More proof BDS is antisemitic (and Ilhan Omar is a liar)

There was a Twitter spat between BDS supporters and Democratic Majority for Israel:

Many people responded to Hill and Omar pointing out quotes from BDS leaders that showed that they oppose the existence of the Jewish state altogether, and the claim that BDS has no position on the ultimate solution is specious since one basic tenet is to support "return" which would flood Israel with Arabs specifically to end it as a Jewish state.

I've also argued that BDS is antisemitic because the BDS movement targets only Jewish owned businesses in Israel and the territories, and ignores those owned by Israeli Arabs.

There is however one other fundamental reason BDS is antisemitic.

The BDSers love to pretend that the movement started in 2005 with a "call from Palestinian civil society."  Pro-Israel groups point out that BDS was a direct result of the antisemitic 2001 UN Conference against Racism, held in Durban.

But BDS comes directly from Arab boycotts of Jews that have been declared for over a hundred years.

The earliest I could find was from 1909 in Hebron, when Arabs there decided to boycott Jewish merchants, followed by another in 1914. The Hebron Jewish community had lived there continuously since Biblical times, so they could hardly be described as Zionist invaders. 

These anti-Jewish boycotts continued through the decades:

Boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses in Mandatory Palestine were organised by Arab leaders starting in 1922 in an attempt to damage the Jewish population of Palestine economically, especially during periods of communal strife between Jews and Arabs.[5] The original boycott forswore with any Jewish-owned business operating in Mandatory Palestine. Palestinian Arabs "who were found to have broken the boycott ... were physically attacked by their brethren and their merchandise damaged" when Palestinian Arabs rioted in Jerusalem in 1929.[6] Another, stricter boycott was imposed on Jewish businesses in following the riots that called on all of the Arabs in the region to abide by its terms. The Arab Executive Committee of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress called for a boycott of Jewish businesses in 1933 and in 1934, the Arab Labor Federation conducted a boycott as well as an organized picketing of Jewish businesses. In 1936, the Palestinian Arab leadership called on another boycott and threatened those who did not respect the boycott with violence

The 1945 Arab League boycott wasn't shy about saying that its targets were Jews. Its declaration stated, "Products of Palestinian Jews are to be considered undesirable in Arab countries."

Even after Israel was reborn, the Arab boycott was explicitly antisemitic. The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs, with their new oil wealth, were eager to use their economic power to boycott not only Israel but even US businesses owned by Jews. (Bnai Brith Messenger, 1956)

This explicitly antisemitic boycott continued through the 1970s (NYT, February 8, 1975)

Arab states were so eager to extend their boycott that they even started threatening any Arabs would would shop at high-end London stores owned by Jews:

Marks and Spencer department stores and Selfridges department store are undeterred by the news that they are to be picketed by patrols trying to enforce a boycott by Arabs because of their Jewish ownership and connections with Israel.

The Arab boycott conference meeting at Aleih, near Beirut, yesterday decided to keep a close watch on Arab visitors abroad. Observers of different Arab nationalities “who can discreetly spot their countrymen” will be posted in front of or inside “blacklisted” stores in Britain and other parts of Europe.

By the turn of the century, the idea of the boycott had already morphed into what looks like BDS nowadays. This 2002 Muslim News article (UK) bridges the antisemitic Arab boycott with the liberal language of BDS - three years before BDS was supposedly "launched." 

Even BDS adherents acknowledge that the movement is related to the previous Arab boycotts. This 169-page white paper hosted on the BDSMovement site goes through the history of Arab boycotts, carefully excising any mention of "Jews" as the target and pretending that the boycott began only after Israel's establishment.  

BDS did not sprout from out of nowhere. It came directly from this explicitly and proudly antisemitic background. Erasing the word "Jewish" from their literature doesn't make it any less antisemitic than it was in the 1920s, 1940s and 1970s. 

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The Forgotten Pogrom–Tiberias, 1938 (American Zionism)

The Forgotten Pogrom

@AmericanZionism

Author Note: Please follow @americanzionism on Twitter

Abstract

A major pogrom took place in the city of Tiberias in Mandatory Palestine on October 2, 1938 during the height of the Arab Revolt. Tiberias had a significant Jewish majority and a diverse population of both Mizrachi and Ashkenazi Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Although this massacre is not as well knows as the massacres in Hebron, Safed, or Jerusalem, it was nevertheless one of the most disturbing and brutal events that took place during the British Mandate period.

Keywords: Israel, Mandatory Palestine, Arab Revolt, Tiberias, Pogrom

The Forgotten Pogrom

1938 was an especially violent year in the Holy Land. It was the midst of the first de facto Intifada of the Jewish/Arab conflict, a violent nationalist uprising called the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Lead by the father of Arab nationalism in Palestine, Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amīn al-Ḥusaynī, the Arabs founded the Arab High Committee and set three key demands – end all Jewish immigration, ban all land sales to Jews, and give Arabs control of 100% of Mandatory Palestine, leaving them to deal with the Jews. A steady stream of incitement in schools, Arab press, and houses of worship ensued, along with a call to boycott Jewish products. It did not take long for the incitement to turned into violence. In April 1936, Arab terrorists attacked a Jewish bus and killed two. This event unleashed a Pandora's box of tit-for-tat violence which saw the death of many Jews and Arabs. This latest wave of Arab attacks on Jews and the unrealistic demands of their leadership led the British to establish the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937, known colloquially as the Peel Commission. The Peel Commission concluded that the Jews and Arabs in Mandatory Palestine simple could not live together and “Partition offers a chance of ultimate peace. No other plan does.”¹ They recommend partition of the land into an Arab state and a Jewish state, with the Arabs receiving the bulk of the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea and the Jews receiving a sliver of land on which they were the majority (Exhibit 1). The secretary of the Arab High Committee al-Ḥusaynī made it clear that the Arabs would not accept any partition. He testified “The Arab case in Palestine is one which aims at National independence.” ² In the commission’s final report in July 1937, in the midst of this wave of violence against the Jewish community, the commission noted that “The only solution of the problem put forward by the Arab Higher Committee was the immediate establishment of an independent Arab Government, which would deal with the 400,000 Jews now in Palestine as it thought fit.” ³ Given the Mufti’s association with Hitler, his role in founding a Bosnian unit of the Nazi SS and planning for an Einsatzgruppen in the Middle East, and his direction of the Arab Revolt, it is not hard to imagine the tragedy that “as it thought fit” would have meant. The Arabs ultimately rejected the Peel Commission’s recommendation for partition. The Jews accepted a less than ideal and far from equitable agreement.

Tiberias

Tiberias was a predominately Jewish city for much of its existence. It is located on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, in Northern Israel, and is surrounded by hills. It is one of the four holy cities in Judaism. It holds such an import place for Jews that Maimonides, the most famous of Medieval Jewish rabbis and philosophers, loved and respected by Jews as well as gentiles, asked that after his death in 1204 Jews take his remains to be buried in Tiberias. His tomb remains to this day.

In the 1896 comprehensive census done by geographer and orientalist Vital Cuinet, the population of the city of Tiberias was 7,433 with 5,700 Jews (77%), 1,400 Muslims, and 330 Christians, and the greater Tiberias district has a total population of 10,052, with 6,700 Jews (67%), 2,259 Muslims, and 1,093 Christian.⁴ Similar demographic proportions existed before the Cuinet survey, and afterwards. This was a quintessentially Jewish area in the Holy Land. Of note is that the Tiberias Jewish population was made up of many Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) Jews including those whose families lived in the Holy Land for innumerable generations.

