Tsvi Bisk – The Unbearable Shallowness of Being Progressive Part I – The Middle East
Tsvi Bisk has posted numerous articles on the Daily Kos website – a self-defined progressive website – with no problems. This particular posting, disputing the anti-Israel narrative of many on the left with substantive arguments, was taken down within hours with the following excuse — Your story was unpublished for multiple violations of our Rules of the Road (https://www.dailykos.com/rules-of-the-road
We invite all our readers to peruse their “Rules of the Road” and determine for yourselves if Bisk violated ANY rules and base your decision to subscribe or contribute to the Daily Kos on the basis of your own conclusions.”
The moral and intellectual superficiality of many in the “progressive” camp has become an embarrassment to the very concept of progressive thinking. Many self-identified progressives have become so locked into postmodernist deconstructionist gibberish and pseudo-Marxist sloganeering that they have become totally incapable of seriously addressing human affairs that are conspicuously sui generis. They throw around words that have profound and precise historical meaning as if they were so many holiday treats: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, colonial settler, war crimes, crimes against humanity etc. etc. They have become good students of Foucault who famously said, “I hate facts” (as in “facts can really mess up a good narrative”).
It used to be that democratic socialists and social democrats distinguished themselves from Marxists in the recognition that some historical events simply cannot fit comfortably into some all-encompassing historiosophic theory. I refer of course to the Middle East and the present iteration of that conflict.
I want to stipulate, at the outset, that criticizing Israel for its settlement policies, and its unequal enforcement of the law, and its budgetary inequities, and its theocratic aspects does not make one an antisemite, else I would be an antisemite. Neither does supporting the Palestinian cause or taking their side in the overall dispute make you an antisemite. Neither does thinking that Zionism was a bad idea to begin with. But denying that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination and supporting Hamas’s dedication to destroying the Jewish state, however, does make you an antisemite. The atrocities of October 7th have nothing to do with words like context, root causes or “nuance” – the purposeful cruelties are barbaric by any standard and cannot be justified by fancy dialectics. Denying that the atrocities of October 7th even happened certainly makes you an antisemite. But I am getting ahead of myself. First a due diligence. I am a pre-postmodernist (or a post-postmodernist, whatever you fancy); I believe words signify real objective meaning and not the subjective feelings of the morally self-indulgent. For example:
Genocide
Genocide used to mean that the population of a certain ethnic group plummeted as a result of mass slaughter; not that it increased significantly during the period of the genocide. Between 1939 and 1945 the Jewish population of the world DECLINED by 6 million (and still hasn’t reached pre-war levels). Between 1948 and 2023 the Palestinian population of the world INCREASED by 6 million. A very strange genocide indeed. But if you want a taste of what real genocide might look like if those supporting Hamas get their way, just look at what they did on October 7th. Even the Nazis didn’t demonstrate so much glee when they were slaughtering Jews (and the Hamasniks made sure to boast they were killing Jews and not Zionists). Indeed, one of the arguments for the facelessness of the gas chambers was that the German soldiers were demoralized by having to shoot women and children. The Hamasniks certainly weren’t demoralized; the bloodier it got the more exhilarated the Hamasniks became. How one can justify or explain away what happened on October 7th and call oneself a “progressive” is beyond me. How so-called progressive women’s organizations can remain indifferent (and mute) to the mass rape and sexual mutilations that took place on October 7th is revolting.
Real genocide is more accurately reflected in Muslim on Muslim bloodshed and slaughter. For every Muslim killed by Israelis, British, and Americans since 1950 many dozens have been killed by their fellow Muslims. A partial list includes 50,000 Muslims gassed in Yemen by Nasser in the 60’s; 20,000 Palestinian men women and children killed by King Hussein in 1970 Black September (Queen Rania’s tearful entreating is a bit much considering her father-in-law killed more Palestinians in aggregate than Israel ever has); a million Muslims killed by Muslims in the Iran-Iraq war in the 80’s; 200,000 Muslims killed by Muslims in Algeria in the 1990’s; Saddam Hussein’s butchery of tens of thousands of his own Muslim citizens; tens of thousands killed in sectarian Sunni-Shia strife in Pakistan and Iraq; Assad slaughtering 600,000 of his own citizens; the present slaughter again in Yemen (on both sides) with each side bombing hospitals and refugee camps. Over 8 million Moslems have been killed by their fellow Moslems since 1948, compared to less than 100,000 by Israel (mostly on the battlefield and mostly not Palestinians).
