Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: 1940

Showing posts with label 1940. Show all posts

Monday, August 14, 2023

Yes, there was a Saudi consulate in Jerusalem before 1948

Saudi Arabia’s appointment of its first ambassador to the Palestinian Authority, who will also serve as consul general to Jerusalem, was not coordinated with Israel, and Israeli diplomatic figures are struggling to gauge its implications for the efforts to normalize relations with the kingdom.

Senior Israeli officials said Sunday that Riyadh’s weekend announcement that the Saudi Ambassador to Jordan, Nayef bin Bandar Al-Sudairi, will henceforth also serve as the kingdom’s nonresident ambassador to the Palestinian Authority and consul general in Jerusalem, created facts on the ground for Israel and was not preceded by a dialogue between the countries on the issue.

The only Israeli official to comment Sunday on the Saudi announcement was Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, who stated in an interview with Radio 103FM that Israel “will not allow the opening of any kind of diplomatic mission.”

His remark is based on Israel’s official policy for decades of not permitting the opening of diplomatic missions in Jerusalem, with the exception of those that operated in the city before 1948 in the western part and before 1967 in East Jerusalem. Since Saudi Arabia is not planning at this stage to establish a new diplomatic mission in the city, the appointment does not violate Israeli policy.

So if Saudi Arabia had no consulate before 1948 in Jerusalem, Israel wouldn't allow one now.

However, al-Sudari then tweeted a photo of a Saudi consulate in Jerusalem from 1947! The signs indeed say "Saudi Arabian Consulate of Palestine."

Under the guidance of His Majesty the late King Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman in 1947, Uncle Abdulaziz bin Ahmed Al-Sudairy sponsored the opening of the Saudi Consulate General in Jerusalem (Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood).

Indeed, there was a Saudi consulate in Jerusalem, since about 1940. Here is a Palestine Post article that mentions it and the consul general's name in January 1945.

They aren't asking for a consulate at this point, but if Israel's official policy listed above is accurate, then things might get interesting - and not just vis a vis the Saudis, but also the Biden administration as well that wants to open up a consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem as well. Even if Israel allows the Saudis to do this in some fashion as part of the deal for normalization, it would have a hard time saying "no" to the US.

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!

In 1940, American Jews were urged to purchase land in Eretz Israel despite antisemitic British restrictions

The most infamous section of the 1939 British White Paper was the part that severely restricted the ability of Jews to immigrate to Palestine - on the eve of the Holocaust.

Not as well known is that the White Paper also prohibited or restricted Jews from purchasing lands from Arabs for much of the area of the Mandate:

The Administration of Palestine is required, under Article 6 of the Mandate, "while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced," to encourage "close settlement by Jews on the land," and no restriction has been imposed hitherto on the transfer of land from Arabs to Jews. The Reports of several expert Commissions have indicated that, owing to the natural growth of the Arab population and the steady sale in recent years of Arab land to Jews, there is now in certain areas no room for further transfers of Arab land, whilst in some other areas such transfers of land must be restricted if Arab cultivators are to maintain their existing standard of life and a considerable landless Arab population is not soon to be created. In these circumstances, the High Commissioner will be given general powers to prohibit and regulate transfers of land.

This was official antisemitism.

In 1940, the specifics of what land was allowed to be sold was first published, as described by the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry:

[The] Land Transfers Regulations, published on 28th February, 1940, divided Palestine into three zones.

In Zone A, consisting of about 63 percent of the country including the stony hills, land transfers save to a Palestinian Arab were in general forbidden. In Zone B. consisting of about 32 percent of the country, transfers from a Palestinian Arab save to another Palestinian Arab were severely restricted at the discretion of the High Commissioner. In the remainder of Palestine, consisting of about five percent of the country-which, however, includes the most fertile areas- land sales remained unrestricted.

Here is a map, published in American Jewish newspapers shortly afterwards, showing the different zones as best understood at the time.

It appears that the map is wildly inaccurate - and hugely optimistic. The white areas where there should be unrestricted ability for Jews to purchase land is shown as far more than the 5% that the Anglo-American Commission determined, and Zone A forbidden for Jews to purchase as shown is far less than 63% of the entire land.

The real map shows that Jews could only purchase (without restriction) within the red-bordered areas, nearly all along the Mediterranean coast plus Jerusalem:

But while the Jews reacted negatively to this official discrimination against Jews by Great Britain, the Zionist leaders used this map as incentive to get American Jews to purchase land in Palestine, saying there was plenty of land available to legally buy:

The above map of Palestine, tentatively drawn, is based upon an unofficial analysis of the Palestine land edict which divides the country into three zones for the purpose of land purchase. The tentative map gives an inkling into the meaning of the message cabled to Dr. Israel Goldstein, President of the Jewish National Fund, by Menahem Ussishkin, World President of the Keren Kayemeth in Jerusalem, that "Large opportunities for land buying (in Palestine) are still available."

The free zone embraces, including the land holdings already in Jewish possession, an area of approximately 7,000,000 dunams exclusive of the Negeb. Final clarification of the limits of the respective zones is awaited.

