I AM A JEW (PART XI - The Israeli Propaganda Machine)

As the title shows this is the 11th part (actually the 12^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the titles: "I AM A JEW (Part I)," "I AM A JEW (Part II)," "I AM A JEW (Part III)," "I AM A JEW (Special Bulletin)," "I AM A JEW (Part IV - The Torah & The Talmud)," "I AM A JEW (Part V - Gaza Is A Huge Prison)," "I AM A JEW (PART VI - The Palestinians)," "I AM A JEW (PART VII - A Defense of Israel’s Policies and a Rebuttal)", "I AM A JEW (PART VIII - Hamas & Likud)" ,"I AM A JEW (PART IX- The Palestinian Diaspora & The Right of Return)" and "I AM A JEW (PART X - The Abject Poverty of the Palestinians)."

As I write these articles I become increasingly aware of how uninformed and misinformed we are about the nature of the Israeli government, its aims and its crimes.

This was brought home to me when in response to my post "I AM A JEW (PART IX - The Palestinian Diaspora & The Right of Return)" one of my subscribers, Ernest Hauser of the Bronx, NY, wrote:

The Arab refugee problem is indeed sad and difficult.

In 1948 the Arab neighbors Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan] urged the Arabs to flee and return after the Jews were driven into the sea. Well, that did not happen.  

Israel took in about a half million Jews who were persecuted in the Arab world, but none of the Arab lands gave citizenship to any of the Palestinian refugees.

They prefer to keep then in camps as a thorn to Israel.

This brought home to me just how effective Israeli propaganda has been and continues to be.

The vast majority of Americans and particularly American Jews probably believe the statement by Ernest Hauser, yet it is demonstrably false. I myself may have believed it, until I did the extensive research required for this series. Yet, even in the face of facts contradicting Hauser’s assertion, the myth lives on.

My response to Hauser is set forth below:

You are simply repeating the standard line from Israeli propaganda sources. Before you mindlessly repeat things you ought to take the time to research the matter to determine the facts.

Or at least read my posts.

In "I AM A JEW (Part II)” I wrote and I quote:

There has long been a debate about whether Arabs left Israel out of their own free will, at the urgings of their leaders or were driven out by Israeli forces conducting ethnic cleansing. After extensive research I have concluded that both are true. What has come to be known as the Deir Yassin massacre is instructive.

I quote from Wikipedia:

The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Irgun Zevai Leumi and Lohamei Herut Israel Zionist paramilitary groups attacked Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, a Palestinian Arab village of roughly 600 people. The assault occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem by Palestinian forces during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.

Around 107 villagers were killed during and after the battle for the village, including women and children—some were shot, while others died when hand grenades were thrown into their homes. Several villagers were taken prisoner and may have been killed after being paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem, though accounts vary. Four of the attackers died, with around 35 injured. The killings were condemned by the leadership of the Haganah—the Jewish community's main paramilitary force—and by the area's two chief rabbis. The Jewish Agency for Israel sent Jordan's King Abdullah a letter of apology, which he rebuffed.

The deaths became a pivotal event in the Arab–Israeli conflict for their demographic and military consequences. The narrative was embellished and used by various parties to attack each other—by the Palestinians against Israel; by the Haganah to play down their own role in the affair; and by the Israeli Left to accuse the Irgun and Lehi of violating the Jewish principle of purity of arms, thus blackening Israel's name around the world. News of the killings sparked terror within the Palestinian community, encouraging them to flee from their towns and villages in the face of Jewish troop advances, and it strengthened the resolve of Arab governments to intervene, which they did five weeks later. (Emphasis added)

And in an article by David Remick in The New Yorker, entitled: "Blood and Sand - A revisionist Israeli historian revisits his country’s origins” published on May 5, 2008, he writes:

"In 1988, Morris published “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” which revolutionized Israeli historiography and, to a great extent, a nation’s understanding of its own birth. Relying less on testimony than on the newly available documents, Morris described how and why sixty per cent of the Palestinians were uprooted and their society destroyed. It was a far more complex picture than many Israelis were prepared to accept. The book features a map that shows three hundred and eighty-nine Arab villages, from upper Galilee to the Negev Desert. Morris revealed that in forty-nine of these villages the indigenous Arabs were expelled by the Haganah and other Jewish military forces; in sixty-two villages, the Arabs fled out of fear, having heard rumors of attacks and even massacres; in six, the villagers left at the instruction of Palestinian local leaders. The refugees, who probably expected to return to their homes in a matter of weeks or months, went to Gaza and the West Bank, and also to surrounding Arab countries—Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria—where, to this day, they have never been fully absorbed."