The embarrassing fact for progressives is that Shiite and Sufi Muslims are more secure in Israel than in any Sunni country and Sunnis are more secure in Israel than in any Shiite country. On November 2017, Sunni Islamists stormed a Sufi mosque in the Egyptian-ruled Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 305 people. Assaults on Sufi shrines in Pakistan carried out by Sunni extremists is standard fare (their treatment of Shiites, Ahmadis, and Hindus is no better). Shiites have been persecuted and pogromed in Sunni Egypt for decades. Wahabi Sunnis destroy Shia shrines in Saudi Arabia. Ahmadi Muslims are persecuted throughout Muslim majority countries. Pakistan’s constitution declares them to be non-Muslims. Saudi Arabia bars Ahmadis from entering the country and performing the Haj. Algeria persecutes them mercilessly. The only Ahmadi mosque in the entire Middle East is in Jewish Haifa, and the Ahmadis are altogether integrated into Israeli society. Compared to unsubstantiated Western and Israeli contempt for Islamic culture, real internal Muslim contempt is striking.
Muslim contempt for (and genocide of) non-Muslims has been even more prominent. Muslim Sudan murdered millions of non-Muslims in southern Sudan. Christian Copts in Egypt have been perennially persecuted. The Yazidi genocide in Iran is still ongoing. Muslim Taliban committed the greatest cultural atrocity of the 21st century when it blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas statues in Afghanistan (a UNESCO World Heritage site). This aroused no Muslim indignation, but caricatures in a Danish newspaper provoked millions to demonstrate, riot and boycott. The culture of self-pity and denial as well as the inability to engage in constructive self-criticism are the true enemies of Islam, not the Jews or the West.
Ethnic Cleansing
Real ethnic cleansing is at this very moment, in 2023, taking place in Sunni Pakistan which is forcibly expelling 1.7 million Sunni Muslim Afghani refugees at the onset of winter with no international aid arrangements for their well-being. Tractors in the middle of the night destroying their tents and homes – tens of thousands will likely die. Progressives – where art thou?
The truth is that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that Israel is being accused of has rather gone the opposite way since 1948. 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled in 1948. 900,000 Mizrahi Jews fled or were expelled from Arab and other Muslim lands where they had lived for 20-30 centuries, long before Muslims conquered these lands by force of arms. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians remained in Israel and now number over two million Israeli citizens compared to less than 20,000 Jews remaining in the entire two billion strong Muslim world. The methods of driving the Jews out have been varied. From Iraq’s Farhud pogrom in 1941, which killed 200 Jews, injured 1,000 more and destroyed 900 homes, to much more subtle legal machinations. Many left with the clothes on their backs, forced to abandon all their belongings and property. Progressives should note that whenever the question for reparations for Palestinian refugees comes up, these Mizrahi Jews and their descendants (deemed Kosher for progressive consumption because of their brown skin) demand equal consideration for reparations for the property taken from them by the Muslim regimes they had to flee.
Racism and Apartheid
I stipulate that Israel is as racist as France, the United States and dozens of other countries, although I would love to see an empirical Human Development Index study comparing Israeli Arabs with Europe’s Muslim communities as well as America’s inner cities and Native American reservations. As for Israeli “apartheid” and the inherent racism of Zionism, the chairman of the board of Bank Leumi, founded by Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, is Dr. Samer Haj Yehia, an Israeli Muslim. The Director of the Rebecca Sieff hospital – named after the founder of WIZO, the Women’s International Zionist Organization is Dr. Salman Zarka, a member of Israel’s Druze community. Christian Arab woman, Prof. Mouna Maroun, is head of the Sagol Department of Neurobiology at Haifa University. Prof. Ashraf Brik leads an international lab of researchers at the Technion and sits on the editorial boards of Cell Chemical Biology and ChemBioChem. Muslim cardiologist, Dr. Aziz Darawshe, is director of the emergency department at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, and chairman of the Israel Society for Urgent Medicine. Muslim woman, Lucy Aharish, is a news anchor, for channel 12, a major Israeli television network. Bibras Natcho, a Circassian Muslim, captained Israel’s national football team. Dr. Masad Barhoum is Director of the Galilee Medical Center. Presiding Judge of the tribunal that sentenced Jewish President Moshe Katzav to prison was Christian Arab George Karra, who subsequently became a member of Israel’s supreme court. Muslim Judge, Khaled Kabub, now sits on Israel’s Supreme Court.
