The Eiland report on the Mavi Marmara, plus more

Maj. Gen. (Res.) Giora Eiland had the task of examining, from a military perspective, the conduct of the IDF in the Mavi Marmara incident. He gave his report today, and here are some highlights - not only from the IDF report on his debriefing but also some details given by a senior IDF official that I received via email.

In terms of the intelligence effort, the team concluded that not all possible intelligence gathering methods were fully implemented and that the coordination between Navy Intelligence and the Israel Defense Intelligence was insufficient. At the same time, the team emphasized that it is not certain that an optimal intelligence effort would create a complete intelligence picture. The team also pointed out that the anticipated level of violence used against the forces was underestimated.

In terms of situation assessments towards the flotilla, the team clarified that the operation relied excessively on a single course of action, albeit a probable one, while no alternative courses of action were prepared for the event of more dangerous scenarios.

Regarding technological alternatives, the team determined that on the day of the incident, decision makers were not presented with alternative operational courses of action other than a full boarding of the flotilla. The team emphasized the fact that as far as is currently known, no country in the world holds the ability to stop a vessel at sea in a non hostile manner. Therefore statements made on this matter following the incident are unfounded and irresponsible. At the same time, the team determined that alternative courses of action could have existed had the process of preparation begun enough time in advance, and recommended to accelerate the process of examining alternative methods....

The team determined that the Navy Commando soldiers operated properly, with professionalism, bravery and resourcefulness and that the commanders exhibited correct decision making. The report further determines that the use of live fire was justified and that the entire operation is estimable.

The additional points I have found out are perhaps more interesting:

* Nine IDF soldiers were injured in all, 3 of them seriously
* There were at least four and perhaps as many as six separate incidents where IDF soldiers were fired upon by "peace activists". In one case a soldier shot in the knee was shot by a weapon which was not IDF issued, and shell casings were found on the ship of bullets that did not come from Israeli weapons.
* In every situation where IDF soldiers used their weapons they were in life-threatening situations.
* The first Israeli soldier shot was the second one who rappelled down. This was almost certainly the first use of live fire by anyone in the incident - in other words, Mavi Marmara passengers shot first. The bullet that hit him came, apparently, from an Israeli gun that had been stripped off one of the other soldiers. He was not shot while going down the rope but soon thereafter.
* 3 soldiers were taken hostage. All of them were taken to the lowest deck. Two of them managed to escape and jump overboard where they were rescued; the third one was too badly injured and was rescued later.

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Frustration after losing soccer match in World Cup 2010

After the soccer match Netherlands vs. Spain in the World Cup finals of 2010 in South Africa, which ended in Spain winning the World Cup (0-1), not everyone was coping well with it.

Now, I should say that in general the many Dutch supporters behaved nicely, even though in sorrow after the loss. There were not many reports of riots. However, in the Hague, the seat of the Dutch government, Dutch supporters showed their sorrow quite differently.

If you listen carefully, at 0:40 the crowd starts to shout: "Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas" (translation: "Hamas, Hamas, send Jews to the gas"). We've heard that one before.

But wtf? Really, what has this to do with football?

More shocking was the news that hundreds of miles farther, in Uganda, at least 74 people watching the finals got killed in a trio of bombings. A Somali Islamist militant movement claimed responsibility today.

Today, I'm in mourning. Not because the Dutch lost, but because of our fallen humanity.

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Open thread

Real life intruding on blogging. Have fun in the comments.

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Gas pains ahead

Dar al Hayat has an article that begins to discuss the issues with the new, large natural gas fields that have been discovered or are expected to be discovered in the Mediterranean.

Briefly, gas fields have been discovered off the coasts of Egypt, Gaza ("Marine"), southern Israel ("Mary B") and northern Israel near Haifa ("Tamar.")

Chances are good that the Marine and Mary B are a shared field. Chances are also pretty good that Tamar field extends into Lebanese waters, with Lebanon technically at war with Israel with no demarcated borders - especially at sea. The Tamar field may also reach Cypriot waters.

And to make things more complicated, Turkey would assert rights over offshore Cypriot gas fields, and Syria might want to get in on the action as well.

