Arab leaders in 1919: "If the Jews had conquered Palestine by force, we would bow our heads and remain silent"

The Detroit Free Press, July 13, 1919, writes about the Arab reactions to Zionism. 

The article is very negative towards the Zionist movement and it describes it as a "peril" to the Arab population. It describes in detail how the Zionists are buying up land at 500% of its value, how Tel Aviv and Haifa have become beautiful Jewish communities - and how resentful the Arabs are about this.

The reporter spoke to a new group of Muslim and Christian anti-Zionists in Palestine where they describe why they believe Zionism is a peril to them. Some of their arguments can be seen today to be proving the opposite of what they intend.

"If the Jews have a right to Palestine, then...the Indians have a right to New York," went one argument, that unwittingly conceded that Jews were there first. 

The most interesting argument was this one:

'If a Jewish army had beaten us in battle and had taken our land away from us by force of arms, we would have no word to say against Zionism. While our Jewish conquerors occupied our country, we would bow our heads and remain silent."

Somehow, between 1919 and 1949, that attitude changed dramatically. And what became clear is that there was no issue with living under the rule of non-Arabs, as they had for centuries, but living under the rule of Jews. 

The article, and others from the region in the years immediately following the end of World War I, also shows that what little Palestinian nationalism that existed was purely a reaction to Zionism. And this article says that explicitly: that Zionism has managed to awaken Arabs in Palestine to "such a degree of national consciousness that they have never known before." 

Many critics of Bezalel Smotrich's assertion that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people a century ago say, quite reasonably, that this is irrelevant: there are a Palestinian people today and that is all that matters. But if Palestinian nationalism and peoplehood are completely or even mostly an angry response to Zionism, and if their main goal is not the creation of a nation but rather the destruction of another, then it is not a nationalism at all. 

It is a weaponization of an entire population against Jewish self-determination. 

That is not nationalism. That is sabotage pretending to be nationalism.

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More

Palestinian anger at shofar blasts is just like when the Mufti demanded a shofar ban at the Kotel

Hamas is threatening war if any Jew manages to blow a shofar on the Temple Mount.

Palestinian media has been obsessed with Jews blowing the shofar for weeks. It began when Yehuda Glick played a recording on his phone of a shofar blast while visiting the Temple Mount, an event that was widely reported in Arab media as if he played the shofar itself.

Glick was banned from the Temple Mount as a result - something the Arab media did not report - and he therefore decided to blow the shofar from outside, near the eastern wall.

Muslims objected to that as well, and the Israeli police arrested Glick again. But Israeli courts ruled that there is no reason not to blow the shofar outside the Mount. 

Yet when Jews returned to blow the shofar again, they were arrested anyway, for "violating public order."

Five times a day, the loudspeakers on the Temple Mount blast the call of the muezzin at a decibel level 10 times higher than what the most accomplished shofar blower couldn't approach. (The numbers I see are 95 decibels maximum for the shofar but ss high as 110 decibels for muezzin loudspeakers in India, which I suppose are comparable to those on the Temple Mount.) Each muezzin call takes minutes, while the shofar blast takes seconds (except on Rosh Hashanah itself.)

Palestinian fear and anger at shofar blasts is antisemitism, and as if often the case, the proof can be seen in history.

Today, the Palestinians are saying that the spot that Glick blew the shofar is an Islamic cemetery. But back in 2006, they stopped shofar blowers at the Kotel HaKatan - not a Muslim holy place and not a cemetery .

I'm not certain whether Jews blew the shofar at the Kotel before the twentieth century, but I have news articles from 1914 and 1919 about shofar blasts for specific occasions (not on the holidays) to call attention to major events. Apparently, though, the shofar was blown routinely at the Kotel.

In 1929, just as today, Muslims managed to get the police (then British, now Israeli!) to acceded to their demands not to blow the shofar by threatening violence.

But brave Jews risked certain arrest every year from 1930 through 1947 to blow the shofar at the Kotel.

 The Mufti's objection to the shofar was his objection to Judaism. And the Palestinian objection to the shofar today is the exact same thing. 

Hamas says that Jews visiting the Temple Mount with shofars (and the lulav and etrog) will "lead to a battle nobody wants." But what they are really saying is that they hate the idea of Jewish human rights so much that they will go to war to try to prevent them.

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More

The "anti-Zionist not antisemitic" crowd once argued that they would have no problem with Jews if Jews defeated them in battle

People who claim to be anti-Zionist and not antisemitic offer some reasonable sounding arguments. The reason we know that these arguments are disingenuous is not that the arguments themselves are logically false, but that we have over a century of such arguments - and they morph over time, while keeping the common denominator of always targeting Jews.

For example, the Arab boycotts against Jews from the early 20th century through the 1970s are now seen to be obviously antisemitic - even as they insisted in public that they have nothing against Jews. Today's BDS is a refinement of those methods, but again they only target Jews, not Israeli Arab businesses. 

They keep trying to refine their arguments but when you look at history, you can see that the arguments may change but the underlying antisemitism remains the same.

I just saw a neat example of this from a July 12, 1919 article in the Deseret Evening News ("Is 'Zionism' A Threat to World Peace?") where Palestinian Arabs are interviewed about why they are against Zionism.