"Do not despair," Mr. Ussishkin declared in his message. "We will persist in our opposition with all means at our disposal to the new policy threatening to convert our Homeland into a ghetto. Large opportunities for buying land are still available." He is confident that American Jewry, center of Jewish hope, will rise to occasion and assist the Jewish Agency in its political struggle and the Keren Kayemeth in its practical work to win the struggle.

Even in the face of these immoral and bigoted restrictions, the Zionist leaders wanted to redouble the chance for legally purchasing what little land they still could.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

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!

When do charges of "cultural appropriation" cross the line into antisemitism?

Palestinian Arabs falsely complaining that Israeli Jews are "culturally appropriating" their cuisine have become so common that they are almost a cliche.

But at least some of these accusations cross the line from absurd into antisemitism.

Here's an article this past weekend from L'Orient Today by Emmanuel Haddad:

After hummus, falafel and so many other flagship dishes of Palestinian and Levantine cuisine, knefeh nabulsi is the latest victim of appropriation by Israel.

This delicious dessert, which originated in Nablus and is named after the main ingredient — nabulsi cheese — has been incorporated into a more-than-dubious recipe developed by Pizza Hut Israel.

For Palestinian chef Fadi Kattan, the affront is threefold: "First against the knefeh, then against pizza... And then, against the taste!"

The flavor is as off-putting as it is bitter for Salma Serry, historian of Near Eastern cuisine. The Israeli pizza-knefeh fits perfectly into the definition of appropriation she offers on Sufra Kitchen, the online platform she created to decolonize regional cuisines:

"Appropriation [is the] inappropriate adoption of a group's food without giving it credit, especially for commercial gain. Example: Israeli restaurants profiting from falafel, knefeh or hummus without mentioning their original culture."

The word "inappropriate" in that definition does some heavy lifting here. The USA has lots of restaurants that serve pizza or tacos; is it cultural appropriation to mention them without the prefixes "Italian" or "Mexican?" Apparently, only in Israel, and only for Jews, is cooking food from surrounding countries considered a crime without mentioning their origin - and in the case of foods from Arab countries, the origin in often murky and hardly ever "Palestinian. "

The Israeli Pizza Hut chain never once claimed that "knafeh pizza" is an Israeli food. On the contrary, when they introduced the dish last month, their press release said, “Pizza Hut recognized the unrealized potential of this irresistible Middle Eastern food, and decided to make its own version.”

And Pizza Hut is not calling it "knafeh" but "knafeh pizza." It is a (perhaps bizarre) combination of the two, but no one claims it is authentic knafeh - or authentic pizza, for that matter.

The article goes on:

Salma Serry says she often hears denials of this culinary appropriation, defended as the natural spread of cuisine among different communities.

"Of course, food is meant to be shared. But when there is active violence that takes away a group's cultural identity and denies its heritage, its land and the food it produces while manipulating its history, then it becomes problematic,” she said. “In the specific case of Palestine, it's not about sharing; it's about taking and not giving back."

This is simply not true. Israeli chefs and cookbook writers happily describe where Israeli cuisine comes from. No one is "stealing" anything. Read Janna Gur's "A Short Introduction to Israeli Food" preface to her cookbook Shuk where she concisely describes the Israeli food scene's influences, from dozens of ethnic cultures in the Israeli melting pot but also from the neighboring Palestinians. Yes, sometimes non-experts will lazily say that some Arab dishes are Israeli, but they mean that they are popular in Israel: no one says that they originate there, unless they really do, as in the case of falafel in pita. Similarly, there was much angst when Haaretz once said that shawarma is "Israeli street food" - yet it is, just as much ss pizza is American street food.

Here's a 1949 advertisement for a Tel Aviv restaurant selling "oriental food."

No Israeli ever claimed hummus was natively Israeli.

The real irony is that Palestinians are the ones who have culturally appropriated Middle East foods. They really have claimed to have invented most popular Levantine foods like hummus and falafel, and here they claim to have created knafeh. They may have invented knafeh nabulsi, which uses cheese made in Nablus, but knafeh itself has much murkier origins.

Why does no one accuse Palestinians of cultural appropriation for claiming foods that were invented elsewhere?

Because they are not Jews.

There are two reasons that articles like this descend from simple lies into antisemitism.

One is that they are saying that while every nation's cuisine is an amalgam from many places, only Israeli Jews are accused of "theft" - even though Israeli foodies freely admit and eagerly explain where all their dishes originate.

The other is that these articles deny the or even existence of Mizrahi Jews on the Israeli food scene, even though they are the primary source.

The L'Orient article includes this falsehood:

For chef Kattan, the case of hummus is emblematic of the broader problem:

"It was the very first dish appropriated by the Israelis as early as 1948. Originally, the Zionist project was marked by European-style colonialism that denied the Arabness of Palestine and its land. But when they went to eat at the homes of Palestinians who survived the Nakba — during which 580 Palestinian villages were razed to the ground — they said to themselves, ‘This chickpea puree is not bad!’”

Jews in the Middle East have been eating hummus for centuries. This is a Palestinian chef erasing hundreds of years of Jewish history, and claiming that Jews have no right to be in the region.