A recent US Geological Survey indicates that the entire Levant basin might hold 227 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, as well as billions of barrels of oil.

This could get very, very dicey.

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Notable quote from Dar al-Hayat

A few weeks ago there were rumors, immediately denied, that Saudi Arabia would allow Israel to use its airspace (or even to build an airbase!) in order to attack Iran. While the airspace story might have some plausibility in a situation where the Saudis could maintain deniability, an analysis by a rabid Israel-hater in Dar al Hayat includes a paragraph that needs to be studied:

Perhaps the Saudi government has a thousand objections to the practices of the Iranian government. However, it would never help Israel against a Muslim country. This is impossible with Abdullah bin Abdulaziz as King, Sultan bin Abdulaziz as the Crown Prince, and with his brothers, their children, grandchildren, ministers and the entire people.

It takes a lot for an Arab country to accept help from the US against another Arab country - as in the case of Kuwait against Iraq. But to accept help from the hated enemy Israel? Sorry, it will never happen in any sort of public way. It is inconceivable that even  Egypt or Jordan would accept military help from Israel. Under the table, away from the public, in the back rooms, with absolute deniability - perhaps. But the citizens of any Arab country, raised for generations with implacable hate against the Jews cum Zionists, would not stand for such an absolute betrayal from their leadership. The Arab hate against Israel is palpable (as can be seen in the remainder of the article linked to here.)

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The desire for symmetry doesn't mean it exists

James Carroll, in the Boston Globe, defines the Palestinian Arab/Israeli conflict neatly symmetrical terms that are very elegant, and very false.

Against the usual perception, the Israeli and Palestinian stories are not contradictory but parallel. Jews and Arabs did not dig the ditch that keeps them apart.

To shift the analogy, Israelis and Palestinians are trapped in a corner. But the walls of that corner were constructed by someone else — an unacknowledged third party. Those walls are anti-Semitism and colonialism, each of which is thought to be well understood. But their recombination begets something new — a lethal feedback loop, as the historic hatred of Jews mixes explosively with the contempt for native peoples that defined imperial expansion.

Now Europe, together with its legacy culture America, sends representatives, such as Mitchell and Blair, claiming to offer disinterested “help” to the stubbornly warring parties. Yet that broader culture is fully complicit as the source of the two momentous animosities. Because that complicity is never reckoned with, energetic diplomatic interventions, going back past Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger to successive British “white papers,” have come to nothing....

The return to the land of Israel was momentous for people who had prayed for most of two millennia, “Next year in Jerusalem.” From the Arab point of view, however, Zionism could only be taken as a manifestation of the colonialism that native Palestinians had by then every reason to detest. Just as it is wrong to take Zionism as colonialism, it is wrong to take Palestinian hatred of Jewish arrival — and, even more pointedly, of Israeli occupation — as anti-Semitism....

Carroll seems to be a nice guy, and he is not the first to think he has come up with a unique perspective that could help break the impasse.

Creating false equivalences does not help to solve the problem, though.

The Zionist viewpoint is not that Palestine was filled with anti-semites as Jews returned from exile. To be sure, there was anti-semitism among the Arabs - to deny that it exists is as foolhardy as to compare it to the far worse traditional European anti-semitism. Even so, today the problem is not the underlying implicit anti-semitism that still festers in the Arab world, but the explicit and festering anti-Zionism - the utter inability to accept a Jewish state under any circumstances in what they consider Arab land. That is a problem that cannot be wished away. Whether modern anti-Zionism is congruent with traditional anti-semitism is not the pertinent issue - rabid anti-Zionism, which I once termed misoziony, is in itself a roadblock to any chance for peace. When Palestinian Arabs are claiming that Jews in Israel are colonialists, it is not merely the opposite of the truth - it is a manifestation of an underlying hatred that is endemic and every bit as toxic as traditional anti-semitism.

When Carroll tries to create a symmetry between Arab views of Zionism as colonialism, and Jewish views of anti-Zionism as anti-semitism, he is missing the point. Even if anti-Zionism is not a specific manifestation of anti-semitism, it is no less hateful and no more tolerant.

