Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: David Ben Gurion

Showing posts with label David Ben Gurion. Show all posts

Thursday, August 31, 2023

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Guess who wanted to see Arabs transferred out of Palestine in the 1940s?

Zachary Foster of Princeton University tweets a "gotcha:"

This appears to be an accurate representation of what Weitz wrote in his diary in 1941. But what Foster leaves out is that David Ben Gurion rejected Weitz's desire to create a transfer committee in 1948, during the actual fighting.

Was the idea of population transfer mainstream in Zionist thought? It wouldn't be a huge surprise if there were prominent Zionists who felt that this was the best possible solution to avoid huge amounts of bloodshed. What the critics of Israel don't want people to realize is that while transfer is considered a war crime today, up until the 1940s it was considered a viable solution for many conflicts (see India/Pakistan for a classic example, as well as some 20 million Europeans transferred in the years after World War II.) Before World War II there were mass population transfers also to avoid ethnic conflict that were approved by the League of Nations.

Jews at the time are being subject to the international law of today. That is yet another form of antisemitism.

In 1944, a prominent group of people promoted the idea of population transfer of Arabs out of Palestine.

The British Labour Party.

The Palestine Post⁩, 26 April 1944⁩

If anything, based on all available evidence, the Labour Party was far more enthusiastic with the idea of population transfer of Arabs than the Zionist Jews were.

Yet no one today damns the British Labour Party as promoting ethnic cleansing in the 1940s. Only the Jews of the 1940s are tarred with that particular brush. And they still are today, despite all the evidence showing it is a lie.

Without context of how the world not only accepted but promoted all kinds of population transfers in that time period, the charge against Zionist Jews of the 1940s is deceptive at best, and a malicious slander at worst.

Which goes to show yet again that antisemitism never went away - it just morphed into new and sophisticated forms.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.

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The American Jewish Committee in the 1960s: Peter Beinart's NYT lies more egregious than I reported

I wrote my fisking of Peter Beinart's NYT op-ed quickly, but the true depth of Beinart's dishonesty can be seen from a deeper dive into one of the topics he mentioned and I touched upon.

He wrote, "Although supportive of Israel’s existence, America’s leading Jewish groups did not make it the center of their work in the mid-20th century. And when they did focus on Israel, they often tried to bring its behavior in line with their broader liberal democratic goals. The A.J.C. repeatedly criticized Israel for discriminating against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In 1960 the head of the group’s Israel Committee explained that it hoped to eliminate “antidemocratic practices and attitudes” in the Jewish state so the organization could more credibly “invoke principles of human rights and practices in our country and abroad.”

Beinart links to a fairly obscure 1998 academic paper, "Transformation Through Crisis: The American Jewish Committee and the Six-Day War," by Lawrence Grossman, published in the journal American Jewish History. This is already a red flag - if American Jewish organizations in the 1960s were so uniformly critical of Israeli democracy, wouldn't there be a New York Times article about it that Beinart could link to?

The entire point of the academic article Beinart links to is to show that the AJC was out of the mainstream of American Jewish opinion on Israel and Zionism before 1967. It refutes Beinart's point - but Beinart quotes a small portion and pretends that the AJC's ambivalence on Israel represented mainstream American Jewish thought.

On the contrary - that attitude made the AJC nearly irrelevant in the 1960s. The paper makes the AJC's anomalous status clear:

The Jewish community had shifted massively toward the Zionist pole, and the AJC risked being marginalized if it did not adjust.

By the early 1960s, writes Naomi Cohen, AJC "had virtually stopped growing." In 1962 Executive Vice President John Slawson told a newly organized AJC Committee on National Growth that one reason Jews were reluctant to join was that "there is still a feeling that we are anti-Israel."

The article also notes that the AJC was literally the only Jewish organization in America to criticize Israel for a 1966 retaliatory raid in Jordan after a series of Arab attacks and not to condemn a UN anti-Israel resolution on the issue. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Organizations, the major American Jewish umbrella group, condemned the UN resolution. The National Community Relations Council, the other large American Jewish umbrella group, was prevented from joining the Conference of Presidents resolution because its rules required a unanimous vote - and the objection of the AJC, which had only recently joined the NCRC, vetoed it.

Beinart must have read the entire piece to find the out-of-context quote he published, which means he knows very well that he was misrepresenting the opinions of major American organizations.

To be sure, American Jews in the 1960s had other issues to worry about besides Israel. There was still explicit antisemitism in America, and the plight of Soviet Jewry started gaining recognition. But I did a quick survey of the front page of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, as a representative of Jewish mainstream concerns, on its first issue in each year from 1960 to 1967. Israeli topics were featured as the top story in every issue (judged as the right-most story on the front page):

January 1, 1960: Golda Meir criticizes a World Bank loan to Nasser's Egypt

January 6, 1961: David Ben Gurion says a speech of his was distorted and he lauds US Jewry

January 5, 1962: Soviet-Egyptian pact on arms a concern for Israel

January 4, 1963: "Middle East arms race unfolding to Israel's disadvantage": Javits

January 3, 1964: Israel charges Syria with "barbarism" in treatment of Israeli prisoners

January 1, 1965: Cabinet decides against reopening Lavon affair

January 7, 1966: State Department confirms supplying Jordan with up to 100 Patton tanks

January 6, 1967: Israel complains to Security Council over Arab raids

Beinart is making things up, knowing full well that most people - and certainly the New York Times editorial board - will not fact-check him. This is a pattern with Beinart, who is not only lying, but attempting to rewrite history itself.

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!

Of course we should teach young Jews about 1948

Hey Alma has yet another article about how young Jews who attended Zionist summer camps are unaware of the complexities of the Israeli/Arab conflict.

As is typical in these articles, the assumption is that the newly anti-Zionist Jews have been cheated out of real knowledge, and now they know better, and must “unlearn” the hasbara/propaganda they were force fed by evil former IDF soldiers.

For example:

My Jewish education at camp heavily involved learning about modern-day Israel and the reason why it was so central for Jews to have their own homeland. I remember first learning about Theodor Herzl at camp, along with famous Israeli prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. We had Hebrew lessons every day which often came with education about Israeli culture, and a section of our madrichim (counselors) were Israeli, young and usually fresh out of the IDF. They would teach us about where they grew up and put on a week-long celebration of Israel’s independence every summer. Posters with facts about Israeli culture and history were commonplace in camp buildings: Did you know that the average Israeli consumes 22 lbs of hummus each year?

I loved learning about Israel and felt a spiritual connection to this country I had never lived in or been to. When I was told by my counselors that Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, that it had every right to defend itself from missile attacks coming from the West Bank, I believed them — why would I not? I was never told about the nation that existed before the formation of Israel or the native Palestinians who lived there. I was never told about the occupation and what it means for Palestinians living under Israeli rule.

So they are “unlearning” that Israel is a democracy and “learning” that there was a Palestinian nation on the land beforehand. Isn’t that great? Myths are replacing a vacuum.

It is way past time (if it isn’t happening already) for Jewish kids to be taught an accurate version of modern Israeli history, one that is proud and unapologetic. There is no reason to demonize ordinary Palestinian Arabs but there is a need to describe the antisemitism of their leaders, of the Hadassah Hospital convoy massacre, of how the Arabs attacked immediately after the partition vote, of how the Zionists waited for months before finally fighting back, of the drama of the UN vote and the declaration of the state, of the Palestinian Arabs who fled from Jaffa after their leaders abandoned them. It can all be taught accurately in a way that kids can understand.