An intense political engagement over the question of West Bank settlements is continuing between the Barack Obama administration in the United States and the government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel. A failure to resolve the issue would be fatal to any chances of real progress towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
A particular rhetorical weapon is being employed by self-proclaimed supporters of Israel in the United States in relation to the settlements: that any dismantling of these communities and removal of their inhabitants would amount to "ethnic cleansing". The use of such a term makes an explicit association between any withdrawal of the settlers from the West Bank and (among many other cases) the systematic expulsions that took place during the wars of ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
The argument is being made for immediate political purposes, as the pace of engagement in the new round of regional diplomacy quickens (see Alex Spillius, "Obama close to securing Middle East peace talks", Daily Telegraph, 26 August 2009). But some of its rhetorical potency derives from the fact that it connects to historical experience and political reference-points in the region as well as beyond. The "ethnic cleansing" case thus deserves closer examination: but might it lead in directions that its proponents would not wish to go?
A subtle warning
A prominent Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, has circulated a report to sympathetic individuals and organisations on behalf of the Israeli Project (TIP). This outlines what it calls "the best settlement argument": "The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews" (see Gilad Halpern, "Pro-Israel group: Obama settlements policy backs 'ethnic cleansing' of Jews", Ha'aretz, 23 August 2009).
The advice of the Israel Project - whose board of advisors includes twenty members of the US Congress, from both parties - represents an interesting variation in the response to perceived threats. Israeli politicians and their allies have long argued that Arab and Islamist opposition to Israel's existence portends a new holocaust. The most prominent example is the reaction to the anti-Israel rhetoric of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the holocaust-denying Iranian president, in 2005 (interpreted by no less than the International Association of Genocide Scholars as a "public expression of genocidal intent"). The Israel Project's approach (albeit now somewhat qualified by its founder) represents a subtler and apparently more realistic warning of a new, inherently anti-Semitic, threat. The "ethnic cleansing" argument - given that this concept is so often used as a euphemism for genocide - keeps the genocide threat to the fore without conjuring the fear of a mass slaughter of Jews, which is obviously implausible in the context of any likely peace settlement.
The political context and motive of the "cleansing" argument may make it appear little more than a shallow propaganda move. Certainly the way the Israel Project presents it - denying any threat to "cleanse out Arabs from Israel" and asserting Israeli Arabs' citizenship and "equal rights" - is doubly disingenuous. The desirability of "transferring" Israeli Arabs out of the state is a recurring theme on the not-so-far shores of Israeli politics, and on no serious assessment can Arabs be said to have equal rights in what is, after all, the "state of the Jewish nation". The current proposals to demand that Arabs take a loyalty oath to the Jewish state only emphasise the deepening crisis of the Arab community's position within Israel (see Laurence Louër, "Arabs in Israel: on the move", 20 April 2007).
The historical code
But if the Israeli Project's focus on "ethnic cleansing" hits a deeper nerve, this is precisely because of the way that all political issues in the Israel-Palestine conflict, including the settlements, are defined in terms of communal interests. Sixty years ago hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were expelled and terrorised into flight by the emergent Israeli state - a certain episode of "ethnic cleansing" and indeed of genocide (to the extent that there was a concerted policy to destroy a large part of Arab society). For the last forty years, Israel has used its occupation of the West Bank and east Jerusalem to continue the process of dispossessing Palestinian homes and land, in slow-motion and by means which are ostensibly legal in domestic law (if not in international law, since the occupation itself remains illegal).
In this light, is it not then plausible to consider the proposal to dismantle Israeli settlements a kind of "ethnic cleansing" in reverse? It is clear that there have been many such genocidal "cleansings" in history, including the wholesale "revenge" expulsions of Germans in the closing stages and aftermath of the second world war in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. True, there can be no suggestion that the mere "freeze" on new and extended settlements currently proposed by President Obama could fall into this category, since no one will be dispossessed or expelled from anywhere as a result (although a freeze may save a few Palestinians from this fate). But since any even half-reasonable peace settlement must hand over some Israeli settlements to Palestinian control (without this there is no possibility of a coherent and viable Palestinian state), the situation of the Jewish population in these settlements is a real, complex and potentially difficult issue.
It is clearly relevant that many settlers, as well as settlement leaders, have been in the vanguard of Israel's illegal expansion in the occupied territories, and their parties are the most aggressively anti-Palestinian in the current Israeli political scene. No able-minded adult settlers can truly have been wholly ignorant of this context, and in this sense all can be regarded as complicit to some degree. However these facts cannot justify the compulsory removal of an entire population, including children and the mentally incapable - as well as those settlers whose motives have been primarily socio-economic rather than expansionist. Such an expulsion might indeed be considered, like the Israeli expulsions of Palestinians since 1948, "racial" in character (whatever the specific ideological motives). Even if neither Israel nor Jews have collective rights to occupied Palestinian lands, it can be argued that individuals and families may have acquired personal rights to stay in homes in which they have lived for years or even, in some cases, decades. The key to the question, then, is the reconciliation of these rights with justified Palestinian demands for political control over the occupied lands in which settlements have been built - and the rights of former Palestinian landowners to compensation.