Here is a Palestine Post article about the popularity of falafel among Palestinian Jews in 1940 - and it interestingly describes the uniquely Israeli version of falafel in pita even then. The writer interviews a Jew who was born in Yemen, went to Egypt and brought his falafel skills to Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street.

These articles invariably downplay the role of Mizrahi Jews in bringing with them the bulk of what is now called Israeli cuisine.

Yes, that is antisemitism.

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!

False claims of Nazi spies masquerading as Jews provided excuse to limit Jewish immigration to America during the Holocaust

The Ken Burns documentary that started being broadcast last night, The US and the Holocaust, has prompted me to dig up little known stories about how the US severely limited Jewish immigration.

One reason that the US gave for limiting immigration was the fear that some of the immigrants were in fact Nazi spies.

The New York Daily News reported on November 26, 1940 - a year before the US entered the war - about a secret Gestapo school in Prague to train spies to act as Jews for espionage purposes.

The article makes it clear that this fear would end up dooming thousands of Jews.

I cannot find any independent report during or after the Holocaust about this supposed "Jewish institute."

There are cases of Nazis who masqueraded as Jewish refugees in Europe. One such ring was reported in Holland and the Dutch authorities easily discovered them, as JTA reported:

The disclosure that Nazi agents masquerading as refugees had helped the Nazi parachutists landing in the Netherlands recalled today that the Dutch authorities had several months ago discovered a group of such agents through the medium of botched circumcisions.

Last February the Paris newspaper L’Ouevre reported that 16 Nazi spies who entered the Netherlands in the guise of Jewish refugees — even taking the precaution of being circumcised — were unmasked when it was determined through a rabbi that they were not circumcised according to the Jewish ritual.

According to the report, the Gestapo had selected 16 men who looked as Jewish as possible, had them attend synagogue services for several weeks to acquaint ports stamped with “J” (Jew) and sent them into Holland.

The Netherlands anti-espionage service, suspecting that they were spies, arrested the men. After examining them, the authorities called a rabbi and, without informing him about the details of the case, asked him to ascertain whether they had been circumcised in the Jewish manner. He reported that they were not.

But (so far) I cannot find any such case in the US. The closest was the case of Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, a German-born American citizen who arrived in the US on the Swedish-American liner SS Drottningholm in 1942. The media originally said that he pretended to be a Jewish refugee but that wasn't true, as JTA reported at the time:

The Nazi spy, Herbert Karl Friedrich Bahr, who was arrested aboard the diplomatic exchange ship Drottningholm, will face a speedy trial, it was announced today. Full information of the arrest released here indicated that the 29-year-old spy was posing as a “friend of Jews in Germany,” and not as a Jewish refugee as was generally reported yesterday when the news of his arrest was made public by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Inquiry at the FBI office here elicited the information that Bahr was provided by the Nazi military espionage office with full information concerning a Jewish family in Germany in order to be able to explain to U.S. authorities how he happened to be in possession of $7,000 in American currency. He was instructed by the Nazi espionage headquarters to say that a Jewish friend of his in Germany, a member of the old Social-Democratic party, had been beheaded by the Nazis, that the man’s wife had sold a valuable stamp collection for $7,000 and given him the proceeds to take out of the country for her.

In 2015, the Smithsonian Magazine wrote an investigative report on Bahr and noted that in fact the rumors of Nazis posing as Jews to spy on the US were essentially baseless:

Government officials from the State Department to the FBI to President Franklin Roosevelt himself argued that refugees posed a serious threat to national security. Yet today, historians believe that Bahr's case was practically unique—and the concern about refugee spies was blown far out of proportion.

In the court of public opinion, the story of a spy disguised as a refugee was too scandalous to resist.

Immigration restrictions actually tightened as the refugee crisis worsened. Wartime measures demanded special scrutiny of anyone with relatives in Nazi territories—even relatives in concentration camps. At a press conference, President Roosevelt repeated the unproven claims from his advisers that some Jewish refugees had been coerced to spy for the Nazis. “Not all of them are voluntary spies,” Roosevelt said. “It is rather a horrible story, but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”

Here and there, skeptics objected. As the historian Deborah Lipstadt points out in her book Beyond Belief, The New Republic portrayed the government’s attitude as “persecuting the refugee.” The Nation didn’t believe that the State Department could “cite a single instance of forced espionage.” But these voices were drowned out in the name of national security.

Government agencies like the State Department used spy trials as fuel for the argument against accepting refugees. But late in the war, government whistleblowers began to question this approach. In 1944, the Treasury Department released a damning report initialed by lawyer Randolph Paul. It read:

“I am convinced on the basis of the information which is available to me that certain officials in our State Department, which is charged with carrying out this policy, have been guilty not only of gross procrastination and wilful failure to act, but even of wilful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler.”

The FBI, State Department and media couldn't resist pushing the narrative of Jewish spies, the result being that tens of thousands of Jews who could have been saved in the US were murdered instead.

One other point: It would have been easy for the FBI to hire religious Jews to vet the immigrants to ensure that at least the religious ones were who they said they were. But it seems that the antisemitism of the day precluded considering American religious Jews as truly American and trustworthy for such a task.

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!