When Palestinian and Israeli negotiators finally face each other across one table, these common notes of experience should be paramount — but only for the sake of moving beyond them. Two peoples who have each defined themselves positively by negative hatred of the other have been at the mercy of a broad culture that created this very habit of mind. Jews and Arabs can renounce this history without renouncing themselves. Each can then receive the other’s account of the past, and, perhaps for the first time, hear it respectfully.

Again, he is ascribing to the Zionist side the hate that exists on the Arab side. While it is undoubtedly true that Palestinian Arabs define themselves in negative terms, by their shared hate of Israel, Jewish nationalism is a far richer and naturally positive historic trend. Before 1948, and even before modern Zionism, no one doubted that the Jewish people were a nation as well as a religious group. Jew and Gentile alike recognized this fact as a given, and newspaper clippings from the 19th century are as likely to use the term Israelites as they were to use Jews. While modern Zionism was partially a reaction to anti-semitism, it was European anti-semitism that the Jews were trying to find an antidote to: Arabs were considered irrelevant to the issue, and often even regarded as potential allies in creating a parallel national movement.

Carroll also errs when he tries to imply that misoziony is merely a Palestinian Arab phenomenon - it is at the very least a pan-Arab psychosis, perhaps the only true pan-Arab mindset that exists. There is precious little else that the Arab world can agree upon.

Another problem is that Carroll (and many others) think that Zionist Jews' false understandings of the Palestinian Arab narrative is partially to blame for there being no peace, when in fact Zionism has almost always shown an almost superhuman ability to empathize with the other side. Consistently, Zionist peace plans have attempted to address the purported issues  in a way that would support a win-win solution. The real problem is that the other side has shown zero interest in a solution that still allows a Jewish state to continue to exist, and these continuous attempts to compromise will inevitably fail because they are not regarded as confidence building gestures or goodwill measures, but as steps on the way to the annihilation of Israel. There is a vast gulf between the Western perception of a solution being a win-win for everybody and the Arab mentality of the zero-sum game.

The unfortunate truth is that the Arab world will never accept Israel except as an entity too strong to defeat or dislodge. The only thing protecting Israel is its strength. Pretending that there are myths on both sides that can be transcended to reach peace is not realism, but another case of wishful thinking. It assumes that peace is the goal for both sides, and that is simply not the case.

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Israel Channel 2: Assad lied to Mitchell's face

According to Israel's Channel 2 news, George Mitchell accused Bashir Assad of transferring weapons in convoys to Hezbollah. When Assad denied it, Mitchell showed him satellite photos - and Assad still denied it.

Finally, after a number of such iterations, during which Mitchell informed Assad that he had seen incontrovertible proof, Assad asked Mitchell, "And if we are transferring - so what?"

A senior US official is quoted as saying that Assad is a liar and that it is impossible to reach an agreement with him.

But, meanwhile, Syrian weapons still pour into Lebanon.

(h/t Jed)

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Peace partner Abbas would love to see Arab war on Israel

From Palestinian Media Watch:

The PA daily reports that Abbas said this at a meeting with writers and journalists in the home of the Palestinian Ambassador to Jordan.

The following is the transcript from the official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida:

"'We don't accept the statement [of Hamas]: a [Palestinian] state of resistance and refusal. What we hear from everyone is that the basis is negotiations, at a time that the entire world agrees about this, despite the absence of other options, we either have negotiations or no negotiations, what has put Israel in the corner.
We are unable to confront Israel militarily, and this point was discussed at the Arab League Summit in March in Sirt (Libya). There I turned to the Arab States and I said: 'If you want war, and if all of you will fight Israel, we are in favor. But the Palestinians will not fight alone because they don't have the ability to do it.' He [Abbas] said: 'The West Bank was completely destroyed and we will not agree that it will be destroyed again,' in addition to 'the inability to confront Israel militarily.'"

[Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), July 6, 2010

I saw this on Friday and couldn't find the original article in Al Hayat al Jadida online, so I emailed PMW, who provided me with a facsimile of the print page, with the quote highlighted in yellow:

Once again we see that peace is not a goal for even the "moderate" PA. The goal is to destroy Israel; peace (or, more accurately, the "peace process") is a strategy towards achieving that goal.