The political twist
So if "peace" does not "require that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews", three things would be necessary to achieve peace without "cleansing".
First, Israeli advocates must stop talking euphemistically about a "Palestinian area", and face up to the unanswerable case (in the absence of any realistic prospect of a single bi-communal state) for a viable Palestinian state. Second, Israel must acknowledge the terrible consequences of its own "ethnic cleansings" of Palestinians, starting with 1948 and including those that have taken place recently to allow the building of the settlements, and make proposals to address the continuing injustices arising from them. Third, Israel must address the poor and deteriorating situation of the Arab minority within its own borders, dropping all constitutional provisions which make Arabs second-class citizens and ensuring that "equal rights" become a reality.
For if the continued existence of a Jewish population in the settlements requires a Palestinian state in which minorities can be confident that their individual and communal interests will be respected, the latter needs to be matched by an Israeli state which demonstrates the same standards. A Palestinian state should not be a racially Arab state; but neither should the Israeli state be defined as the state of the Jewish people. Unless both states can be defined both by secular, non-racial constitutions and by clear, well-founded and widely-supported policies of minority inclusion, the prospects for Jewish residents in any settlements handed back to Palestine - and for Israeli Arabs - will continue to be poor.
The Israel Project offers nothing in this direction. It supports policies that would continue to confine Palestinians to Bantustan-style "areas", deny the abuses they have suffered over sixty years and their unequal status within today's Israel, and do everything to sustain the present illegal status of territory- and land-grabbing settlements.
The group's advocacy touches on a real issue, but by seeking to block any serious compromise with legitimate Palestinian claims its campaign only makes more likely the kind of "cleansing" which it says it wants to avoid - and that when compromise comes, as it must, a number of Israeli settlers will be forcibly removed. Most probably this will be done, as in Gaza in August 2005, by the Israeli state itself.
This makes it ever more important now to distinguish between the rights of settler families and the ideological interests and purposes of the Israel Project and its allies. For in the context of the just and secure two-state agreement that Israelis and Palestinians alike desperately need, such ostensible support for Israel turns on closer inspection into its opposite.
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Also in openDemocracy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2009: Paul Rogers, "Gaza: hope after attack" (1 January 2009) Ghassan Khatib, "Gaza: outlines of an endgame" (6 January 2009) Avi Shlaim, "Israel and Gaza: rhetoric and reality" (7 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the Israel-United States connection" (7 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the wider war" (13 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "After Gaza: Israel's last chance" (17 January 2009) Tarek Osman, "Egypt's dilemma: Gaza and beyond" (12 January 2009) Menachem Kellner, "Israel's Gaza war: five asymmetries" (14 January 2009) Khaled Hroub, "Hamas after the Gaza war" (15 January 2009) Prince Hassan of Jordan, "The failure of force: an alternative option" (16 January 2009) Fred Halliday, "The greater middle east: Obama's six problems" (21 January 2009) Conor Gearty, "Israel, Gaza and international law" (21 January 2009) Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the war after the war" (22 January 2009) Mustafa Kibaroglu, "Turkey-Israel relations after Gaza" (26 January 2009) Sadegh Zibakalam, "Iran and the Gaza war" (26 January 2009) Khaled Hroub, "The ‘Arab system' after Gaza" (27 January 2009) Hugo Slim, "NGOs in Gaza: humanitarianism vs politics" (30 January 2009) Lucy Nusseibeh, "The four lessons of Gaza" (4 February 2009) Prince Hassan of Jordan, "Palestine's right: past as prologue" (11 February 2009) Colin Shindler, "Israel's rightward shift: a history of the present" (23 February 2009) Faisal al Yafai, "What makes the Arabs a people?" (25 February 2009) Eyal Weizman, "Lawfare in Gaza: legislative attack" (1 March 2009) Akiva Eldar, "The United States and Israel: moment of truth" (18 May 2009) Gershon Baskin, "The state of Israel: key to peace" (19 May 2009) Gideon Levy, "Barack Obama: Israel's true friend" (25 May 2009) Karim Kasim & Zaid Al-Ali, "The Cairo speech: Arab Muslim voices" (8 June 2009) Akiva Eldar, "Binyamin Netanyahu's mirage" (15 June 2009) Gershon Baskin, "Israel's path: from occupation to peace" (7 July 2009) Akiva Eldar, "Iran, the Arabs and Israel: the domino-effect" (27 July 2009) Hazem Sagheh, "Israeli settlement, Arab movement" (28 July 2009) David Gardner, "Israel-Palestine: solving the refugee question" (18 August 2009) |
Comments
Zionists often use universal ideas as particularistic arguments. When Israel deems houses of Palestinians build illegaly it breaks them down and the people who lived in them have to look for another place to live. When this logic is (universally) applied to the occupied territories, it is clear that houses that are built for settlers are built illegally according to international law. According to the substance of the Zionist logic of "breaking down illegal buildings", they should be broken down too.