The Pogrom

There were many violent attacks in Tiberias on Jews during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The one that stands out for both its brutality and organization is the Massacre of Jews in the city of Tiberias on October 2, 1938. There were other attacks in Tiberias in 1938 before the Pogrom. In May, a Jew was killed in by an explosion, and in September three Jews were murdered, and a Jew and an Arab were wounded by four Arab terrorists.⁵ Dozens of similar attacks like these occurred all around Mandatory Palestine that year. But the Tiberias massacre in October was different. Its ruthlessness had not been seen since the violent attacks in Safed and Hebron in 1929.⁶

On October 2^nd, an Arab terrorist cell occupied the hills surrounding Tiberias.⁷ It is not exactly clear how many terrorists were involved in the attack, but it must have been anywhere from many dozen to over 100. They waited for the cover of darkness to begin their well-planned operation. At 9pm, the terrorists cut the telephone lines into Tiberias so that the victims could not call for assistance. Two terrorist cells hiding in the hills tactically entered city from the north and south (exhibit 2). Five minutes later, the terrorists remaining in the hills sounded a shrill whistle loud enough so both cells could hear it. This signaled the beginning of the attack. The small local police force was taken by surprise. The terrorists first hit the office of the British district commissioner, the police station, and the quarters where British police were housed hoping to weaken or eliminate any defenses. Tiberias was a poorly defended city with only a couple dozen British police officers and a small number of supernumerary Jewish constable called Notrim or Ghaffirs. In a harbinger of what the future could hold for Jews in Israel in a single bi-national state where Jews no longer have sole control over their security, just three months before the attack, Moshe Sharett (Shertok), Head of the Jewish Agency at the time, had petitioned the British government to arm additional Jews. He also asked for mobile patrols around Tiberias and other Jewish towns and cities. Both requests were rejected by the British and the concern by the Jewish Agency was deemed “exaggerated.”

After attacking the police and government offices, in stereotypical pogrom style, the attackers went to the central synagogue and set it on fire. The caretaker of the synagogue Ezekiel Katz, 42, was trapped inside and burned to death. The terrorists also burned down the local post office before making their way to the Jewish neighborhood of Kiryat Shmuel, north of the old city, armed with bombs, rifles, daggers, and torches. That is when the “systematically organized and savagely executed”⁸ carnage began. Even children were not spared. The terrorists set fire to several Jewish wooden homes. They entered the house of Joshua Ben-Arieh where he, his wife Shoshanna, and one of their sons, Arieh, were stabbed to death and then set on fire. There younger son Moshe, only 18 months old, was shot to death. Visiting the Ben-Arieh family were three siblings –Chaim age 12, Rivkah age 10, and Ezra age 8. The terrorists stabbed and burned to death all three children. While Shimon Yochanan Mizrahi was on patrol in another part of town, terrorists stormed his house and killed his wife Rachel, 26, and all five of their children ages 12, 5, 3, 2, and 1. The terrorists also attacked a third house, the home of Menachem Kabni, 60, and his wife Dora, 40. Both were American citizens. Mr. Kabni had been the beadle of a synagogue in New York for 30 years. Rabbi Asha Werner, who had been visiting Tiberias at the time, reported that the terrorists stabbed the couple to death and burned their bodies.⁹ Miraculously, Mr. Kabni’s sister Esther managed to escape the execution. In total, the terrorists set six Jewish houses on fire and savagely murdered anyone they could find inside. Two supernumerary Jewish constables, Israel Bookman and Zvi Chatzkeleviz, and an additional Jewish man, Jacob Gross, died in a gun fight valiantly trying to stop the attacks. Several other Jews were seriously injured. All but four of the victims were stabbed to death¹⁰ and set on fire.

So diabolical and well planned was the attack that police and troop reinforcements did not arrive in Tiberias for 25 hellish minutes because the Arabs who had whistled from the surrounding hills fired on them on the road to the city. The first to arrive were the Trans-Jordan Frontier Force stationed in the village of Samakh. They managed to fight their way through an ambush and road obstructions set near the hot springs to the south.¹¹ The fighting and pogrom lasted until 11pm, two grueling hours, until the British police and armed forces, along with Jewish constables, were able to repel the terrorists. British troops then pursued the attackers to the nearby village of Lubya.¹² Fighting continued until morning and the terrorists suffered 50 casualties.¹³ When all was said and done, twenty-one Jews were murdered, including seven men, three women, and, as The Times (UK) reported on October 4^th, eleven “Jewish Children Butchered”.¹⁴

The massacre could have been much worse. A brigade of Jewish constables from a nearby Jewish village called Mizpah encountered a terrorist cell on their way to attack the city and engaged them. They managed to kill six of the terrorists and seized one German and four English rifles, along with ammunition.^{15 16}

Immediately after the Pogrom the British Mandatory government placed a curfew on the city. It was only allowed to be broken for a funeral procession for the victims that walked past the ruins of the still smoldering synagogue while the dead body and destroyed Torah scrolls lay inside.¹⁷ Chief Rabbis Dr. Isaac Herzog and Dr. Jacob Meir sent a joint appeal to British secretary Malcolm MacDonald, “Palestine Jewry is deeply horrified at the Tiberias massacre and sacrilege. In G-d's name, we appeal to you to end the terror.”¹⁸ The Jewish Agency’s Mr. Sharett would add, “The murders were a terrible price to pay for arousing the authorities to take urgent measures.”¹⁹

Even after such a horrendous pogrom that saw infants shot, stabbed, and burned to death, the attacks on Jews did not stop. The Arabs did everything they could to make Tiberias vulnerable. They set rock barricades and other obstacles on the road to the city so that British reinforcements would have a difficult time arriving (exhibit 3). Less than a month later, on October 27^th, the Jewish Mayor of Tiberias Zaki El Hadef was shot to death by an Arab terorist in the middle of the old city, in broad daylight.²⁰ What was unique about Mr. El Hadef is that he presided over a council that consisted of four Jews, two Muslims, and one Christian. He came from an ancient Mizrachi family that settled in Tiberias in 1715. He spoken both Hebrew and Arabic fluently and was by all accounts loved by all the residents of the city. He was a man for all people who at the start of the Arab Revolt in 1936 managed to pass a motion in the municipal council appealing for peace. Nevertheless, like Sadat and Begin would suffer after him, he could not save himself from extremist violence (exhibit 4).

