Point Taken on “Let me tell you about Israel”, but
Let Me Tell You What the Palestinians Say They Want
“You must be a religious Jew who believes the propaganda.”
Was the response I got from introducing historical facts to “Let me tell you about Israel”.
First, the Zionist movement began in the 1870s and 1880s, long before Herzl reacted to covering the Dreyfuss trial and writing Der Judenstaat in 1896. 150 years ago, when Herzl supposedly concluded there was no cure for European anti-semitism, Herzl was eleven.
Second, Palestine was not a country, but an Ottoman province run by absentee landlords from Constantinople. They were only too happy to sell to immigrant Jews paying five times the market price for the swamp land that later became Tel Aviv.
Third, it's pogrom, not pogram, since I almost never existed because of one. My then eight year old paternal grandfather lived through the pogrom in Kishinev in 1903, the same year the Tsarist government published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Slaughter in Kishinev, triggered the banker Jacob Schiff’s $200 million financing of the Japanese war effort against Tsarist Russia the following year. The Tsar’s foreign minister had invited Schiff to St Petersburg to discuss a bond issue, but he declined because Jews like my grandpa in the Russian empire’s Pale of Settlement weren’t allowed to go to the Russian capital. The Tsar’s minister offered Schiff a special pass, but he declined this offer of special privilege.
The connection to Palestine? The 1903 pogrom plus the 1905 revolution unleashed by Russia’s defeat by Japan, triggered more lethal pogroms and more massive Jewish emigration to the UK (my East London Yiddish cockney maternal grandfather), Palestine and America; my four year old maternal grandmother in 1906 sailed from Libau (Liepaja) Latvia to New York and my paternal grandfather to work in a garment factory in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913. Italian, Irish and Polish immigrants would tell my grandfather, and a quarter century later, my father in Brooklyn, “hey Jewboy, go back to Palestine.” Even recent European immigrants to America saw the connection between Jews and Palestine. It was Jews who were Palestinians.
When American entry into WWI came in April 1917 my grandfather saw the Americans training troops for six weeks before they were sent to fight the Germans and the Jewish Brigade of the British army in Canada training troops for six months before they sailed to Egypt to fight the dying Ottoman Empire. My grandpa thought, better six months than six weeks and better the Turks than the Germans, which is why exist to write this story.
The result: he never had to fire his rifle once in contributing to detaching Palestine from the Muslim Ottoman Empire and turning it into a British mandatory territory promised by Lord Balfour as a “national home for the Jewish people”, in part due to the contribution of the Zionist biochemist Chaim Weitzmann’s contribution to the British war effort:
“the ‘father’ of industrial fermentation. He developed the acetone–butanol–ethanol fermentation process, which produces acetone, n-Butanol and ethanol through bacterial fermentation. His acetone production method was of great importance in the manufacture of cordite explosive propellants for the British war industry during World War I.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Weizmann#Zionist_activism)
As a thank you for saving the British Empire from going deeper into debt to America, the British, worried about access to oil fields, promised the same land to the Arabs and trained and equipped the Arab Legion that invaded Israel in 1948, which detached Israeli Jews from the property they owned in East Jerusalem.
What’s Your Nationality?
Had you asked an Arab tenant farmer on the western side of the Allenby bridge my grandfather marched across in 1918 if he was “Palestinian”, he would have seen no ethnic difference between himself and other Arabs. Political categories that counted in the Arab world from the 6th to the 20th centuries: clan, tribe, religion and empire. Nationality and nationalism are western imports.