Similarly, the use of "ethnic cleansing" as an argument by Zionists is particularistic. They don't apply it to the Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 or 1967, nor to those whose "illegal" houses were broken down in e.g. East Jerusalem. They only apply it to Jews who might be forced to leave the occupied territories. Of course, thinking through the argument from a universal point of view (instead of a particularistic Zionist one) leads one to ask whether or not it is possible that settlers stay in their houses, while the settlements become part of the Palestinian state. This is of course unthinkable for the group of Zionists that uses the argument of "ethnic cleansing", because it is precisely this group that will insist that this is impossible for security reasons.
The conclusion is that the Zionist argument of "ethnic cleansing" is used particularistic in order to legitimise Zionist goals and policies. It legitimises that Israel insists on keeping the settlements.
From the "legitimisations - point of view" one can also ask what it legitimises for the Zionists vis-a-vis the Israeli Arabs. If, as part of a peace agreement, Jewish settlers are forced to move to the "Jewish" state, why should Israeli Arabs not be forced to move to the "Arab" state? If the Palestinian negotiators give in to Netanyahu's demand to recognise Israel as a "Jewish" state, this will lend additional legitimisation to this possibility.
Usually, with regard to Zionist aims, Israel implements what it regards as legitimate. I don't think expelling Israeli Arabs will be regarded as legitimate by mainstream Israeli society. However, I do think that mainstream Israeli society is susceptible for legitimisations such as that of "ethnic cleansing" (as used by Zionists). According to Jonathan Cook in "Blood and Religion" some Zionist thinkers entertain the idea, not of "transferring" Israeli Arabs themselves to the Palestinian state, but of transferring their citizenship rights to the Palestinian state. In other words: Israeli Arabs can continue to live in Israel (for the time being at least), but will lose their rights as Israeli citizens. I am afraid that the legitimisation of "ethnic cleansing" (as used by Zionists), will lend support for this idea among mainstream Israeli's.
Here's an interesting context:
"The Palestinian Authority's chief Islamic judge, Sheikh Tayseer Rajab Tamimi, said on Wednesday that there was no evidence to back up claims that Jews had ever lived in Jerusalem or that the Temple ever existed."
(Jerusalem Post, Aug. 26)
The Sheikh is wrong about the past, but he is quite right about the present:
It's like the same article over and over again.
Most scholars do not refer to the displacement of Arabs during the 1948 War as a genocide. Most, including Benny Morris, the most respected scholar on this issue, view it as the kind of population displacement that is routine during civil war. Most of the terrorizing that caused Arabs to leave was done by the Arabs themselves, who, as they do to this day, exaggerated stories of Jewish victories and invented stories of Jewish massacres in order to incite their people.
Like many analyses, this one is replete with false assumptions, chief among them that there is some symmetry between the declaration of Palestine as an Arab state and Israel's character as a Jewish state. The fact of the matter is that there are dozens of Islamic states and dozens of Arab states in this world. There is no need for another one. The Arabs have not historically been persecuted. They have little tradition of Western liberal democratic values that would suggest that a new Arab state could function with proper civil and political liberties.
Jews have been historically persecuted, both in Europe and the Arab world, culminating in the Holocaust in Europe, and the wholesale expulsion of Jews across in the Arab world in the 1940s and 1950s on the wholly unjustifiable premise that a Jewish entity somewhere in the Arab world justified the ethnic cleansing of Jews everywhere in the Arab world.
Israel has long been an outpost of liberal democracy in a sea of authoritarian dictatorship. Arab states have a poor record of treatment of minorities, far inferior to Israel's. No Arab society is as racially, socially, or culturally diverse as Israel's is. None approach Israel's protection of civil rights and civil liberties. Are there those in Israel who favor things like loyalty oaths? Yes. But they are a small minority, and they are dwarfed by people in the territories who kill their political opponents and imprison them. Israel is in the Middle East, not in Europe, where, ironically enough, there are places that Muslim women cannot even wear the hijab.
The Israel Project's campaign merely points out the irony that Palestinian accuse the Jews of discrimination when, in fact, their entire national project is in fact based on a future act of ethnic cleansing, and a long-standing commitment not to sell land to Jews that predates the 1967 War. Having been expelled from everywhere in the world at one time or another, it should be understandable that Jews refuse to be excluded from the West Bank. There are pragmatic political reasons why such an approach may nevertheless be necessary for peace, but it is ironic nonetheless.
@Michael Brenner:
You are wrong when you say: "Most of the terrorizing that caused Arabs to leave was done by the Arabs themselves". When you read Morris's "the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited" you will find that the most important cause was Zionist military attack. Indeed the implementation of the military Plan Dalet inevitably meant the expulsion of huge numbers of Palestinians, because allmost all Palestinian villages in the area's coveted by the Zionists were to be targeted.