After the Pogrom at Tiberias, Moshe Sharett of the Jewish Agency, who would go on to become the second prime minister of Israel, sent a message to the Arab Palestine Defense Committee in Damascus, a message that would be repeated over and over by Jewish leaders but which always fell on deaf ears – that the Jews in Palestine extend a hand of peace and cooperation to the Arabs of Palestine, but if it is not accepted the Jews will not be intimidated and the Arabs should know that violence and murder will not deter the Jews from re-establishing their homeland in the land of Israel.²¹

“Zionism cannot be deterred by threats of killing, and the fact the Jews have stood in Palestine for 3 years against all onslaughts is an eloquent testimony that they cannot be intimidated. If the Arab neighboring countries ever resort to the practice of massacring Jews they would not prevent the realization of Zionism, but would only disgrace themselves, just as the killing and burning of women and children at Tiberias will only remain as a shameful stain on the record of the Palestine Arab. We see a possibility for a full and fruitful cooperation in Palestine embracing Jews and Arabs as well as neighboring countries for the good of everyone concerned, but on the essential condition that the basic rights of the Jewish people in Palestine are recognized. The realization of Zionism can only be to the benefits of the Arabs. The Jewish return to their ancient home is dictated by historical necessity, and no danger or threat would deflect the Jewish people from the path or stifle their surge for freedom.”²²

The word pogrom often conjures up images of poor Jews in Eastern Europe being slaughtered or of Kristallnacht. People do not often think of what happened to the Jews in Mandatory Palestine as pogroms, but that is exactly what they were. The massacre in Tiberias in 1938, both by virtue of not being as well known as the massacres at Safed and Hebron, and of not being thought of as a pogrom, an organized massacre of Jews, makes this the Forgotten Pogrom.

References

The Evening Star, Washington D.C. October 3, 1938

The Evening Star, Washington D.C. October 30, 1938

Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin, United States, Vol. IV, No. 154, October 4, 1938

REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN for the year 1938, United Kingdom, December 31, 1938

The Times, United Kingdom, October 5, 1938

The Times, United Kingdom, October 14, 1938

The Times, United Kingdom, October 31, 1938

The Times-News, Hendersonville, NC, October 4, 1938

The Times-News, Hendersonville, NC, October 18, 1938

Footnotes

1. “Palestine Royal Commission Report”, July 1937, p. 537

2. From “Palestine Royal Commission Notes of Evidence taken on Tuesday, 12^th January 1937”, p. 292

3. Ibid, p. 298

4. “Syrie, Liban et Palestine, géographie administrative, statistique, descriptive et raisonnée”, Vital Cuinet, p. 111

5. “REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN for the year 1938”

6. “Massacre at Tiberias, Jewish Children Butchered, Victims Burned”, The Times, United Kingdom, Tuesday, October 4, 1938, p. 14

7. Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin, United States, Vol. IV, No. 154, October 4, 1938
The Evening Star, Washington D.C. October 3, 1938

8. “REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN for the year 1938”

9. “U.S. Citizen and Wife Among New Holy Land Dead”, The Times-News, Hendersonville, NC, October 4, 1938

10. “REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN for the year 1938”

11. “Massacre at Tiberias, Jewish Children Butchered, Victims Burned”, The Times, United Kingdom, Tuesday, October 4, 1938, p. 14

12. Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin, United States, Vol. IV, No. 154, October 4, 1938

13. “REPORT by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of PALESTINE AND TRANS-JORDAN for the year 1938”

14. “Massacre at Tiberias, Jewish Children Butchered, Victims Burned”, The Times, United Kingdom, Tuesday, October 4, 1938, p. 14

15. Ibid.

16. Jewish Telegraphic Agency News Bulletin, United States, Vol. IV, No. 154, October 4, 1938

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. “Ambushed Mayor Dies”, The Evening Start, Washington DC, October 30, 1938.

21. “Jewish Reply to Arab Threats, Refusal to be Intimidated”, The Times (UK), October 14, 1938, p. 13

Exhibits

Exhibit 1

 

Peel Commission Partition Recommendation 1937

 

Exhibit 2

 

Topographical Map of Tiberias and the Kiryat Shmuel Neighborhood

 

Exhibit 3

 

The Times-News, Hendersonville, NC October 10, 1938

 

 

Exhibit 4

 

The Times (UK), Obituary of Zaki El Hadef, October 31, 1938.

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1948 Arab quotes shows the only “nakba” is that they didn’t slaughter the Jews

Here are some quotes from Arab leaders in 1948 around the War of Independence. (They were compiled by the late Ami Isseroff, whose MidEast Web site is an encyclopedic and accurate source of information.)

 

Encouragement by Arab Leaders and Rumors - A study by Childers, which examined British monitoring of Arab broadcasts during that period, did not find any evidence that Arab leaders called on Palestinians to leave their homes. However, considerable evidence and testimony exists that at different times, Arab leaders encouraged refugees to flee.  This issue has been inflated beyond its actual importance. It has no real significance in international law, except to counter or support the Palestinian claims of expulsion by force.

During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo and no friend to Israel or the Jews, found  that while the refugees "express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab states. "We know who our enemies are," they will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their home. . . ."

The Economist, reported on October 2, 1948: "Of the 62,000 Arabs who formerly lived in Haifa not more than 5,000 or 6,000 remained. Various factors influenced their decision to seek safety in flight. There is but little doubt that the most potent of the factors were the announcements made over the air by the Higher Arab Executive, urging the Arabs to quit....It was clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades."

Times Magazine (May 3, 1948) reported: "The mass evacuation, prompted partly by fear, partly by orders of Arab leaders, left the Arab quarter of Haifa a ghost city....By withdrawing Arab workers their leaders hoped to paralyze Haifa."

Edward Atiyah, the secretary of the Arab League Office in London, wrote in his book, The Arabs: "This wholesale exodus was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re­enter and retake possession of their country."

According to Near East Arabic Radio, April 3, 1948: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees to flee from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and that certain leaders . . . make political capital out of their miserable situation . . ."

Nimr el Hawari, the Commander of the Palestine Arab Youth Organization, in his book Sir Am Nakbah (The Secret Behind the Disaster, published in Nazareth in 1955), quoted the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Said as saying "We will smash the country with our guns and obliterate every place the Jews seek shelter in. The Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down."

Habib Issa wrote in the New York Lebanese daily newspaper Al Hoda on June 8, 1951, " The Secretary General of the Arab League, Azzam Pasha, assured the Arab peoples that the occupation of Palestine and of Tel Aviv would be as simple as a military promenade... He pointed out that they were already on the frontiers and that all the millions the Jews had spent on land and economic development would be easy booty, for it would be a simple matter to throw Jews into the Mediterranean. -- Brotherly advice was given to the Arabs of Palestine to leave their land, homes, and property and to stay temporarily in neighbouring fraternal states, lest the guns of the invading Arab armies mow them down."

Reports of massacres and actual fighting caused fear among the population. In Tiberias, Haifa and Jaffa, the Arab irregulars initiated combat with the Jews, who retaliated. The Palestinian civilian population, often abandoned by their leaders, were unwilling to stay under Jewish administration and left. In Haifa, Jewish leaders including the mayor and head of the labor council pleaded with Arabs to stay. In Jaffa, the British pleaded with them to remain, but the exodus continued.

The atmosphere in Palestinian towns can be appreciated from the following quote:

"Jaffa was boiling: every second that passed you heard a new rumour, and after every minute the imaginary tales and lies became bigger, finally, they were accepted as definite truth by the public. At sunset, many of the Mufti henchmen patrolled the streets in private and lorry cars, calling upon the people: oh! men, oh! heros; Help..Help.., stop the Jewish attack! They have attacked your brothers in the Manshiya; they pillaged their properties; burned their holdings and raped their women and girls. They have committed awful acts of horror and brutality against your brothers!! In but a few minutes Jaffa's inhabitants were incited and agitated shouted and fired into the air -- On Them! On Them! ("aleihoom, aleihoom") on Tel-Aviv, the town of the wicked...Groups and individuals, they marched on and among them, behind them or in front of them, went the Mufti henchmen belittling the Jewish strength..."