The percentage of Arab students studying for a bachelor’s degree at the Technion (Israel’s MIT) is over 20 percent. Jewish waiters wait on Arab diners and Jewish soldiers take orders from Druze, Circassian and Bedouin officers. Arabs share swimming pools and beaches with Jews, including Arabs from the West Bank. When hospitalized, I shared my room with an Arab. Three of the doctors that attended me were Arabs. 21% of doctors in Israel are Arab (their same percentage in population). A very strange racism and Apartheid indeed!
But if you are really interested in Apartheid against Palestinians consider that Arab journalists Khaled Abu Toameh and Rami Khouri have accused Lebanon of practicing apartheid against Palestinians. Palestinians in Lebanon are prohibited from owning property and suffer legal restrictions barring them from working in more than 20 high-level professions including the public services and institutions run by the government such as schools and hospitals. Lebanese law also bars Palestinians from receiving social security benefits and deprives them of health care, social services, and education. Unlike Israel, Lebanese public hospitals do not even admit Palestinians for medical treatment or surgery. One of the ironies of October 7th was that Hamas murdered and kidnapped Kibbutzniks who had devoted their lives to arranging medical treatment in Israel hospitals for Gazan children.
White Settler Colonialism
Zionism is accused of being a white settler colonial manifestation, similar to North America, Australia and a dozen others. Seriously? Let’s observe a few differences.
- Every other settler colonial enterprise represented or derived from an existing mother country or group of countries – extant political entities financing and encouraging the enterprise. Zionism, on the other hand, was a self-generated ideology addressing the needs and desires of Jewish people, financed and managed by themselves and not a product of any imperialist metropole.
- No other settler colonial enterprise viewed itself as returning to its homeland. White colonial settlers knew they were colonizing foreign lands to which they had no historical connection.
- No other modern settler colonial enterprise was driven by the desire of the settler colonizers to escape persecution and discrimination.
- No other settler colonial enterprise viewed its colonial ambition as being part and parcel of their national cultural, psychological and moral renewal.
- No other settler colonial enterprise satisfied itself with only one
- No other settler colonial enterprise desired so passionately to settle a land almost completely devoid of natural resources.
- No other settler colonial enterprise desired to create an independent state (all the others saw themselves as dependent colonies of the mother country).
- No other settler colonial enterprise actually bought and paid for the land they were settling (at grossly overvalued cost) before the creation of the state.
- No other white settler colonial enterprise was composed of so many brown skinned people.
A very strange white settler colonial enterprise indeed!
A more fundamental question is the following: if Zionism was a settler colonial enterprise, why did six million Jews die? Certainly the sponsoring imperialist metropole would have seized the opportunity to further its colonial ambitions and settled these Jews. The Wannsee Conference defined the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem” in 1942 after Hitler despaired of finding any non-European country or European empire willing to take the Jews. The Holocaust began in 1939 but the means and strategy of the Final Solution was finalized in 1942. So what Imperialist power does Zionism represent?
Open Air Prison
Gaza contains dozens of billionaires and hundreds of millionaires living in villas; a professional middle class living in upscale apartments, and very exclusive shopping centers serving both these populations. A very strange prison indeed!
True, the billionaires and millionaires are mostly corrupt Hamas operatives who derive their wealth from being exclusive suppliers to UNRWA and having a monopoly on all imports to Gaza, selling them for inflated prices on the black market. Hamas is really an organized crime operation running the most extensive protection racket in the world. Yet, even with Gaza’s kleptocratic mafia style governance, its aggregate Human Development Index (HDI) is higher than the aggregate average of the Arab States, higher than almost all sub-Saharan African countries, as well as the countries of Southeast Asia (India. Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.)