Shaw misses a number of very basic points: The Jewish people, as a collective, do have rights to Judea and Samaria, as they are part of our ancestral homeland, in which we are an indigenous people. The Arabs who left their homes in 1948 did so because the Arab world attacked Israel, illegaly, forcing it to defend itself, in the course of which many people were made homeless (including Jews, who were subsequently helped to find homes by their brethren, and not cynically and profitably kept as phony puppet "refugees" ad infinitum). That is NOT ethnic cleansing, it is legitimate self-defence in the face of a racist, self-proclaimed genocidal attack - learn your history, Shaw. Arabs living in Israel have full civil and constitutional rights (there are about a dozen in the Knesset) - they do suffer from some economic and social inequalities, and their situation is improving. Shaw lies when he says otherwise.
@ Felix: you write "learn your history". But which history?
You probably refer to the Zionist version of history that you want people to learn. Hwever this histiry is full of dubious legitimisations (some of which you also provide) of what the Zionists did.
If you study history critically, you will find that the truth is much different. Of course I don't expect Zionists to do this for two reasons: 1) because it is bad for their (collective) self-image, because it reveals that Zionists did not act as moral as they want to believe, and 2) because Zionism is still involved in a fight for Palestine, and if they view their own actions critically, they undermine their own cause.
JC B:
What specific holy sites in Jerusalem have been desecrated by the Israelis? Who specifically has been expelled exactly, and when?
When the Arabs controlled east Jerusalem after 1948, all Jewish residents were expelled, including from the Jewish Quarter where they had lived since antiquity, all the synagogues were destroyed, thousands of Jewish graves were destroyed, and the ancient Jewish Mt. of Olives cemetery, with graves dating back to the Roman period, was destroyed and partly paved for a road. (See Meron Benvenisti's history of Jerusalem.). Have the Israelis done something similar? Give specifics please.
You shrug off this important Fatah official's outrageous claim about the past, as if it had no ideological meaning or weight. Yet what he said on Wednesday was exactly Arafat's position--and only "contribution"--to the Camp David negotiations in 2000. Nice job.
@Ethan II:
You simply ignore the fact that the Zionists made hundreds of Palestinian villages disappear in 1948. Anything bad the Palestinians did in 1948 is dwarfed by the Zionists' behavior. Also, after 1948 and 1967 many Palestinians have had their houses destroyed and their land taken away by Israel. This is a fact. It is part of a Zionist drive to Judaise Israel and the occupied territories.
Furthermore, from my point of view the ideological view of Palestinians on the past is similar to the ideological view of Zionists on the past: the Zionist one is much further developed, but both shouldn't be taken too seriously. When Palestinians make 'outrageous' claims about the past this is often a reaction to Zionist claims. Both people claim the land, and both try to legitimise their claim and deligitimise the others. For instance in my opinion the "historical right" claimed by the Jews is dubious. The indigenous people of Palestine were already there when Abraham came on the scene, they were there when Jacob left, when the Jews returned from Egypt, when the Jews went to their Babylonian Diaspora and their later Diaspora, and when Jews returned under the banner of Zionism. It seems to me that the indigenous population has a prevalent right over people whose ancestors lived there in a few periods in history.
JCB, I wonder too about the implication of Tamimi's talk about "expulsions".
The Arab population of East Jerusalem was about 68,000 before the 1967 War; in 2007 it was about 245,000. That's a rise of about 250%. Not what one usually sees, or thinks of, with "expulsions".
Around 250% is the normal growth rate of the Palestinian population in all of Palestine in the past 40 years, including in Israel.
Acoording to the Palestine Monitor: (see http://www.palestinemonitor.org/spip/spip.php?article5)
The Jewish people, as a collective, do have rights to Judea and
Samaria, as they are part of our ancestral homeland, in which we are an
indigenous people
There is not one shred of evidence to show that people of the jewish faith have any more "ancestral" right to these places than the Palestinians.
1. JC Bosma: the subject of our debate was Tamimi's outrageous claims about *Jerusalem*, past and present, nothing else. You could have said about Tamimi's claims about Jerusalem, "well, Tamimi's either an ignorant barbarian, or else a ruthless conscious liar for his side." Instead you asserted that although what Tamimi said about Jerusalem's past was wrong, what he said about Jerusalem's present was true. You defended his *accuracy*. You didn't have to do that, but you did do that: "The Sheikh is wrong about the past, but he is quite right about the present" (today, 11:20).
I've called you out on that defense, and asked you to defend it, and you have no reply, hence you changed the subject to another topic, not Jerusalem, something broader (that's today, at 15: 42, paragraph 1).