[Muhamed Nimer Al Hawari in THE SECRET OF THE CATASTROPHE, Nazareth, 1955]

It is hard to square the actual atmosphere among Arabs in 1948 and the current narrative of Jews ethnically cleansing them. The “nakba” was and remains a problem created by and for Arabs, but pride and politics does not allow Palestinians to blame anyone but the Jews.

The narrative they say today is a lie. To know the truth, look at what they said in 1948.

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1931 British census says while Jews in Palestine are a nation, Arabs are not

 

The 1931 British Census of Palestine includes an interesting observation:

 

In addition, however, to the development of this complex of religious communities, a political development has taken place, and the Jewish Community existing as legal entity, and created historically under a principle of religious freedom, has now a specifically political character. The following quotation descriptive of the community is extracted from Command Paper No. 1 700 of the 1st of July, 1922 :-

. . . The Jewish community in Palestine has its own political organs :  an elected assembly for the direction of its domestic concerns  elected councils in the towns : and an organization for the control of  its schools. It has its elected Chief Rabbinate and Rabbinical Coun­cil for the direction of its religious affairs. The business is conducted in Hebrew as a vernacular language, and a Hebrew Press serves its " needs . It has its distinctive intellectual life and displays consider­ " able economic activity. This community, then, with its town and " country population, its political, religious and social organizations, " its own language, its own customs, its own life, has, in fact,' national ' " characteristics."

In fact, the Jewish Community is a " nationality ". The consciousness of the existence of this "nationality " has led the non-Jewish religious communities to a vague conception of an Arab "nationality ". This Arab " nationality " has no legal existence since there is no Arab community in any formal sense. Its basis is perhaps best described as an awareness, on the part of members of some of the non-Jewish religious communities, of the possibility of common factors in the aims of the several communities. This awareness found its expression in a request during the preparations for the census from the Arab Census Committee that persons enumerated at the census should be given the opportunity of declaring an Arab " nationality ".

While this is speaking about “nationality” from a legal perspective, realizing that the Jews of Palestine had even in 1922 already become a cohesive community that acts and self-governs like a nation, it is striking that it notes that there is no similar Arab consciousness of nationality.

Of course, the word “Palestinian” is not mentioned. They were taking about a general Arab nationality, not specifically Palestinian Arab national feelings, which of course virtually did not exist at the time.

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McMahon clarified his 1915 agreement with the Arabs in 1937 - Britain did not promise Palestine to them

There has been a long standing dispute by Arabs against the Balfour Declaration of 1917 promising Palestine as a Jewish homeland.

Briefly:

Sir Henry McMahon, acting on behalf of the British government, met with Sherif Hussein of Mecca in 1915 and made what were taken to be a series of promises to the Arab people. These ‘promises’ were later disputed by the British government and, as with many issues concerning recent Middle East history, were open to interpretation.
Hussein interpreted the correspondence given to him by McMahon as a clear indication that Palestine would be given to the Palestinians [sic] once the war had ended. The British government was later to dispute this interpretation. They claimed that any land definitions were only approximate and that a map drawn at the time (but not by McMahon or a member of the British delegation) excluded Palestine from land to be given back to the Arab people.

...

By the time war ended in November 1918, two distinct schools of thought had developed regarding Palestine:

1) That the British had promised Palestine to the Arabs after the war had ended in return for their support to the Allies in the war.

2) That the British had agreed to give their support to the Jews for a homeland in Palestine as laid out in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

It turns out that this same argument came up in 1937, when the Peel Commission issued its partition plan. In that plan, there would be a tiny Jewish state but the Arab state would become united with Trans-Jordan, seemingly under the rule of King Abdullah. ("two sovereign independent States would be established--the one an Arab State consisting of Trans-Jordan united with that part of Palestine which lies to the cast and south of a frontier such as we suggest in Section 3 below; the other a Jewish State consisting of that part of Palestine which lies to the north and west of that frontier.")

At the time, Palestinian Arabs argued that the McMahon correspondence gave them the right to an independent state in Palestine and therefore the Peel Commission plan was invalid.

As a result, Sir Henry McMahon himself wrote a letter to the Times of London and set the record straight. The Palestine Post reported:

Sir,

Many references have been made in the Palestine Royal Commission Report and in the course of the recent debates in both Houses of Parliament to the ‘McMahon Pledge’, especially to that portion of the pledge which concerns Palestine and of which one interpretation has been claimed by the Jews and another by the Arabs.

It has been suggested to me that continued silence on the part of the giver of that pledge may itself be misunderstood.

I feel, therefore, called upon to make some statement on the subject, but I will confine myself in doing so to the point now at issue—i.e., whether that portion of Syria now known as Palestine was or was not intended to be included in the territories in which the independence of the Arabs was guaranteed in my pledge.

I feel it my duty to state, and I do so definitely and emphatically, that it was not intended by me in giving this pledge to King Hussein to include Palestine in the area in which Arab independence was promised.

I also had every reason to believe at the time that the fact that Palestine was not included in my pledge was well understood by King Hussein.

Yours faithfully,
 A. Henry McMahon.
July 22.

That should have settled the matter, yet even today Arabs and Arabists are arguing that the McMahon correspondence pledged an independent Palestinian state.

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1934 survey of Palestine showed how Jews helped Arabs; Arabs flocked to live near Jewish areas

I had seen similar reports but this specific one is new to me.

It shows that Arabs flocked to Palestine because of Jewish economic success, and that there was essentially no negative effects of Jewish immigration.

Arab villages near Jewish population centers were shown to have improved in every way compared to the villages further away, which looked as they were a hundred years beforehand.

Similarly, Arab houses near Jewish communities went up in value, those further away lost value.

Some of it is a little hard to read, and most of it was not digitized.

From JTA, January 31, 1934:

The rest of it is in the JTA digital archives:

The beneficial effect of Jewish immigration is reflected not only in modernized Arab agriculture, but also in a remarkable expansion of Arab urban settlements. The 1931 government census shows a great increase in Arab population in the cities, with a resulting rise in building, commericial and industrial activities. On the other hand, in Arab centers removed from Jewish influence real estate and improvements have shrunk in value.

ARABS SWARM HOLY LAND“The most convincing proof of the economic improvement experienced by the Arabs is the fact that formerly thousands of Arabs emigrated annually. Today Arab immigrants are drawn to Palestine from other countries. Between the censuses of 1922 and 1931 the Arab population grew by 225,000, or forty percent. A further illustration is the sharp reduction in the number of nomadic Arabs. These inveterate wanderers of the desert cannot resist the powerful attraction of the thriving urban and rural settlements where the opportunities for labor are, due to Jewish enterprise, plentiful.

“Moreover, the benefits from Jewish immigration are not exclusively of an economic nature. Practically the entire government appropriation for education goes toward the maintenance of Arab schools. The Jews support their educational system from private funds. As a result illiteracy is disappearing among the Arabs. Of even greater benefit to the Arabs have been the Jewish medical services. The prevalence of trachoma, malaria, enteric diseases and typhoid has shown a steady decline in the last decade.