Its HDI has been financed by international aid which since 1948 totals five times more per capita than Europe received under the Marshall Plan, augmented by tens of thousands of Gazans working in Israel, receiving greatly discounted water and electricity from Israel, and having Israel’s advanced medical system available to it in emergencies. If the Strip hadn’t been so corrupt it might have become one of the wealthiest areas in the world. As far as being too crowded to develop, well, wealthy Singapore’s population density is 25% higher than that of Gaza.
Root Causes
An analogy of the logic of this argument might go as follows: the root cause of the Holocaust was the Versailles Treaty. If Germany hadn’t been so humiliated, Hitler and the Nazis never would have come to power. Of course the Nazis might have overdone it a bit but one must always contextualize, pay attention to nuance and try to understand motivation. Because even though 80% of the German people supported Hitler, it was completely immoral of the allies to kill so many “innocent” civilians. The killing of millions of innocent civilians constitutes a genocide against the German people especially given the fact that the allies did not call for a ceasefire and insisted on unconditional surrender. Also, the Nazis killed between 70 and 80,000 French Jews in the course of their occupation of France while, allied “friendly” fire killed between 70 and 80,000 French men, women and children between D-Day and the liberation of Paris. This makes the allies and the Nazis in France equivalently immoral and equality guilty of genocide against the French people, as there is no moral distinction between killing people intentionally as the Nazis did and killing people within that euphemism termed ‘collateral damage’.
The fundamental justification for the “revolutionary resistance” action of October 7th, which exhilarated so many enlightened progressives, is that the root cause of the attack is the occupation in general and the blockade on Gaza in particular. In other words, Israel is to blame! The problem with this argument is that there is no real blockade of vital supplies, only limits of things that Hamas can turn into weapons – else their HDI could not have been what it was.
The blockade began in 2007 after the democratically elected Hamas government slaughtered 200 Palestinian Authority officials. Since Hamas’s clearly enunciated aim (in both its covenant and entire educational project) was to exterminate all the Jews in the world, Israelis were worried that they might once again turn Gaza into a base for terror attacks against Israel. This fear was quickly justified by Hamas’s actions and thus began the blockade. I remind the reader that the aim to exterminate the Jews has been a fundamental principle of the Palestinian national political platform since Hitler’s Muslim ally and supporter, the Mufti Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the most powerful leader of the Palestinian national movement during most of the British rule over Palestine, and a vicious antisemite who wanted to rid the entire world of Jews (Hitler was more modest, he only wanted to rid Europe of Jews).
The root cause of the occupation is the 6-Day War which was a consequence of Egypt violating international law and closing the straits of Tiran and Israel being surrounded by four armies (Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq) in full battle readiness declaring they will destroy Israel. This is defined by international law as a casus belli, which is “an act or situation provoking or justifying war”. The root cause of the occupation is that following the 6-Day War and Israel’s readiness to return territories for peace the entire Arab world responded with the three Noes of Khartoum: “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.”
The root cause of all this is the very existence of the State and the 1948 war which created the refugee problem. The root cause of all this lies in a fundamentalist Muslim view that non-Muslims, especially Jews, have no right to political sovereignty in territories previously ruled by Muslims. It is worth remembering that long-term strategic discussions within Hamas (and other branches of the Muslim brotherhood) debate whether it is wise to make claim to southern Italy (the Caliphate of Sicily) and southern Spain (Andalusia) now, or only after they destroy Israel.
Historical Muslim Hostility to Jews
The Palestinians claim they are paying for European crimes against the Jews, using the Holocaust as ‘year one’ in the Zionist calendar. But Zionism was a response to the centuries-long treatment of the Jews in Europe and the Muslim world well before the Holocaust. Actually the Palestinians ‘paid’ for a crime they were prevented from committing by circumstances. If Montgomery had not defeated the Germans at El Alamein, the Mufti’s followers would have assisted them in the extermination of 400,000 Palestinian Jews and then gone on to help purify Egypt of its 150,000 Jews – with Syrian, Lebanese, and Iraqi Jewry soon to follow. How do we know this? Because the Mufti and his followers were quite open and clear about their intentions, if only given the chance.
