A Miracle w/Grit: How Israel rescued the Promised Land from devastation and neglect - by James Sinkinson

Part of the Israeli miracle is the restoration of a depleted, deteriorating land through determination, ingenuity and back-breaking work.

James Sinkinson..
FLAME/JNS..
07 July '20..

Last week I toured much of northern Israel, from the Jezreel Valley and the Lower and Upper Galilee regions to the Golan Heights. The natural beauty of this part of Israel, as well as the explosive proliferation of agriculture, was striking and inspiring.

The abundance of flora in Israel today makes it easy to forget that this land at the turn of the 20th century was a parched wasteland. It also raises the questions: How did this miraculous transformation take place, and who was responsible?

On his visit to Palestine in 1867, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) called the Sea of Galilee “a solemn, sailless, tintless lake, as unpoetical as any bath-tub on earth.” On the other hand, last week I found the Kinneret (its Hebrew name) a sparkling blue jewel surrounded on its north, south and west by vegetable fields, orchards and forests.

Traveling by horseback through the Jezreel Valley, Clemens noted: “There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for 30 miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride 10 miles, hereabouts, and not see 10 human beings.”

Clemens continues, “Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince. … Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.”

(Continue to Full Column)

James Sinkinson is president of Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. 

A Thriving Jewish Presence: Gaza, like you never knew it - by Nadav Shragai

For modern-day Israelis, Gaza is synonymous with terrorism and alienation. But Gaza has a long history of a thriving Jewish presence, explains researcher Haggai Hoberman.

The Margolins' flour mill 

 Photo: Joseph Margolin's archive

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
19 March '20..
Link: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/03/19/gaza-like-you-never-knew-it/

"Gaza will be like Ponevezh," the famous Israeli tea merchant Ze'ev Kalonymus Wissotzky predicted in the summer of 1885, as he laid out his revolutionary vision of "building urban Jewish neighborhoods in Arab cities like Lod, Nablus, Bethlehem, Tyre, Sidon, and Gaza."

Wissotsky made his proposal after he concluded that the Jewish agricultural settlement that existed in the Land of Israel was insufficient to provide for the new olim coming in from Russia. Wissotzky 's vision began to become a reality a year and a half later. A founding core group arrived from Jaffa under the leadership of Avraham Haim Shlush and Nissim Elkayam. Later, other families from Jerusalem and Hebron joined them, and eventually, the Jewish community increased to 30 families. The Arabs of Gaza, as difficult as it might be to believe, welcomed them.

Journalist and researcher Haggai Hoberman has just published a new book about the venture, titled "A Jewish Community in Gaza," in which he tells the story of the city's Jewish history. If today, "Gaza" is synonymous with terrorism and alienation, a place with a Philistine and Palestinian past, Hoberman's new research tells the unknown story of the Jews who lived there for generations, from the days of the Hasmoneans, during the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods, in the Middle Ages, and until the early 20th century.

In our era, Gaza and its religious leaders are seen as demonic. An image bolstered by the TV series Fauda, Hoberman reveals that once, Gaza was home to Islamic religious leaders who were no less devout than those of our time, but different. It almost reads like science fiction. Who would believe that only 110 years ago, then Chief Rabbi of Gaza Nissim Binyamin Ohana, and then mufti of Gaza Sheikh Abdullah al-Alami, co-authored a book?

Rest in pieces

Gone is the era when the world understood, even if momentarily, that we, no less than anyone else, deserve a place to be.


Daniel Gordis
Guest Columnist/JPost
16 July '10


Khaled’s been our “fix-it” guy for a decade. When he was over recently, I came upon him in the living room as he was taking a break from his work. He was looking at a series of photographs on the wall, one of which is called “Rest in Pieces.”

“What is this?” he asked.

“It’s a Jewish cemetery in Argentina,” I told him. “See the Hebrew lettering on the tombstones?”

“But why are the tombstones shattered?” “People broke them,” I explained.

“But why would anyone do that?” “Because they hate Jews, I guess,” I told him.

“Why?” And a moment later, “But these Jews were dead,” he said to me. “They hate dead Jews, too?” Now things had gotten surreal. Was an Israeli Arab really asking me why anyone might hate Jews? Khaled wasn’t kidding. He seemed utterly perplexed, and continued studying the photograph.

I didn’t really know where to begin. I told him that in some places in Europe, people still destroy Jewish cemeteries. He was astounded. For a moment, I considered telling him what the Jordanians had done to Jewish cemeteries between 1948 and 1967, but for whatever reason, I decided not to. Maybe I just wanted to relish, even for a few moments, the hopeful moment of an Arab man who couldn’t understand why anyone would hate the Jews. It was the sort of moment that gives you some hope, even if but a faint flicker.

But flickers fade, especially in this region. A few days later, my wife and I were in Tel Aviv for an outstanding program on “The Law of Return: Just or Discriminatory?” sponsored by the Metzilah Center, founded by Prof. Ruth Gavison, one of the country’s most eminent jurists and a Zionist thinker of great profundity. Dr. Raif Zreik, of Tel Aviv University, whom I’d never heard before, was the first speaker.

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Book Review: Palestine Betrayed

Elder of Ziyon
21 May '10

(I believe this is the 4th review I'm posting on Palestine Betrayed, each reviewer with a slightly different take. The one thing they have in common, Great Book! I purchase through Amazon, with an average shipping time to Israel of about 8 days from the order being placed. With shipping it comes out to slightly less than the list price. Elder of Ziyon has Amazon for this book on his post.)

Efraim Karsh's "Palestine Betrayed" is an answer to the "New Historians'" view of Israel during the War of Independence. In it, Karsh makes a strong argument that the vast majority of the tragedy of the "naqba" was because of Arab, not Jewish, actions.

