The implicit rejection of the Palestinian narrative of catastrophe

Michael Curtis..
American Thinker..
28 April '13..

The release by the British National Archives in London in April 2013 of the records, previously secret files, of the British Mandate Administration in Palestine are revealing and invaluable for an understanding of contemporary attitudes towards Israel. The files dispose in what should be a final and definitive fashion of the concept, the simple and histrionic one, asserted by the Palestinian Narrative of a Nakba, or catastrophe, resulting from the establishment of Israel. The true Nakba, it should now be clear, comes from the refusal of Arab states and Palestinians to accept the United Nations General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of November 29, 1947 and thus a peaceful settlement of the conflict with Israel. The documents reveal that unlike the Jewish response to the Resolution, that of the Arabs was "a mood of bitterness and universal suspicion."

Not surprisingly, the documents show the British lack of sympathy, overt distaste, and even hostility for the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine, and they comment on the increase in Jewish settlement on the land. The British administrators stated that the Jews were willing to go "to any lengths to achieve their aims." Though they refer to atrocities on both sides, they more frequently mention Jewish terrorist groups that were attacking both British forces and Arab fighters in the weeks before Israel was established. One report of October 1947 mentions an interview by Menachem Begin, then head of Irgun, that "the fight against the British invader would continue until the last one left Palestine."

Another report presents the Arab version of the killings, by a Jewish militia attempting to end the blockade of Jerusalem by Arab forces, that occurred on April 9, 1948 in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, the details of which are still disputed (though Palestinians and Arabs have continually used it for propaganda effect). It also explains, if not defends, the massacre on April 13, 1948 by Arabs of 79 Jewish doctors and nurses in the convoy bringing supplies to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus as a response to Deir Yassin. An extremely hostile view of Jews was expressed by Sir Alan Cunningham, High Commissioner of Palestine, who wrote on April 30, 1948 that the Jewish broadcasts about their military activity "both in content and in manner of delivery, are remarkably like those of Nazi Germany."

The documents also argue that the Jewish public endorsed the view of their leaders that "terrorism is a natural consequence of the general policy of His Majesty's Government." Most important in this was the British refusal to allow Jews, especially those coming out of Nazi concentration camps, to enter Palestine, and the British hostility to "illegal" immigrants.

What is most important in these documents is the implicit rejection of the Palestinian narrative of catastrophe that has been embraced by so many groups and individuals. This is the validation by the British, themselves, so unsympathetic to the Jewish community, that the Arab attacks on Jews took place before the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948. The documents record that in early 1948, the Arabs "had suffered a series of overwhelming defeats." The consequence was that the Jewish military victories "have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands. It is now obvious that the only hope of regaining their position lies in the regular armies of the Arab states."

(Video) Yael Ben-Dov - "Go home!" A Story of the 1948 Generation

Yael Ben-Dov talks about how she got her start at a young age in the struggle for Israel's founding as part of The Founders: The Story of the 1948 Generation, a jointly produced project of Toldot Yisrael and the History Channel.


ToldotYisrael on Jun 23, 2010

About Toldot Yisrael: Toldot Yisrael is a Jerusalem based nonprofit organization dedicated to recording and sharing the firsthand testimonies of the men and women who helped found and build the State of Israel. Over 500 video interviews have been conducted with those who were involved during the pre-State struggle and the momentous events of 1948. Our aim is to conduct hundreds more over the next several years while it is still possible.

Like to learn more? Please come visit Toldot Yisrael's site by clicking here

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Medad - Lipman Seethes Wrongly

Yisrael Medad
My Right Word
03 November '11



http://myrightword.blogspot.com/2011/11/lipman-seethes-wrongly.html

Some persons just do not know the facts.

Take this lady, Jennifer Lipman, who writes:

...As always, my shul's mid-afternoon Question and Answer session was packed with hungry but engaged congregants. One query in particular prompted a lengthy response from the rabbi. In it, he referred to British Mandate Palestine and those Jews whose fight for statehood saw them join the militant Irgun group. "They weren't terrorists," went his argument. "It was a different time and they were fighting for their freedom."

