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Understanding the Palestinian Movement

An HIR Series, in four parts

Historical and Investigative Research - 22 April 2006
by Francisco Gil-White

http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov.htm

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:

“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.”

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):

1

 

Was Arab anti-Jewish racism in the first half of the 20th c. fundamentally different from the European variety?

2

 

Was there, in British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ a ‘nationally conscious’ ‘Palestinian Arab people’?

3

 

Did the Zionist Jews take something away from the Arabs in British Mandate 'Palestine'?

4

 

How did the so-called ‘Palestinian movement’ emerge? Who put it together? Who sponsored it?


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1

 

Was Arab anti-Jewish racism in the

first half of the 20th c. fundamentally

different from the European variety?

_________________________________________________________

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,

a) that the Muslims became quite determined to exterminate the Jews precisely when these slaves, whom the Muslims had despised for centuries, cancelled the dhimma by insisting that they would have their own Jewish state. For the Muslims, the cancellation of the dhimma triggers a renewed jihad: the killing of uppity infidels until they are all dead or re-enslaved. (That the Arabs are reacting with offense to the impudence of slaves is obvious from how the King of Saudi Arabia has defined jihad in modern times: as the destruction of the State of Israel.[11])

We also have that,

b) the Europeans, after despising the Jews as slaves for centuries, exterminated them right as the Jews got to talking about a ‘modern world’ and even began carrying themselves like full citizens, excelling at everything.[12]

Finally,

c) that the jihad in Palestine and the German Nazi Final Solution assisted each other, and were both led by the same Arab Muslim: Hajj Amin al Husseini

 

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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).

http://www.hirhome.com/logo-HiR.gif

The next piece in this series is:

“Was there, in British Mandate Palestine, a ‘nationally conscious’ ‘Palestinian Arab people’?”; Historical and Investigative Research; 30 April 2006; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/pal_mov2.htm

_____________________________________________________

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:

"On April 19 an outrage occurred in the small Bessarabian town of Kishinev, which, in less than 48 hours, left 45 local Jews lying dead, and nearly 600 wounded; 1,500 shops and homes were pillaged or destroyed. The church bells were ringing on Easter Sunday, when a wild mob, undoubtedly acting on a given signal, rushed through the narrow streets killing Jews and setting fire to their homes and stores. In the past few decades Kishiniev's Christian population of some 60,000 had lived peacefully alongside 50,000 Jewish artisans and small shopkeepers. The only newspaper in the town was a sensational anti-Semitic journal, the Bessarabitz, subsidized by the czarist Ministry of the Interior from a special slush fund. In recent months the Bessarabitz had waged a vicious campaign against the Jews of Kishinev, accusing them of ritual murder of Christian babies and of sponsoring, at the same time, both socialist revolution and the capitalist exploitation of Christians.

The police made no attempt to interfere in the widespread killing, looting, and arson. For almost twenty-four hours, while the army was ordered by the provincial governor to remain in its barracks, the mob ran amok. Nails were driven into victim's skulls, eyes gouged out, and babies thrown from higher stories of buildings to the pavement. Men were castrated, women were raped. The local bishop drove in his carriage through the crowd, blessing it as he passed. Only on the evening of the second day did the police appear on the scene to disperse the mob. By then the devastation had been accomplished. It was generally believed that Konstantin Pobedenostsev, the Czar's close adviser and head of the Holy Synod, had inspired the outrage in order to divert popular sentiments from the social revolutionists.

Pobedenostsev's own solution of the Jewish problem was known to be three-pronged: a third would convert, a third would emigrate, and a third would die. It was widely reported that Wenzel von Plehve, the czarist Minister of the Interior, had instructed the provincial governor of Kishinev not to be overzealous in his protection of the Jews. At Kishinev the government was testing a new technique to drown the revolutionary fervor in Jewish blood. News of the pogrom was suppressed in the Russian newspapers, which merely stated that there had been a sudden outbreak provoked by the Jews."

SOURCE: Elon, A. 1975. Herzl. New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston. (pp.373-374)

JERUSALEM: The following account of the 1920 anti-Jewish racist riots in Jerusalem is from Kenneth Levin:

"The British, in the [WWI] postwar years, were attempting to maintain their Middle East territories with very limited forces and were indeed concerned with minimizing local unrest. But, of course, this does not account for [British] Mandate [in 'Palestine'] officers working as agents provocateurs and stirring up anti-Jewish violence or for British authorities failing to quell Arab riots when they were fully able to do so. Nor does it explain the [British] Military Administration's preventing local Jewish units -- elements of the Jewish Battalions -- from coming to the defense of the Jews of Jerusalem. [The Jewish leader Vladimir Zeev] Jabotinsky, who tried to organize defense, was arrested by the British and sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment. He was soon released by only in the context of an amnesty extended also to the rioters. The British chose to construe the Jewish units' attempts to defend the Jews of Jerusalem as an intolerable breach of military discipline and disbanded the units.

