheless it is still quoted - invariably bowdlerized - even today, by anti-Zionists as evidence of the true design of Jewish migration.[30] Further, when Shaftsbury formed his observations of the region and was writing his memoirs, Palestine had recently undergone a significant depopulation due to the draconian occupation of the forces of Muhammad Ali.

A leading Palestinian website sums up the attitude that is repeated in just about any book, article, blog, etc. that deals with this conflict. In a typical porridge of the patois of postmodernism, or a postmodernist polemic for a pre-modernist people

Zionist identity was built from the beginning on a two-fold negation: it negates time and space of the Jews outside Zion, a 'negation of exile' which extends beyond the realm of religion, and it negates time and space of those indigenous to the territory of Zion. The latter is best defined by the well-known statement of Zionist leader Israel Zangvil about, "a people without land returning to a land without people."[31]


The irony is that Zangvil actually wrote that contrary to Lord Shaftesbury’s musings. Zangvil wrote this forty years after Shaftsbury’s memoir; yet it has been misrepresented from then until Phillip Adams and beyond. Why has AL not gone straight to the original sources to check this? I am not being some mere “footnote pedant” when I ask this. After all, AL shares with us that he had nothing to do with Israel until his two week visit in 2005. And yet, he is so fired up at the shameless and rotten-to-the-core Zionist enterprise. How could he know that it was so rotten ab initio? If I were going to publish a book with such strident views I would imagine I would consult the actual words of those I was impugning: if not for anything more than curiosity. And especially as AL likes to remind us he majored in History at Monash in the early to mid 1990s. Let us hope that Monash has lifted its game since then.

All of these fine historians and experts acknowledged by AL insist Zionism was motivated by a belief that Palestine was deserted. And yet they all then quote screeds of the early Zionists who reject the notion that Palestine was deserted. In other words they cite endless early Zionist’s actual words and thoughts to reject non-existent Zionist’s allegations that Palestine was uninhabited! So where on earth do these people get their ideas?

Equally specious is in the more radical forms of this Palestinian/anti-Zionist mythology is that by 1880 there was a unique Palestinian people, and even a Palestinian nation that was displaced by the Zionist invasion.
[1]
[2] p.xiii
[3]
[4] Patai, R. (ed.) The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Vol. 1 (1960) pp, 90 and 88.
[5]
[6] fn 7. on p.268 citing Masalha, N. Expulsion of the Palestinians: the concept of ‘transfer’ in Zionist political thought, 1882-1948, Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
[7] Laquere, W. A History of Zionism
[8] Quoted from Lindermann, A. Esau’s tears, Camridge:2000 p.125
[9] 71
[10] AL
[11] This is unsourced from Dershowitz, p.24
[12] provide examples
[13]
[14] get an exact number from CIA fact book etc.
[15] Again, unsourced from Dershowitz p.24.
[16] Unsourced from Dershowitz p.24
[17] Unsourced from Dershowitz p.25
[18] The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World.
[19]
[20] Abu-Manneh, Brutus. “The Rise of the Sanjak of Jerusalem in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Pappe, Ilan (ed.) The Israel Palestine Question, Routledge: London, 1999, p.41.
[21] Morris 2001 p.123
[22] Ilan Pappe Interview by Don Atapattu” 19/9/05 CNI Foundation http://www.rescuemideastpolicy.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=114
[23] ibid. p.111
[24] discussed in Said., Edward and Hitchens., Christopher, eds. Blaming the Victims (London: Verso, 2001).
[25]
[26]
[27] Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms. p.90
[28] AL p.74 quoting NF.
[29]
[30] Said, Edward
[31] www.palestinerememebered.com/???

Israel at Sixty: Culture War Issues

This is the first of a Ten Part Series I will be publishing over the next two weeks as part of Israel's 60th birthday. In particular I focus on the biases inherent in Culture Warrior analyses

As the state of Israel celebrates its sixtieth birthday, Israel’s character is presented across a broad spectrum. At one end, Israel is a democratic and occasionally laudable state that has lost its way since 1967. In this view Israel can make amends and produce peace by satisfying the demands of international law and various peace agreements it has entered into with its neighbours. Towards the middle of the spectrum, Israel is seen as a nation born in the original sin of ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in 1948, for which it must acknowledge and make amends. At the other extreme, Israel was born in the original sin of 19th century Zionism; Zionism’s logic has always been to ethnically-cleanse the Palestinians, and thus Israel’s atonement can only be achieved with the dismantling of Israel in favour of a single state of Palestinians and Jews living together in a secular democracy. Regardless of where along the spectrum any of these characterizations of Israel lies, the powerful and insidious influence of foreign Zionist lobbies is taken as a given.

