|
Notify me of new HIR pieces!
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Understanding the Palestinian Movement An HIR Series, in four parts Historical and Investigative Research
- 22 April 2006 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Introduction In 1929 there were Arab terrorist riots in British
Mandate Palestine against the civilian Jewish population that lived there. “The [1929]
riots were accompanied by militant Arab slogans such as... ‘Palestine is our
land and the Jews our dogs...’ [and] brutal acts by
Arabs...such as the killings in Hebron, where small children were tortured by
their murderers before being murdered. ...the Jewish community in Palestine
found itself caught up in a wave of violent disturbances that swept with a
fury through Jewish settlements and neighborhoods throughout the length and
breadth of the country. The danger now appeared to threaten the very survival
of the entire Jewish community.”[1] This was not the first mass racist attack by Arabs
against unarmed civilian Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ nor would it be
the last attempted extermination. Historian Anita Shapira, above, writes in a way that
suggests compassion for the Jewish victims of Arab racism. She is considered
to be a Zionist. For a different portrayal, let us turn to Zionism: False
Messiah, by historian Nathan Weinstock, who agrees with Shapira on the
most important facts but not on the interpretation: “...the
Palestinian anti-colonialist movement was deformed by racism. The distorted
national struggle expressed itself in anti-Jewish slogans (‘Palestine is our
country and the Jews are our dogs’), followed up by attacks upon Jewish
passers-by and store-owners, and eventually in mob violence akin to the
all-too familiar pogrom [ = unprovoked racist attack against unarmed Jews,
with the semi-unofficial assistance of the (in this case British) authorities[1a]].
These attacks cannot, however, in any way be assimilated to straightforward
anti-Semitic outrages which had their source in classical European
coordinates of the Jewish problem, but should be seen as a deformed
expression of national consciousness, all the more understandable as the
Zionist leaders clearly allied with the British while the latter encouraged
this distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle.”[2] Notice first that the anti-Zionist historian
-- Weinstock -- agrees that Arab mobs attacked civilian Jews in British
Mandate ‘Palestine,’ and that these mobs were racist. Weinstock, like
Shapira, quotes the slogan that the Arab rioters chanted in the streets:
“Palestine is our country and the Jews are our dogs.” These are important
points of agreement. The difference is that Shapira goes out of her way to
stress the genocidal intent of the Arab attackers: “The danger now appeared
to threaten the very survival of the entire Jewish community”; whereas
Weinstock instead loudly forbids any comparison between the Arabs who tried
but failed to exterminate the local Jews, and the Europeans who tried and
succeeded: “These [Arab] attacks cannot...in any way be assimilated to
straightforward anti-Semitic outrages which had their source in classical
European coordinates of the Jewish problem.” It's a strong statement. But if
genocidal Arab racism against the Jews is not, as in Europe,
“straightforward[ly] anti-Semitic,” then what is it? According to Weinstock,
it is a consequence of Arab “national consciousness.” Now this is a curious argument. “National consciousness” happens when a sizable
portion of a population believes itself to be a nation, which connotes
attachment to a specific land and (usually) a distinctive language. What
would be the basis for belief in the Palestinian Arab nation? The
so-called ‘palestinian’ Arabs do not speak palestinian, and, as Weinstock
awkwardly admits elsewhere in the same book, there was no such place as
‘Palestine’ until the British colonialists -- infidel foreigners --
imperially defined Middle Eastern boundaries after WWI, giving the name
‘Palestine’ first arbitrarily to one territory, then arbitrarily to another
(see Part 2). Consider, further, what Weinstock has recently
conceded in a different book: “Though it may
seem paradoxical to affirm it, this is nevertheless true: Palestine did not
exist in the 19th century. …Definitely, the territory of the [British]
Palestine Mandate corresponded to [Ottoman] Mediterranean Syria and its
inhabitants considered themselves as being part of Syria in the larger sense
(bilad al-Sham). ...[but] this affirmation does not
mean to invalidate Palestinian nationalism.”[2a] It doesn’t? Well then we must agree with Weinstock:
what he presents is indeed a paradox: a Palestinian national identity without
Palestine! But how can Weinstock so breezily deny that this brutal
contradiction invalidates his argument for a genuine “Palestinian [Arab]
