Another Fisk Flop

Robert Fisk is at it again.  Notice his not-so-subtle besmirching here:

...as Professor Ian Buruma pointed out recently (and earlier), the political heirs of "deeply racist traditions" are the new champions of the Jewish state, whose policies now owe more to 19th-century ethnic chauvinism than to Zionism's socialist roots. All kinds of strange people now give their support to Israel. It is disturbing to note that the Oslo mass murderer, Anders Behring Breivik, supported the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the West Bank. That's not Israel's fault.

Of course it's not Israel's fault but, well, Fisk wouldn't mind you dwelling on the angle and, perhaps, hating Israel.

And as for those "socialist roots",  Zionist thought, that is, genuine Jewish national expressions, institutions and practice predate modern socialism by, say, 2500 years or so.  Perhaps socialism and/or liberalism were departures from the original concepts of Jewish national life as practiced by two Jewish commonwealths and kingdoms and tribal federations and family establishments. And he continues to drop his 5 kilo hammer:

Israel, which in the past could analyse events rationally, if not always correctly, appears, too, to have lost its ability to grasp events, its Prime Minister hiding behind self-delusional speeches...When Netanyahu and the king of Saudi Arabia could line up to plead with Obama to save Mubarak, you knew something had gone terribly wrong. Gideon Levy, one of the finest of Israeli journalists, writes with biting eloquence of his government's folly, its failure to see that Arab democracy is a cause for good, not bad...And, all the while, the settlements continue. Which is why the Palestinians will not resume peace talks with Israel under the grubby neutrality of the United States.

Liberal Jews in America are ever more outraged at this phenomenon. They have often seen something faintly fascist about the right in Israel. Indeed, I have a letter beside me as I write, sent to The New York Times on 2 December 1948, warning of the visit to the US of the young Menachem Begin whose "Freedom Party", said the letter's authors, was "closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties". Among the authors of this letter was Albert Einstein...

In brief, (a) "democracy"? but the Islamists have some 70% of Parliament and will take the Presidency come summer. what "democracy"? it's all fundamentalist Islam. (b) "they", those "liberal American Jews" are but one part of American Jewry, a small part but over-proportionately represent in the media by people like....Robert Fisk. (c) if anyone cannot analyse events rationally, it is Fisk and, through him, liberals, Jews and non-Jews, end up hating Israel because that way they can hang on him their own radical ideas, all most illogical and irrational.

By the way, that anti-Begin letter can be read here and you can judge for yourself if those Jews were smart and corect - reminder: Begin mande peace with Egypt, surrendered all of Sinai, promised autonomy/self-governing authority, etc. and was against the Military Government of Arab areas in the pre-1967 era.

Woe those who hate, who do not know and who wish not to know - and who make sure others do not know the turth.

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He's No Agent and A Poor Journalist

Hunting for the last mortal remains of Major Anthony Palmer of Special Operations Executive, disappeared with 23 Jewish Haganah commandos on 18 May 1941, en route to blow up the Tripoli oil refinery, Robert Fisk finds his way to an IDF unit in Lebanon:-

He gave me the address of a luxurious mansion above Beirut. There I found Israeli troops in the grounds, but was shown into a book-lined library where an Israeli lieutenant colonel sat behind an oak-panelled desk. And beside him lay two large, blue-covered files on the disappearance of Major Palmer. The colonel introduced himself as Shlomo Ben Elkanah. Only years later would I discover that he was something of an expert in finding corpses. After the 1967 Six-Day War, he had questioned Bedouin Arabs in newly captured Rafah in the Gaza Strip in an attempt to find the body of Avshalom Feinberg, a member of a pro-British Jewish underground organisation in 1917 who died in a battle with Arabs while trying to contact General Allenby's British forces. In 1967, the Bedouin pointed to a palm tree and Elkanah dug it up. There were the bones of Feinberg, the tree embracing his skeleton because it had sprouted from the dates which the dead man had in his pocket.

Now Elkanah was trying to find the graves of Palmer and the 23 dead Jews who were also aboard the Sea Lion. He wanted to bring the remains of the Haganah men – one of whom had been Elkanah's friend – back to Israel, which regarded Operation Boatswain in 1941 as the first military action of the Israeli army. The operation had been arranged between a Palestinian Jew called David Cohen and de Gaulle's Free French forces in London.

And to my amazement Elkanah showed me his files. These papers suggested that the Sea Lion reached the coast of Tripoli but was intercepted by "the French and Italian (sic) coastguard". One of his reports said four of the Jewish commandos were killed and their bodies washed ashore, but when Palmer turned back south he was stopped by an Italian submarine. A British intelligence officer called Perkins, according to this document, then told a Jewish Agency official, Reuven Zaslani, that Palmer and his surviving 19 men had been taken prisoner. The paper said that Palmer then escaped his French guards, was recaptured on the island of Arwad off the Syrian coast, was returned to Lebanon and executed without trial at Jounieh, just north of Beirut. At the time, a German radio broadcast referred to the capture of "a British agent and 20 Jews" by Italians.

