The Terrible Terrorizing Henry Siegman

In his "The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy" published in the London Review of Books, Vol. Volume 40 No. 10, May 24 2018, Henry Siegman, inter alia, deals with the issue of  the history of, and the comparison between, terrorism, Jewish and Arab.

Excerpts with interspaced comments:

Pompeo, Haley and the Israel lobby – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) and allied organisations – are probably unaware of, or simply refuse to know about, the extent to which terrorism and war crimes marked the creation of Israel. 

Which terrorism, exactly, marked Israel's creation? Whose 'war crimes'?

Has he read this book I reviewed?

Those who are told about this history dismiss it as a fabrication. 

Who are these those? Can it truly be simply dismissed?

What they deny or ignore is that these charges have been fully documented not only by historians, including Israeli ones, but by Israel’s own military. The point of recognising this history is not to justify terrorism by either Israelis or Palestinians, but to acknowledge the outrageous double standard that has been applied to the two parties and has undermined the possibility of a peace accord. 

If there is a double standard, it is that Arab terrorism is justified as a right of resistance. And that 80% (or more) of the victims of Arab terror are civilians.

Without knowing that history, it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand the extent to which Israeli propaganda has succeeded in shaping a narrative about the creation of Israel that presents the Palestinians who were brutally expelled from their homes as the aggressors and the Jews as their victims. Without that history, it is impossible to understand the outrage Palestinians feel over having been portrayed as the bad guys for so long.

Mr. Siegman, exactly how many Palestinians were brutally expelled?

And they were not the aggressors? Who is fabricating now? Who is subverting history?

Palestinians opposed the UN partition plan and started the 1948 war, but they did so not because of their hatred of Jews or their unhappiness with the partition plans, but because they didn’t want to accept exile, homelessness and disenfranchisement. 

Henry, the Arabs hated the Jews. They hated them as a result of their Islam, as a result of the Mufti's identification with Hitler's Nazism and the Final Solution

...The point is not that Israelis have no right to defend themselves against Palestinian terrorism, but that the Israeli argument that there is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli preventive and retaliatory violence is deeply flawed. 

No. He who initiates violence is morally flawed, not he who responds to defend.

The relevant comparison is between the way the Jews acted during their struggle for statehood – not after they achieved it – and the way Palestinians, still very much in the midst of their hopeless struggle for statehood, are acting now. It is also flawed because you cannot condemn terrorism if you do not offer people under occupation a credible route towards achieving viable statehood through non-violent means. That is something Israel has never offered the Palestinians...

A credible route?
The June 19, 1967 offer to return almost all territories gained?
The Dayan Plan? The Allon Plan?
Begin's autonomy plan?
Oslo?
Clinton/Barak Parameters?
Olmert's offer?

...The violence to which Palestinians have resorted in their struggle for statehood is not any different from the measures to which Zionists resorted before and during the 1948 war. According to Morris, ‘the upsurge of Arab terrorism in October 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict.’ While in the past, Arabs ‘had sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers’, now, ‘for the first time, massive bombs were placed [by Irgun] in crowded Arab centres, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed.’ Morris notes that ‘this “innovation” soon found Arab imitators.’

The Arab killings of Jews before the Balfour Declaration don't count?
The horrific pogroms and riots of April 1920, May and November 1921 and August 1929?
The slaughter of Jews in the streets of Jaffa in April 1936?

During Israel’s War of Independence, Jewish defence forces acted in similar ways to Irgun and Palestinian terrorist groups. As Morris explained in an interview in Haaretz, documentation declassified by the IDF shows that ‘in the months of April and May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages.’...

The Arabs began their attempted eradication of the nascent Jewish state decided upon by the UN of the morrow of that November 29, 1947 Partition Plan. After four months, the offensive was launched. In a war between civilians and communities and villages, that is the result.

The hypocrisy of Israel and the international community’s demonisation of the Palestinians are also evident in the writings of Ari Shavit, a long-time star columnist of Haaretz, who conducted the interview with Morris. In his own book, in which he unflinchingly describes the atrocities committed by Israel’s military against the Palestinian civilian population of Lydda in 1948...

Have you read Martin Kramer's research on the Lydda incident?

According to this double standard, my people’s terrorism is sacred, but my neighbour’s terrorism is criminal. When my neighbour renames a street after his terrorist hero it proves he will continue his terrorism even after he achieves statehood, whereas when my country elects former terrorists as prime ministers (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir) it proves we are the greatest democracy in the Middle East. When my terrorists are killed or imprisoned, a grateful people take care of their families. When my neighbours do the same, it proves they reward terrorism, and must be denied statehood. The point is not that states behave hypocritically – of course they do. The point is that when hypocrisy is the starting point of diplomacy, you will not get peace but only more hypocrisy and violence.

Let's quote from Dan Margalit:

Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN Partition Plan (the last in a series of international decisions dating back to the 1920 San Remo Conference) to divide the land between its two peoples, a plan that also recognized the Jews’ rights in Palestine, they could have been dwelling peacefully on their land ever since. But the day after the resolution was passed, they launched a war and declared they would throw the Jews into the sea, and today they bear the responsibility for the consequences.

A month after the start of the shooting from Arab Jaffa at Tel Aviv, the local leaderships agreed to a cease-fire. Palestinian public leaders and the Najda paramilitary organization sought the consent of the Supreme Arab Committee but were rejected (see Dr. Itamar Radai’s “Palestinians in Jerusalem and Jaffa, 1948: A Tale of Two Cities”). Only after five more months of sniper fire on Tel Aviv did Menachem Begin permit the Irgun fighters to attack Jaffa. This was in April 1948, a month before Israel's establishment. The Arabs chose to become refugees. A similar situation occurred in Haifa at the same time. The Jews urged the Arabs to remain, but they left the city after their leadership assured them they would return in 10 days and get to plunder the Jews’ houses.

These facts can be concealed and denied by fake news, but they are the real truth. The two great abandonments happened at the Arabs’ initiative.

Don't believe Siegman, his views or his "facts".

Nor his understanding of the conflict the Arabs have with Israel and Zionism.

^