nationalism”? We shall see a way out of this riddle if we pay close attention
to Weinstock’s argument. Though it was the British who had just invented
‘Palestine’ (and more than once, and with different boundaries!), and though
its Arab inhabitants had been thinking of themselves as Syrians, they
nevertheless had a Palestinian Arab “national consciousness,” says Weinstock,
because they had been awakened through an “anti-imperialist struggle” against
the British. Weinstock calls this struggle the “Palestinian anti-colonialist
movement.” And yet, curiously, he confesses that this “anti-imperialist
struggle” of the “Palestinian anti-colonialist movement” did not result in
violence against the British imperialists and colonialistas but in
wave after wave of terrorist violence against the old and new Jewish inhabitants
of the area. How to explain that? Well, Weinstock claims that the
“Palestinian anti-colonialist movement” had been “deformed by [anti-Jewish]
racism.” But this is “understandable,” he rushes to add, because “Zionist
leaders clearly allied with the British.” For someone like myself
it is hard to escape the impression that Weinstock has twisted logic in
twenty different ways in order to suggest that the Jews deserved what they
got. And yet, despite his claims of a British-Zionist alliance against the
Arabs, he concedes that the British in fact “encouraged” Arab murders of
innocent Jews, including torture to death of small children. Weinstock would
appear to have refuted himself. Could this mean that he is wrong? According to Weinstock, the British “encouraged”
Arab mob violence against the Jews as a “distraction from the
anti-imperialist struggle.” But the British Liuetenant Colonel John
Patterson, an eye-witness in the early 20th c. to Arab violence against Jews
in British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ presented a different hypothesis. In
Patterson's view, his own British superiors were inciting the Arabs against
the Jews in order to tell the world that, due to local resistance to the
creation of a Jewish homeland in ‘Palestine,’ the entire Zionist project had
to be abandoned (see footnote
1a for Patterson's account). The British no longer
thought that a Jewish homeland in the Middle East was in their interests, and
they were trying to sabotage it. I like this second hypothesis better because
what everybody agrees happened is that the British imperialists were
helping Arabs kill Jews, and that doesn’t sit well with Weinstock’s
interpretation that there was a Zionist-British alliance against the Arabs. As it turns out, Weinstock’s curious representation
of the conflict between Arabs and Jews in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ is
consistent with the current representation of the Arab-Israeli
conflict. We all know that the Arab enemies of the Jews turn their own
children into bombs in order to kill Jewish men, women, and children. If
people were doing this in the streets of the United States or Britain they
would be institutionalized, whether in a mental facility or in a jail, if not
killed. But since this violence is directed against Israeli Jews, we are
asked instead to see it as an “understandable” consequence of a ‘Palestinian’
“national consciousness.” I am not exaggerating. Just the other day, on 17
Monday, April 2006, “A Palestinian
suicide bomber blew himself up outside a fast-food restaurant in a bustling
commercial area of Tel Aviv during the Passover holiday Monday, killing eight
other people and wounding at least 49, police said.”[3] A famous Israeli pro-‘Palestinian’ organization,
dominant in Israel’s so-called ‘peace’ movement, Gush Shalom, immediately
sent out an email to its list saying the following: “Sure, we are
horrified by the senseless random killing. But we have also something to say
about why it happened, how it might have been prevented, how the next one can
still be prevented. But how to say it on this day and in that location? How
to make comprehensible, to shocked and angry and traumatized [Jewish] people,
that the occupation is the root cause of our suffering as well as the
Palestinians’? How to explain convincingly that we must dry at source the
oppression which makes young Palestinians don explosive belts and throw away
their lives together with those of others?”[4] In other words, Gush Shalom is asking this: How can
we explain to the Israeli Jews that a child in her stroller deserved to be
torn to pieces because she is the spawn of a colonialist power that
dispossesses and oppresses a third-world people? How can we get Israelis to
agree with the Orwellian logic of the above paragraph, where “senseless
random killing” = justified political act? Since the threshold for endorsing
violence against Jews is low anyways, it appears that Nathan Weinstock has
already provided the answer: the trick is to insist that Arab antisemitism is