Real Estate is a Contact Sport
Fourth, the Palestinians subject to eviction in Sheikh Jarrah are renters. The owners are Jewish Israelis who merely reclaimed the real estate that had been stolen from them during the Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank from 1948-67 and whose Jordanian occupiers had never transferred title to the tenants:
“It is an ordinary property dispute between private parties. The Jewish claimants’ ownership of the few plots of land has been confirmed repeatedly in court, following laws that apply equally regardless of ethnicity. Israeli courts have gone out of their way to avoid evicting the Palestinian residents who haven’t paid rent for half a century. In the case now before Israel’s Supreme Court, the owner is an Israeli corporation with Jewish owners whose chain of title is documented back to an original purchase in 1875. Until 1948, the neighborhood now known as Sheikh Jarrah was home to both Jewish and Arab communities. Jordan invaded Israel in 1948 and occupied half of Jerusalem, expelling every one of its Jewish inhabitants and seizing their property. When Israel reunited Jerusalem and ended the Jordanian occupation in 1967, it had to decide what to do with these properties. In the many cases in which Jordan had officially transferred the title of Jewish-owned properties to Palestinians, Israel respected the new titles — and still does — even though they are based on forcible takings in a war of aggression followed by ethnic cleansing against Jews. Where title had never been transferred, however, Israel returned properties to their owners.” (https://www.wsj.com/articles/almost-nothing-youve-heard-about-evictions-in-jerusalem-is-true-11621019410)
Land and property titles were a tricky business in pre-mandatory Ottoman Palestine, since many property owners avoided registration to avoid taxes:
“The Turkish government on Sunday gave the Palestinian Authority a copy of the Ottoman archive containing all documents pertaining to land ownership in pre-state Israel through 1916. The PA requested the records to support Palestinian land claims. The Palestinians say that these documents reflect the “true” ownership of the land.Even before 1917, Jewish and Zionist institutions had purchased large tracts of land in Palestine from absentee landlords, who lived mainly in Syria and Lebanon. These landlords had previously leased their property to local farmers, but were happy to sell it for the right price, without giving a thought to their tenant farmers. Nevertheless, Palestinians view these sales as more legitimate than those that took place during the British occupation that began in 1917. Under Ottoman rule, a substantial portion of the land in Palestine was registered as state land. Some of this land was later sold or transferred to pre-state Jewish institutions. Other portions belonged to the Muslim waqf (religious trust), and these, according to Islamic law, cannot be sold. However, there was no orderly registration process; ownership was determined primarily using records such as tax payments.” (https://www.haaretz.com/1.4877655)
Fifth, there’s no correlation between ending occupation and peace. Israelis were assured that if they left the Gaza Strip there would be peace. So in August 2005 the Israeli army forcibly removed settlers, dismantled settlements and handed over Gaza. The assets the Israelis handed over included:
““The sum of exports from the greenhouses of Gush Katif, which were owned by 200 farmers,[5] came to $200,000,000 per year[6] and made up 15% of the agricultural exports of the State of Israel. The combined assets in Gush Katif were estimated at $23 billion….The Economic Cooperation Foundation, which is funded by the European Union, agreed to purchase the greenhouses for $14 million and transfer ownership to the Palestinian Authority, so that the 4,000 Palestinians employed to work in them could keep their jobs….Former head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, contributed $500,000 of his own money to the project.[11] The rest was contributed by a group of prominent Jewish philanthropists, including Mortimer Zuckerman, Lester Crown and Leonard Stern. They bought the irrigation systems and other moveables, because, according to Zuckerman, “Without those, the Palestinians would not be able to make a go of running the greenhouses.” When the IDF left Gaza, half of Gaza’s greenhouses were dismantled by their owners before leaving. The owners despaired at the time of receiving compensation, so they removed what they could.[12] Afterwards Palestinians looted the area, and 800 of the 4,000 greenhouses were left unusable…” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Katif)
But in the Middle East, no goodwill goes unpunished:
“Abu Abir, a member of the Popular Resistance Committees terrorist organization, commented that “The looting and burning of the synagogues was a great joy…It was in an unplanned expression of happiness that these synagogues were destroyed.” Later, in 2007, it was reported that “The ruins of two large synagogues in Gush Katif, the evacuated Jewish communities of the Gaza Strip, have been transformed into a military base used by Palestinian groups to fire rockets at Israeli cities and train for attacks against the Jewish state, according to a senior terror leader in Gaza.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gush_Katif)
Within a year after the greenhouses were looted Hamas overthrew Fatah in a post-election coup in 2006 and started a war with Israel in 2008. This war is just the latest round since then.
