The three lies that fuel hatred of Israel and the new wave of anti-Semitism
There are constants that are repeated regularly, obstinate, with a granite certainty that no pandemic can scratch. One of these is the resumption of clashes between Palestinian and Israeli factions, with the corollary of one-sided hatred spewed in the mass and social media against Israel, that black sheep state of Jews who do not want to be exterminated a second time, going calmly to the slaughter like ordinary and reassuring white sheep.
Anti-Semitism is more alive today than ever. To the streams of black water of the far right have long been added the torrents of hatred that flow from the left. The most unlikely accusations against Israel are inevitable, in which they try to cover the stench of anti-Jewish racism with an alibi that is now impossible to sustain even with crutches: “I am anti-Zionist, not anti-Semite” .
The cheap analysis of professional haters of the Jewish state is based on a series of clichés, as common and taken for granted as they are false and historically absurd. Three in particular grab hold of the common imagination: the idea that in the past Jews have driven out the original Palestinian population; the equation between Israelis of today and Nazis of yesterday; the indomitable and pure struggle of the Palestinians for their freedom.
These are obviously accusations and claims without foundation, but which are worth analyzing again, to understand how, especially on the left (but not only), they are willing to sacrifice the truth in the name of purely ideological positions.
A land that has always been Palestinian? – How many times have we been told that Palestinians lived in those lands for centuries, until the arrival of the evil Zionist settlers (not surprisingly often referred to as bankers and usurers, another classic stereotype of anti-Semitism) who would have expropriated their ancestral lands . The reality is very, very different.
It is worth remembering that, even before the first Zionist settlers took office in 1884, Jerusalem was already predominantly Jewish. Just as there were other Jewish communities settled for centuries, in what has in fact been a Jewish land for centuries, for example that of Hebron.
The Palestinians (who do not exist as such as a people, being Arabs, of Arabic language, of religion for the most part Sunni Muslim) are none other than the descendants of Arab immigrants first of all from the surrounding territories, and then from other countries of Islamic culture , attracted by the job opportunities created by the Zionist settlers. Joan Peters, in the book "From Time Immemorable" , explains how at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Arab population in the Holy Land increased twice where there were no Jewish settlements, and five times where kibbutzim and kibbutz were founded. agricultural communes.
Even today al-Masri (ie the Egyptian) is one of the most common surnames among Palestinians, especially in Gaza. Further confirmation, therefore, that we are not dealing with "indigenous" at all.
This lie is closely related to another: the good Palestinians would have been forcibly driven out by the bad Israelis. The reality, however, is completely different.
Bernard Lewis, one of the greatest scholars of Islam, recently deceased, an eyewitness to the events in 1950, said that most Palestinians were not expelled, but voluntarily abandoned their homes and lands, both because it was instigated by their leaders. who did not want any agreement with the Jews, both because they were frightened by the progress of the conflict (opened by the Arab states of the region).
A fact confirmed by Emanuele Ottolenghi, former professor of Israeli Politics and History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict at the University of Oxford, who, about the alleged expulsion of Palestinians, speaks of a myth not supported by history, but used for political purposes by the Palestinian leadership. There is also numerous documentary evidence in this regard:
"We must not forget that the Arab High Command has encouraged the Arabs to flee their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem and that some Arab leaders have tried to take political advantage of the miserable condition of the fugitives."
( Radio Near East of Cyprus , April 3, 1948)
"The Arab states, which encouraged the Arabs of Palestine to flee their homes temporarily so as not to hinder the invading armies, have not kept their promises to help these refugees."
(from the Jordanian daily Falastin , February 19, 1949)
“The fact that there are these refugees is a direct consequence of the actions of the Arab states against partition and the Jewish state. The Arab states unanimously agree with this policy and must share the burden of solving the problem ”.
(Emile Ghoury, secretary of the Palestinian Arab High Committee in an interview with the Beirut Telegraph , September 6, 1948)
"On May 15, 1948 he arrived … That day the mufti of Jerusalem appealed to the Arabs of Palestine to leave the country because the Arab armies were about to arrive and fight for them."
(from the Cairo newspaper Akhbar el Yom , 12 October 1963)
“For the flight and the fall of the other villages it is our leaders who are responsible because of their propaganda of rumors that exaggerated the crimes of the Jews and described them as atrocities to inflame the Arabs. By spreading rumors of Jewish atrocities, killing of women and children, etc., they have induced fear and terror in the hearts of the Arabs of Palestine to the point of making them flee, leaving their homes and properties to the enemy ”.
(from the Jordanian newspaper Al Urdun , April 9, 1953).
Another piece of evidence is Israel's own Declaration of Independence, which contains an invitation to Arabs to participate peacefully in building the new state. On the other hand, it is not clear how the Jews could have "stolen" the lands from the Arabs, given that the Holy Land was first under Ottoman and then British control.
Finally, there are a couple of other considerations to make: if indeed the Arab-Palestinians were expelled from their homes, as explained by the presence today of over one and a half million Arab-Israelis, who are in effect citizens of the State of Israel, with their Knesset parties and Supreme Court judges? Arab-Israelis who, it is worth remembering, are careful not to pass from a minority in Israel to a majority in the territories controlled by the ANP or Hamas, and who would never give up their citizenship.
And again, if there was, why is there no mass expulsion from Gaza and the West Bank after their occupation by Israel following the Six Day War?
The truth, however, is that the Zionist settlers proceeded to buy (not steal) the lands on which the Jewish state would later rise, through the establishment in 1920 of Keren Hayesod , the national construction fund of Israel, which precisely to raise funds to buy land in the Mandate of Palestine.