an “understandable” reaction to supposed Jewish colonialism, as opposed to
just plain racism. And the better to allege that this is Arab “national
consciousness” (as opposed to just plain racism), we will outlaw any
comparison between Arab Muslim attitudes and those European attitudes that
produced the Nazi Final Solution against the European Jews. Says Weinstock:
Historical and Investigative Research is
a website built on the premise that, in order to get a grip on the present,
one must learn some history. Thus, in order better to understand the
‘Palestinian movement,’ and the better to judge whether the current
representation of the violence perpetrated by West Bank and Gaza Arabs
against Israeli Jews is a fair representation, I propose to examine the
following four questions (you may hyperlink below):
Let us begin with this: We learn above
that Arab mobs chanted “the Jews are our dogs” as they murdered unarmed
Jewish civilians during an attempted extermination of the Jews in British
Mandate 'Palestine' in 1929. What does this suggest? That these Arabs
perceived the status of Jews to be vastly inferior to their own. This ought
to be surprising to anybody who accepts historian Nathan Weinstock’s
interpretation that “the Zionist leaders clearly allied with the British,”
and that the Arabs were fighting an “anti-imperialist struggle.” After all,
Arabs chanting “the Jews are our dogs” hardly conveys that the Arabs
perceived the Jews as imperial overlords or proxy overlords. What it conveys,
rather, is that the Arabs thought of the Jews as their slaves. Which view is correct? This question can be answered by looking at how
Arabs and Jews lived in mid-19th century ‘Palestine,’ before the
Zionist migrations began, when ‘Palestine’ was ruled not by the British
Empire but by the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire (a period nowhere discussed
in Nathan Weinstock’s book). For a description of Muslim, Jewish, and
Christian relations at that time and place, I turn to historian Arnold
Blumberg’s Zion before Zionism, which book, as he explains, “closes in
1880 because it is the last year before the great Jewish immigration began”
(p.x). [Quote from
historian Arnold Blumberg begins here] “Moslems,
whether Turkish or Arab, were united in a determination to preserve the
Islamic character of society, especially in cities where Christians or Jews
constituted large pluralities or majorities. Under Koranic
law, Jews and Christians were regarded as ‘peoples of the book’ who had
received authentic divine revelation, but who had perversely rejected the
ultimate revelation given to humanity through Mohammed the Prophet. Infidels
of that description were assured of toleration if they accepted inferior
status and paid a special head tax in lieu of military service. Since Islam
idealizes the soldier as a propagator of the faith, anyone denied a soldier’s
career was necessarily humbled. Known as Ahl Ud-Dimma or the ‘people
of protection,’ they had an assured niche in society, but labored under
severe restrictions. No church or synagogue could have windows which looked
down upon Muslim religious property. No church bells could be rung, nor could
Christian religious processions bear the crucifix or other Christian symbols
through the public streets. At religious shrines sacred to two or more of the
monotheistic faiths, priority was given invariably to Moslem needs. A mosque
had been erected over the burial cave containing the remains of the biblical
patriarchs and matriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, and Leah.
Jews were permitted to climb only the first seven steps of the mosque leading
to the shrine and suffered varying degrees of harassment even while
submitting to that humiliating limitation. Jews praying at the western wall
at the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest shrine, were prohibited from sounding
the ram’s horn or making any other noise which might offend Moslems. Jews
could not erect a mechitza or barrier separating male and female
worshippers at that wall, lest it be construed as a
recognition of their right to build a true synagogue there. Moslems
freely threw garbage upon the heads of Jewish worshippers from the Temple
Mount without interference by the authorities. Only Moslems could climb the
Temple Mount. Black Sudanese tribesmen enforced the exclusion of infidel
trespassers... No new church
or synagogue could be erected without a specific firman from the
sultan, though old houses of worship could be repaired. Thus all sorts of
subterfuge became the normal means whereby new non-Moslem houses of prayer
were erected. In Jerusalem, for example, four separate synagogues pursued
separate careers within the same four walls because the three newer ones had
been built as mere ‘enlargements’ of the oldest congregation. The purchase
of property by foreign non-Moslems also required a special imperial firman.
