My colleague, Albert Nekimken, of Vienna, Virginia, a
staunch defender of Israeli policies, has agreed to present the Israeli
viewpoint chapter by chapter, and I will share his comments with you together
with my rebuttals.
Please read or reread my post "I AM A JEW (PART I)." Nekimken’s
counter-views follow in italics together with my rebuttals paragraph by
paragraph.
While valuable as a way to personalize our dialogue with readers, being a Jew is quite irrelevant to our understanding of the subject. Men can be feminists and Christians or Hindus can be Zionists, especially when there are non-Zionist or anti-Zionist Jews (some informed, some not).
While I share your inability to embrace fully Judaism as a religion, we should be honest and admit that “cultural” Jews will not ensure the survival either of the Jewish people or Israel. We must depend on traditional religious Jews for both goals.
Here I
must immediately disagree! In my personal experience, (and I know of no meaningful
study of the subject) it is precisely “cultural Jews” who assure the survival
of the Jewish people as an entity. In my own family, my wife was born Christian
and never converted. It was religious Jews who tried to deny my daughter’s
Jewish identity on the ground that her mother was not of the faith. Yet she
married a culturally Jewish man, they observe a Kosher home as a matter of
tradition, and even light candles to usher in the Sabbath, all as a matter of
tradition.
It used
to be argued that inter-marriage was the greatest threat facing the existence
of Jews as a people and as a religion. It has proven itself to be wrong.
Pages,
possibly books, could be written on this subject, and probably have been, but
this is not the place for it.
The background that you outline here strikes me as having minimal relevance to the topic at hand. It is more important to note that Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Koran and, in Muslim tradition, it holds third place in importance after Mecca and Medina. In contrast, for Jews Jerusalem in particular and Zion in general have always had paramount importance, especially after Jews were dispersed from their homeland. The Torah is replete with references to Jerusalem.
True,
but irrelevant! Almost all agree that the religious sites in Jerusalem must be
respected.
I assume these background anecdotes are intended to preview your sense of personal moral outrage at the failings (as you perceived them) of Zionism and of recent Israeli governments—just as you take pride in their accomplishments. This is quite understandable. Here you preface your central viewpoint that Israel has become an “oppressor” and, as a result, has forfeited your respect as a Jew and as an American. This, too, is quite understandable. Yet, defining that term, “oppressor,” and using it accurately are more difficult.
In this context you might have mentioned FDR’s odious decision to turn away boatloads of Jewish refugees from American ports.
This is
one of the many misunderstandings of history, and a defamation of the memory of
F.D.R. At the time there was a very clear immigration law in existence. It had
no provision for asylum for refugees. F.D.R. did not have the power to let
people without visas enter the country. The proposal of Secretary of Labor
Perkins would have helped, but unbeknownst to F.D.R. the State Department had a
strong antipathy to Jews. See here. But this really has no bearing
on our discussion here.
Here, I feel compelled to point out that you, like every historian who creates a narrative, are obligated to select your “facts.” It’s never possible to include everything (historicism) and any attempt to do so would lead to utter confusion. You have scrupulously defended your attention to “facts,” but you ignore the implicit values that guide your selection of which facts to include.
Probably
true, but obviously unavoidable! That is why I invite comments and disagreements.
For example, here you assume that, in 1947, Arab residents of the British Palestine Mandate thought of themselves as a “people” with its own territory. Many other facts document that, on the contrary, Arabs (both resident in the Mandate and non-resident) conceived themselves as part of a larger pan-Arab, Muslim “umma.” Arab leaders at the time, such as newly installed Hashemite King Abdullah of Transjordan, wanted desperately to annex Palestine to their holdings. The epitome of this trend came with Gamel Abdel Nasser’s ill-fated Pan-Arabism of the 1960s.
The
fallacy of the above lies in the fact that Gamel Abdel Nasser’s Pan-Arabism was
ill fated. But more important, this argument is rather offensive, for it
attempts to rob the Arab people living in Palestine of their humanity. The only relevant fact is that at the time
of the 1948 partition, and to this day, there are Arabs living in Palestine. By
any definition, people who live in Palestine are Palestinians. Many of those
who lived in Palestine in 1948 were driven from their homes, and have ended up
in a diaspora, being victims of the Jewish, understandable, desire to end their
own diaspora.
At no time in recorded history has there ever been a “Palestinian people” or state.
This is
a very frequently stated, but a totally irrelevant fact. None of the states
that emerged from colonialism existed. The Jewish Virtual Library (See here.) sets forth the facts and I don’t
think they are cherry picking them: ”Jordan did
not exist until 1921 when Winston Churchill invented it.”
In fact
the whole Middle East used to be part of the Ottoman Empire and most of the
states in the Middle East were created after World War I.
From the "History of the Middle East" page on Wikipedia: Syria became a French protectorate thinly disguised as a League of Nations mandate. The Christian coastal areas
were split off to become Lebanon, another French protectorate. Iraq and Palestine became British mandated
territories. Iraq became the "Kingdom
of Iraq"
and one of Sharif Hussein's sons, Faisal, was installed as the King
of Iraq. Iraq
incorporated large populations of Kurds, Assyrians and Turkmens, many of whom had been promised
independent states of their own. See here.
But whatever
the history of the region is, the modern Arab states as well as Israel are a creation of the
Imperial powers and what existed and when is largely irrelevant.
When a
people live in a given territory they take the name of that territory. People
who live in Palestine are Palestinians and if they are not what are they?