2. JC Bosma, you then claim that Israeli and Palestinian claims about the past are equally outrageous. (today, 15:42, beginning of paragraph 2.) Really? Is the claim that there were no Jews in Jerusalem to be placed on a par with the claim that the Davidic Kingdom existed, that its capital was Jerusalem, that Solomon built the First Temple, that the Second Temple existed until destroyed by the Romans (remember--this is *denied* both by Tamimi and Arafat), that Jerusalem then (in both cases) was a Jewish city, and that all of this has been confirmed by archaeology? Be specific, please, on how Zionist claims such as these deserve to be put on a par with the rantings of Sheikh Tamimi.
@Ethan II
1. I wrote "quite right", not "exactly right". I don't know what the Sheikh means with "desecrating its holy sites", but there certainly is an ongoning attempt to Judaise Jerusalem and house destructions (which are de facto expulsions when no alternative housing is available in East Jerusalem) and land confiscations are part of that drive. The occupation is the weapon that Israel uses..
2. Zionists have a distorted view of the past. The gist of Zionist history is that Palestine was a waste-land, except when there were Jews. In fact many other people lived there too, and achieved great things too. But when I wrote about Zionism's distorted view of the past I didn't mean that period. I meant the last century. Read e.g. Simha Flapan's "the birth of Israel", which exposes seven myths Zionists hold about "1948".
It doesn't matter what JC Bosma meant. It's what Sheikh Tamimi meant that counts. He was talking about Jerusalem, and Bosma endorsed his claims about the present, and still does endorse those claims, but when pushed to name specific "desecrations" that Tamimi charges, he admits he can't.
Discussion of variant interpretations of the near past is not the same as denial of basic facts about the far past of the Holy Land, the kind of denial in which Tamimi engages Bosma's *equation* of these outright lies (or ignorant barbarisms) about the far past with variant interpretations of 1948 is not likely to be accepted by any thinking person as a real equivalence. One is far more radical than the other. And remember: Tamimi is a high-ranking Fatah official, and his position that there had been no Jews in Jerusalem *ever*, and no Second Temple, etc., was Arafat's positon at Camp David too. And the problem of peace lies...where?
How do you know this was Arafat's position at Camp David? Which source says that?
Tamimi's pronouncements are offensive. So are the pronouncements of Israelis who insist that Palestinians do not exist or government ministers who suggest that Arab Palestinians should take an oath of loyalty to their conquerors or leave.
There's a lot of offensive noise in the debate but the Professor is interested in the offensive noise from Arabs and only the offensive noise from Arabs. Most interested observers realise that there are idiots on both sides who are really just distractions from the substantive debate. Unfortunately there are those who welcome such distractions.
Heck, Big C, all I'm trying to do is provide a little balance to the one-sided flood of anti-Israel rhetoric, and blame-the-Israelis-only, that one finds consistently here on opendemoc.
@ Ethan II:
Discussions of interpretation of the near past is much more important than the far past. It was in the near past, in 1948, that the Zionists conquered a large part of Palestine and expelled a large part of the Palestinian population from it. It was all engineered by Ben-Gurion, who arranged that the Haganah would attack almost all Palestinian villages in the area the Zionists coveted, and destroy most of them. All in the name of security of course. While the Zionists knew from their intelligence gathering that most Palestinians wanted peace, they still attacked and destroyed their villages. Even friendly villages were expelled. For instance the collaborating village of Zarnuqa was expelled in 1948. However, the villagers returned the next day because their fellow Palestinians chased them away as traitors. There were Jewish soldiers ransacking their houses, who expelled them again; for the second timef; without mercy. Did they do this for security reasons, or for the sake of their romantic dream of a Jewish state?
Zionism is responsible for an ethnic cleansing!
Allmost all Zionists deny this of course, because it would shatter the Zionist myth of their moral superiority, it would delegitimise Zionsim and Israel, and it would destroy the moral basis that Zionists themselves see for their claims on occupied Palestinian territory. Indeed, it is nigh impossible for Zionists to look at the history of Zionism in an impartial way, because it would destroy their entire world view..
Indeed, there is no equivalence. The Zionist denial is much more outrageous than the Palestinian one!
JC Bosma's latest rant is one extreme interpretation of the events of 1947-1948. It is hardly the only one, nor is it a widely accepted one--except in the fever swamps where the far left and the Islamists dwell (what an alliance!).
Remember, JC Bosma is the person who on another thread asserted falsely that the proto-Israelis not only began the war, in 1948 [sic], but that they and everyone else knew that they were always in a winning position.
As to the first assertion, the war began in Nov. 1947, and Benny Morris says in '1948' that the Palestinian Arabs, not the proto-Israelis, were the ones who first resorted to violence, and that the Palestinian Arabs, not the Israelis, were the ones on the offensive in the first five months (Nov. 1947-April 1948). This means that the Palestinian Arabs weren't hapless victims of israeli aggression (in fact, they were the first to engage in ethnic cleansing, in their attacks against Jewish quarters of Jerusalem in Dec. 1947-Jan. 1948). As to the second assertion, JC Bosma has never dared reply to the fact that General Sir Alan Cunningham, British High Commissioner in Palestine and a very experienced military man, reported to his government on April 3, 1948 that the Arabs were winning, and decisively winning. Again, this means the Palestinian Arabs weren't hapless victims of Israeli aggression. The complex truth here makes people in the fever swamps uncomfortable.