Since there was no Turkish land registry law until 1858, each rare approval
of land purchase by foreign Christians or Jews also required ratification by
the local pasha. Both Christian and Jewish individuals and institutions were
constantly engaged in litigation, attempting to prove legitimate inheritance
of ancient land deeds. The Turks, for
their part, assumed an attitude of amused contempt as they surveyed the
squabbling of the rayah or non-Moslem communities. They could afford
to do so. Even in the walled cities containing Christian or Jewish
majorities, virtually all property was in the hands of Moslem landlords who
leased it on a long-term basis to tenants who were born, lived and died there
with no expectation that they would own land.”[5] [Quote from
historian Arnold Blumberg ends here] The full list above is instructive but I want you to
stay with this image: the landless, property-less Jewish worshippers climbing
just the allowed few steps at the Temple Mount, accosted with flying garbage
by gleeful Arabs who taunt them as the Turkish authorities smile with “amused
contempt.” This was going on in the mid-19th century. Thus, Arabs torturing
small Jewish children to death and chanting “the Jews are our dogs” in 1929
makes perfect sense: the Arabs and other Muslims in ‘Palestine’ regarded the
Jews as something less than fully human, and treated them accordingly. But hatred and contempt for Jews way back in
mid-19th century ‘Palestine’ can have absolutely nothing to do with an Arab
“expression of national consciousness,” because even Weinstock does not claim
that there was any such consciousness then. And neither could it be a
reaction to a supposed alliance between Zionist Jews and British
colonialists, because at the time there weren’t yet any Zionist Jews or
British colonialists. The place was ruled by the Ottoman Turks, and Zionism
hadn't begun. Rather, this was an expression of how Jews and Christians were
treated all over the Muslim world -- it was hardly a phenomenon unique to the
Arab, Turkish, and African Muslims in ‘Palestine.’ This is worth a short discussion. Arnold Blumberg says above two things that are
intimately related: he notes that “Islam idealizes the soldier as a
propagator of the faith,” and he refers to Christians and Jews among Muslims
as Ahl Ud-Dimma or the “people of protection.” What is the connection
between the two? It is like this: the soldier “propagators of the faith” were
the ones producing dhimmis or “people of protection.” Consider the following quotation from the Qur’an: “Oh Prophet,
incite the believers to combat. If there can be found among you twenty who
will endure, they will vanquish two hundred, if one hundred can be found,
they will vanquish a thousand infidels, because they are people such as
cannot understand.” This Quranic passage is quoted in The Islamic
Manifesto, a work by the famous Bosnian Muslim author Alija
Izetbegovic (a favorite of NATO and the Western press, which lionized him as
a great ‘moderate’).[6] Izetbegovic
apparently considers any interpretation here unnecessary, because he produces
the Quranic quotation entirely without comment or adornment in a section
entitled “The Relations Of The Islamic Society With Other Societies” (the
entire section consists of similarly chilling Quranic quotations, likewise
without comment or adornment). So, the “propagators of the faith” will piously kill
“infidels,” which is to say people who “cannot understand” that they are
supposed to become Muslims. This sort of thing will indeed tend to propagate
the faith because many people become willing Muslims when confronted by a
victorious Muslim army. And as historians have been telling us, this is
precisely how this faith did propagate across the world: before the raised
curve of a scimitar blade, those refusing Islam were either killed on the
spot or enslaved. But with the Christians and Jews the Muslims made an
exception: if they agreed to become semi-slaves to the Muslims, they would be
allowed to live as infidels. Should the Muslims ever think that Christians or
Jews were becoming uppity, however, jihad (Holy War) would resume, and
then Christians and Jews could once again be slaughtered with impunity. So
this is why Christians and Jews were “people of protection”: the Muslims
‘protected’ Christians and Jews from slaughter at the hands of the same
Muslims. (An obvious parallel: gangsters who extort money