Over the past twelve months a slew of publications has cranked up the volume of anti-Zionism: I will focus on four of them. In March, 2006 an eighty page working paper appeared on Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government homepage. Co-authored by the school’s Academic Dean, Professor Stephen Walt, and University of Chicago Professor of Politics, John Mearsheimer The Israel Lobby and Foreign Policy was instantly zapped across cyberspace. The paper was republished on blogs, websites, cyzines, and became a mandatory item in the email inboxes of news junkies across the globe. A condensed version of the paper was published on 23/03/06 in London Review of Books. For those who spend little time in the blogosphere, the paper might as well never have been published.

On the other hand, as an habitue of the blogosphere, even I was surprised when, within days, cyberspace fulminated with outrage at the supposed ‘over the top attempts to silence legitimate debate.’ In fact, the first the Australian MSM registered the paper’s existence was when The Australian - more than a month later - published an article by blogger, Antony Loewenstein. Four months, four broadsheet articles and two television appearances later, Loewenstein’s own book, My Israel Question was published. During that same four months, the M&W paper received coverage in most mainstream press including lengthy extracts and commentary in various News Ltd. and Fairfax Features and op-ed sections. Towards the end of 2006, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe published Palestine: Ethnic Cleansing. The momentum has apexed with the publication of former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace, not Apartheid.

M&W and AL cover the same ground, use similar sources, and reach similar conclusions: the U.S. and its allies - such as Australia - are making significant strategic errors in their middle east priorities. M&W focus their critique on the U.S. and advocate the withdrawal of its diplomatic and financial support of Israel or at least using its influence to demand substantial changes in Israeli foreign policy. With all the authority that comes with tenured professorships at two of the world’s top schools of foreign affairs, they insist that pro-Israel and Zionist lobbies have a stranglehold over U.S. foreign policy and have had so for decades, particularly since 1973.[1] As a consequence of this stranglehold the U.S. has been backing the wrong horse, Israel, in the middle east. As two Cold-War era international relations scholars from the realist school, M&W warn these lobbies function as a destabilising fifth column in U.S. politics: indeed, “this situation has no equal in American political history.”[2]

AL agrees with this position, but throws the line out even further to explore the benefits of dismantling Israel. His book marinades in the autobiographical journey of a young Jewish Australian growing to reject Zionism. His reportage combines confrontations with Australian-based Zionist lobbies, his coverage of the contretemps surrounding Hanan Ashrawi’s award of the Sydney Peace Prize, and his four week trip to Israel and the U.S. in 2006. Loewenstein is defiant in the face of a perceived campaign against him; he sees himself as a “dissenter” who obdurately resists those who denounce him as a “self-hating Jew.” He warns “the undeclared war in the Middle East is the abiding conflict of our era, with little apparent hope of resolution despite years of peace talks.” He asks “how much Zionism - the ideology of Jewish nationalism - is to blame for this intractable conflict?”[3]

M&W explore why “since the Six Day War in 1967 the centrepiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel.”[4] This question is crucial to U.S. security “given the strategic importance of the Middle East and its potential impact on others both Americans and non-Americans.” For M&W, the answer to his question lies in ‘understanding and addressing the Lobby’s influence on U.S. policy.’[5]

Both M&W and AL claim to prosecute their theses in the language of scholarship; au fait with the considerable historiography of the Middle East during the twentieth century, and the role of the U.S. in that history. Both also boast of their heavy reliance on Israeli sources. M&W reinforce their case with assurances that “the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars;” reassuring readers they “may reject our conclusions, of course, but the evidence on which they rest is not controversial.”[6] Similarly, Jimmy Carter wailed at a University of Georgia conference

I have been called a liar. I've been called an anti-Semite. I've been called a bigot. I've been called a plagiarist. I've been called a coward. Those accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact that the book is accurate, and that it's needed.[7]

AL assures the reader that his history major from Melbourne’s Monash university reinforced “as a liberal Jew, I was brought up to question the established historical narrative.”[8] Fired up since what he describes as “the Hanan Ashrawi Affair” AL has passionately burrowed into the world of Australian lobby groups, published bits and pieces in on-line magazines, and established his own blog devoted to the Arab-Israel conflict, the machinations of Diaspora Jews, and other geostrategic hot buttons such as Hugo Chavez and Tibet. All this was topped by a four week trip to Israel and the U.S. in 2005.