A LABOR SHORTAGE“Not only is Jewish immigration being speedily absorbed, but there is a shortage of labor, both Arab and Jewish necessitating the importation of Jewish immigration has resulted in an increase of the number of Arab industrial workers. From 1924 to 1928 their numbers rose by about 6,000, of whom 2,000 were employed in Jewish enterprises, representing twenty percent of the employees of Jewish capital, while the Arabs employ practically no Jews.”

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On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Fake News And Leaders Fomenting Hate Is Nothing New (Daled Amos)

Last week, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, world leaders gathered in Jerusalem. Listening to the speeches, it was obvious the intent was to go beyond just commemorating and remembering the past. There was a growing apprehension about the future and the increase in antisemitism.

And not just about Europe.

The increase in reported incidents of antisemitism in the US is beyond shocking. It goes beyond graffiti, protests and harassment. It goes beyond college campuses. Jews are being physically attacked and murdered, both by fanatics on both the right-wing and the left-wing too.

Jews are being attacked in New York City -- by blacks.
And those who would be expected to provide protection and address the problem are not as forthcoming as one would expect.

The media may report what is happening, but begrudgingly mention the attacks by blacks in New York City, and even then, many in the media are trying to find ways to excuse it, blaming the attacks on the Hasidic victims, on gentrification.

Then there are the political leaders, who have been excruciatingly slow to address the problem. Some in Congress have insisted that antisemitism cannot be singled out as a problem, but rather must be packaged with 'Islamaphobia" and other forms of hate. Others have taken advantage of the crisis in order to score political points, whether to blame Trump or single out the right-wing as the sole source of the hatred.

The lengths to which the media and politicians will go to craft a narrative to suit their purposes comes up in a review in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month, of the book "Wilmington's Lie", by David Zucchino, about the 1898 massacre of blacks in Wilmington, N.C., by members of a white-supremacist conspiracy. The book reveals what happens when the media and politicians ally with each other, leading up to the massacre and in covering it up afterward.

At the time, in addition to 3 of Wilmington’s 10 aldermen being black, there were black health inspectors, postmasters and magistrates, and a black street superintendent and county treasurer. The American Baptist Publication Society called Wilmington “the freest town for a negro in the country.”

According to the article:

Other key offices, such as those of the mayor and police chief, were held by white Republican or fusionist allies. Contrary to later racist propaganda, the city was well run. It was the very presence of blacks in positions of power that was intolerable to leading Democrats, who began railing against “Negro rule.”

This led to heated and racist rhetoric and worse. In this regard the review makes reference to Josephus Daniels, the influential editor of the Raleigh News and Observer:

His race baiting and fake “reporting” fueled the savagery of the white mobs. “White supremacy” has today become something of a buzzword in the debate over racial inequities: In the Wilmington of 1898, it was a proud battle cry.

Daniels would later serve as Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson. He was a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him ambassador to Mexico. A cruiser launched in 1963 bore his name.

Josephus Daniels. Public Domain

When Alex Manly, the editor of Wilmington’s black newspaper, the Daily Record, denounced the routine charges aimed at black community -- such as that blacks were rapists worthy of lynching --  there were outright calls for Manly's murder while a local paper, The Messenger, claimed that Wilmington was suffering from a massive crime wave (a claim that has been proven to be a complete fabrication):

“The Sambos do not wait to be threatened or assaulted but they take the initiative and assault to kill from the start.”

The newspaper went on to claim that blacks were stockpiling arms, that nannies were planning to poison the white children in their care and to set their homes on fire.

That November, on election day, blacks were blocked at gunpoint from the polls, where ballot boxes were openly stuffed. In one case, a Democrat won with 100 more votes than the total of registered voters in his precinct. Similar tactics brought Democrats overwhelming victories across much of North Carolina. One newspaper proudly declared: “Our state redeemed—Negroism defunct.”

And then came the massacre.

What came next was an organized riot, one that, as Mr. Zucchino conclusively shows, was planned even before the stolen election as a decisive coup de grâce to what remained of the biracial fusion movement. On streetcars, on horseback and on foot, hundreds of armed men poured into Wilmington from outlying towns, “stoked with adrenaline . . . and eager for an opportunity to shoot black men,” in Mr. Zucchino’s words. Many of them, known as “Red Shirts,” wore red calico blouses or red jackets over white butterfly collars, with cartridge belts around their waists. They shot their guns into black homes, fired on blacks standing on street corners, and burned the office of the black-owned Daily Record. Alex Manly had already fled north or he would have been lynched.

Later, white officials claimed that their actions were necessary to quell “Negro riots.” In reality, what took place was a slaughter. One white man was overheard to say to another as he fired, “We are just shooting to see the n—s run!” White housewives brought the shooters coffee and hotcakes. Meanwhile, hundreds of black women and children fled to the surrounding swamps in terror. By the time it was all over, at least 60 black men lay dead and many others wounded.

Every member of Wilmington’s fusion government, white and black, was forced to resign. In their place, 8 white supremacists, including 2 men who had led the rioters, were chosen as alderman. Col. Alfred Waddell, who had called for black voters to be shot, was selected as Wilmington’s mayor. Not one of the rioters was ever charged with a crime.

“With the killings completed and their enemies banished,” Mr. Zucchino writes, “Wilmington’s whites began crafting a lasting narrative of a heroic victory over dark and malevolent forces.” Later reports in the white press typically asserted that black men were the aggressors.

...In the years that followed, whites shamelessly rewrote history to incorporate racist tropes. In the 1930s, one popular writer asserted that Wilmington’s whites had to act because “black rapists prowled the city...attacking Southern girls and women.” And as late as 1949 school textbooks portrayed the insurrectionists as heroic defenders of law and order.

All this is not meant to demonize Democrats or the Democratic Party.

But it is interesting to note in passing the story of William Holden, the governor of North Carolina, from 1868-1871. 1870, in response to the assassination of Republican senator John W. Stephens months earlier, Holden called out the militia against the Ku Klux Klan, imposed martial law in two counties, and suspended the writ of habeas corpus for accused leaders of the Klan. This became known as the Kirk-Holden war.

For his efforts, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Governor Holden on December 14, 1870.

Holden was later posthumously pardoned -- by the North Carolina Senate, in 2011.

Today, we may take some comfort from the fact that the rhetoric aimed at Jews is not as heated or as debased as what Blacks faced in 1898 -- that is, unless you take a look at what appears on social media. Under the banner of 'free speech,' community and political leaders such as Sarsour, Omar and Tlaib consider themselves free to make various any of a number of baseless claims against both Jews and Israel.

And if the lack of backlash against them is any indication, they really are free to say anything.

In an article, Anti-Zionism has a death toll, Hen Mazzig notes that one of Sarsour's favorite memes has gotten Jews killed:

David Anderson, one of the Jersey City kosher supermarket shooters, posted, “Jews were using the police to [carry] out a well planned agenda [against black people]” to a thread discussing the 2016 police killing of Alton Sterling.

...One of the more prominent anti-Zionist organizations spreading this theory is the ironically-named Jewish Voice for Peace, which developed a campaign called “Deadly Exchange” to scapegoat Israel for police brutality in the United States. JVP claims that Israel is the root of anti-black police brutality, with practices that include “extrajudicial executions, shoot-to-kill policies, police murders, racial profiling, massive spying and surveillance, deportation and detention, and attacks on human rights defenders.”