Somehow, I don't think that there will be any angry requests from the White House demanding that Abbas explain or disown his statements.  They reserve those actions for things that are really heinous, like announcements of Jews building houses in their capital city.

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Should I start my own "think-tank"?

I just received an email from JCPA, the excellent Israeli think-tank, bragging about its Internet success:

Which Israel-Based Think-Tank Leads the Pack on the Internet?

After a decade of concentrated effort on the front lines of the Internet, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs headed by former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold leads the pack of Israel-based think tanks, according to data from Alexa.com, an independent website traffic ranking service owned by Amazon.com.

 A comparison of 17 think tanks in July 2010 shows that the Jerusalem Center ranks much higher than better known and more lavishly funded institutions such as the Israel Democracy Institute, Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies, the Shalem Center, and the Peres Center (see table).

Rank	Website	World Ranking
1	Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs	368,054
2	NGO Monitor	605,446
3	One Jerusalem	752,482
4	Daily Alert	962,386
5	Institute for Counter-Terrorism, IDC Herzliya	978,644
6	Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University	1,093,413
7	Israel Democracy Institute	1,302,090
8	Reut Institute	1,735,615
9	Van Leer Jerusalem Institute	1,878,871
10	Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information	2,205,274
11	Peres Center for Peace	2,594,697
12	Ariel Center for Policy Research	2,761,903
13	Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress	3,312,665
14	Shalem Center	4,859,252
15	Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University	5,812,872
16	Rabin Center	6,365,319
17	Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies	8,419,974

So I looked up my Alexa rank:

209,116.

I am speechless.

I don't know whether to be proud that my ranking is so high, or upset that these professional think-tanks - with full time staff and salaries, filled with stellar content - cannot do better. 

Maybe, if they would hire me full time, I could make aliyah and increase their ranking!

(Just for context - newspapers and magazines do much, much better than my little blog, and these sites don't generally have daily news updates, but still....)

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Mexico slows down Hezbollah's South American network

Haaretz reported last week:

Mexico foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to establish a network in South America, a Kuwaiti newspaper reported on Tuesday.

Hezbollah operatives employed Mexicans nationals with family ties to Lebanon to set up the network, designed to target Israel and the West, the Al-Seyassah daily said.

According to the report, Mexican police mounted a surveillance operation on the group's leader, Jameel Nasr, who traveled frequently to Lebanon to receive information and instructions from Hezbollah commanders there.

Police say Nasr also made frequent trips to other countries in Latin America, including a two-month stay in Venezuela in the summer of 2008.

Nasr was living in Tijuana, Mexico at the time of his arrest, the report said.

The report follows warnings from the United States that Hezbollah and its backer Iran are stepping up operations in the region.

In June, a U.S. congresswoman wrote to the Department of Homeland Security to warn that Hezbollah was increasing its presence in Central and South America.

In her letter, Congresswoman Sue Myrick called on the U.S. to work with Mexican forces, as there was intelligence that Hezbollah was working in conjunction with Mexican drug cartels on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In 2009 a U.S. commander tasked with overseeing U.S. military interests in the region said Hezbollah was linked to drug-trafficking in Colombia.

Hezbollah's activities in Central and South America are a bit more long-term and entrenched, however. From The Sunday Paper, May 21, 2007:

Argentina linked Hezbollah to the bombings of the Israeli Embassy in 1992 and the Argentine-Israeli Community Center in 1994, both in Buenos Aires. A car bomb loaded with 300 kilograms of explosives was used to execute the latter attack, which killed 81 people.

In February 2000, Paraguayan authorities arrested Ali Khalil Mehri, a Lebanese businessman with financial links to Hezbollah, in the country's Tri-Border Area, so called because Brazil and Argentina's borders meet Paraguay's there. In November of that year, Paraguayan authorities arrested Salah Abdul Karim Yassine, a Palestinian who allegedly threatened to bomb the U.S. and Israeli Embassies in Paraguay, and charged him with entering the country illegally.

As reported by the Washington Times on Aug. 21, 2001—less than a month before Sept. 11—U.S. Special Forces were training Paraguayan soldiers here in anti-drug operations "that closely resemble counterinsurgency operations," while hundreds of U.S. soldiers spent four months in Paraguay which had "long been a home to Arabs linked to the Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad militias."