Really? I thought, my blood boiling (never good on a fast day). Oh yes, I'm sure their cause and the context would have been of great comfort to the families of the 91 people who died in 1946 when the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel.

More to the point, doesn't that argument sound familiar? Isn't it essentially the defence used today by extremist groups after a blast on a bus in Israel or a random attack in the West Bank? If we condemn it now, we cannot excuse it in history.

I left the session seething with anger and disbelief but, most of all, with disappointment. Was it intentional moral relativism or just a short memory? I can't speak for the rabbi - perhaps he simply said the first thing that came to mind- but it makes little difference. It is irresponsible, not to mention dangerous and counter-productive, to use the bully pulpit to spread a limited or even false view of events. That is always true, but it is especially so with a subject as sensitive as the Israeli-Arab conflict...

Since any simple Google-search could have provided the lady with the facts, allow me to be short and to the point as this issue comes up a dozen times a year if not more and it is so terrible that Jews fall for Arab propaganda when they should know better (unless, of course, they are radical leftwing bolshie progressives who are anti-Zionist to begin with - no pun there - which I do not think the lady is).

Accepting the Jews' Right to a State: The San Remo Conference of 1922

Daphne Anson
12 April '11



The following article, on the acceptance of the principle of a Jewish State by world leaders, is by Hillel Fender and entitled "91 Years Ago: At San Remo, Allies Accepted Jews' Right to Land." It first appeared at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/143490:

The 91st anniversary of the first international recognition of Jewish national rights in the Land of Israel – namely, the San Remo Conference – will be commemorated in two weeks.


The San Remo Conference was an international meeting of four of the leading Allied powers of World War I, known as the post-World War I Allied Supreme Council. It was held in San Remo, Italy, and was attended by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French PM Alexandre Millerand, Italy’s Prime Minister Francesco Nitti and Japanese Ambassador K. Matsui.

Its resolution that a Jewish nation must be established in Palestine was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922.

Background:

Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a result of World War I, it became necessary to determine how the lands formerly governed by the Ottoman Turks would be ruled. The precise borders of the territories were not specified, but regarding the Holy Land, known then as Palestine, the plan was clear, and the appropriate San Remo resolution read as follows:

“The High Contracting Parties agree to entrust… the administration of Palestine, within such boundaries as may be determined by the Principal Allied Powers, to a Mandatory, to be selected by the said Powers.


The Mandatory will be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 8, 1917, by the British Government, and adopted by the other Allied Powers, in favour of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The international community thus officially recognized – the Alllies in 1920, and the League of Nations in 1922 – the national legal rights of the Jewish People in the Land of Israel. Even more importantly, these rights for the Arabs were specifically not recognized.

Yes, the resolution stated that the “civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” must be upheld – but specifically left out any mention of “political” or “national” Arab rights. Clearly, these were not a factor in the equation.

Furthermore, the resolution did mention “rights” and “political status” – but only of “Jews in any other country,” emphasizing that they must be upheld. In addition, the parallel League of Nations granted the Arabs political rights in four other mandates – Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and later Trans-Jordan.

Last year at this time, the European Coalition for Israel marked the date with educational seminars and a ceremony in the very house in San Remo where the resolution was signed in 1920. It noted that San Remo essentially gave birth to the League of Nations’ "British Mandate for Palestine,” which laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Later, the 51 member countries of the League of Nations unanimously approved the Jews’ historical connection with the Holy Land.

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“The Whole Thing Has a Nazi Smell About It”: How Britain’s Palestine Censor de-judaised a Christmas Message

Daphne Anson
23 December '10

Just before Christmas in 1940 Dr Norman Maclean, a chaplain to King George V and an ex-moderator of the Church of Scotland, who happened to be visiting Jerusalem, was invited to write a Christmas message for inclusion in the Palestine Post (since 1950 the Jerusalem Post) at the invitation of its editor, Gershon Agron.