Another leader of the anti-Zionist movement, former Women’s March co-chairwoman Linda Sarsour, called the anti-Semitism watchdog Anti-Defamation League, “An organization that takes police officers from America ... to Israel so they can be trained by the Israeli police and military, and then they come back here and do what? Stop and frisk, killing unarmed black people across the country.”

Sarsour’s fellow co-chairwoman Tamika Mallory has taken this conspiratorial rhetoric a step further. When Starbucks announced it planned to work with the ADL on anti-bias training, the activist demanded the public boycott the coffee conglomerate because Jewish organizations like the ADL are “CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” When asked to clarify how, she wrote, “The ADL sends U.S. police to Israel to learn their military practices. This is deeply troubling.”

Then, there is Hanan Ashrawi, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Miftah, which Elder of Ziyon revealed in 2013 posted on their website an article accusing Jews of using Christian blood on Passover. Just last year, the Miftah website claimed that Israel steals the organs of Haitian and Ukranian children.

When Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar announced their trip to Israel, they arranged it through Ashrawi and her Mitah organization.

Now Tlaib and Ashrawi have made news again this past weekend, doing what they do best: accusing Israel of killing non-Jewish children.

There was outrage -- on social media.
From politicians?
Not so much.

We keep talking about Tlaib and Omar.
But we almost gloss over the fact that we are talking about Representative Tlaib and Representative Omar, who serve in the House of Representatives in the US Congress in Washington, DC.

And what they do and say is important, relevant -- and dangerous:

Ashrawi apologized for her tweet, not whole-heartedly ("not fully verified"; "not certain"), but she apologized.
Tlaib just deleted her retweet, with neither comment nor apology.

It is only a matter of time before she will say or write another biased, derogatory accusation against Israel.

What happened in Wilmington seems long ago and far away. And it may be true that today such blatant, open and over-the-top attacks on blacks -- and Jews -- may be a thing of the past.

But then you read the stories about the increase in antisemitism.

And you read that the increase is not just in campus harassment, or verbal assaults on clearly identifiable Jews or the number of swastikas that are being spray-painted.

Synagogues around the world are being protected by the police and armed guards. My synagogue has been redesigned with reinforced metal doors with combination locks, special fobs and synagogue volunteers who will let you into the synagogue on Shabbos -- if they recognize you.

If the overt attacks by the politicians and the mainstream media are a thing of the past, their silence and foot-dragging in dealing with the rapidly increasing problem are very much a problem today.

With the increasingly vocal hate and the killing of Jews that is tied to it, maybe there really is not that much difference between Sarsour, Representative Tlaib and Representative Omar -- and their allies -- and the Wilmington racists after all.

All the more need for the media and political leaders to wake up.

Today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, would be a good day to start going beyond just words.

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Has New York City Learned Nothing From The Crown Heights Riots? (Daled Amos)

A suspect has been arrested in connection with the stabbing of 5 Orthodox Jews in Monsey.

But even though this attack happened in Monsey, it is part of a growing and increasingly alarming pattern inside New York City.

And no one expects these attacks to stop soon.

One reason for the pessimism is the failure by the media, elected officials and social media 'celebrities' to address the fact that, contrary to the accepted media narrative, these attacks on Orthodox Jews are being carried out by Blacks -- not by "White Supremacists."

Elder of Ziyon has posted about the reluctance among leftists to mention this common link among the majority of the attacks on Jews, either out of fear of being labeled racist or accused of inciting violence against the Black community:

Most blacks are not antisemitic, although the percentage is roughly double that of whites (in 2016, 23% compared to 10%.) No one is saying that all blacks should be blamed. But the fear of being labeled a racist is the major reason there has not been any effective outreach to the black community to help solve this problem.

But this is not the first time that the fear of addressing Black antisemitism has manifested itself and prevented the media and community leaders from speaking out.

Remember the Crown Heights Riots?

In 2016, Seth Lipsky wrote for The New York Post, 25 years later, we still haven’t learned the lessons of the Crown Heights riot -- and in the 3 years since then, matters have only gotten worse:

Crown Heights erupted after a driver in the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s motorcade lost control and killed a black child, Gavin Cato. For three days, historian Edward Shapiro would write, “bands of young blacks” had “roamed” the neighborhood, assaulting Jews. [Emphasis added]

At the time, Yankel Rosenbaum, a Jewish student visiting from the University of Melbourne, was stabbed to death -- and his killer, Lemrick Nelson, was acquitted of murder by a New York jury. Two federal civil rights prosecutions were required before Nelson would be sent to prison, and in the end, he did 10 years on civil rights charges.

What stands out most for Lipsky is that during the Crown Heights Riots, neither the political nor the private leaders in the city could bring themselves to admit that the attacks on Jews were antisemitic.

Ari Goldman, who reported on those riots for The New York Times at the time, later wrote about the experience, noting the insistence by journalists at the time to frame the attacks as a result of a "racial conflict."

In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Goldman quotes AM Rosenthal, a former executive editor at The New York Times who said what others would not:

“The press,” Rosenthal wrote, “treats it all as some kind of cultural clash between a poverty-ridden people fed up with life and a powerful, prosperous and unfortunately peculiar bunch of stuck-up neighbors — very sad of course, but certainly understandable. No — it is an anti-Semitic pogrom and the words should not be left unsaid.” [emphasis added]

Indeed, one journalist tweeted about the Monsey attack something similar - and later deleted their tweet:

The situation in NY (and let's be clear we don't know who perpetrated the Monsey attack yet) is *massively complicated* and a growing division among two communities. What we need right now is a way to find solidarity with each other against our shared enemy of white supremacy.

Other tweets, in response to steps proposed by Mayor de Blasio last week to increase police protection of the Jewish community, were worse:

This sends a pretty stark message to non-Jews living in these neighborhoods that their safety matters less to @NYCMayor than the safety of their Jewish neighbors. That's really really bad for literally everyone except our common enemies, who benefit when we're divided.

and

Worst move. One that many of us have been warning against for many months now. de Blasio has caved to the pressure of racist demagogues like Dov Hikind and now many young black men will be at risk.

This isn't about ending hate, it's transferring the violence to acceptable targets.

We are seeing the same blind eye and lack of decisive action now that we saw 28 years ago.

Two years after the riots, in 1993, an exhaustive state investigation into the handly of what happened sharply criticized Mayor Dinkins for his failure to understand and act upon the severity of the crisis.

The Jewish community now is growing increasingly concerned that the current mayor does not understand what is happening any better.

Lipsky concludes his 2016 article pointing to attempts at reconciliation within Crown Heights, yet notes:

Liberal elites have made no such progress. They have never lifted a finger for the Orthodox Jews. The animus that erupted as “Heil Hitler” in Crown Heights has broken out on some of our city’s finest campuses, which echo with “Zionists out” and “Long live the Intifada.”

And liberals are unalarmed that Black Lives Matter has begun to make common cause with the BDS movement against Israel. So 25 years after Crown Heights, it’s anyone’s guess where the next attacks will break out against the Jews. [emphasis added]

These days, there is no longer any need to guess.

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Arab hate literature of the 1950s shows the transition from blaming "Jews" to blaming "Zionists"

Here is an excerpt from the Congressional Record, June 27, 1956, part of a very lengthy testimony about the Arab boycott of Israel and of Jews.