As reported in international Spanish newspaper El Pais in November 2001, an investigation by the National Direction of Civil Aeronautics determined that 16 foreigners enter Paraguay illegally on a weekly basis via the airport of Ciudad del Este, paying some $5,000 in advance, but many more are believed to enter by land.

According to the state department, since 2003, "al-Said Mokhles was extradited from Uruguay to Egypt, Ali Nizar Dahroug was convicted in Paraguay of tax evasion and sentenced to 6.5 years in prison, and Assad Ahmad Barakat, the Hezbollah financial kingpin in the Tri-Border Area, was extradited from Brazil to Paraguay also to face tax evasion charges."

[Quoting Forbes] Iran is the biggest patron of Hezbollah, delivering $100 million or so a year to the terrorists ...Last year, Rady Zaiter, a Lebanese citizen, was arrested in Colombia for allegedly heading a cocaine smuggling outfit in Ecuador that sent most of its profits to Hezbollah … The Party of God gets $10 million a year from the area where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet.

Hezbollah's international reach is barely reported in the MSM, as it continues to morph Western perceptions of the organization from a worldwide terrorist group into just another Lebanese political party.

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Lebanon waters down bill to grant Palestinian Arabs basic human rights

From Ya Libnan:

Central News Agency (CNA) has reported that MP Walid Jumblatt has agreed to withdraw his bill, that grants Palestinians civil rights and allows them to buy property in Lebanon, in favor of a humanitarian bill that was worked out between al Mustqbal , March 14 Secretariat and and the Lebanese Forces that will grant the Palestinians the right to work in Lebanon.

The new humanitarian bill was formulated following discussions with Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir , former PM Fouad Siniora and Phalange party leader Amin Gemayel and was also approved by Speaker Nabih Berri and MP Michel Aoun.

MP Nuhad Mashnouk has been commuting between Jumblatt, Aoun and Berri to get consensus on the new bill.

During an interview with CNA Mashnouk said, "Wwe have reached consensus on a bill that will grant the Palestinians the right to work on condition that this action will not add any burden to the state of Lebanon (either through social security, subsidies or through any other funds)."

Mashnouk added ”The international community should bear some responsibility in this regard.”

Mashnouk also confirmed that discussions are ongoing between all the concerned groups over granting Palestinians the right to own property in Lebanon.

There was fierce opposition to the idea of Palestinian Arabs being able to purchase land in Lebanon.

One Lebanese MP noted on Friday, “It is shameful that Israel grants Palestinians their rights while Lebanon stands idly by.”

Yet even he was dead-set against the possibility of granting full citizenship rights to Palestinians.

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Today's PalArab news (7/11/2010)

A ship from Libya headed towards Gaza left Greece last night, filled with food that Gaza does not seem to be lacking. Israel Matzav notices that the "charity" that is running the ship once received some $200,000 from - the Obama administration.

Hamas' amnesty program for "collaborators" ended over the weekend, and they claim to have gotten many key spies to turn themselves in. Some are wondering what will happen now if anyone else decides to "repent" after the deadline...

The new head of Al Azhar University in Cairo said that he would not repeat the mistakes of his late predecessor, and would not consider shaking hands with Shimon Peres or meeting with any delegation of rabbis.

It is not only UNRWA and Hamas running summer camps in Gaza. Islamic Jihad has a system of 51 camps for kids 11-16, where they "prepare a generation armed with faith and awareness that is capable of carrying burdens and challenges."

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Al Qaeda takes a page from Hamas playbook

From NYT (h/t Soccer Dad):

Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia recently issued a fatwa telling its fighters to marry the widows of those who have fallen.

In Diyala Province east of Baghdad, the fatwa has produced about 70 marriages in a little more than three weeks, according to members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and their relatives and associates. They spoke to an Iraqi reporter conducting interviews for The New York Times.

While Diyala is one of the group’s last remaining strongholds, the mere fact that so many people would rush headlong into marriages to strangers seemed to reflect how far the American military and the Iraqi government remain from their goal of eliminating the organization.

Some members say they are taking third or fourth wives, but many new husbands are from among the group’s most dedicated fighters — confirmed bachelors previously wedded only to the work of killing invaders and their Iraqi allies.

