Love of the Land: Palestine Betrayed

Palestine Betrayed

by Efraim Karsh
Yale, 336 pp., $32.50

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes
National Review
May 17, 2010

Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," has entered the English language in reference to the Arab–Israeli conflict. As defined by the anti-Israel website The Electronic Intifada, Nakba means "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands [of] Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948."

Those who wish Israel to disappear actively promote the Nakba narrative. For example, Nakba Day serves as a mournful Palestinian counterpart to Israel's Independence Day festivities, annually publicizing Israel's alleged sins. So established has this day become that Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations — the very institution that created the State of Israel — has sent his support to "the Palestinian people on Nakba Day." Even Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Palestinian community in Israel claiming to be "engaged in educational work for peace, equality, and understanding between the two peoples," dutifully commemorates Nakba Day.

The Nakba ideology presents Palestinians as victims without choices and therefore without responsibility for the ills that befell them. It blames Israel alone for the Palestinian-refugee problem. This view has an intuitive appeal, for Muslim and Christian Palestinians had long formed a majority on the land that became Israel, whereas most Jews were relative newcomers.

Intuitive sense, however, does not equal historical accuracy. In his new tour de force, Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh of the University of London offers the latter. With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.

In Karsh's words: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." More broadly, he observes, "there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Palestine Betrayed

Love of the Land: 1948: Palestine Betrayed

1948: Palestine Betrayed

Elliot Jager
jewishideasdaily.com
20 April '10

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough. Elliot Jager interviewed Efraim Karsh for Jewish Ideas Daily.

Who "betrayed" Palestine?

Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?

A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.

(Read full interview)

Love of the Land: 1948: Palestine Betrayed

Love of the Land: The taboo on Israeli chauvinism

The taboo on Israeli chauvinism

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
26 March '10

Those Israelis not shunned in the media and on campuses abroad are predominantly left-wing trashers of their own country.

Truth is often an unwelcome guest. Truth can be unpopular. Truth can disconcert. Truth can be bad for business. Truth can be counterproductive for certain reputations – even for the reputation of professionals whose status is ostensibly derived from their dedication to seeking truth.

Truth can be denied even when solidly backed by history. In our postmodern moral-relativist environment no truths exist, only self-serving narratives, claims and counterclaims. Hence truth can be spurned as a biased assertion aimed at furthering someone’s narrow interests. This is all the more insidious because it’s so fashionable.

It’s simplistic to dismiss any fact as an expedient and calculated misrepresentation. This isn’t just intellectual indolence. It’s also intellectual anarchy. Everything can be willy-nilly turned upside down. With nothing rooted to actual sequences of events, liars are liberated. Falsehoods are granted equal standing with truth. Frequently they even gain ascendency and are paraded as unquestionable. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

MY ABOVE ruminations were inspired by twin events. An opinion piece I wrote for an Australian newspaper elicited a deluge of noxious e-mails sent to my private mailbox. In these my ancestors and I were dispatched to the lowest levels of hell and my offspring and I were threatened with torture and death.

Yet somehow worse, because it didn’t come from the loony fringe, was a very polite letter sent by a highly respectable German magazine editor to an acquaintance (also German) who suggested the periodical print his translated version of my column “A good cop goes to Auschwitz” (January 20). The column revisited the World War II avid Arab collaboration with the Nazis (in the wake of MK Muhammad Barakei’s provocative participation at the Auschwitz liberation memorial).

It was flatly rejected on the grounds that it’s “too pro-Israel” and “too massively partisan.” The editor judged it unsuitable, saying it raises “the specter of chauvinism” (in its original sense of ultra-nationalism, before it was hijacked by gender polemics).

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: The taboo on Israeli chauvinism

Love of the Land: AP’s Historical Revisionism on Jerusalem

AP’s Historical Revisionism on Jerusalem

Gilead Ini
CAMERA
12 March '10

Revisionism is big, at least when it comes to Jerusalem. For example, Ikrima Sabri, until recently the Palestinian Authority-appointed mufti of Jerusalem, told the German daily Die Welt in 1997 that "In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history... The Jews cannot legitimately claim [the Western] wall, neither religiously nor historically."

But revisionism is not limited to Holocaust-denying Palestinian religious leaders. A somewhat less absurd, but nonetheless outrageously false, version of the city's history has recently been promoted by major Western news organizations.