In contrast to the variant interpretrations of 1947-1948, however, Sheikh Tamimi's assertions (defended by JC Bosma), are either ignorant barbarisms, or conscious lies. Why would Bosma seek to defend Tamimi? It's beyond me.
And it's simply absurd for Bosma to assert that the interpretations of 1948 that vary from his own very extreme one are worse than Tamimi's assertions that there were never any Jews in Jerusalem in antiquity, and that the Second Temple never existed, etc. The latter is a far more radical view (in fact it's nuts). We should, instead, be disturbed that such statements come from a high Fatah official at all. They came from Arafat in 2000 at Camp David, too. It shows where the problem lies.
@Ethan II:
In my opinion you are not seriously arguing here:
1) you call one of my contributions a 'rant'. Please be polite
2) you are focussing on small details and are distorting my words and opinions in order to make it look as if you are winning the debate. I am not trying to distort your opinion, so please do not distort mine.
3) you ask me for specific details, but when I ask you for a reference about Arafat's alleged opinion in Camp David, you don't react
4) when you talk about an extreme interpretation you are referring to a Zionist point of view. Since Benny Morris's "the Palestinian refugee problem 1947-1949" showed that most Palestinians did not flee on Arab orders or to embarras the Zionists, but because they were attacked or under threat of attack by the Zionist forces, very few serious historians have disputed this. This means that there was an ethnic cleansing. Most serious scholars now agree on this. If you qualify this as extremist, this says more about you than about what happened in 1948, it says that you are talking from the Zionist point of view.
5) You are using Morris as an authority, but Morris writes from the Zionist point of view. In his book a Palestinian attack becomes an ethnic cleansing or at least an attempt at ethnic cleansing, while Zionist expulsions are qualified as defensive acts. Ilan Pappe wrote a book "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine", in which he asserts that Ben-Gurion and his cronies engineered the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. This book is more straightforward than Morris's. And you know what is remarkable? When you read Morris's "Birth ..." carefully, you will find that Morris provides no evidence that contradicts Pappe's story!
6) I am not defending Tamimi's views on the far past, as I clearly stated that they are wrong. His opinion about the present though is qualified by me as 'quite right', and I defended that.
7) The real problem lies with the Zionist refusal to see reality as it is; they believe they can do two things at the same time: 1) conquer a country and expel part of its inhabitants, and after that conquer the remaining part of the country and occupy it for 40 years, and 2) always act moral. It's nice that they want to act moral, but the problem is that these two things do not go together. They only go together if one adopts a distorted biew of reality, a view full of dubious legitimisations. This is how Zionists handle reality.
Heck, Big C, all I'm trying to do is provide a little balance to the
one-sided flood of anti-Israel rhetoric, and blame-the-Israelis-only,
that one finds consistently here on opendemoc.
So you feel that blame-the-Arabs-only is balance? I don't think so Professor.
Your purpose here is to move away from the substantial debate and onto points of petty triviality like the view of the British High Commisioner. If he reported that the arabs were winning and decisively winning then he was a very stupid man indeed because they didn't. Why on Earth should anyone reply to such an assinine point?
As long as Israel keeps playing the victim when it's really the aggressor or the containor by their own walls, they will always be wrong--at least to a point. No one has mentioned that Palestinians were right or wrong. They weren't even in the equation for settlements. The taking of the land, building of both large compounds of apartments and then walls and roads that fit only for Israel are where it is wrong and will always be so. The treaty of 1967 settled where the boundaries were to be and the only one that gone over that line for its own purposes has been Israel. The laws signed last month or two back in the Knesset where everyone in Israel had to claim themselves to be Zionist Jews not only cancels out the Palestinians in East Jerusalem but those Jews that are not Zionist--secular Jews, ultra right Jews that don't believe in Zionism and then all Palestinians. See the April issue of NY Review of Books by David Hare where he illustrates Israel's military presence in the Palestinian towns in the West Bank--Why?? That's not Israel's territory. There is also another article in NY Review in May that illustrates Israel's history of "ethnic cleansing" to the Arabs from 1947 on. Strangely enough, both authors are Jewish. If both areas become STATES of their own, the presence of either group m ixed with the other should not even be a factor. That is for the individuals to decide. There have been mixed marriages for years but these actions and laws have kept them apart or they have had to move to other countries to live normal lives. Yes, Palestinians must adhere to the laws but that can't even be discussed when Israel keeps taking land, adding settlements, or promising not to do it but then continues anyway. Israel is the ruling power in the area but until it begins to keep all laws--theirs and international agreements-- there is not much to say about the Palestinians.