Moreover, Palestinian pressure on the British to enforce the White Paper probably cost the lives of several hundred thousand European Jews who might have been saved, if the British had let them take refuge in what eventually became Israel. The Farhud in Iraq in 1941 was a pogrom carried out by pro-Nazi Iraqis actively supported and egged on by the Mufti. It was but an extension of the anti-Jewish riots in Palestine in 1936 and 1939. This behavior had deep historical roots. As early as 1834 – long before resentment towards Zionism could possibly be used to justify barbaric behavior – local Arabs massacred the Jewish population of Safed. This was not a unique occurrence. Previously, in 1660, local Arabs had slaughtered the Jews of Safed. In 1929, the non-Zionist ultra-religious Jews of Hebron were slaughtered by the Palestinians. The claim that Palestinian Arabs never persecuted the Jews is patently false.
The claim that Jews were treated better in the Muslim world than in Europe is akin to claiming that Blacks were treated better (or less worse) in Jim Crow Virginia than in apartheid South Africa. Why this kind of argument should make the Middle Eastern Jew or the American Black feel better about the nature of their discrimination is beyond comprehension. As the historian G.E. von Grunebaum wrote:
It would not be difficult to put together the names of a very sizeable number of Jewish subjects or citizens of the Islamic area who have attained to high rank, to power, to great financial influence, to significant and recognized intellectual attainment; and the same could be done for Christians. But it would again not be difficult to compile a lengthy list of persecutions, arbitrary confiscations, attempted forced conversions, or pogroms.[1]
The historical Muslim hostility to Jews was ubiquitous from Islam’s very beginnings. In the 8th century, Idris the First, the founder of Morocco, wiped out entire communities of Jews in North Africa. In 1066 a mob incited by Muslim preachers destroyed the Jewish quarter of Granada and slaughtered over 4,000 Jews. Jews were forced to live in Mellahs (the Muslim analogue to the European Ghetto) in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Morocco. When the Almohads (the medieval analogue of ISIS) conquered Morocco and Islamic Spain in 1172, they forcibly converted or expelled or killed Jews and Christians (much like ISIS in 2014). Some Jews, like Maimonides, escaped to more tolerant parts of the Muslim world, while others moved north to Christian areas. In 1465, the Fez pogrom slaughtered thousands of Jews. In 1656, the entire Jewish population of Isfahan Persia (present-day Iran) was expelled from the city. In 1785, hundreds of Libyan Jews were murdered.
The situation of Jews in Arab countries became even more dangerous in the 19th century. Jews in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Morocco were forced to live in ghettos. In Morocco, Jews were forced to walk barefoot or wear shoes of straw when outside the ghetto. Muslim children threw stones at Jews and harassed them in other ways. The frequency of anti-Jewish violence increased, and many Jews were executed on charges of apostasy. In Algiers, Jews were massacred in 1805, 1815 and 1830. In 1864, pogroms in Morocco killed over 500 Jews. In 1869, 18 Tunisian Jews were killed in Tunis, and on Jerba Island, an Arab mob looted Jewish homes and stores and burned synagogues. In 1875, Moroccan Jews were attacked and killed in the streets in broad daylight. In 1897 in present-day Libya, Jews were murdered and their synagogues looted. Ritual murder accusations against the Jews became commonplace in the Ottoman Empire.
The situation of the Jews in Persia (modern Iran) was especially extreme. In 1839, in the city of Meshed, a Muslim mob attacked the Jewish Quarter, burned the synagogue, destroyed the Torah scrolls, and forcibly converted the Jews to Islam. Another massacre occurred in Barfurush, in 1867. In the 19th century, a Jewish traveler and commentator wrote about the life of Jews in Muslim Persia thus:
…they are obliged to live in a separate part of town…for they are considered as unclean creatures…should they enter a street inhabited by Muslims, they are pelted by boys and mobs with stones and dirt… they are prohibited to go out when it rains; for it is said the rain would wash dirt off them, which would sully the feet of the Muslims… If a Jew is recognized as such in the streets, he is subjected to the greatest insults. The passers-by spit in his face, and sometimes beat him… unmercifully… If a Jew enters a shop for anything, he is forbidden to inspect the goods… Should his hand incautiously touch the goods, he must take them at any price the seller chooses to ask for them… Sometimes the Persians intrude into the dwellings of the Jews and take possession of whatever pleases them. Should the owner make the least opposition in defense of his property, he incurs the danger of atoning for it with his life…If…a Jew shows himself in the street during the … Muharram, (the first month of the Islamic calendar)… he is sure to be murdered.[2]
Many Iranian Jews were forced to wear a yellow patch on their clothing to identify them as Jews. Since Iran (literally Land of the Aryans) was not considered a Semitic country by Hitler, he most probably got the idea for yellow star patch from them (just as he appropriated the swastika from the ‘Aryan’ Hindu tradition). The Jews of Muslim Bukhara in central Asia were also forced to wear yellow clothing in public. Many were forced to convert to Islam. Jews were not the only ones to be ‘branded’ by Muslims. Christians also were forced to wear special insignia on their clothes. The yellow badge actually originated in 9th-century Baghdad and then spread to medieval Europe; another source of ‘inspiration’ for the Nazis. Hindus living under Islamic rule in India were also often forced to wear yellow badges.