What is especially interesting here is that the section on Arab anti-Jewish propaganda shows that there was a transition period between direct anti-Jewish statements and seeming "anti-Zionist" statements, for all intents and purposes identical. The testimony says that the change was prompted by American public relations firms retained by Arab countries.

This is an early blueprint of today's anti-Zionist propaganda, just today it is slightly better disguised.

ARAB ANTI-JEWISH PROPAGANDA ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES

Perhaps the most vicious offense committed by Arab governments against Jewish citizens in the United States is their deliberate fomenting of domestic anti-Semitism in this country and their collaboration with and sponsorship of elements in the American hate movement.

Collaboration with American hatemongers

In carrying out its anti-Jewish campaign, the Arab Information Center has determined upon a course of intimate cooperation with professional anti-Semites in this country.

A policy statement sent by [Kameel Abdul] Rahim on October 25, 1954, from Cairo before his departure for the United States to head the center. to Dr. Omar Haliq. Arab League representative tn New York (Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatch of March 17, 1955) declared that the Arab Information Center henceforth would welcome the cooperation and assistance of professional anti-Semites in all fields and ways. Rahim emphasized that such activities were to be handled discreetly so as not to expose the center to charges of anti-Semitism or compromise its character as a cultural exchange. Rahim indicated that he intended to deal with this facet of the center's activities personally.
....
Distribution of anti-Semitic literature

The increasing voluminous literature published directly by Arab official propaganda agencies bears a comparable stamp of anti-Jewishness although, significantly, it does not usually bear any imprint identifying its source. Mort of the anti-Jewish items now being freely distributed across the country, often elaborately and handsomely printed, are published by the embassies of the Arab states and distributed by the Arab Information Center.

Generally, Arab officials obey the advice given them by American consultants to avoid heavy-handed anti-Jewish themes in their propaganda. On the other hand, the Arabs understand that the term “Zionist” and “Jew” are so closely identified in the United States by the general public that the theme of anti-Zionism can be handled adroitly to produce anti-Jewish implications, thus the continually repeated refrain concerning “the influence of the American Zionists in Washington.”

Occasionally, however, the Arab line is directed into an unmistakable excursion into overt anti-Jewish incitement. This is especially true in two pamphlets now widely in circulation, Story of Zionist Espionage in Egypt and Jewish Atrocities in the Holy Land..... These pamphlets clearly seek not only to inspire antipathy toward Israel but, in addition, to invoke a feeling of anti-Jewish prejudice and bias generally. And as a matter of fact, domestic anti-Semites in the United States already have distributed and exploited these documents for their own purposes.

The Story of Zionist Espionage In Egypt is openly anti-Jewish as well as anti-Israel...[It describes Zionism and communism this way:]

“Zionism and communism are two distinctive forces with one political objective— world domination. Both powers cooperate secretly and in public without friction since the power in the end will  eventually go to Zionism.

"They will not achieve supremacy until they destroy the Islamic and Christian countries all over the world. Therefore communism helps Zionism and each in its own way completes the other: only thus will they reach their aim—Zionlist world supremacy.”

Jewish Atrocities In the Holy Land includes:

“Now we have once more to hear the horrible tale of sadistic cruelties and wanton brutalities perpetrated against an innocent population, mainly composed of women, children and old men. But this time the aggressors are those very Jews who were lately so loud tn their outcry against the Nazis.

"When reading of these atrocious acts, one unconsciously thinks of their perpetrators as being  untaught savages, or barbarians of the remote past. Yet these same Jews have for centuries, by virtue of their money-amassing activities, gathered to themselves the cream of culture, and refinement of whatever country they have settled in. The wealthy, educated Jew surrounded by all the culture and art that his riches can command has long been a familiar figure in civilized society.”

An even more outrageous document, published by the World Truth League of POB 44, Jerusalem, Jordan-Arab side, is distributed widely in the United States through embassy offices of the Arab delegations to the U.N. as well as by the Arab Information Center. The sheet, composed in a sensational format, contains touched-up photographs of alleged Israeli massacres of Arab children, old men, and women. It quotes liberally from the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to the effect that the Jews believe the gentiles are a flock of sheep and we are the wolves and you know what happens when the wolves get hold of the flock. This Jordanian leaflet maintains that Jews. not Israelis, are the unconscionable exploiters of the gentile world and they have very well proved it once again by their recent Judaic barbarities against innocent Arab shepherds. It declares that the basic material in all Jewish propaganda is composed of lies and distortion of facts as is known by now all over the world.

...
It is apparent that crude and vicious canards of this kind are not intended to be limited merely to  incitement of hostility against Israel. They are designed for the larger purpose of promoting hatred toward Jews of every national allegiance throughout the world.

For those who insist that anti-Zionism has nothing to do with antisemitism, this history shows that they were identical in the 1950s and everyone knew it. The accusations against Israel today mirror those in the Arab antisemitic literature of 60 years ago. Given that the accusation of antisemitism was considered toxic, the Arab world slowly replaced "Jew" with "Zionist" but the intent was the same - to foment Jew-hatred worldwide.

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Black Hebrew Israelites - Jewish Enough To Be Killed By Palestinian Terrorists (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Two Black Hebrew Israelites deliberately attacked a kosher grocery in Jersey City this past Tuesday.

We can leave it to the media to report who the Black Hebrew Israelites are.
There will be articles about just how Jewish they are, about their history and about their community in Israel.

But while they are not considered Jewish by the Israeli government, Black Hebrew Israelites are Jewish enough for Palestinian terrorists.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune in 2002, Death bridges gap for Black Hebrews:

Under a cool, clear sky and with a large crowd of mourners on hand, 32-year-old Aharon Ben-Yisrael Elis was buried Sunday in a new section of this town's cemetery.

He was the first of the Black Hebrews--a small group of African-Americans, most of whom came to Israel from Chicago more than three decades ago--to be born in Israel. He also was the first of the group to die from the terrorism that has haunted the Jews of Israel for years.

Aharon Ben-Yisrael Elis. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Because the group had their own religion, combining Judaism with other beliefs, the Black Hebrews were not fully accepted into Israeli society and were not granted citizenship.

But those differences were set aside in the face of the terrorist attack:

Yet Elis' passing at the hands of a terrorist provoked an outpouring of Israeli mourners, including Dimona's mayor, a member of the Knesset and the two top rabbis from this town in the northern tip of the Negev desert. Elis was killed Thursday, one of six people slain by a Palestinian gunman who had stormed a banquet hall in a northern town where a bat mitzvah, or a coming-of-age ceremony, for a 12-year-old Israeli girl was under way.

...Dimona officials talked about how the Black Hebrews had found a home in their community and were welcomed. Av Shalom Vilan, a member of the Knesset from the left-of-center Meretz Party, said he hoped that the death of a Black Hebrew as a result of Arab violence would open the hearts and doors of Israel's society for citizenship for the group, which the Black Hebrews have long sought.

Rabbi Shalom Dayan, the chief Sephardic rabbi of Dimona, summed up in a few words what the others said Elis' death meant for the Black Hebrews' long-term quest to win full acceptance into Israeli society.

"You have just sealed one of the most difficult pacts with our Israeli society," Dayan said.