from their innocent victims at the point of a gun, because the alternative is
death, call the income they make ‘protection money,’ and what they do is
referred to as a ‘protection racket.’) It is true that there have been periods of
relatively increased tolerance for dhimmis in certain times and places
in the Muslim world -- times when things weren’t as bad for dhimmis as
they could have been. But the current propaganda about the supposedly traditional
tolerance for Christians and Jews in Muslim societies because they are People
of the Book and therefore -- you will hear this -- “protected people”
is... propaganda. Historian Bat Ye’or is an authority on the
stipulations of the dhimma and what she calls the Christian and Jewish
condition of dhimmitude in the Muslim world. She explains that the
Muslims got some of their ideas, and the legal framework, for how to treat dhimmis
from Christian ideas about how to treat Jews. This the Muslims did when they
overran the Eastern or ‘Byzantine’ Roman Empire with its capital in
Constantinople or ‘Byzantium’ (now Istanbul) and adopted much of what was
there. “On the level
of civil rights the Muslim authority adopted the full range of anti-Jewish
laws stipulated in the codes of the Byzantine emperors Theodosius II (5th
century) and Justinian (6th century). From the 8th century, Muslim
jurisconsults reinterpreted these laws within an Islamic conception and
imposed them on both Jews and Christians. These anti-Jewish laws adopted in
Islamic jurisprudence, and often harshened, were considered an
expression of the divine will. They conferred on dhimmitude an immutable
juridical structure that generated humiliations, debasement, and extreme
vulnerability. Together with the aforementioned military factors this led to
the reduction or -- in some places -- total disappearance of Jewish and, even
more so, of Christian communities. After the order banishing Jews and
Christians from the Hijaz in 640, Christianity was totally eliminated from Arabia,
while Judaism survived in Yemen under the most precarious conditions.”[7] (emphasis mine) So we learn not merely that European Christian and
Arab Muslim antisemitism are, as cultural phenomena, very much the same kind
of thing, but that the very laws making up the dhimma in the
Muslim world were in fact borrowed from the laws oppressing Jews in the
Christian state known as the Roman Empire East, with its capital in
Constantinople, now Istanbul. This is the very city from which the Muslim
Ottoman Turks ruled Arabs and Jews in 19th century ‘Palestine.’ And where did the Roman Empire East get its ideas
about how to treat Jews? From the Roman Empire West: from Augustine. The man Christians remember as Saint Augustine, who
would be the most influential of all Christian minds -- in matters of the
faith -- for centuries to come, is who promulgated in Rome, in the 5th
century, the policy toward the Jews. The relevant passage is from his City
of God: “...the Jews
who killed him and refused to believe in him [Jesus], to believe that he had
to die and rise again, suffered a more wretched devastation at the hands of
the Romans, and were utterly uprooted from their kingdom, where they had
already been under the dominion of foreigners. They were dispersed all over
the world -- for indeed there is no part of the earth where they are not to
be found -- and thus by evidence of their own Scriptures they bear witness
for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ.” [8] How did Augustine defend Christians from the charge
that they had “fabricated the prophecies about Christ”? As follows: Augustine
said it was because ‘the Jews’ supposedly murdered Jesus (a false
accusation, since it was the Romans who murdered Jesus), and because they
did not accept Christian claims about Jesus, that the Jews had been
devastated by the Romans in a frightful genocide carried out over the course
of the first and second centuries, which indeed produced a great scattering
of those Jews who were not killed, though a great Diaspora existed already
(to read about this ancient outrage, consult the footnote).[8a]
According to Augustine, the success of the anti-Jewish Roman Holocaust proved
Jewish guilt, so the Christians, who accused the Jews, had to be correct. The divine function of the Jews, as far as Augustine
was concerned, was to exist in every country so they could everywhere give
evidence of the truth of Christianity by preserving certain books in which