On CNN, Christiane Amanpour had insisted that the "tug of war over Jerusalem" began in 1967, when Israel removed homes abutting the Western Wall. "The 40-year tug of war over Jerusalem began when Israel bulldozed the Arab neighborhood next to the Western Wall and built a plaza where Jews now pray," she said in the original version of CNN's 2007 program God's Jewish Warriors.

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: AP’s Historical Revisionism on Jerusalem

Love of the Land: New law creates 3 million stakeholders in peace

New law creates 3 million stakeholders in peace

Bataween
Point of No Return
11 March '10

From Nathan Jeffay of The Forward, the first real comment piece to be published since the passing of the Knesset bill requiring compensation for Jewish refugees from Arab countries was passed on 22 February. The piece says that all Israel's Zionist parties supported the new law. Some Israelis, however, voice doubts about linking Palestinian and Jewish refugees, based on the myth that the Palestinians can be exonerated from responsibility for the plight of Jewish refugees. This view is not supported by the facts: the Mufti of Jerusalem played a key role in dragging the Arab League into conflict with the Jewish state, and for decades actively incited violence and antisemitism against Jewish citizens of Arab countries.

"The plight of the estimated 856,000 Jews who were forced to leave Arab countries after the establishment of the State of Israel has played a minimal role so far in negotiations for Middle East peace. But on February 22, the Knesset adopted a law under which any Israeli government entering into peace talks must use those talks to advance a compensation claim for those who became Israeli citizens.

The impact on the Middle East peace process is unclear. But according to the law’s supporters, its implications for Jews from Arab countries is substantial.

“This is a historic decision that will make peace in the Middle East about justice for everyone,” said Isaac Devash, the lobbyist who brought the various communities together around the legislative proposal and then took it to the Knesset. Devash, a Tel Aviv businessman and child of Libyan Jews, is a volunteer with the New York-based group Justice for Jews From Arab Countries.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: New law creates 3 million stakeholders in peace

Love of the Land: Why Serge Klarsfeld is on a fool's errand

Why Serge Klarsfeld is on a fool's errand

Bataween
Point of No Return
11 February '10

You know that feeling of exasperation you get when some bumbling but well-meaning old relative tries to intervene in a family row, but only manages to make things worse? That was how I felt when I read news of Serge Klarsfeld's latest tour of the Arab world.

Under the auspices of the Aladdin project, sponsored by UNESCO, the French veteran Nazi hunter, whose father was deported to a death camp, has just concluded in Baghdad a series of talks on the Holocaust in Tunis, Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Rabat, Jerusalem and Nazareth in northern Israel. His purpose? To fight Holocaust denial in the Arab world.

In itself, that is a perfectly laudable objective. We know that Holocaust denial has reached epidemic proportions in Arab and Muslim countries. Only through Holocaust education might a future Holocaust be prevented. And Arabs who understand the full extent of the mass murder by industrialised methods of a third of the Jewish people might just begin to appreciate the need for a Jewish state.

Except that the 73-year-old Klarsfeld went further, and set up a false moral equivalence between Jewish suffering under the Nazis and Muslim suffering at the hands of the Israelis. In Baghdad on Monday he urged Muslims and Jews 'to learn about their mutual suffering as a way to bring them closer.'

"We must spread knowledge about works showing the common ties between Jews and Muslims, because Muslims also suffered from colonialism and humiliation...I understand that those who have lived under English and French colonialism would also want to speak of their suffering and of those who suffer Israel's presence on what they consider their land.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: Why Serge Klarsfeld is on a fool's errand

Love of the Land: What the AP Doesn't Say about the Palestinians and the Holocaust

What the AP Doesn't Say about the Palestinians and the Holocaust

TS
CAMERA/Snapshot
27 January '10

In her article about the controversy among Jews and Arabs surrounding an Israeli Arab MK's trip to Auschwitz today, AP's Diaa Hadid reports:

The conflict over the Holocaust dates back to the founding of Israel in 1948.

At this point, readers knowledgeable about Mideast history and the Holocaust may have expected mention of the Palestinian Arabs' close collaboration with the Nazis. Grand Mufti Haj-Amin El-Husseini, with his warm relationship with Nazi leaders, was instrumental in recruiting several SS divisions worth of Bosnian Muslims. It's not for nothing that he's been called Hitler's "Muslim Pope."

But Hadad does not mention the Palestinian Arabs' role in the Holocaust here or anywhere else in the article. Instead she goes on to state:

(Read full post)

Love of the Land: What the AP Doesn't Say about the Palestinians and the Holocaust