After Cast Lead, Hamas actually offered $3000 to anyone who would marry a wife of a "martyr,", and at least some took advantage of this program - using these women as second or third wives - in a mass wedding last July.

Can't these women just go the old fashioned way and meet the mujaheed of their dreams from a Muslim dating site?

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Collective punishment in Nablus!

From Ma'an:

Palestinian Authority forces imposed a curfew in the northern West Bank village of Salem in the Nablus district after a man was killed overnight, police said.

Locals said Issa Ahid, 30, sustained critical wounds after being stabbed several times with a sharp object. The victim was taken to the Rafedia Hospital, where he died of his injuries.

PA security forces deployed in the village shortly after the incident occurred, placing movement restrictions on residents while investigations were underway, locals said.

After only a single incident, and entire village is forced to suffer from inhumane collective punishment. People cannot freely move in and out of their community because of the harsh, repressive measures taken in the name of "security."

We can be sure that activists will be all over this case of human rights abuses done by the Palestinian Authority security forces. After all, we know how inhuman such punishments are, especially when applied so capriciously. How dare they make so many people suffer!

Obviously the murder was an excuse to repress these people, yearning to be free.

Right?

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Gilbert Achcar - another bogus scholar

The Washington Post has a very short review of a book called "The Arabs and the Holocaust - The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives," by Lebanese historian Gilbert Achcar:

Gilbert Achcar probes the differing views of Arabs and Israelis over the migration of Holocaust survivors to the Middle East after World War II. While Israeli narratives center on Jewish expulsion and genocide in Europe, Palestinians and other Arabs speak of the "grievous catastrophe" associated with the establishment of a Jewish homeland: the forced departure of Arabs from Palestinian territories and the subsequent wars.

Achcar, a professor of development studies and international relations in London, carefully examines the long history of Arab-Jewish conflict back through the 19th century, illuminating the range of opinions -- whether Zionist, ultra-nationalist, liberal or anti-Semitic. He points out that, by World War I, opposition to Zionism was central to Palestinian identity and Arab nationalistic consciousness. Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, saw Jewish settlement during that period as another form of European colonization. However, early confrontations between Arab peasants and Jewish settlers were not xenophobic or anti-Jewish, Achcar writes, but a predictable outcome of the expulsion of farmers from their lands. Achcar doesn't shy away from the contemporary debate. He argues that the Palestinians are engaged in "the last major anticolonial struggle."

The statement about the early confrontations being because of expulsion of farmers is simply not true. A Christian travelogue of Palestine written in 1874 mentions "Men in Palestine call their fellows 'Jew,' as the very lowest of all possible words of abuse." The first attack of Arabs towards Zionist Jews was in 1886 at Petah Tikva, which was built on former swampland and did not displace anyone.

One gets the impression that Achcar is not being quite as honest and objective as a historian should be.

Well, it turns out that he is even worse than that. A preview of his book is available at Google Books, and I noticed this section:

The book preview did not let me look up the endnote citation, but an Internet search showed that this quote is all over the most virulently anti-semitic sites as proof of Zionist callousness towards the victims of the Holocaust. Most of those sites mindlessly copy the citation from a book by Holocaust denier Roger Garaudy, attributing it to someone named "Yvon Gelbner."

It turns out that there is no "Yvon Gelbner" but the quote actually came from a work by Yoav Gelber, a professor at the University of Haifa. I emailed him about the quote, and here is his response:

The quotation is correct and it was said by Ben Gurion at Mapai's Center on 7 December 1938 (Labour Party Archives, 23/38). The English translation is somewhat kinky.
However, when I published it, I did it in its context, which those who quote me omit.

The background is the Kristallnacht in Germany and the British restrictions on immigration to Palestine. No one thought at the time on the Holocaust, including BG. A movement spread in the Yishuv at the time, calling to let German Jewish children enter Palestine regardless of immigration quotas, to be adopted by Yishuv families who would care for them until their parents arrived in the future. The demand had appeal and to counter it and remove the pressure from Palestine, the British proposed to bring to England 25000 Jewish children from Germany. Mapai's Center held a debate on how to relate to the British proposition. BG was vehemently opoosed to it and said these words in the heat of the discussion. As far as I remember (it's more than 25 years since I wrote it), most members backed BG's position.