Augustine believed he could discern oblique allusions to Jesus of Nazareth as
the Jewish Messiah (these are the “prophecies about Christ” that Augustine
insisted had not been fabricated). The Jews would also give evidence of the
truth of Christianity by their lower social status because, according to
Augustine, this was further punishment from God (which the Christians carried
out in God’s name) for not following Jesus. In fact Augustine gives this point special emphasis
by quoting from the Book of Psalms (69.22): “bend their backs always,”
a phrase that he interprets, unaccountably, as a message to future Christians
from the ancient Jews concerning how they should treat their own Jewish
descendants who would reject Jesus. Then he restates: “...we find
those prophecies sufficient which are produced from the books of our
opponents [the Jews]; for we recognize that it is in order to give this
testimony, which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by
their possession and preservation of those books, that they themselves are
dispersed among all nations, in whatever direction the Christian church
spreads. In fact, there
is a prophecy given before the event on this point in the book of Psalms,
which they [the Jews] also read. It comes in this passage, ‘As for my God,
his mercy will go before me; my God has shown me this in the case of my
enemies. Do not slay them, lest at some time they forget your Law,” without
adding, “Scatter them.” For if they [the Jews] lived with that testimony of
the Scriptures only in their own land, and not everywhere, the obvious result
would be that the Church, which is everywhere, would not have them available
among all nations as witnesses to the prophecies which were given beforehand
concerning Christ.”[9] Augustine, then, wanted the Jews everywhere to
perform the role of useful proof of Christian theological superiority, so
they were to be scattered and everywhere enslaved. But “Do not slay them!” In
other words, the Jews would be “people of protection,” precisely what they
also became in the Muslim world. As in the Muslim world, they were
periodically slain anyway.[10] Should we be surprised that there is such a close
identity between the European and Muslim approaches to the Jews in their
midst? No. The Augustinian policy was stated at the turn of the 5th century,
and Muslims did not wrest Jerusalem away from Byzantium until the seventh
century.[10a] Historian Bat
Ye'or explains above that it was “From the 8th century,
[that] Muslim jurisconsults reinterpreted these [Byzantine] laws
within an Islamic conception and imposed them on both Jews and Christians.”
So the Augustinian policy, which became the European policy because of the
enduring influence and power of the Roman Catholic Church, also became the
policy of Muslims, inherited through its specific implementation in the
Eastern Roman Empire which they conquered, and whose laws they adopted. This
is what explains the almost perfect identity between the traditional European
and Muslim policies toward the Jews: each is an expression of Augustine. But not only that. The links between one and the
other persist strongly in the modern world as well. The top leader of the
German Nazi Final Solution to the 'Jewish Problem,' the partner in everything
of the better known Adolf Eichmann, was Hajj
Amin al Husseini, an
Arab Muslim who had already distinguished himself as the leader of a jihad
against the Jews of British Mandate Palestine, including the 1929
terrorist attacks mentioned at the outset. One of these attacks, in 1936-39,
had been organized with weapons supplied by Adolf Hitler. So we have,
We also have that,
Finally,
Such commonality of response and action suggests
commonality of ideological source, and sure enough both sets of attitudes
toward the Jews in fact derive ultimately from the same ancient Roman
authority, the very same “classical European coordinates of the Jewish
problem”: Augustine. And yet Nathan Weinstock says the following about the
genocidal anti-Jewish racism of Muslims in early 20th century ‘Palestine’: “These attacks
cannot...in any way be assimilated to straightforward anti-Semitic outrages
which had their source in classical European coordinates of the Jewish
problem.” Did he go out on a limb? “Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!,” as they say in Oz (where historians
who defend the so-called ‘Palestinian movement’ must be getting their
degrees).
The next piece in
this series is:
