No Presbyterian need lose sleep over the injustice done to these Jews

"In the first decade, hundreds of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews flooded Israel to escape the blowback or fear of blowback, as the region became inflamed at the perceived injustice of the enforced partition of Palestine..."
The word 'blowback' is the only reference in 78 pages of this ferociously anti-Zionist screed to the Jewish Nakba -- the mass persecution and expulsion, from 1948 onwards, of a million Jews from the Arab world.

Lyn Julius..
Huffington Post..
06 March '14..

In the neighborhood of Kerem Hateymanim, the bougainvillea spill out over the terraces. The one-story homes, built higgledy-piggledy, jostle for space. Here, like in much of south Tel Aviv, outsiders have been buying up property as the area undergoes inevitable gentrification. But in the beginning, the neighborhood was constructed out of wooden beams and tin roofs by desperately poor Jews from the Yemen in 1904, before Tel Aviv itself was founded.

It has become almost received wisdom that the first Zionists to resettle in 19th century Palestine were European Jews. Not so. The Jewish immigrants from Yemen arrived in 1882, seven months before the first wave of Jewish farmers from Russia.

The Zionists arriving from Yemen on foot were living proof that their yearning to live as masters of their own destiny in the land of Israel had been a motivating force for Mizrahi (oriental) Jews before Theodor Herzl made his mark. For centuries before them, waves of Sephardi (Spanish) Jews from the Ottoman Empire had resettled in Hebron, Jerusalem, Safed and Tiberias.

Why is it important to put the record straight? Because propaganda such as Zionism Unsettled, a congregational study guide produced by the Israel-Palestine Mission of the U.S. Presbyterian Church, tries to paint Zionism as an unjust European settler movement. Yet none can describe Jews who had been in the Arabian peninsula for 3,000 years as other than indigenous.

The guide goes further: It implies that Mizrahi Jews were lured under false pretenses to Israel. In the words of the maverick New York academic Ella Shohat -- who incidentally never lived in an Arab country -- these Jews have been swindled out of their cultural heritage by European Zionism -- 'an immense confidence trick.'

For Shohat, Mizrahim can only ever be victims of 'Ashkenazi' Zionism. Never mind that today Mizrahim and Sephardim are prominent businesspeople, entertainers, army generals and government ministers -- Shohat will forever think of them as the 'Second Israel' -- fit only for exploitation and discrimination by their European brethren.

For Shohat's theory to make sense, the guide has to create a pre-existing myth of 'peaceful coexistence' between Jews and Arabs. Thus, the diaspora is really not such a bad place for a Jew. Anything is better than living in that 'unsettling' Zionist state. Jewish life 'is alive and well' in Iran under Islamist rule. (An assertion ably refuted by Karmel Melamed here).

In truth the booklet is not especially aware, or interested, in the 50 percent of Israeli Jews whose families escaped with their lives from Arab and Muslim lands.

It makes scant mention of Jews from Arab countries. But on page 14, we come to:

"In the first decade, hundreds of Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews flooded Israel to escape the blowback or fear of blowback, as the region became inflamed at the perceived injustice of the enforced partition of Palestine...

The word 'blowback' is the only reference in 78 pages of this ferociously anti-Zionist screed to the Jewish Nakba -- the mass persecution and expulsion, from 1948 onwards, of a million Jews from the Arab world.

Blowback. A reaction. A backlash. Had those dastardly European Zionists not dared partition Palestine, the 'region would not have been inflamed at the perceived injustice.' There would have been no blowback. In other words, the Jews themselves, even non-combatants minding their business miles from a war they did not start, are to blame for the Arab and Muslim antisemitism that drove them out.

The Presbyterian authors have barely a word -- and no word of sympathy -- for these Jews, sent packing with a single suitcase. The guide has plenty about the 500 depopulated villages of Palestine, whose inhabitants were complicit in an Arab war of extermination against the newborn state of Israel. Not a sentence about the deserted Mellahs of the judenrein Middle East and North Africa, the Jewish property abandoned, the now overgrown cemeteries, the sequestrated clubs and schools. No Presbyterian need lose sleep over the injustice done to these Jews.

More or less accepting his enemies’ ‘right’ to bash his brains out!

Fresnozionism.org..
08 April '13..

Yesterday I talked about universalizing the Holocaust, and how it obscures an important lesson for the Jewish people: that we cannot place the responsibility for our defense in other hands.

A reader has pointed me to another piece which made a similar point, but expressed in in more general terms. Daniel Greenfield (‘Sultan Knish’) wrote this (but read the whole article):

The Jewish response to the Holocaust fell into these two categories. Never Again and Teach Tolerance. And the two responses were segmented by population. Never Again became the credo of Israel and Teach Tolerance became the credo of the Western Diaspora.

There were many Israelis who believed in teaching tolerance and many Western Jews who believed in self-defense, but for the most part the responses were structural because the divide between Nationalists and Universalists predated the Holocaust. …

Never Again made the Holocaust a teachable moment for Jews. Teach Tolerance made it a teachable moment for all mankind. The Nationalist and the Universalist draw two opposite lessons from the Holocaust. The Nationalists focus on resistance while the Universalists focus on persecution. The Nationalist aspires to be a ghetto fighter while the Universalist aspires to be a good German. …

The Holocaust did not heal the divide between the Universalists and the Nationalists; it deepened it. The Universalists still insisted that a better world was coming and that the Holocaust made it more urgent for us to work toward it, while the Nationalists saw the world as a cycle of civilizations that had to be survived, with no respite, except for the religious who awaited a final transformation of the world and everything in it.