I hope this helps to clarify things.

This is echoed by CAMERA, which demolishes the claims made by some - including, as we see here, Achbar - that Ben Gurion was indifferent towards the fate of European Jewry:

The Ben Gurion quote is taken from comments he made to Mapai's central committee on December 7, 1938. This followed Britain's decision to deny entrance into Palestine of 10,000 German Jewish orphans in the wake of Kristallnacht, instead offering them asylum within Great Britain. It was almost a year before the Nazis launched World War II and several years before the Final Solution (to annihilate the Jews) was methodically implemented. While Ben Gurion believed that Germany's anti-Jewish policies would necessitate creating a safe haven for numerous Jewish refugees that no other country was willing to accept, he had no way of predicting the enormity of what was to follow.

The British offer to accept several thousand children appeared to be a gesture of conscience allowing Britain to close the doors of Palestine — not only to those German orphans, but to future refugees as well. Ben Gurion had recently witnessed the results of the international Evian conference, which had been convened in July 1938 to address the growing Jewish refugee problem, and knew that other countries were also unwilling to accept hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees. He believed that only a Jewish homeland would be able to properly absorb these Jews. Thus Ben Gurion stated that "our concern is not only the personal interest of these children, but the historic interest of the Jewish people" (translation from the stenographic records by Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Holocaust, Harcourt Brace & Co. 1996, p. 47).

According to the records of the Mapai meeting, Yitzchak Ben Zvi immediately clarified Ben Gurion's brusque remark, explaining "ten thousand children are a small part of Germany's [Jewish] children...They [the British] don't intend to save Germany's Jews, and certainly not all of them. The moment the Jewish State Plan [the Peel plan] was shelved, the possibility of complete rescue of Germany's Jews was shelved with it." (ibid. p. 48)

There is ample evidence ... that Ben Gurion viewed the rescue of Jews as paramount. As early as 1936, Ben Gurion told Palestine's high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope, that "had there been the possiblity of bringing Poland's Jews to the United States or Argentina, we would have done so regardless of our Zionist beliefs. But the world was closed to us. And had there also not been room for us in Palestine, our people would have had only one way out: to commit suicide" (Ben Gurion, Memoirs, p.3:105, cited in Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion and the Holocaust, pp xlix, 110). And in November 1941, Ben Gurion argued that "the supremely important thing now is salvage, and nation-building is incidental" (Teveth, ibid. p.xlviii).

It was only in November 1942 that the Yishuv became aware of the systematic slaughter of Jews. The Zionist leadership established a rescue committee and raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for the rescue mission. Ben Gurion made his priorities clear at a September 1943 fund-raising meeting of the Mobilization and Rescue Appeal in Jerusalem where he hailed the Allies' invasion of Europe for "first of all, and foremost, the saving of Jews, then the saving of the Yishuv, and finally and thirdly the saving of Zionism" (cited in Teveth, p. 143). He emphasized the importance of funding the rescue mission, saying:

We must do whatever is humanly possible...to extend material aid to those working on rescue operations in order to save [those who] can still be saved, to delay the calamity as far as it can be delayed. [And we must] do it immediately, to the best of our ability. I hesitate to say - since the matter is so serious - that we shall do our utmost; we are flesh and blood and cannot do the maximum, but we shall do what we can. (quoted in Friling, Tuvia, Arrows in the Dark, University of Wisconsin Press 2003)

It is bad enough that Achcar is twisting Ben Gurion's words and misrepresenting his thoughts, when the truth is so easily accessible to any serious historian. What is more troubling is the fact that he used that specific quote to begin with: either he found it on his own and twisted it out of context himself, or he had seen it at one of the many purely anti-semitic websites that have loads of similar quotes and misquotes from Zionist and Jewish leaders and attempted to put a scholarly sheen on it. If it is the former, then he is a sham as a historian; if it is the latter, then he spends time reading and believing anti-semitic propaganda.

How many other so-called scholars place indefensible falsehoods in their texts, turning what should be history into pure propaganda?

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