Since the lack of an Israeli occupation of the West Bank during the 19 year Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank did not bring peace, why should anyone think ending it now will? The single constant of Palestinian national aspirations has been “from the river to the sea” since they opposed the UN partition plan passed on November 29, 1947, which mandatory Palestine’s Jews rejoiced over. The PCPSR, the Palestine Center for Survey and Policy, reported in June 2015 after the 2014 Hamas-Israel war of 2014:
51% support the two-state solution and 48% oppose it.
34% support the one-state solution and 64% oppose it. 54% oppose and 44% support a mutual recognition of national identity of the states of Israel and Palestine. 67% support popular non-violent resistance and 49% support return to an armed intifada.
Gaza War: 63% support Hamas’ indirect negotiations with Israel for a long term hudna. 59% believe that Hamas has won the last Gaza War but satisfaction of the war achievements drops to 35%. 63% support continued rocket launch for Gaza if the siege and blockade continue. (http://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/poll%2056%20fulltext%20English.pdf)
The PCPSR poll from 2003 shows that Palestinian opinion’s consistency over time:
“Question 9: Are there conditions under which you could accept coexistence
with Israeli Jews in peace and security?
Palestinian refugees in West Bank and Gaza:
Yes 20.3% No 79.1% Don’t know 0.7%
Palestinian refugees in Jordan:
Yes 9.7% No 85.5% Don’t know 4.7%
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon:
Yes 18.7% No 77.8% Don’t know 3.5%
(https://www.imra.org.il/story.php?id=17694
The phrasing of the question implies conditionality: accept coexistence only AFTER Israeli behavior has changed. So the majority answering no is saying that there are NO changes to Israeli policy that will end the dream of “from the river to the sea”.
The occupation must end. But that depends on the Palestinians doing a deal that renounces “from the river to the sea” and the right of return. Nothing less will lead to defeat for the Netanyahus, Bennetts and Liebermans of Israeli politics. Source the destruction of the Israeli left and Peace Now at the door of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority that could not say yes to Ehud Barak, President Clinton and the Saudi ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar in 2000. But the story of how Arafat, the man who could not say yes, lying to Prince Bandar when asked if he did the deal, is a longer one than I can tell here. (https://honestreporting.com/in-depth-arafat-rejected-peace-in-2000/)
Sixth, you don't want to be quoting the terrorist apologist and anti-semitic Jew Norman Finkelstein, who has "praised David Irving, who was labelled an “antisemite and racist” by a High Court judge after famously losing his libel suit against the historian Deborah Lipstadt....“David Irving was a very good historian – I don’t care what Richard Evans (the historian who was a key player in the Lipstadt libel trial) says. He produced works that are substantive…If you don’t like it, don’t read it. In the case of Irving, he knew a thing or two – or three.”
Mr Finkelstein continued: “I don’t see the reason to get excited about Holocaust deniers. First of all I don’t know what a Holocaust denier even is."
David Irving learned what a Holocaust denier is in an Austrian jail. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/20/austria.thefarright)
Finkelstein has called my late friend Otto Klein, a twin who knew Dr Mengele personally, a liar and a hoaxster of the “Holocaust industry”. His “I don’t know what a Holocaust denier even is” says the same about my late friend Riva Shafer, who survived the clearing of the Riga ghetto on December 8, 1941 and survived with her mother in safe houses until the Red Army arrived in October 1944. My wife and I videotaped an interview with her for two hours in 2014 in English, French, German and Russian four months before she died at the age of 92. Mahmoud Abbas, whose PhD thesis at Moscow University was holocaust denial, and Finkelstein both agree with David Irving that my late friends are liars.
So, today’s history lesson is: check sources and motives with a healthy dose of empirical scepticism and ask what else he knows before accusing the writer.
