The perpetual Palestinian paradox
Even if the Palestinians were to have their own state, they will remain refugees “because it is an essential part of our identity,” Mansour declared. Palestinian former legislator and activist Hanan Ashrawi, with whom I got into an unpleasant heckling match, concurred.The real history of the U.S.-Israel relationship
This strange double-think was evident elsewhere. The Jerusalem Post Magazine’s Voices from the Arab Press round-up (compiled by The Media Line) last week contained an item with the headline “Lessons for Palestinian Leadership,” by Majid Kayali, writing in Lebanon’s An-Nahar on August 20. It was a diatribe against Israeli security actions and in particular the raids and closures of NGOs affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), recognized as a terrorist organization.
“Israel’s actions are also meant to send a clear message to the Palestinian Authority, according to which the Palestinians – despite having a president, a government, a flag, an anthem, embassies and even a security force – are ultimately nothing more than pawns in Israel’s chess game,” Kayali wrote, accusing Israel of seeking “to expose the fragility of the Palestinian Authority and undermine its role in front of its people.”
It’s not the PA fragility that I seek to expose, but the hypocrisy. As Kayali notes, the Palestinians already have the symbols of statehood – in fact, the State of Palestine is recognized by more than 135 UN member states – yet they see themselves as refugees, deserving unique support. This culture of entitlement gives the PA no motivation to return to the negotiating table in good faith to solve the issues that could let both Israel and the Palestinians thrive, side-by-side. On the contrary.
And it’s not only Israel that’s paying attention. Particularly following the 2020 Abraham Accords, an increasing number of Arab and Muslim countries have shown interest in growing stronger economically and technologically together with Israel – and to combat the Iranian threat and dangers of Sunni jihadi extremists. While the Palestinians are obsessively anti-normalization, Arab states are realizing that peace and stability are more beneficial for all. The Palestinians might be brothers, but they’re a heavy load for the Arab world to continue to carry. And they have been betrayed by their leadership, particularly Abbas, now in the 17th year of his four-year term of office.
It is also now obvious to all that Israel is here to stay, with the emphasis on here – in its ancient homeland. Having turned down multiple rounds of negotiations and peace processes – which usually ended with waves of terrorism – the Palestinian resolve to unilaterally declare statehood will compound the problems rather than solve them. Keep in mind that maps of “Palestine” include all Israel, “from the river to the sea.”
At the same time, the Palestinians’ long-term plan is to remain dependent on the UN and external funding and to maintain and their refugee status. Not so much a paradox as a parody, it’s classic chutzpah.
More than half a century ago, the great American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus warned: “A people that is not conscious of its past has no assurance of a future.” His words would make an apt epigraph to Walter Russell Mead’s magisterial new book, “The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People.”PBS series asks hard questions about how Americans treated Jews in WWII
Mead, a professor of foreign relations and humanities at Bard College, notes that the ancestral homeland of the Jews may be just a speck on the world map, but “it occupies a continent in the American mind.” That space, he found, is filled with misinformation, subject to prejudice and swamped by emotion. “To get the story straight I was going to have to take on both pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist legends that have obscured the historical record,” he writes. He set himself the task of helping Americans understand the “real history of their relationship with the Jewish state,” the importance of Zionism and Israel’s place in American world strategy.
He has achieved that goal. Any careful reader will come away from this book armed with facts, history and context, and with a clarity absent from most discussions of the subject. At a time when “replacement theory” has become acceptable political rhetoric on the right, and with antisemitic incidents at an all-time high, this volume is more than timely — it is necessary.
Mead tackles head-on the narrative that a secret Jewish cabal controls American foreign policy on Israel. Election by election, he cites the facts: George W. Bush, whose Iraq War was “allegedly taken in Israel’s interest,” saw Jews voting heavily against him in 2000 and 2004. Donald Trump, who moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and delighted Benjamin Netanyahu by terminating the nuclear agreement with Iran, lost the Jewish vote by a wide margin. Mead writes, “To blame the Jewish community for policies it dislikes made by presidents it rejects seems, if not virulently antisemitic, at least uninformed.”
Why, then, is recent American foreign policy relentlessly pro-Israel? Because “it emerges from the same kind of political process and struggle that produces the rest of our policies.” A global strategy, grounded in domestic politics — which he spells out, decade by decade — underlies the U.S. stance, Mead writes.
To depict the history, the filmmakers relied heavily on their advisory board (they have one for every project they take on) to determine how much time to devote to various historical events, whether to show certain images or merely describe them and how to describe them. “We don’t go anywhere without our board of advisors,” Botstein said.
For “The US and the Holocaust,” the advisors included Holocaust historians such as Debórah Dwork, Peter Hayes and Richard Breitman, as well as scholars of race history such as Nell Irvin Painter, Mae M. Ngai and Howard Bryant.
Often the advisors disagreed on how to depict moments in history, and this disagreement is sometimes reflected in the film itself. A debate over whether the United States should have bombed Auschwitz, or even the trains leading into the death camp, echoed in the advisors’ room just as much as it did in the highest levels of government in the war’s waning months. The film reproduces those debates, quoting from historians who argue both points.
The film’s treatment of Franklin D. Roosevelt is also notable given Burns’ demonstrated interest in the US president. Many historians today fault Roosevelt for failing to take more decisive action to prevent further bloodshed at key moments in the war. The director noted that the new series is more critical of FDR’s actions during the Holocaust than his earlier series “The Roosevelts” was, but Burns still believes the president was mostly acting within his means as a politician. “He could not wave a magic wand,” he said. “He was not the emperor or a king.”
All Burns films are released with teaching guides and are intended for use in the classroom, but getting “The US and the Holocaust” into schools was of particular importance to the filmmakers because they saw an opportunity to fit it into the dozens of statewide Holocaust education mandates that have been passed.
And also, Novick said, because the filmmakers have noticed the rise of various far-right, white supremacist ideologies, including many figures who espouse Holocaust denial. “It’s a never-ending battle that has to be fought,” she said. The film itself doesn’t engage with such denialists.
In their publicity for the film, Burns and company are partnering with several organizations to try to bring the Holocaust’s lessons into the modern day, including the International Rescue Committee, a refugee aid agency, and the US government-funded think tank Freedom House.
The producers asked JTA not to give away the details of the film’s ending — an unusual request for a Holocaust documentary. But the reason is that Burns and his team don’t end with the camps’ liberation in 1945. Instead, they come up to the present, in unexpected ways.
“Most of our films come up to the present,” Burns said. “And we would be remiss if we did not take on this most gargantuan of topics, and not say that this is rhyming so much with the present.”
When asked why the film makes some of the connections it makes, Burns quoted a line Lipstadt delivers in the film: “If ‘the time to stop a Holocaust is before it happens,’ then it means you have to lay on the table the ingredients that go into it. Maybe these ingredients don’t add up to it… But if you’re seeing people assembling, in the kitchen, the same ingredients, you’ve got to say, you cannot wait until the meal is prepared.”