Doing his utmost to raise morale during that dark period, when, since France had fallen and America had not yet entered the conflict, Britain and its Commonwealth faced the Nazi barbarians alone, the good clergyman entitled his message “Sursum Corda” (“Lift Up Your Hearts”).

Mindful that Chanukah and Christmas coincided that year, he referred in his message to the “world of wonder and mystery, in which the threads of life are so closely interwoven that were it not for the Jewish festival there would never have been a Christian festival, for the one is the child of the other”.

Inexplicably, that passage never made it to Agron’s newspaper – it was cut by the Palestine Censor employed by the British government during the Second World War.

Dr Maclean also wrote: “it is totalitarians today who must be changed from instruments of torture and tyranny into men of goodwill ‘ere peace can come”. For some reason the Palestine Censor disapproved, and through that passage too went his blue pencil.

The Censor also struck this through: “the Angels did not proclaim peace to gangsters, robbers, and mass murderers”.

(Read full “The Whole Thing Has a Nazi Smell About It”: How Britain’s Palestine Censor de-judaised a Christmas Message")

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Murder, Mayhem, and a Strange Case of Mandate Inertia

Daphne Anson
10 October '10

On the afternoon of 11 July 1938 Lily Tobias (née Shepherd, 1887-1984), from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family in the Swansea valley, was at home in Mount Carmel putting the final touches to her novel The Samaritans. An aunt of the future famous Welsh-Jewish poet Dannie Abse and his flamboyant politician brother Leo, she was already a published writer. Her The Nationalists, and other Goluth Studies, a book of short stories, had appeared in 1921; her novel In My Mother’s House, which tells of a Welsh-born Jew who rejects, and then reclaims, his heritage, in 1931; her anti-war novel Eunice Fleet, about a conscientious objector, in 1933; and The Tube in 1935.

Lily had made aliyah in 1935, the year before the eruption of Arab disturbances in Palestine, with her husband Philip Vallentine Tobias, who was originally from South Africa, and her widowed father, a retired furniture dealer from Poland. Philip Tobias, who had been active in the Cardiff Jewish community before moving with Lily to London, where he was a founder and leading member of the Finchley Hebrew Congregation, ran a glass company in Palestine. And on that afternoon, as Lily was at work on her latest novel’s closing chapter, he was alone in his car en route to Haifa.

(Read full post)

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Israel and the Meaning of Independence

AviDavis
The Intermediate Zone
21 April '10

Many people are confused why the State of Israel seems to celebrate the anniversary of its establishment on a different date every year. After all, the State of Israel came into existence after a declaration by the Provisional Council of State in Palestine, led by David Ben Gurion, on May 14, 1948. But in the intervening 62 years, Israel Independence Day has been celebrated on May 14 only once.

The answer is that Israel marks its anniversaries by the Hebrew calendar, not the universal secular calendar, which means that from year to year, anniversaries, holy days and even birthdays, are often celebrated as much as a month apart from the dates to which they are attached in the Gregorian calendar.

But another fact that is often glossed over is that Israel did not actually achieve independence 62 years ago because there was nothing to claim independence from. British suzerainty of Palestine had been mandated, not by the international body, The League of Nations, but under a resolution of the San Remo Conference (1920) which was later ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Both effectively recognized British conquest of Palestine and ended Ottoman rule. In fact, the British Mandatory Authority, established thereafter, was not a sovereign body and was not universally recognized by all nations ( the United States being the most prominent among them). Its legal legitimacy was in fact in question for 30 years. So while the creation of the state in 1948 derived its standing in international law from U.N. Resolution 181, Israel’s declaration of “independence” was no more than a dramatic means of stating its formation as a contiguous and indivisible state. But on May 14, 1948 it became independent of nothing.

Those might seem like picayune legal arguments, with no particular relevance to today’s politics or diplomacy. Yet the importance of understanding the concept and meaning of independence is vital to appreciating how Israel sees itself today.

For the question of the country’s independence has been a determining factor in Israel’s survival until now and today is a deciding factor in how it proposes to deal with the menace arising to its existence from the Persian Gulf .

History has some important things to say about the matter.

(Read full article)

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