Jordanians? But Jordan has disclaimed all sovereignty over the area. Israelis
too are Palestinians, but since the two people have little in common, only partition,
which has always been assumed to be the optimum solution, remains. The new
drive in Israel for Israeli sovereignty over the whole area is nothing more
than a plan to deny a minority population their right of self-determination,
and possibly, even a means of ghettoizing them.
Yasir Arafat created a distinct Arab “Palestinian” identity after 1967 as part of a strategy to destroy Israel.
This is
a bold-faced statement, but Nekimken gives no source or support. As a matter of
fact he doesn’t give references for any of his assertions, as I do.
It was based on the story of the shared “catastrophe” of the Nakhba in May 1948, which had been preceded by 30 years of planned, anti-Jewish uprisings.
You presume here that Arabs accepted the Western idea of the nation state in opposition to colonialism. However, Arab nationalism developed only slowly among elites and, according to the Salafist view that underpinned the anti-Jewish resistance, the concept of the “nation state” itself was rejected as a Western (“alien”) import.
This is
certainly true of the Isis or Isil movement in Syria and Iraq, but I see no
support for this assertion, for any of the other modern Arab states.
Your use of the term “alien non-Arab entity” deserves particular attention. You appear to assume that only Arabs “deserve” to live in the Middle East when, in fact, the region is a mosaic of peoples and cultures (albeit often at each other’s throats).
This is a strange assertion, since I have not used the term “alien non-Arab entity” anywhere.
It’s difficult to understand how Jews can be considered “alien” when their kingdoms in the region preceded the migration of Arabs out of the Arabian peninsula and took form some 5,000 years ago.
But so
did the Roman Empire. Are we to resurrect it? The claim to a Jewish homeland
cannot be based on ancient history. Its claim, and this claim is legitimate, is
its crucial need for a homeland where in times of persecution Jews would always
be welcome, and this was the basis for Herzl’s advocacy of Zionism. To be sure
other minorities, whether Christians, Druze, or Kurds, have lived there for
centuries, but they have always been there as minorities in an overwhelming
Arab Muslim population. The expectation that Arabs would have a natural
animosity to Jewish settlement, was recognized by the Godfather of the present Israeli
government Vladimir (Ze’ev)
Jabotinsky,
who wrote, as I point out in "Part XX.":
“Every native population in the world resists
colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of
the danger of being colonized…That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing,
and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark
of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’
into the 'Land of Israel.”
Your lamentable observation that Jews living in Arab countries did not “agitate for independence” is best forgotten. In truth, Jews lived in Muslim territories as second-class citizens (dhimmis) who were accepted, tolerated or oppressed at various times. Before the advent of Zionism, they couldn’t afford the luxury of expressing political views.
I made
no such observation! That Jews were second class citizens in Arab countries is
undoubtedly true, but has little, if any bearing on our discussion,
particularly, since Jews for centuries, fled from Christian countries to Muslim
ones, because they could have a better life there.
Inter alia, the millions of Kurds resident in the Middle East over millennia have never had their own independent territory.
True!
But its relevance escapes me. I think they should have.
More important, you appear to have forgotten that anti-Jewish hatred has been the primary motivating factor in the conflict between Zionists and Arabs over the past hundred years. There were numerous times when territorial compromises could have been negotiated. Yet, at every point, Arabs refused to accept any Jewish presence on any lands perceived as belonging to them, except as a tolerated (and powerless) minority. Land, per se, was never the paramount issue.
I
disagree “that anti-Jewish hatred has been the primary motivating factor.” But
this raises the question of what came first – the chicken or the egg – we can argue
this ad infinitum.
Inexplicably, you neglect to mention that early Zionists accepted every territorial concession presented to them that offered peace—first a British decision to cede the land east of the Jordan River to Arabs to create a new, “Palestinian” state of Transjordan, then the 1947 partition plan which you describe here. After the June 1967 war came the famous September Khartoum Declaration of “No peace, No recognition, No negotiation with Israel” which ended Israeli delusions about any “new understanding” that could lead to peace.
I refer
the reader back to Jabotinsky. This was to be expected. As long as they felt
that they could win, they were not ready to compromise. Now that they know they
can’t win, they want to compromise. And that represents the opportunity we have
been looking for.
Nevertheless, Israel subsequently and unilaterally returned a portion of Golan territory to Syria and the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.
Not unilaterally!
As part of negotiations leading to a cessation of hostilities.
Later, Israel withdrew unilaterally from the Gaza Strip.
This
was not done out of generosity. It was a military decision that continuing
occupation was costing Israel too much, and that withdrawal, with a blockade,
would aid Israel in claiming all of the West Bank.
(In contrast, when Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri [who was later assassinated by Hezbullah] was asked why he couldn’t accept Israeli presence on a small parcel of borderland called Sheba Farms, he replied trenchantly, “Why should I?”)
This is
hardly unusual. Nations are very jealous about their territorial integrity, and
all nations are reluctant to give up “one inch” of what they consider to be part
of their nation.
As indicated earlier, historians select their “facts” based on covert or overt values. It isn’t possible to assess “rights” or “wrongs” without identifying these values.
This is
an unfortunate comment for it relegates all history, and all facts, as being
subjective, and therefor implies that we should not be bothered by facts or by
history. But then what is left. This assertion suggests, or implies, that facts
and history are on my side of the debate, and therefor we should ignore them.
I now welcome
comments readers care to make, but it may be difficult to post them, while this
discussion with Nekimken is in progress.
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