In Yemen, Muslims considered Jews to be impure. They were forbidden to touch a Muslim or a Muslim’s food and were forced to behave obsequiously to Muslims. They were compelled to walk to the left side of Muslims (next to the hand Muslims used to wipe themselves before the advent of toilet paper). Since a Jew could not be higher than a Muslim their dwellings were lower and they were forbidden to ride a camel or horse. They were limited to riding donkeys and even then had to dismount if they approached a Muslim on foot so as not to be higher. Jews were even forbidden to defend themselves if attacked by Muslims.
The 20th century was no better. By the twentieth century, the status of Jews and Christians in Muslim lands had not significantly improved. H.E.W. Young, British Vice Consul in Mosul (present day Iraq), wrote in 1909:
The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.[3]
A majority of Arabs and Muslims supported Nazi Germany and their anti-Jewish policies. Hitler’s racial laws of 1935 received praise from all over the Arab world. In 1937 King Saud of Saudi Arabia told an English emissary:
Our hatred for the Jews dates from God’s condemnation of them for their persecution and rejection of Isa (Jesus) and their subsequent rejection of His chosen Prophet (Muhammad)… for a Muslim to kill a Jew, or for him to be killed by a Jew ensures him an immediate entry into Heaven and into the august presence of God Almighty.
Muslim hatred for the Jews was no doubt exacerbated by the creation of Israel because these upstart Jews obviously did not know their proper place – to be subservient to the Muslims. ‘Knowing your place’ should have a familiar ring to it for Black Americans. The hatred of Jews as Zionists did not have a virgin birth. It grew upon the fertile field of condescending contempt for any Jewish pretension to equality, which was deeply rooted in Muslim attitudes. Zionism was a Jewish pretension to equality as it pertains to political self-determination. Thus, the so-called Muslim tolerance for Jews was always explicitly dependent on the Jews’ recognition of the inferiority of their rights.
Middle Eastern Jews were expelled from their historic homelands because they were Jews and not because they were Zionists (which most of them were not, in the modern sense of the word). Libya deprived its Jews of citizenship in 1961, as did Algeria in 1962. Iraq expelled its Jews in 1951, as did Egypt in 1956. Jordanian law forbade Jews from even living in Jordan; Jordanian Civil Law, which governed the Jordanian-occupied West Bank stated: “Any man will be a Jordanian subject if he is not Jewish” – not if he is not a Zionist.
The very ideology of the Palestinian national movement is antisemitic. The original Hamas Covenant maintained that the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was authentic and called for the extermination of Israel and the creation of a greater Islamic state in Palestine. It called all Arabs and Moslems that did not adhere to this position, traitors to Allah and implied they were deserving of death. Article 22 contained every canard against the Jews in the canon of antisemitism.
With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money, they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there…They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.
Article 28 contained a lie that Goebbels would have been proud of:
We should not forget to remind every Moslem that when the Jews conquered the Holy City in 1967, they stood on the threshold of the Aqsa Mosque and proclaimed that “Mohammed is dead, and his descendants are all women”…Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. “May the cowards never sleep!”
Examples of the Koranic origins of Moslem anti-Semitism were also contained in the body of the Covenant. For example, Article 7 contained the following:
The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him…”
The moral absolutes of Islam could not tolerate any semblance of Jewish autonomy. Nor could they tolerate the peace process. Article 13 of the Hamas Covenant should disabuse many well-meaning Westerners that the Palestinians have any interest whatsoever in a two-state solution:
Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors.