These are fundamental considerations, especially given the fact that today's anti-Semites deny at the root the legitimacy of the State of Israel. This is the position, for example, of the former leader of the Spanish Podemos party, Pablo Iglesias, who defined Israel as an illegal country.
Iglesias evidently ignores that Israel is instead fully legitimate according to international law, thanks to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to a binding resolution of 1922 of the League of Nations, and to the non-binding resolution number 181 of the UN of November 29, 1947 (the one that divided the territory in an Arab and a Jewish state, accepted by the Jews and rejected by the neighboring Arab states that started the war).
Israelis as Nazis? – The second great lie on which hatred of Israel and organized anti-Semitism is founded is more recent and coarse in its absurdity, but no less dangerous.
The infamous comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany comes from the left. According to the alternating current paladins of human rights (always silent when Palestinians are killed by other Palestinians), Israelis today are behaving like Nazis. The slander is so great that it is astonishing how true it can be believed.
As is known, the Nazis practiced genocide against European Jews, killing over 5 million. Could the same be said of the Palestinians? A simple check on Wikipedia informs us that today there are about 13 million Palestinians (of which almost five million between Gaza and the West Bank), compared to the 750,000 Arabs who left the territories where Israel later arose during the war of 1948-49. . Basically, in the space of 70 years the Palestinians have increased by 13 times.
Until now, no one on the left seems to have been able to explain the demographic miracle of a people who are subject to genocide, instead of decreasing, multiplying. Along the same lines, accusations are wasted that they regard Gaza and the West Bank as concentration camps.
A more sweetened version argues that Israel is practicing an apartheid policy against the Arabs. The accusation can only appear insulting to those who have truly suffered discrimination in South Africa, and in fact there are those who have strongly criticized every combination. This is the case of Kenneth Meshoe, a South African parliamentarian and leader of the African Christian Democratic Party . Meshoe, who has had the opportunity to visit Israel several times, considers the apartheid allegations against Israel to be absurd, lies about who Israel really is and what apartheid really was.
The Arab-Israelis for their part feel so discriminated that when the Israelis years ago proposed the sale of some Arab-Israeli majority villages to the PA in exchange for the annexation of some settlements on the border, it was the inhabitants of those villages. to protest, proudly displaying their Israeli passport.
And what about the Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank? A 1999 study of 3,617 adults between 18 and 64 years of age found one third of the sample to be overweight. According to the WHO (a simple online search is enough to find out) over a quarter of Palestinians can be considered obese. Numbers that badly match those you'd expect in a concentration camp.
Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini in turn reports statistics that, once again, are a punch in the stomach for supporters of alleged Israeli apartheid : Palestinians (at least those in Gaza and the West Bank) have a life expectancy of 74-75. years (the global average is 72 years), the lowest infant mortality in the Middle East (13 per thousand and constantly decreasing), the highest graduation rate in the Arab world (49 per cent of the population with education).
At this point it is impossible to believe the propaganda that sees in the soldiers with the star of David so many small SS. Especially when you consider that thousands of Palestinians travel to Israel every day to work and that thousands have already received medical assistance directly in Israeli hospitals. However, it does not appear that the Nazis treated Jewish children in German hospitals.
The myth of "liberation" – Finally, there is the evergreen myth of the war of liberation, where Che Guevara's beret is replaced by the checkered keffiah , which is so exotic and smells of anti-colonial struggle. Myth dear to the left who loves to ride the waves of rebellion, ending up drowning in a sea of conformity. However, asking and asking certain questions is necessary to understand.
If Palestinians are really fighting for a state of their own, why are they targeting civilians in Israel rather than military personnel in the West Bank? Why does the Hamas statute talk about the destruction of the State of Israel?
And above all, the question that has always been unanswered on the left: why did the Palestinians ever take up arms against Egypt and Jordan which, in defiance of the UN resolutions, occupied the territories belonging to the Arabs of Palestine for 19 years? Perhaps some occupations are more occupations than others, to paraphrase George Orwell?
We would then have to ask the pro-Arab left to account for its distraction during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, but the embarrassment for a possible interlocutor would perhaps be too much.
At this point it would even be rhetorical to ask why, especially on the left, we do not get particularly warm for other causes (the Tibetans or more recently the Uyghurs oppressed by the Chinese, for example), or to stay in the Middle East, for the way in which which the Palestinians have been and still are treated by their Arab brothers (their expulsion from Kuwait after the First Gulf War, the legal discrimination they face in Lebanon, the events of 1970 known as Black September).
In all these cases it is not possible even with a considerable creative effort to somehow fall the blame on Israel and on what it represents: a development model based on capitalist-liberal civilization, the only example in the area, capable of leading to unimaginable levels of individual prosperity and freedom in a state that has no oil and is still partly hated by its neighbors, on whom it cannot rely.
A success that represents an unforgivable shame for those who have always and invariably exploited the rhetoric of the Western world, so as to have a comfortable scapegoat on the one hand and a (self) absolving excuse for its alleged victims on the other.
A rhetoric that unites anti-Semites, both from the West and from the Middle East, united in their common hatred of Israel and blind to the objective responsibilities of the Palestinian leadership.
The post The three lies that fuel hatred for Israel and the new wave of anti-Semitism appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/le-tre-menzogne-che-alimentano-lodio-per-israele-e-la-nuova-ondata-di-antisemitismo/ on Tue, 18 May 2021 03:57:00 +0000.