_____________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] Shapira, A.
1992. Land and power. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press,
(p.174) [1a] This footnote contains discussion of two pogroms. The first
took place inside the Russian Empire, where the word 'pogrom' originates, in
the town of Kishinev [Kih-shee-nuh-yev], in 1903, and the events are related
by historian Amos Elon. The second took place in British Mandate Palestine,
and the events are related by Kenneth Levin (who quotes at length the
writings of eye-witness Lieutenant Colonel John Patterson). KISHINEV:
JERUSALEM: The following account of the 1920
anti-Jewish racist riots in Jerusalem is from Kenneth Levin:
[2] Weinstock,
N. 1979. Zionism: False Messiah. London: Ink Links Ltd. (pp.166-167) [2a] « L’affirmation parait révéler du paradoxe, mais n’en est pas moins vraie : la Palestine n'existe pas au XIXe siècle. ...En définitive, le territoire de la Palestine mandataire correspond a la Syrie méridionale et ses habitants se considèrent comme faisant partie de la Syrie au sens large (bilad al-Sham). ...[mais] cette constatation ne vise pas a déconsidérer le nationalisme palestinien... » SOURCE :
Weinstock, N. 2004. Histoire de chiens. Paris: Éditions Mille et Une
Nuits (Groupe Fayard). (pp.37-38) [3] Suicide
Bomber Kills 8 in Tel Aviv, Associated Press Online, April 17, 2006
Monday, 1:50 PM GMT, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, 1050 words, By DANIEL
ROBINSON, Associated Press Writer, TEL AVIV Israel [4] Gush Shalom
email, below: Return-Path: <intl-bounces@mailman.gush-shalom.org> ----- Original Message ----- From: Adam Keller Sent:
Tuesday, April 18, 2006 1:04 AM Subject:
Comment on the day of the suicide bombing We had just heard about the explosion and were busy
making phonecalls: "Wanted just to know you are okay. You heard about
the bombing, did you?" Then we saw an email coming from overseas to the
Gush Shalom mailbox, a very short one: One o'clock. In the noon news magazine on the radio, the commentator
speaks in a rather bored way of the ongoing army raid into Nablus, words
nearly identical to the reports of yesterday and of last week: "The
Palestinians claim that the boy shot in central Nablus was unarmed... The
soldiers assert that they had shot only at armed militants, as per orders...
This is part of a continuing operation to root out terrorists in Nablus and
Jenin, which is already going on for several weeks... When soldiers arrive,
dozens of youngsters start throwing stones, which complicates the detention
of wanted terrorists..." Suddenly: "We interrupt this report. A large explosion just
occurred at the Old Central Bus Station in Tel-Aviv. Dozens of casualties.
Stand by for further details" The Old Central Bus Station. The least fashionable part of Tel-Aviv.
The lively dirty streets which are the haunt of migrant workers one jump
ahead of the notorious Immigration Police and the most poor and disadvantaged
among Israel's own citizens. The place where people have again and again to
endure suicide bombings, too. Today, once again. As always, the dilemma: Should we go there, to the scene where six
people have just perished and forty others wounded,
a place which is just a short bus ride away and where we just a few days ago
went to buy sandals? Go there, as Israelis and human beings and and peace
activists - but to do what? To say what? Sure, we are horrified by the senseless random killing. But we have
also something to say about why it happened, how it might have been
prevented, how the next one can still be prevented. But how to say it on this
day and in that location? How to make comprehensible, to shocked and angry
and traumatized people, that the occupation is the root cause of our
suffering as well as the Palestinians'? How to explain convincingly that we
must dry at source the oppression which makes young Palestinians don explosive
belts and throw away their lives together with those of others? In the end, we don't do anything except stay tuned to the non-stop
broadcasts on radio and TV. At least the extreme-right people, who in past
years used to rush to such scenes with their hate placards, are not there
either today. It seems that they no longer find the public so receptive to
their simplistic "solutions". The flood of news reports continues. The number of fatalities has grown
to nine, and doctors at Ichilov Hospital are still fighting to save the life
of a very severely wounded sixteen year-old boy. At least two of the women
killed were foreign migrant workers, and the Israeli consulate in Romania is
trying to locate the family of one of them. Responsibility was claimed by the
Islamic Jihad, and the perpetrator was a young man from the West Bank town of
Quabatiya. In the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian boy (age not mentioned) was
killed in an Israeli artillery bombardment (probably, somebody again
instructed the artillery to decrease the range to the Palestinian inhabited
areas...) The bombing had targeted the very same cheap restaurant which was
attacked in the previous Tel-Aviv bombing, three and a half months ago. Three
and a half months ago. Nobody seems to remember the time when suicide
bombings were taking place every week, or also several times each week.