Elkanah showed me another paper. This recorded that Moshe Sharett – later Israel's foreign minister – handed a report to Perkins that a "Jewish messenger" called Joseph Fines saw the clothes taken from the bodies of the four dead Jewish sailors and believed the rest of the crew, including Palmer, were taken away to an unknown destination. Then the British authorities declined to allow Perkins to continue his investigation. Because, perhaps, the few Vichy French soldiers in Lebanon who transferred their allegiance to de Gaulle had been involved in the killing of Palmer?

In 1982, the Israeli army captured Beirut but stopped short of Tripoli. Could I, Elkanah wanted to know, drive up to Tripoli – still under Syrian and Palestinian guerrilla control – and take a look around the city's cemeteries? Could I find a mass grave, perhaps? Journalist I may be. Agent I am not. I waited till long after the Israelis had left. Then I began to prowl the graveyards of Tripoli, sniff for the municipality archives, talk to middle-aged men who supported Vichy and who remembered 1941. They knew nothing. Or they said they knew nothing. Two of the Jews were said to have been buried in sand dunes, a third in a "cemetery for foreigners".

^

Fisking the Jews

I read this twice and the only conclusion I can come to is that Robert Fisk of the Independent is seeking to draw the reader's mind into assuming that just like there are claims that the German population, a mjority for sure, "knew" what was happening in terms of the Holocaust, then the Jewish soldiers in the German Army during World War I must have been aware of what was happening to the Armenians.

Indeed, there were Jews in the German army in the First World War – 12,000 of them were killed in action for the Fatherland – but hands up those readers who know that, even as the Germans were fighting for their lives in 1916, the authorities undertook a "Jew census" in the army after provocations from small anti-Semitic parties in Berlin.

On the eastern front, 92,451 Russian prisoners died in German captivity. "They are not to be given water at first," a 1914 German 8th Army order read. "While they are in the vicinity of the battlefield it is good for them to be in a broken physical condition." The Untermenschen idea was already there, it seems. At least 9 per cent of Germany's 158,000 soldiers in Russian camps, it should be added, also died.

Amid such a charnel house, the Ottoman genocide of one and a half million Armenians – still outrageously denied by Turkey, although it taught Hitler how to destroy the Jews of Europe less than three decades later – provides a terrible historical continuity.

Did those German-Jewish soldiers of the First World War have the slightest inkling of what was to come? They must have known of the German army's cruelty towards civilians, even if they could not then read the words of the angry, gas-blinded corporal from the Somme who asked after the armistice: "Did all this happen only so that a gang of wretched criminals could lay their hands on the Fatherland?"

But the Armenian genocide took place far from Europe and Fisk presents no data at all regarding whether if any Jewish German soldiers, if at all, were there at the time of the killings which, I may add, were done by Turkish soldiers.

The Facile Fisk

Robert Fisk, that is. In The Independent:-

This Easter, the 92nd anniversary of the Rising, it is intriguing to look at the parallels that connect Ireland and the Middle East. The "Black and Tans", whom Churchill supported when they took their revenge on Irish civilians in 1920, were later sent – again with Churchill's support – to Palestine, where they became the "British Gendarmerie" and continued their reprisals against Arab and Jewish civilians to considerable effect. Decades later, John Hume (Ireland's only living statesman) wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel and "Palestine" should take a page out of Ireland's Good Friday Agreement. It was all about compromise, he said.

He was wrong. Israel's settlements on Palestinian Arab land in the occupied territories were as illegal as the Protestant settlements and the dispossession of the Catholics in 16th-century Ireland.

Well, here's my response:-

In a facile attempt to draw a link between Ireland and Israel, Robert Fisk suggests that "Israel's settlements on Palestinian Arab land in the occupied territories were as illegal as the Protestant settlements and the dispossession of the Catholics in 16th-century Ireland" (Mar. 23). Illegality cannot apply to this instance.

In the first place, Arabs invaded the area of Palestine, a country they never have quite managed to refer to in Arabic, adopting the Latin corruption of Philistine from the Roman conquerors. Their presence as interlopers begins in the 7th century, some 2000 years after the Jewish migration to the country which, until their arrival, was but a collection of feudal kings of perhaps ten different populations groups. It was under the Israelite monarchy that the land was united.

In the second place, the highest international legal authority of the time, the Supreme Council of the League of Nations, acknowledged the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute their homeland in all the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea in a series of decisions during 1922-23, the land mass having been whittled down by British imperial interference. That is the land area the Israel government administers at present.

If there is any true parallel, it is the underground resistance of the Irish that encouraged Jews to seek their independence from the British occupation, eventually forcing England to give up her Mandate.