Phil Weiss at Mondoweiss, the most lucid and informed voice on the American Jewish left doing journalism critical of right wing Zionism, reports on remarks of The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg at a Jewish Community Center forum in Manhattan.It's worth reading the entire section that Weiss quoted from Goldberg, because it is quite accurate, which is why it bothers the serial liar Cole.
In Weiss’s telling, Goldberg argued to his audience that Israelis are like the Seminole indigenous people of Florida, and the Palestinians are “the cowboys.”
This framing of the issue is completely ahistorical and frankly ignorant, and is offensive on all sides.
Many Palestinian leaders understand the conflict not as the conflict between the cowboys– the Jews– and the Indians– the Palestinians.Cole can't handle the truth, so he sputters. The next sentence in his article is that "Goldberg apparently can’t bring himself to say the word 'Palestinian,' as though all Arabic-speakers are indistinguishable." As you can see above, Goldberg used the word Palestinian and didn't use the word Arab. Cole apparently knows that his brain-dead followers won't bother clicking on the link that proves he cannot help making things up.
But the Jews are the Indians, and the Arabs, the Palestinians, the cowboys, in the following sense. What happened in the Middle East– this is not a political commentary about what should actually be done leading to a fair and equitable solution to the challenge here– but what happened here is the equivalent of the Seminoles sitting in Oklahoma or wherever they are today, scattered around the United States– Seminoles coming together and deciding that they’re going back to Florida. And going back in such numbers and telling the whites and blacks and Hispanics of Florida, Oh by the way, we’re home and we’d like a state, and we’d like to take over Florida.
The people of Florida would probably say to them, you haven’t been here in 200 years. This isn’t your home. And the Seminoles would say, Actually, it is our home. This is where our people are buried. This is the center of our religion, this is where we were expelled from.
That [discussion] doesn’t happen; and people need to understand that – what’s happened is, it’s really interesting from an analytical perspective. As Israel has become more and more powerful as a country, and every year it becomes more powerful, it becomes bigger, it becomes more militarily powerful, economically powerful, it’s lost more and more control of its own narrative. The narrative is of an indigenous people coming home to its homeland and to some degree, to a large degree, to some degree, willing to share that homeland or at least parts of that homeland with the people who moved in after. Right? But they lost total control of that narrative, because the people who were opposed to Israel’s existence are very very powerful and clever narrators as well.
In order to understand what’s going on historically you need to understand history…
It is completely natural that the people of Florida would say to the Seminoles who are walking back 200 years after the Trail of Tears, coming back to Florida, What the hell– what do you mean? You don’t live here, your father wasn’t here, your grandfather, your great grandmother, nobody was here, you can’t claim this as your own, but that’s because we don’t really understand and privilege historical memory, among other things.
Cole then goes on an extended pseudo-history of Jews with cherry picked (and possibly made up) facts where he strenuously tries to say that Jews aren't from Palestine - he doesn't seem to subscribe to the Khazar myth but something close - and that Jews hardly ever controlled Palestine, and that Jews weren't interested in living there anyway.
As an example:
The Crusaders killed or expelled most remaining Jewish populations. From about 1100 until the early twentieth century there were virtually no Jews in Palestine. Oh, there were a handful here and there– a few Kabbalist mystics at Safad, retirees in Jerusalem. But I wrote a book about Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of the Middle East and the French report that they only found 3,000 Jews in geographic Palestine in 1799.That's an interesting and counterfactual view. Jews were the majority in Palestine until the Muslim invasion - yes, the Arabs were colonialists, even though Cole falsely claims that most Palestinians have been there for millennia. (Research shows that the only truly indigenous Palestinians are the Christian community, and most of them were originally Jews.)
Since the Muslim invasion, the Jews that lived there went through an astonishing number of massacres and expulsions from both Christians and Muslims. Yet through it all, they kept coming back. Dozens of major rabbis kept immigrating with their students, often to be slaughtered again (with a few major earthquakes that also killed hundreds.)
This Wikipedia article fills in the gaping historic holes that Cole doesn't want you to know. The overwhelming conclusion is that Jews were always spiritually tied to their land despite it having very few ways of supporting them. This is the exact opposite to what Cole wants you to believe.
What about the 3000 Jews that Cole says he found out about? Well, his book on Napoleon says it - without a citation.
Cole continues to lie:
The European Jews were brought to Palestine by British imperial policy during the early twentieth century heyday of colonialism, and by the rise of Fascism in Europe that drove out or killed millions of Jews. Because of the complications of the Holocaust, Jewish migration into Palestine is not exactly like the voluntary settler=colonialism of the Pieds Noire in Algeria,Cole, the self described expert, apparently has never heard of the Perushim, the First Aliyah, the Second Aliyah. He thinks that somehow the British brought the Jews to Palestine, even though practically none of those were from Britain. He pretends that most Jews came to Palestine post-Holocaust not because they wanted to but that they were forced to. As someone who has looked up the Holocaust archives for my parents and relatives, I can tell him that the refugees filled out forms where they were offered where they would like to emigrate to. My parents chose America, they weren't forced to go to Palestine; one of my uncles and his mother chose Palestine.
In other words, Cole is a liar. Nothing new about that.
And by denying Jewish history including how fundamental Israel has always been to Jews and Judaism, Cole is proving that he is dabbling in antisemitism as well.
(h/t Dan, who reads Cole so I don't have to)