More than that, the Israeli government took action too.

Israel destroyed the Palestinian broadcasting center and Israeli tanks came up to Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. Israeli troops entered Tulkarem, where they searched houses, detained a number of Palestinian Arabs and put the city under curfew.

But that was then.

And it makes this week's tragedy even more bitter.

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Israel Did Nothing To Create Hezbollah -- But Arafat Did (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos


With its recent clash with Israel, Hezbollah is again in the news. But for all of the attention Hezbollah gets, there are still elements of its history that remain ignored -- or just misrepresented.

Tony Badran, a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has written extensively about Hezbollah as well as Iran, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. Recently, Iran announced sanctions against the think tank itself.

In his article, The Secret History of Hezbollah, Badran writes that while the Hezbollah mythology claims that the group was founded in 1982, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, as a resistance group to the Israeli invasion that year -- the truth is:

Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Because Hezbollah's origins are directly tied to the origins of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the terrorist group's own beginnings go back to the rivalry between Iranian revolutionary factions that opposed the shah of Iran. The conflicts between these factions played themselves out not only in Iran, but among their followers in Lebanon as well.

Why Lebanon?

In Arafat and the Ayatollahs, Badran traces the relationship between the Iranian revolutionary factions and the PLO back to the late 1960s, when Arafat rose to power. After the shah's crackdown in 1963, Iranian opposition groups adopted guerrilla tactics against the shah and by the end of that decade made contact with the PLO in Qatar, as well as Iraq -- where Khomeini had been living since 1965. Iranian guerrilla organizations looked for training and made their way to PLO camps in Jordan and South Yemen.

But during the early to mid 1970s, Lebanon was especially valuable as a training ground for these groups because of its weak government and lack of control:

Even before Lebanon’s own system collapsed, and the country plunged into civil war, fueled in part by Palestinian weapons and ambitions, the country had become a training ground for revolutionaries from all over the world, and a magnet for cadres of the main Iranian revolutionary factions, from Marxists to theocrats and everything in between.

Iranian revolutionary activists gravitated to Lebanon -- not because of any interest in the fact that Lebanon bordered Israel, but because of the weakness of the Lebanese government. At the time, Lebanon was home to the PLO too, which had been kicked out of Jordan in 1970 following 'Black September'. The PLO was free to run their military training camps. Those camps made it possible for the anti-shah groups to get military training and weapons, contact other revolutionary groups, form alliances, and establish networks to support their fight against the Iranian regime.

Another plus for these Iranian factions, was Lebanon’s large Shiite population, which included the influential Iranian cleric Musa al-Sadr, who helped many of the Iranian opposition groups. Down the road, the networks of both Sadr and the PLO would continue to be helpful after the Iranian revolution, during the power struggle between Iran’s revolutionary factions that followed. Also among the Iranian groups operating in Lebanon at the time was the Liberation Movement of Iran (LMI). One of its leading figures was Mostafa Chamran, who together with the LMI worked closely with Sadr.

Sadr relied on the PLO for training his Amal militia -- but again, not for the purpose of fighting Israel. Instead, with the onset of the Lebanese civil war, Sadr wanted to protect his and the Shiite community’s interests from the other Lebanese factions.

In fact, both Sadr and Chamran were ambivalent about the Palestinians and the divide between Sadr and the PLO widened further:

o In 1976, Sadr supported Syria’s entry into Lebanon, which the PLO opposed
o At the same time, Palestinian attacks on Israel from the south of Lebanon endangered the Shiite villagers which worried both Sadr and Chamran.

Meanwhile, the other main faction of Iranian revolutionaries operating in Lebanon consisted of the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That group maintained close relations with the PLO, while mistrusting Sadr and the LMI. This is the faction would go on to become part of the Islamic Republic party after the Iranian revolution. Many of them also became top commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

According to PLO operative Anis Naccache, who coordinated with the Iranian revolutionaries, Khomeini's group fear of a coup following their victory, led to the creation of the IRGC, for which he took personal credit, claiming he was approached specifically to draft the plan to form what became the main pillar of the Khomeinist regime.

According to Badran:

The formation of the IRGC may well be the greatest single contribution that the PLO made to the Iranian revolution.

One of those associated with this Khomeinist faction was Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Mohtashami, a student of Khomeini who would play a critical role in the emergence of Hezbollah. Another important figure, Mohammad Saleh Hosseini, played a key role in forming Hezbollah and was a founding member of the IRGC. Hosseini and the Khomeini's followers recruited young Shiites who were pro-Khomeini who became the nucleus of Hezbollah. The most famous of these was Imad Mughniyeh, who went on to become the group’s military commander and the mastermind of many of Hezbollah’s most notorious operations, such as the Marine barracks bombing in 1983.

The tensions between the Sadr and Khomeini camps in Lebanon played out back in Iran after the revolution. And then in August 1978, Sadr disappeared during a trip to Libya.

After Sadr’s disappearance, events accelerated. The shah was forced to leave Iran in January 1979, leaving the way open for Khomeini to return to Iran a few weeks later in triumph. Soon after, the Islamic Republic party was formed, bringing together Khomeini’s followers and the founding of the Islamic Republic. They began calling themselves Hezbollah, to distinguish themselves from their rivals, the LMI and allied factions.

By the summer of 1981, the Islamic Republic party finished taking sole control of the government, and called themselves “the Hezbollahi government.”

Mohammad Saleh Hosseini was assassinated in Beirut in April 1981, but by then the assets that he and the top IRGC leadership had been cultivating in Lebanon since the mid-70s were consolidated. Mughniyeh was summoned to Iran to discuss providing training for Hezbollah and in 1982, an Iranian delegation arrived in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

Badran writes:

In the conventional narrative of Hezbollah’s origins, it is the arrival of this contingent, the work it did there, and the men it trained that is typically said to signal the organization’s birth. However, by the time Dehghan, Mohtashami, and Mughniyeh engineered the October 1983 attack that killed 241 American servicemen, the Khomeinists had already been active in Lebanon for over a decade. [emphasis added]

In effect, just as Khomeini and his followers took over control of the revolution in Iran, they did the same thing where it had all began, in Lebanon:

And now it was all coming full circle as Iran’s triumphant Islamic Republicans, Hezbollah, spawned their namesake in Lebanon.

Arafat must have been thrilled.

His support for Khomeini and for Hizbollah seemed to bode well for the terrorist's influence with Iran. In fact, when he arrived in Tehran on February 17, 1979, he was the first “foreign leader” to be invited to visit Iran -- just days after the victory of the revolution.

Arafat and Khomeini, 1979

Arafat tried to exploit his new-found friendship, but just like he did in Jordan, Arafat soon made himself unwelcome.

o  Arafat tried to mediate the US Embassy hostage crisis, but his interference angered Khomeini, and made him suspicious.
o  The Iraq-Iran war only made things worse. Arafat could not afford to side with Iran against Iraq and risk losing the support of the Arab world that funded the PLO. He tried to mediate, but Khomeini refused to even see him.

In the end, Arafat's plans backfired:

By forging ties with the Khomeinists, Arafat unwittingly helped to achieve the very opposite of his dream. Iran has turned the Palestinian factions into its proxies, and the PLO has been relegated to the regional sidelines.

And Hamas, at least, seems to have made its peace with that.

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