The original PLO covenant, while nowhere as vile in tone as the Hamas one, contained similar contempt for the Jews. And while Arafat had formally abrogated it, the PLO’s education system (like that of Hamas) still inculcate their children with the most vile antisemitic garbage. Unlike progressives, Israelis treat the Palestinians as adults who say what the mean and mean what they say, and not as childish natives without agency who have to be saved from their impulsiveness by great white progressive heroes. Israelis believe the Palestinians are sincere adults and really do hate the Jews as Jews.
The extent of corruption in Palestinian governance is another complication conveniently ignored by progressives. After the Oslo Agreement, the government of Ehud Barak complained to the Clinton administration about this and was told it was none of Israel’s business and that if Israel made a public issue about it the peace process would be endangered and Israel would be blamed for that. But the Palestinian street was not so inhibited. There were demonstrations in Gaza against the corruption of the Palestinian Authority. Arafat’s genius was in convincing world opinion that the Second Intifada was a result of Arik Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount (the courtyard of the Al Aqsa Mosque) and not a means of deflecting Palestinian anger from him to Israel and the occupation. That Barak approving Sharon’s visit was stupid in providing Arafat with this justification is beyond question, but no less a personage than Suha Arafat admitted much later that Arafat had told her to leave the territories well before Sharon’s visit because he intended to instigate a Second Intifada. Subsequently, Hamas gained power in Gaza to a great extent as a protest against PA corruption. Ironically their reign has been just as corrupt, if not more so.
This corruption is well known to the foreign donors as well as to Israelis, but the foreign donors rarely even hint at it publicly. They knew that no matter how great the humanitarian benefit of any project for the Palestinian people, it would only get done if they not only paid for it and but also supervised it directly. By 2014, the Palestinian leadership had received more aid per capita than any other political entity in history.
Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was respected in the West as a relatively honest and professional leader who tried to stop the thievery. But he was politically powerless and the leaders of Fatah worked endlessly to get rid of him so they could have unrestricted access to the loot. Hamas also wanted to fire him. And despite the protests of the western money donors he eventually lost his job. Why didn’t the Western funding stop? Because Western leaders felt that the ‘funding’ kept things relatively quiet compared to the rest of the chaos in the Middle East. In other words the ‘funding’ was actually a form of protection money to buy off the neighborhood thugs. Given this, it is not outrageous that Israeli public opinion is wary of the potential stability of any peace agreement with an entity so rife with corruption, devoid of national institutions and governed by leaders that more closely resembled Mafia Dons rather than Statesmen.
Geography Matters
The cavalier attitude of many Western interlocutors towards Israel’s geographical dimensions, when advocating withdrawal from the ‘occupied territories’, makes them suspect even in the eyes of many Israeli territorial minimalists. It is as if they have been cultivating a purposeful ignorance regarding the significance of territory for defense. Consider:
- Distance from Damascus to Tel Aviv is 133 miles; New York to Baltimore is 170 miles.
- Distance from Damascus to Haifa is 90 miles; New York to Philadelphia is also 90 miles.
- Distance from Tel Aviv to Nablus is 31 miles; from Bronx to Staten Island also 31 miles.
- Distance from the Palestinian town of Tulkaram to the Israeli city of Netanya is 10 miles; from the Bronx to midtown Manhattan is 11 miles.
- Distance from Gaza city to Ashkelon is 13 miles; from northeast Philadelphia to south Philadelphia it is 16 miles.
When rockets are fired from Gaza, residents of Tel Aviv have 90 seconds to take cover; residents of Ashkelon have about 20 seconds. The claim that in the age of rockets, territorial depth means nothing is either completely ignorant or just plain wicked. This in combination with the false claims of a Muslim/Jewish Golden Age and the unalloyed evil anti-Jewish rhetoric of much Palestinian bombast has only worked to strengthen the extreme rightwing of Israeli politics.
Dear Progressives – please make an effort to know what you are talking about when you decide to make judgments about the Middle East!
[1] Grunebaum, G.E. “Eastern Jewry Under Islam”, Viator (1971), p. 369
[2]Lewis, Bernard. The Jews of Islam, Princeton University Press, 1984. pp. 181–183
[3]Middle Eastern Studies (1971), p. 232