You can also take a look here and I quote, e.g.

Various quotes have been attributed to Monsignor George Hakim, Greek Catholic Bishop of Galilee, such as “The Arabs were urged to flee by their own leaders" and "The refugees were confident their absence would not last long, and that they would return within a week or two”. Childers investigated this claim:

"Another stock quotation down the years has been that, supposedly, of the Greek-Catholic Archbishop of Galilee. For example, Israel's Abba Eban told the U.N. Special Political Committee in 1957 that the Archbishop had "fully confirmed" that the Arabs were urged to flee by their own leaders. I wrote to His Grace, asking for his evidence of such orders. I hold signed letters from him, with permission to publish, in which he has categorically denied ever alleging Arab evacuation orders; he states that no such orders were ever given. He says that his name has been abused for years; and that the Arabs fled through panic and forcible eviction by Jewish troops. 

As for the comment: "but none of the Arab lands gave citizenship to any of the Palestinian refugees. They prefer to keep then in camps as a thorn to Israel”, it is true that none of the Arab lands gave citizenship to any of the Palestinian refugees, but it is not true that they did it so to keep the camps as a thorn to Israel.

Unlike the myth that Arabs are “one people” they consist of very diverse tribes, with many different forms of Islamic religions and ethnicities. The Arab countries are poor and struggling to survive themselves. The refugee camps are an enormous burden, and trying to assimilate, a foreign poverty-stricken group into their society, is very difficult. In fact in Jordan, they are considered a threat to the monarchy.  In Lebanon the Christians don’t want more Muslims. Egypt today is more attuned to Israel than to Hamas.

There is zero evidence that it is a plot against Israel.

So before you make glib statement without doing your homework, you should make it a point to truly ascertain the facts.

But why is there such universality of misconceptions? There can be little doubt that the Israeli propaganda machine in the US is extremely powerful. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations lists 51 organizations. Most of these are charitable and have no political agenda.

But the most prominent among them, are at the forefront of the defense of Israel, the shaping of public opinion and the lobbying of our government. They defend and advocate Israeli government policy as faithfully as the Communist party did in days of yore and its most faithful adherents believe and propagate these views as faithfully as members of the Communist party once did.

Wikipedia describes “The Israeli lobby” as

...the diverse coalition of those who, as individuals and as groups, seek to influence the foreign policy of the United States in support of Zionism, Israel or the specific policies of its government. The lobby consists of Jewish-American secular and religious groups. The most famous and visible group within the Israel lobby is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC and other groups within the Israel lobby influence American public policy in a variety of ways such as through education, responding to criticism of Israel, and putting forth arguments in support of Israel. The Israel lobby is known for its success in encouraging U.S. lawmakers to support the policies that it supports.

AIPAC is probably the second-most powerful lobby in the US, second only to the NRA. 

October 19, 2014 – NBC News headline: “Obama speaks at AIPAC conference”

March 2012 (during the primary campaign for the Republican nomination for President) The Washington Post headline “GOP hopefuls blast Obama at AIPAC” and to quote from the article: “Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich on Tuesday dismissed Obama’s promises and accused the White House of weakness in trying to thwart Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.”

How many other organization, and particularly lobbies for foreign governments get such overwhelming attention form the country’s leaders and aspiring leaders?

But AIPAC is not alone among the Israeli lobby. There are the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Friends of Likud. Any media criticism of Israel will quickly bring a response from any of these by column if possible, by Letter to the Editor if needed. They influence public opinion and they influence our government.

To a large extent this explains the extensive misconceptions and misinformation of the American public that I am, in my small way, trying to correct.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.