The nationalist/universalist distinction is a good one, much more illuminating of today’s war between the Jews than the more usual ones of Right vs. Left or Conservative vs. Liberal.

As Greenfield notes, the universalist believes in progress — he sees human society as perfectible, and indeed, moving in the direction of a better, more humane world. He often believes that the main obstacles to progress are barriers to communication; all humans are at bottom similar with similar wants and needs (mostly economic), and if we only understood each other we could work together for the common good. He prefers to avoid making moral judgments on other cultures.

Elder - The disappearance and reappearance of Palestinian Arab nationalism, 1949-1968

Elder of Ziyon..
27 December '11..

Palestinian Arab nationalism effectively sprung out of thin air in 1920. Up until then, with very little exception, it was subsumed under the desire to be a part of "Greater Syria" which would include all of Palestine - and leave no room for a Jewish state.

As soon as the ink dried on the San Remo resolution, Palestinian Arab leaders changed their tune, and embraced the idea of an Arab Palestine that would, again, ensure that no Jewish state would ever exist.

After 1948, the desire for a Palestinian Arab state disappeared again. Palestinian Arabs in the west bank of the Jordan became citizens of that country; those in Gaza saw their land occupied by Egypt. Neither of them showed the slightest interest in their own state - the desire just disappeared.

What replaced it was a return to 1919's Syrian-style pan-Arabism, and the person they believed could help them was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Here is an interesting AP story from 1957:

Yes, Palestinians in Gaza in 1957 wanted to be under the administration of Egypt - not to have their own country!

In fact, Jordan's King Hussein's major problem during that time was the threat from Nasser, who incited Jordanian Palestinians to revolt against him and even to assassinate him, so the entire Arab world could be Nasserist.

What happened to their vaunted nationalism? Where was their desire for an independent state that their leaders spoke about so eloquently during the 1940s?

It is apparent that the desire for a state was far less than the desire to destroy Israel, which was Nasser's selling point to them. "Liberating Palestine" meant liberating it - from Jews.

(Read full "The disappearance and reappearance of Palestinian Arab nationalism")

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The son also rises, for Arab misfortune

Michael Young
Daily Star (Beirut)
08 April '10

Michael Young is opinion editor of The Daily Star. Another excellent piece on who are the people in your neighborhood.

In his book “What’s Left,” the British author Nick Cohen quotes a onetime Foreign Office official as saying, “All isms are wasms.” That amusing phrase is an apt summation of Arab nationalism, as regimes throughout the Middle East claiming some sort of fealty to nationalist ideology find themselves at different levels of political breakdown.

The most flagrant sign of the decline of Arab nationalist regimes is their transformation into hereditary republics. Recently, Hosni Mubarak returned from an operation in Germany to face questions about his future. What ailed him remains unknown, but it is no secret that the 81-year-old Egyptian president has long sought to prepare the way for his son, Gamal, to succeed him.

In this, Mubarak is little different than the late Hafez Assad, whose son Bashar followed him as president of Syria. Had Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, he would almost certainly have handed over to one of his psychopathic sons. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, hopes one day to see his son Ahmad in office. In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi appears to have similar aspirations for one of his boys, perhaps Seif al-Islam or the younger Moatassem. And in Tunisia, President Zein al-Abedin bin Ali is rumored to want his son in law, Sakher al-Materi, to one day lead the country.

Forgotten in these family plots is that, in several countries, nationalist regimes once drew their legitimacy from overthrowing monarchical orders perceived as corrupt or in the pocket of foreign powers. Inherent in the Arab nationalism of the latter years of colonial rule and the first decades of independence was a conviction that the ideology was a byword for reform. Baathism in Syria and Iraq introduced purportedly egalitarian socialist principles, as did Nasserism in Egypt. Habib Bourghuiba gave Tunisian women rights while also introducing improvements in education and more.

Yet that did not prevent all Arab regimes from consolidating autocratic rule, usually in the guise of family-led kleptocracies. Whereas specific nationalist leaders may have enjoyed legitimacy upon taking office, all came later on to rely substantially on violence to maintain order. This was the case in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia after Bin Ali, and the list goes on. Arab nationalists, previously thought of as representing the vanguard of a new Middle East, instead merely reproduced the methods of pre-Independence regimes, usually in far more brutal ways.

(Read full article)
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An Arab Liberal Explains What's Wrong and Dreams His Worst Nightmare

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
26 January '10

You couldn’t do better to understand the contemporary Middle East than through an al-Jazira television program recorded and translated by MEMRI. The speaker is Moncef al-Marzouki, a Paris-based Tunisian human rights activist.

Note: if you read to the end of this article you will encounter the stinger, like a horror movie’s last scene when the monster leaps out and devours the hero.

Marzouki lives in Paris, which tells a lot. It’s hard to live in the Arabic-speaking world and express such frank opinions. Moreover, he is very much exposed to Western influences which flavors his thought and, by the same token, distances him from those living in the Middle East.

While under the themes of Political Correctness and multiculturalism, those in the West celebrate and flatter Arab political culture, the people who actually live under that system are in despair.

While those in the West usually argue the main complaint of Arabic-speakers is about what foreigners do to them, their real problem is what their own leaders do to them.

While in Western universities, students are most often taught about the Middle East along the lines of Arab nationalist ideology, their best counterparts in the region are imprisoned and tortured by regimes holding that doctrine. Meanwhile, these victims’ ill-treatment of is applauded by the Western professors’ ideological counterparts in the Arabic-speaking world.

(Read full article)
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