I conclude that Stephen Walt did not write the U.S. article. He seems merely, inadvisedly, to have put his name on it. Secondly, I agree wholeheartedly with AL that “it is time for a radical rethink of the conflict.” However, the conclusions I draw on motives and the peculiarly selective sources used by both and AL and M&W are not pretty. My conclusions, while not prognostic, hopefully will inform the real “radical rethinking of the conflict” we must have. I also show how neatly the ideological lenses through which AL and M&W present their theses nicely match the frames worn by the postmodern history warriors in Australia’s own identity debates; debates sparked by the Mabo decision and Keith Windschuttle’s accusations of the ‘fabricators of Australia‘s history.’[9]

1. Why do so many westerners care about the Palestinian issue?

Since the 1947 UN Partition of British Mandate Palestine, the global geopolitical theatre has been far from dull; yet in 2008 the Israeli-Arab conflict enters its seventh decade: it has evolved from a conflict between Israelis and, firstly Arabs to secondly Palestinians, and today Islamists;[10] And yet, in the same year of partition, the Muslim state of Pakistan was carved out of imperial India. As blogger and Crikey contributor Irfan Yusuf says, the formation of Pakistan led to population transfers affecting several million, with a loss of one million lives[11]; Mao Zedong and his “Long March” unified China into a Communist power that, via the death of tens of millions in the subsequent “cultural revolution,” has evolved into the world‘s second superpower[12]; More than two million Vietnamese, fifty thousand Americans and five hundred Australians lost their lives in the first military defeat ever experienced by the U.S; civil war in Indonesia achieved a non-Communist autocracy, yet fledgling democracy, at the cost of one million lives; Iran and Iraq went to war for eight years at the cost of over half a million lives; Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties with Israel; Afghan and Pushtan mujahadeen repelled the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union collapsed and morphed into a growing ally of the U.S; millions perished in civil wars in Rwanda and Darfur; And of course arguably the most profound geopolitical event of the post-WW2 period was the stunning success of the U.S. in rebuilding Japan and Germany into the economic, cultural, and political powerhouses they are today.

Off the bloody and rhetorical stage of geopolitics, other theatres produced revolutions in human organisation and potential: a lightly-moustached woman of Italian-Catholic origin emerged from Detroit to amass a nine figure fortune simulating sex with a burning crucifix singing “like a Virgin:” another woman, a descendant of African slaves, amassed a similar fortune and even more power with a globally-syndicated daily television talk-show with the message “You Go Girl!” Man landed on the moon; vaccines for small pox and a host of once mass-killers were developed, an openly gay man was appointed to the Australian High Court. Other great cultural achievements. Nobel Prizes were awarded to economists who invented “derivatives’ that have prevented a repeat of 1929. A black woman has replaced a black man as U.S. Secretary of State in Republican Administrations.

And yet in 2000 U.S. President Clinton, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, and Israeli Prime Minister Barak could not complete a seemingly simple real estate transaction. The subsequent second Intifada resulted in four thousand Palestinian and Israeli lives, surely an infinitesimal blip in the narrative of post-WW2 history? But to read AL and M&W, one feels as those who were receiving Orson Welle’s War Of the Worlds thunder over the ether in 1938 might well have felt. But then again, Welles would probably have agreed at the time that the chances of suicide bombers turning the Twin Towers into twin pillars of dust were, “like the chances of anything coming from Mars, a million to one, he said” Why the intractability of a seeming relatively minor dispute?


Given this tempest of the post-WW2 geopolitical soup, M&W’s credibility is questioned immediately on page one when they place Israel at the top of U.S. policy priorities in the Middle East. Wrong professors.

1. The dominant foreign policy of the United States from the end of WW2 until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the first Gulf War, was the threat of Communism; the Cold War. While the actual threat of Soviet and Chinese imperial designs is, and always has been, debatable, it was at least genuinely perceived by successive U.S. administrations as being number one.

2. The second strategic challenge in the middle east was securing a stable and cheap supply of oil, particularly from Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq. To be sure, the U.S. was more than self-sufficient in oil during this period; its main priority was access to the oil needed to fuel the reconstructions of oil-poor Japan and Western Europe (the Marshall Plan). This challenge was partly met by President Roosevelt’s pact with Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal guaranteeing U.S. security for Saudi oil.[13]

3. From 1967 onwards, the third strategic priority was ensuring Israel’s on-going strength to address and deal with threats to stability within the middle east that might threaten U.S. oil interests.

Of course, these three imperatives inevitably collided with each other from time to time. At times, the U.S. had to balance support for Israel against Soviet incursions into neighbouring Arab countries; incursions that at various times involved combinations or all of finance, military technology and arms, and even actual Soviet physical presence. Surely, at least as much as the Zionist-lobby, it is against this multi-dimensional ebb and flow of U.S. strategic thinking that the PR problem must be analysed? Alarmingly, neither M&W, AL, Pappe, or even Carter address this fundamental geostrategic reality.

Part 2: Zionism and early Palestine (to be posted on 11/05/08)

Part 3: What the Culture Warriors do not tell you about Partition and Deir Yassan (to be posted on 12/05/08)

Footnotes:

These references will be flled in over the coming week.

[1]
[2] M&W at p.1
[3]
[4] p.1
[5]
[6] M&W p.2
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10] Of course the historical roots go back further, but this essay is concerned with the role of the U.S. in resolving the issue which is confined to the post-partition experience.
[11]
[12]
[13]