Karsh makes a startlingly effective case for the fact that the mainstream Zionist leadership wanted to live with their Arab cousins in peace. He brings quote after quote, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben Gurion, that shows that the plan of ethnic cleansing that we are told so incessantly about by Arabs today is simply a fiction. He goes into some detail about Arab-Jewish cooperation immediately after the Balfour Declaration - and before the Mufti.

Much of the blame for the severe deterioration on the relationship between the communities goes directly to Hajj Amin Husseini, who almost single-handedly led the Palestinian Arabs to disaster - as Mufti of Jerusalem, as president of the Superme Muslim Council, and as president of the Arab Higher Committee. His unwavering anti-semitism combined with his positions of power and his ability to outmaneuver his rivals created an atmosphere where compromise was unthinkable. Karsh also shows that Husseini, far from being a nationalist, was always more interested in a pan-Arab nation - first as part of Greater Syria, but even later he viewed the Arab Palestine as being a stepping-stone to pan-Arab unification. Karsh follows his career from Jerusalem to becoming a Nazi sympathizer.

The centerpiece of the book is the description of the fighting and Arab flight during the first part of the War of Independence. Karsh puts forth a strong argument that the vast majority of Arabs fled their homes as a result of fear, and often in spite of Jewish entreaties to stay put. He goes into detail of the flight of Arabs from Haifa and Jaffa, into the complete breakdown of Arab leadership and the almost non-existence of a unified Arab front, neither within Palestine nor without.(A fascinating detail from Haifa: the Arab flight occurred during Passover, and the rabbinate of Haifa gave a special dispensation for Jewish bakers to bake bread for Arabs during that time to help them out as their infrastructure evaporated.)

(Read full review)

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Palestine Betrayed

by Efraim Karsh
Yale, 336 pp., $32.50

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes
National Review
May 17, 2010

Nakba, the Arabic word for "catastrophe," has entered the English language in reference to the Arab–Israeli conflict. As defined by the anti-Israel website The Electronic Intifada, Nakba means "the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands [of] Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948."

Those who wish Israel to disappear actively promote the Nakba narrative. For example, Nakba Day serves as a mournful Palestinian counterpart to Israel's Independence Day festivities, annually publicizing Israel's alleged sins. So established has this day become that Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations — the very institution that created the State of Israel — has sent his support to "the Palestinian people on Nakba Day." Even Neve Shalom, a Jewish-Palestinian community in Israel claiming to be "engaged in educational work for peace, equality, and understanding between the two peoples," dutifully commemorates Nakba Day.

The Nakba ideology presents Palestinians as victims without choices and therefore without responsibility for the ills that befell them. It blames Israel alone for the Palestinian-refugee problem. This view has an intuitive appeal, for Muslim and Christian Palestinians had long formed a majority on the land that became Israel, whereas most Jews were relative newcomers.

Intuitive sense, however, does not equal historical accuracy. In his new tour de force, Palestine Betrayed, Efraim Karsh of the University of London offers the latter. With his customary in-depth archival research — in this case, relying on masses of recently declassified documents from the period of British rule and of the first Arab–Israeli war, 1917–49 — clear presentation, and meticulous historical sensibility, Karsh argues the opposite case: that Palestinians decided their own destiny and bear near-total responsibility for becoming refugees.

In Karsh's words: "Far from being the hapless victims of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who, from the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival which culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U.N. partition resolution." More broadly, he observes, "there was nothing inevitable about the Palestinian–Jewish confrontation, let alone the Arab–Israeli conflict."

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1948: Palestine Betrayed

Elliot Jager
jewishideasdaily.com
20 April '10

Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough. Elliot Jager interviewed Efraim Karsh for Jewish Ideas Daily.

Who "betrayed" Palestine?

Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?

A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.

(Read full interview)

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Is Israel a Colonial State?

The Political Psychology of Palestinian Nomenclature


Irwin J. Mansdorf
JCPA
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
#576 March-April '10

Israel's creation, far from being a foreign colonial transplant, can actually be seen as the vanguard of and impetus for decolonialization of the entire Middle East, including a significant part of the Arab world, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

What is not popularly recognized is how the Arab world benefited from the Balfour Declaration and how it served the Arab world in their nationalist goals and helped advance their own independence from the colonial powers of England and France.

Despite the essentially parallel processes of independence from colonial and protectorate influence over the first half of the twentieth century, only one of the national movements at the time and only one of the resulting states, namely Israel, is accused of being "colonial," with the term "settler-colonialist" applied to the Zionist enterprise.

This term, however, can assume validity only if it is assumed that the "setters" have no indigenous roots and rights in the area. As such, this is yet another example of psychological manipulation for political purposes. The notion of "settler" dismisses any historical or biblical connection of Jews to the area. Hence, the importance of denial of Jewish rights, history, and claims to the area.

Lest there be any confusion about what a "settler" is, those who use the terminology "settler-colonialist" against Israel clearly mean the entire Zionist enterprise, including the original territory of the State of Israel in 1948. The "colonial Israel" charge is thus rooted in an ideological denial of any Jewish connection to the ancient Land of Israel.

Psychological factors often play a role in the development of political views. In the Israel-Arab conflict, one of the ways in which psychological factors operate is in the formation of "mantras" that do not necessarily reflect either the historical record or applicable international law.1 Examples include the use of descriptions of occupation as "illegal"2 and the determination that there is a "right" of resistance3 or a "right" of return.4 When used over and over again, these descriptions, despite their questionable legitimacy, can alter perceptions. Once perceptions change, attitudes and behavior change as well, leading to partial and ultimately biased views of historical and political reality.

(Read full article)
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