Michael Lumish: Fun with antisemitic anti-Zionists
I suppose this is rather stupid, but I find "trolling" antisemitic Facebook pages to be kind-of a kick.No, Ben-Gurion did NOT say “We must expel Arabs and take their place.”
There is a page called "Israel is a War Criminal" that I recently became aware of and - as one would expect - they specialize in separating out Jewish people in Israel, if not pro-Israel Jews, more generally, as a unique evil.
Therefore this morning I dropped in briefly to say hello with this little message:
Good morning anti-Zionists! How are you guys today? One of the things that give me a great deal of satisfaction is the knowledge that the Jewish people, after 2,000 years of diaspora have reconstituted our ancient homeland and reclaimed Jerusalem, the ancient capital of the Jewish people. That in itself is a very beautiful thing, I can hardly even tell you. But, y’know, when the Jews who arrived in the Land of Israel from the concentration camps nobody thought that they could actually beat the combined Arab armies. But nobody quite realized that the combined Arab armies were so feminine.
Former dhimmis, along with Jewish women and half-starved Holocaust survivors actually beat the very cream of the Arab fighting forces in 1948 to re-establish Jewish sovereignty on historically Jewish land. And then to see this small struggling country not only survive but thrive just fills my heart with joy and gladness for the redemption of the Jewish people. Now, of course, Israel is a world leader in a variety of areas including technical and medical sciences, water reclamation, agriculture, not to mention arts and letters. Some of the top universities in the world are in that country. It’s really very gratifying.
Peace to you, please, my friends.
Though, it’s rare to see this completely discredited quote appear anymore at ‘mainstream’ news outlets, on April 25th, The Irish News (of Belfast) published a letter which included the following claims:
The scene was set in 1937 when Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, in a letter to his son wrote “Negev land is reserved for Jewish citizens, whenever and wherever they want… we must expel Arabs and take their places… and if we have to use force, then we have the force at our disposal…”. This was, and is, the Zionist mindset before the great Estate Agent in the sky decided who really owned the land of Palestine.
In addition to the false quote concerning “expelling Arabs and taking their place”, the letter also distorts Ben-Gurion’s words concerning the Negev and the use of force. Here’s the actual sentence, again, translated into English by CAMERA.
All of our ambitions are built on the assumption that has proven true throughout all of our activities in the land [of Israel] — that there is enough room for us and for the Arabs in the land [of Israel]. And if we will have to use force, not for the sake of evicting the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but rather in order to secure the right that belongs to us to settle there, force will be available to us.
As you can see, the actual Ben-Gurion quote has almost no resemblance to the way it’s presented in The Irish News letter. The “Zionist mindset”, as the letter writer put it, was not that Arabs should be expelled, but, rather, that there was room for both peoples in the land.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Gorka
“Every young person holding a placard to protest my parents and myself—I challenge you now: Go away and look at everything I have said and written in the last 46 years of my life and find one sentence that is anti-Semitic,” Sebastian Gorka said yesterday before walking out of a panel at Georgetown University. “You won’t find one.”
Gorka is right. But who cares? More specifically, why do I care? I’ve spent much of the last two months talking about Sebastian Gorka, and I’m tired. When I raised objections to the ludicrous assertion—repeated frequently and loudly by numerous media outlets—that the senior aide to President Donald Trump is some sort of crypto-Nazi, I was accused by many people of being a Gorka apologist.
Let’s get some things out of the way. I’ve never met Sebastian Gorka and don’t know much about his work on Islam or terrorism. I’m also not a fan of his boss, Donald Trump, which I’ve made clear in one or two or three hundred articles this past year.
What I object to—and what my interlocutors maddeningly refuse to engage with—is the effort to use history and Jewish memory, in particular, the crimes of the Holocaust, in the service of partisan political tricks. The falsification of history, in particular, the history of the Holocaust, is something that all Jews should object to because it is both the foundation and also the most frequent justification for Holocaust denialism. Indeed, it gives aid to Holocaust deniers—in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe—by using the same methods they do and giving credence to their loathsome rhetoric, which seeks to erase history by insisting that all crimes are the same, whatever their scale.
What I am asking readers to do here is to resist, for a few minutes, the social-media-driven knee-jerk outrage du jour, and instead consider the far weightier issue of how these arguments play into an abuse of history.