Big C, I am amazed that you would elevate the necessity of keeping to your ideological beliefs above the views of the military situation of someone who was an experienced military man, had great responsibilities (not least for the safety of the British forces still in the Mandate), and who was actually there, and on the spot. You'd rather believe that Cunningham was a fool than admit that your ideologically-imposed version of events is wrong. Amazing.
You have an ideological need to believe that the Arabs were hapless victims of Israeli aggression. The story is far more complex than that, and it would do you little harm to admit it.
As for "balance", providing accounts of what the Palestinian Arabs (a) have actually done, and (b) actually believe, including genocide, does no harm to discussion but good, in providing a balanced view of the whole board. If opendemocr was more balanced, I wouldn't need to provide this information. But opendemocr isn't balanced, and so I do need to provide this information.
You'd rather believe that Cunningham was a fool than admit that your ideologically-imposed version of events is wrong.
Belief doesn't come into it. Events proved that Cunningham was a fool. He predicted an Arab victory which clearly was not going to happen. Idiots routinely achieved military rank and high diplomatic office in the British Empire. That's one of the many reasons why it collapsed so ignominiously.
You have an ideological need to believe that the Arabs were hapless victims of Israeli aggression.The story is far more complex than that, and it would do you little harm to admit it.
You have an ideological need to insist that they weren't. Of course there are complexities as there are in any historical issue. However, your tactic here is to repeatedly bring up realitively minor issues as if such things only happen on one side. Your aim is clerarly to make the minute details of a single kidnapping, skirmish or murder become the subject of the debate at the expense of the major issues.
If opendemocr was more balanced, I wouldn't need to provide this
information. But opendemocr isn't balanced, and so I do need to provide
this information.
What do mean by balanced? All postings are published unless they contravene decency or commerciality rules, including yours. The debate balances itself. But be aware that people are capable of distinguishing between quality of argument and a quantity of events which could just as easily be provided by both sides.
The commotion about settlements seems to indicate the lopsided notion that while Arabs may live in Israel ,Jews may not live in Arab Palestine- a racist idea if ever there was one.
I can envisage a situation in which some Israeli Arabs retain Israeli citizenship and can vote for the Knesset while others will opt for Palestinian citizenship while living in Israel but will vote for the Palestinian parliament, just as US citizens living in Israel can vote in US elections.
Naturally all citizens and residents of Israel will pay Israeli taxes as required by law.
By the same token Israelis living in their villages ("settlements") in Arab Palestine will be able to vote for the Knesset in Israel, but will pay local Palestinian taxes as required by law. I see absolutely no reasons to evict Israelis from Judea and Samaria. Some may choose to pack up and leave once they realize that they will no longer be protected by the IDF but by Palestinian police. Others will prefer to stay and face the consequences. One can only hope and pray they will not be the victims of genocidal attacks by neighbouring Palestinians.
In fact in Middle Eastern logic, the fear that Israelis make take the law into their own hands and carry out reprisals on the nearest available Israeli Arabs may the the best guardian of the peace. "You kill my people and I will kill yours." This is how peace has been kept in the Middle East for millennia.
When the IDF entered Hebron in 1967 the Palestinians there cowered in fear, thinking that the Jews had come to take revenge for the mass killings of the Jews of Hebron in 1929. They were quite amazed when they found out that nothing like that was going to happen (until a lunatic Jewish immigrant from the USA massacred Arabs at prayer in Hebron some years later and was promptly and inevitably lynched).
The objections against Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories is not that "Jews may not live in Arab Palestine" (indeed a racist idea), but that ever since the Nazi's tried to Germanise Poland, establishing a state's own population in an occupied territory constitutes a war crime. Things will be different after Israel ends the occupation.
From this quote I derive that whle you are against racism, you do support a racial segregation of citizenship.
In my view nationality derives from citizenship (e.g. a Turk who holds German citizenship is a German). But in the Zionist view it seems to be the other way around: a Jew should be a citizen of the Jewish state, a Palestinian of the Palestinian state. Remarkably, Israel registers the nationality of its citizens not as Israeli, but as Jewsih, Arab etc., i.e. essentially on the basis of ethnic origin.
Jewish is not ethnic. Arab is ethnic but Jewish derives from a religion. Jewish equates with Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist etc. Arab equates with European. Palestinian equates with German, American, Israeli. There would be no Jews without Judaism, ergo, there is no racial part of Judaism. Jews around the world are a mixture of racial groups with some having Semitic links but many not because of conversion.
The argument that Jewish equates with race is no more than propaganda to support the belief that the followers of this religion have a right to a homeland.
Secular Jews are like lapsed Catholics. They are born and remain Jewish or Catholic, members of a religion, but they do not practise.
