David Collier: Pillars and Myths – destroying the false narrative of the 1948 Nakba
I witness pro-Israeli arguments online every day – and one of the things that always depresses me is when I see those defending Israel get stuck down pointless rabbit holes. Anti-Israel activists are only interested in the present ‘what’ – as in ‘the prisoner’, ‘the checkpoint’, ‘the wall’ – and they do this because this is where they are comfortable. These propagandists deliberately avoid the ‘why’ because the truth is quicksand for them. Such as why the ‘wall’ was built in the first place. And why on earth would anyone argue over a ‘settlement’ like Ariel – if the person you are arguing with thinks that Tel Aviv is an ‘illegal settlement’ too. This cannot be stressed often enough – it is simply foolish to fight on their turf.Iraq’s Nazi regime ‘had plans to intern Jews in 1941’
Nowhere is this more visible that in discussion over what they call the ‘Nakba’ – the Arab defeat in a war that they wanted, started and lost. A war in which they sought to annihilate the Jews. Arguing from within their narrative is like bitterly arguing over the size of the thrones in the Narnian Capital ‘Cair Paravel’.
A recent comment piece in the Jewish Chronicle provides a perfect example. One of our naive and privileged youth wrote a piece bemoaning the fact that she wasn’t prepared by her Jewish school to fight for Israel on campus – because as she sees it – ‘we do not talk about the Palestinian narrative in a meaningful way’. Her answer includes introducing ‘Israel-critical’ groups like Yachad into schools and to teach our children about the ‘Nakba’. This is an absurd and submissive response to the problem. Her suggested solution would send an entire generation down the rabbit hole.
The Nakba narrative is a lie. Should the UK have taught children Soviet propaganda so that they would have been better prepared to defend the UK at uni too? Yes campus is hostile. Some places have adopted a far darker and more Islamist vision. I know it is deeply uncomfortable for young Zionists, but submission is not the way forward. If we Jews do not defend ourselves – then who will defend us? Adopting the lies of our enemies onto our own platforms will only lead to self destruction.
The Nakba – as it is described by our enemies – never happened. They have taken isolated incidents, such as the disputed events of Deir Yassin or what took place in Lod – and built an entire fairytale around them. The truth of 1948 – the foundation of everything that followed – is very simple and we should never lose sight of it – nor stop teaching it to our children. The truth can sometimes be really unpopular – but it does not stop being the truth.
What follows is a list of pillars and myths. The pillars are the foundations of the self inflicted distaster that was to befall the Arab population. The myths are the lies upon which the history is being rewritten.
In his passionate attempt to restore the plight of the Jews to one academic’s mangled history of the period, a scholar of Iraqi-Jewish origin has revealed that the 1941 pro-Nazi government in Iraq was planning to intern Jews in a ‘harsh ghetto’ from which ‘they would not come out.’‘There Is a Jew Hiding Behind Me — Come and Kill Him’
London-based Dr E. N., who has 600 academic publications to his name, says that a senior Arab Muslim officer tipped off a group of Jewish army officers that there were plans to intern Jews in ‘terrains of the military’, a place where Jews would supposedly go in and never come out.
Following a coup on 1st April 1941, a virulently anti-Jewish, pro-Nazi government led by prime minister Rashid Ali al-Ghailani ruled Iraq until 31 May 1941 when it was defeated and put to flight by the British army.
The terrified Jewish officers, who had been recalled into the Iraqi army during the two months that the pro-Axis government ruled Iraq, ‘felt powerless’ at news of the internment plans. They would meet at the home of Dr N.’s grandfather, a Jew who felt compelled to resign from his post as commander in charge of the Baghdad Royal Arsenal in 1939, and converse in German and Turkish so that they would not be understood.
According to Dr N., the internment plans remained in place well after the pro-Nazi government had been deposed – until the defeat of General Rommel in the autumn of 1942.
The pro-Nazi government had already established a Jewish ghetto in the city of Diwaniyya.
Dr N.’s revelations come in his review of a book by John Broich, Blood, Oil, and The Axis: The Allied resistance against a Fascist state in Iraq and the Levant, 1941 (Abrams Press, New York 2019) The review, entitled A moral dilemma, appears in a book edited by Dr N.titled For the centennial of Berthold Laufer’s classic Sino-Iranica (1919): Sino-Iranica’s Centennial. Between East and West, Exchanges of Material and Ideational Culture. Broich also contributed a cover story on the 1941 British conquest of Baghdad in the July 1919 issue of the BBC History magazine.
When the former Trump administration announced that it was moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in December 2017, the reaction in the Muslim world and among Muslim communities in the West was predictably furious. In the Friday sermons that followed that announcement, several imams around the world denounced Israel in uncomplicated antisemitic terms, many of them quoting the same hadith — a saying attributed to the prophet Muhammed — that speaks of a mass slaughter of Jews by the Muslim faithful.
Writing about these sermons at the time, I highlighted three that were delivered at mosques in the United States in that same week, all of which spoke about Jews in genocidal terms. Two of the sermons — one at a mosque in Houston, Texas, the other in Raleigh, NC — cited a rather bloodcurdling hadith that reads as follows: “Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.”
That same hadith surfaced at a sermon given by the Imam of the Grand Mosque in the city of Toulouse in southwest France, Mohamed Tataiat, right after the embassy move. Resident in France since 1985 and occupying the post in Toulouse in 1987, Tataiat has been hailed by his supporters as a voice of moderation and enthusiastic backer of interfaith dialogue with Christians and Jews.
Last week, the criminal court in Toulouse concurred with that dubious assessment, acquitting Tataiat of the incitement charges that were filed against him by CRIF, the main Jewish organization in France, as well as the National Office for Vigilance Against Antisemitism (BNVCA) and the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism (LICRA). After a three-month trial, the court deemed that in quoting the hadith, it had not been Tataiat’s intention to “provoke hatred or discrimination.”
Since the authenticity of this hadith is not in question, one can understand why the act of simply quoting it might not be regarded as a criminal offense, even in countries, like France, with stringent hate-speech laws on the books. But as with any kind of hate speech, context is key.