Their anger is against the perception that the British conquered Palestine only to give it to the Jews, who did nothing to deserve it. They actually say that if Jews have the right to Palestine, then Indians have the right to New York - tacitly admitting Jewish indigeneity. 

Then comes this:

You see? The problem is that the Jews didn't earn Palestine, fair and square, by winning it in a war. They were cheating (by, for example, buying farmland at inflated prices, which the article similarly describes as a nefarious Jewish plot.) 

Is that argument no longer valid? Or was it simply a logical sounding excuse to justify antisemitism after the fact?

Just like today, the argument sounded like it has merit at the time. Only since 1948 and 1967, when Jews did defeat the Arabs in battle,  do we see that it was simply an excuse for hate, dressing it up as something respectable using rhetoric. They keep moving the goalposts to find other reasons to hate the Jews that don't sound antisemitic - "refugees" or "occupation" or "settlements" or "apartheid." Then as now, these arguments are created to find respectable clothing to dress up pre-existing hate. 

Just as the "anti-Zionist not antisemitic" arguments of the past changed to avoid looking foolish, so will today's.  And the modern antisemites really, really don't want you to look at history.

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More

The world chooses to forget the amazing Zionist achievement to eliminate malaria from Palestine

Anton Alexander writes in Malaria World Journal about the remarkable achievement of Zionists, specifically Dr. I. Kligler, in eliminating malaria from Palestine - the first time such an accomplishment was achieved on a national scale, anywhere. The methods that were successful then are not being copied now in areas that are still rife with the disease, and Alexander believes that this is largely because so many do not want to accept the scope of this Zionist achievement and instead pretend that a Palestinian state could have arisen on its own had Jews not moved to the region and created such solutions.

After the defeat by the British Army of the Turkish Army in 1918, in the final year of World War I, Palestine was administered by the British Mandate, in effect a colony-like structure. It is little appreciated today that Palestine was then thinly populated or even uninhabitable in many areas. Indeed, Palestine was then almost empty. It is also usually not appreciated that if malaria had not been eliminated in Palestine, it is doubtful the State of Israel could ever have come into existence.

The following brief extract from a previous paper may assist in appreciating the severity of the malaria that existed in Palestine 100 years ago. 

In 1919, Dr. Manson-Bahr, a future director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, described Palestine as one of the most highly malarious countries in the world. He knew the conditions in Palestine as in 1918, in the final months of WWI, whilst an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps with the British Army in Palestine, he had witnessed a force of 40,500 men lose 20,427 men in 9 weeks due to malaria. Of the 100,000 Turkish prisoners-of-war taken after their defeat in 1918 by the British Army in Palestine, 20 per cent had to be hospitalised immediately, suffering from malaria.

...For many years, historical narratives have been promoted providing a hostile account of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 from out of Palestine. These narratives have often assumed the form of the Emperor’s New Clothes, misleadingly omitting reference to the malaria which devastated the country. Such narratives for years have thereby provided an incorrect impression that malaria in Palestine 100 years ago did not exist. In effect, it may have been an attempt to make the disease invisible! 

The world has been done a great disservice by the failure before now to declare ‘the emperor is wearing nothing at all’, to call out that Palestine 100 years ago was drenched in malaria, that it was accordingly uninhabitable in many areas. Palestine, in fact, had become desolate and neglected in many areas, and was then almost empty of inhabitants. The method and approach begun by the Zionists in 1922 to eliminate malaria in Palestine were successful, there was much to learn from the method, and the lessons from that malaria elimination are still relevant around the world and could still be applied today. 

Due to the omission of reference to malaria in these misleading narratives, today’s malaria-community is likely to be unaware of the steps taken in the successful malaria elimination in Palestine all those years ago and which experience could be saving lives today. Sadly, it is likely such misleading narratives by these malaria omissions will have done harm, costing many lives over the years throughout the world today wherever malaria has existed.

Dr. Kliger's methods were respectful to all inhabitants of the land, Arab and Jew, and education was key. Alexander wonders whether today's approaches to control malaria have the same respect for the inhabitants that the Zionists did a century ago.

But before such instruction or education could take place, it was necessary firstly to interest the inhabitants in malaria control or elimination, to cause the inhabitants to realise that a death from malaria was not just a fact of life. Instead, the inhabitants had to realise that such a death was a tragedy. The inhabitants had to believe malaria was not inevitable, therefore fatalism had to be overcome. The commencement of the successful Zionist malaria elimination in Palestine 100 years ago was a demonstration of an effective engagement with the community. Palestine was one of the first places to throw off some of the world’s old colonial attitudes which it did by engaging with dignity and respect all the inhabitants (both Arabs and Jews). This resulted in an extraordinarily strong and resilient cooperation by the inhabitants, Jews and Arabs, in the necessary anti-malaria works, lasting for years and years, and which cooperation was to rid the country of the disease. 

I ponder the point and ask the question to the malaria-community: Are inhabitants today truly treated with respect and dignity? Is the approach and engagement with inhabitants the same that each one in the malaria community would honestly want for themselves? Is there a whiff of old-style patronage about the malaria community’s approach?

---

---

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More