1. Big C, you cannot accept the fact that Sir Alan Cunningham--who was right there on the spot, and an experienced military man, and with heavy official responsibilities (including the protection of British troops)--was reporting to his government the situation *at the time*; and *at the time*, in April 1948, he said the Arabs were winning, and decisively so. Things changed in May. That does not mean he was wrong in April. Nor does it mean that the Jews were *always* winning, even when they were losing. Cunningham wasn't alone: the U.S. government tried to intervene twice in the Nov. 1947-May 1948 period--in order to prevent a massacre of the Jews, not the Arabs.
My advice would be for you and JCBosma to accept these specific historical facts, and their implications too, disturbing as they may be for your ideological stance, in which the proto-Israelis and only they are the aggressors, the proto-Israelis and only they are at fault, and the Palestinians are pure victims.
2. In that context, the facts that the proto- Israelis in Nov. 1947 were the ones attacked, and that up until April 1948 they were losing, are not "minor issues".
3. I noted a similar reluctance on the part of both of you to accept the facts about the brutal Arab and Muslim expulsion of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands in 1948-1960, a process that created a refugee population that was 100,000 people *larger* than the Palestinian Nakba, one difference being that the Jewish refugees hadn't attacked anyone first. You preferred agnosticism on whether these Jewish refugees were expelled or went away from Arab and Muslim lands voluntarily, enticed by evil Zionists.
It's the same as saying Cunningham was an idiot--an argument of desperation, to preserve your ideological stance.
4. I don't mean that opendemocr is *consciously* unbalanced. What I do mean is that as soon as any article dealing with Israel comes up, then the bien-pensant leftists who practice the politics of self-congratulation on their "anti-colonialism" are quick off the mark to dominate the comments section with their extreme anti-Israeli rhetoric. I attempt to provide some balance to this, with facts that allow readers to see the whole board.
The highly respected British High Commisionar General Alan Cunningham said aboiut the escalation of the hostilities in December:
So it were the Zionists who shot first in 1947.
Not unlike in 1956, 1967, 1982 and 2008.
General Cunningham didn't like the Jews much, it's true.
But here's what we find in Morris, "1948":
The UN Declaration is 29 Nov. 1947.
On the morning of 30 Nov, an 8-man Jaffa-based armed band led by Seif al-Din Abu Kishk, ambushed a Jewish bus on the Jaffa Plain and killed five people. Half an hour later the gunman ambushed a second Jewish bus, killing two people. Later that morning, Arab snipers began firing from Jaffa into Tel Aviv. "These were the first dead of the 1948 War." (Morris, "1948", p. 76).
JCBosma, do you think Morris is lying? Either state that this is your belief, that he is lying, or take back your statement that the Zionists shot first in 1947. (That's not quite what Cunningham says anyway.) The Palestinians did.
In my posting of 22:37 on Sunday, "gunman" should be "gunmen". It was Seif al-Din abu Kishk's 8-man team that did the work on both peaceful Jewish busses on the morning of Nov. 30 (the morning after the evening of the UN Declaration), killing 7 people, wounding many more, and (according to Morris) beginning the war.
@Ethan II:
Benny Morris wouldn't lie. He has a reputation to uphold as a serious historian. He doesn't want to undermine the credebility of the story he wants to sell. But he does sell a story, and he does present quite a distorted history. For instance, if you compare Ilan Pappe's "the ethnic cleansing of Palestine" with Morris's "The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem revisited", you will not find evidence in the latter that undermines Pappe's story, while Morris is selling a completely different story.
It is clear from Cunningham's words that he holds the Zionists responsible for the escalation, because in his opinion the Zionists were the first to shoot.
With regard to the "Abu Khisk" deaths you are not telling the whole story. What you are not telling here is what (to his credit) Morris does tell, namely that the Haganah did not believe that this was related to the UN-resolution. Some in the Haganah intelligence service believed it was a robbery; but more believed that it was a reprisal for the killing of 5 Palestinians by Zionist terrorists a few days earlier.
What Morris says about the incident on Nov. 20 is that this atrocity, in turn, was a Jewish reprisal for alleged Abu Kiskh help in an earlier British raid in which five proto-Israeli young men were killed. (Hence, five on each side were killed). Morris also places the Abu Kiskh attacks on Nov. 30 within a broader context of Palestinian Arab shooting into Tel Aviv from Jaffa in response to the UN Resolution (p. 76). Whatever the complicated details of the Abu Kiskh terrorists, in Morris the Arabs shoot first. The first deaths were Israeli civilians. That's not "selling a story". That's a fact (pp. 76-77).
And Bosma (and Big C) need to confront Morris' statement (p. 77) that the first stage of the war was this: "From the end of November 1947 until the end of March 1948, the Arabs held the initiative and the Haganah was on the strategic defensive". This is the even broader context of the events on the day after the UN Declaration.
Are Big C and JC Bosma still disputing Morris' reconstruction? If they are not disputing it, then they cannot continue to depict the war as a continual Israeli aggression against hapless and defenseless Palestinian victims. If they are disputing it, exactly on what basis do they do so?
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