Liuetenant Colonel John Patterson, a non-Jewish British officer who had commanded the Zion Mule Corps in Gallipolli [a Jewish force that fought with distinction on the British side during WWI], was subsequently appointed commander of the 38th Jewish Battalion and led the battalion in the [WWI] Palestine campaign [during which the British wrested control of 'Palestine' from the Ottoman Turks]. Patterson wrote extensively of the anti-Jewish depredations to which his [Jewish] troops, and the Jewish population of Palestine, were subjected by the British military’s forces in Palestine under Allenby (the Egyptian Expeditionary Force) and later by the Military Administration. These depredations emanated both from the command structure and, in the wake of evident command tolerance, from the rank and file. With regard to Arab attacks on the Jews in April, 1920, in Jerusalem, Patterson, referring to the assault as 'the Jerusalem pogrom,' noted the Military Administration's encouragement of the violence, its failure to intervene to stop it, its blocking of intervention by Jewish troops, its attempts to use the Arab assault as an excuse to curb Zionist programs, and its scapegoating of Jabotinsky.

Patterson wrote, for example, of the events of April, 1920, 'A veritable 'pogrom,' such as we have hitherto only associated with Tsarist [Czarist] Russia, took place in the Holy City of Jerusalem in April, 1920, and as this was the climax to the maladministration of the Military Authorities, I consider that the facts of the case should be made public...

'The Balfour Declaration [which gave Britain the responsibility of establishing a Jewish homeland in British Mandate 'Palestine']...was never allowed [by the Military Administration] to be officially published within the borders of Palestine; the Hebrew language was proscribed; there was open discrimination against the Jews; the Jewish Regiment was at all times kept in the background and treated as a pariah. This official attitude was interpreted by the hooligan element and interested schemers in the only possible way, viz., that the military authorities in Palestine were against the Jews and Zionism, and the conviction began to grow [within Arab circles] that any act calculated to deal a death blow to Zionist aspirations would not be unwelcome by those in authority...

'Moreover, this malign influence was sometimes strengthened by very plain speaking. The Military Governor of an important town was actually heard to declare...in the presence of British and French Officers and of Arab waiters, that in case of anti-Jewish riots in his city, he would remove the garrison and take up his position at a window, where he could watch, and laugh at, what went on!

'This amazing declaration was reported to the Acting Chief Administrator, and the Acting Chief Political Officer, but no action was taken against the Governor. Only one interpretation can be placed on such leniency.'

Patterson, as quoted in Chapter 5, wrote elsewhere of the Arab attacks, 'There can be no doubt that it was assumed in some quarters that when trouble, which had been deliberately encouraged, arose, the Home Government, embarrassed by a thousand difficulties at its doors, would agree with the wire-pullers in Palestine, and say to the Jewish people that the carrying out of the Balfour Declaration, owing to the hostility displayed by the Arabs, was outside the range of practical politics.'"

SOURCE: Levin, K. 2005. The Oslo syndrome: Delusions of a people under siege. Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus. (pp.203-204)

[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:

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Subject: Comment on the day of the suicide bombing
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----- 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:
"Any comment on the latest terror attack assholes?"
As a matter of fact - yes.

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
April 17, Tel-Aviv

[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:

“WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN BOSNIA? Were the Serbs the criminal aggressors, as the official story claims, or were they the victims?”; Historical and Investigative Research; 19 August 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/yugo/ihralija1.htm

[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.
http://www.dhimmitude.org/archive/by_dhimmitude_marcionism_en.pdf

[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:

CHAPTER 1. The Roman ‘Final Solution’ in the first and second centuries; why it happened, and why you never heard about it.
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/crux01.pdf

[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:

“THE MODERN ‘PROTOCOLS OF ZION’: How the mass media now promotes the same lies that caused the death of more than 5 million Jews in WWII”; Historical and Investigative Research; 25 August 2005; by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/mprot1.htm

[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
[Accessed May 7, 2006].

[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).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_Prize_winners
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_the_United_States
 


www.hirhome.com

  Part 1 - Palestinian Arab racism against Jews in the first half of the 20th c.


  Part 2 - Who are the Palestinian Arabs?


  Part 3 -  Did the Zionist Jews take something away from the Arabs in British Mandate 'Palestine'?


 Part 4 -  How did the 'Palestinian movement' emerge?

 


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.

Read this article


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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