Nobody mentions that that had been when Hamas was the main initiator of
suicide bombings. Nobody mentions that Hamas has been carefully keeping their
one-side truce for more than a year now, that Jihad is a small organization
with limited resources, that the Hamas self-restraint has saved the lives of
quite a few Israelis in the past year. A TV, reporter speaks smugly from the scene of the bombing: "The
police had carried out massive detentions of Palestinian workers. Illegal
Palestinians were found in all the restaurants and workshops around the site
of the bombing. Why couldn't the police arrest them before it happened? (Because
they had absolutely nothing to do with the bombing, because they came to
Tel-Aviv for no other reason than to feed their families - but nobody says
this on the air...) In Jerusalem, the swearing-in ceremony of the newly-elected Knesset
goes ahead as scheduled, and is broadcast live. The eternal Shimon Peres is
Acting Speaker. Not always our favourite among politicians. But in his speech
today, he at least admits that the Palestinians are not solely to blame for
the absence of peace, and that some Israeli mistakes also have something to
do with it. This is not nothing, especially on such
a day. The late night news is sometimes less tightly controlled than the
prime time. The commentator reports about Defense Minister Mofaz holding
consultations with his generals on the coming military response, and remarks:
"So, there will be a retaliation, and the Palestinians will retaliate to
the retaliation, and we will retaliate again, and then what?" No answer
was forthcoming. Adam Keller [5] Blumberg, A. 1985. Zion before Zionism 1838-1880. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. (pp.21-23) [6] Izetbegovic, Alija.
1999 [1980]. Le manifeste Islamique (original title: Islamska
deklaracija). Beyrouth-Liban: Éditions Al-Bouraq. (see especially the pages 75-76; 81-82; 105; 118; 132). To understand better Izetbegovic’s ideology, read:
[7] “Jews and Christians
under Islam Dhimmitude and Marcionism” Original title : « Juifs et
chrétiens sous l’Islam. Dhimmitude et marcionisme, » published in Commentaire
(97) Spring 2002, Paris: 105-116. (Commentaire is a quarterly
review founded by Raymond Aron. Editorial director: Jean-Claude Casanova)
Translated by Nidra Poller. [8] The relevant
passage is quoted in: Carroll, J. 2001. Constantine's Sword: The Church
and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (pp.216-217) [8a] To learn more about the Roman Final Solution against
the Jews in the first and second centuries, and why you never heard about it,
read chapter one of The Crux of World History: Vol. 1. The Book of
Genesis: The Birth of the Jewish People (2005, Francisco Gil-White),
entitled:
[9] The relevant
passage is quoted in: Carroll, J. 2001. Constantine's Sword: The Church
and the Jews. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (pp.216-217) [10] To see a partial list of Western outrages against the
Jews in the last 2000 years, read the preface to:
[10a] "a Byzantine army was defeated at the Battle of
the Yarmuk River (636), thereby opening Palestine and Syria to Arab Muslim
control." SOURCE: "Byzantine Empire." Encyclopædia
Britannica from Encyclopædia Britannica Online. http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:9022/eb/article-9239 [11] “In 1980, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia gave a clear
definition: ‘What is meant by jihad is a united, comprehensive, integrated
Arab-Islamic confrontation in which we place all our resources and our
spiritual, cultural, political, material and military potential in a long and
untiring ‘Holy War’ against Israel, of course, who else?’” SOURCE: Evening Standard (London) May 19, 1994;
SECTION: Pg. 9; LENGTH: 907 words; HEADLINE: A NEW KIND OF JIHAD [12] Jews have received
at least 22% of all Nobel prizes awarded so far, but they constitute just
0.2% of the world’s population. But these numbers actually understate the
drama of Jewish performance: Nobel prizes were first awarded in 1905, and
most Jews were not even allowed to get a university education until after
World War II. In the United States, university quotas against Jews were not
fully lifted until after the partial victories of the Civil Rights Movement.
Despite this, almost 40% of all US Nobel prizes have gone to Jews (US Jews
are just 2% of the total population in this country). |
Note to the reader: Nathan Weinstock, whom we encounter repeatedly in
this series, claims to have made an 'about face' and to have seen the error
of his earlier ways. HIR has published an article that demonstrates how
Nathan Weinstock has merely found a new, more clever
way to attack the Jewish people.
Notify me of new HIR pieces!
|
|||||||||||||||
