NYTimes Facilitates Misleading Historical Narrative

Yesterday, the New York Times carried an op-ed by an Arab activist seeking to dislodge Jews from their homes and weaken the security of the state of Israel.

I had sent in a letter but it wasn't published. As usual.

Here it is:-

In his op-ed ("Peaceful protest can free Palestine", Feb. 22), Mustafa Barghouthi opens with a statement that "over the past 64 years, Palestinians have tried armed struggle". That is incorrect.


Following several months of protests in late 1919 and early 1920, including one on February 27 which involved lifting the United States Consul-General Otis Allan Glazebrook up on to the shoulders of the demonstrators, and incited by a religious preacher, Haj Amin El-Husseini, the soon-to-be "Grand Mufti of Palestine", Arabs fell upon their Jewish neighbors between April 4 -7, 1920, killing 5 and injuring 200 - all civilians casualties. Indeed, the entire history of the past 92 years has been marked by Arab terror, pogroms, riots and murder directed almost exclusively at Jewish civilians by Arabs, in Hebron, Safed, Jaffa and many other locations where Jews resided. Ethnic cleansing from some cities resulted, all prior to the 1948 war.


If there is a "struggle", it is one for the truth and the genuine historical narrative.

And here are the ones that did get published:-

Hurdles That Block an Israeli-Palestinian Peace

To the Editor:

Re “Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine” (Op-Ed, Feb. 22):

Mustafa Barghouthi, a member of the Palestinian Parliament, writes that “over the past 64 years, Palestinians have tried armed struggle; we have tried negotiations; and we have tried peace conferences.”

Mr. Barghouthi conveniently doesn’t mention one option: accepting Israeli offers to evacuate the West Bank and make peace.

In 2000, Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister, offered to return 96 percent of the territories and to divide Jerusalem. In 2008, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered to leave lands equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank and again to divide Jerusalem.

On both occasions, Palestinian leaders not only refused to accept those offers, but also refused to make counterproposals and initiated violence (the second intifada, increased Hamas rocket fire from Gaza) that poisoned the atmosphere for continued negotiations.

A narrative of relentless Palestinian victimization may be emotionally satisfying, but ignores certain well-known events.

VICTOR LIEBERMAN
Ann Arbor, Mich.

*

To the Editor:

Over the last 64 years, Mustafa Barghouthi writes, Palestinians have been engaged in struggle with nothing to show for it. Do the math. Sixty-four years ago was not 1967, when Israel won control of the West Bank and Gaza from Jordan and Egypt; 64 years ago was 1948, when Israel became an independent state.

So while Mr. Barghouthi rails against post-1967 occupation and settlements, he cannot free himself from the view that Israel itself, from the day of its foundation, should never have been. This is the mind-set that makes an Israeli-Palestinian peace so elusive.

BERNARD JOSHUA KABAK, New York,

*

To the Editor:

Thank you for publishing Mustafa Barghouthi’s eloquent article addressing the hunger strike of Khader Adnan and summarizing clearly the plight of Palestinians. Mr. Adnan, as well as countless other Palestinians, is indeed a hero, and the hope for justice and peace in Palestine-Israel.

JUDY NEUNUEBEL, Santa Fe, N.M.,

Mrs. Neunuebel, an involved Christian, seems to be active in pro-Pal causes via Creativity for Peace and even wrote glowingly of Chas Freeman, that notorious anti-Semite.  Mindless, is what comes to my mind.

_______________

UPDATE

And the following day, this letter appeared:

To the Editor:

In “Peaceful Protest Can Free Palestine” (Op-Ed, Feb. 22), Mustafa Barghouthi does not mention that Israel has been trying for a long time to bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table.

It is quite disappointing to see that the Palestinians continue to seek ways to confront Israel through boycotts and protests, rather than choose a path of collaboration to find a true and lasting peace between neighbors.

Only if we use the language of peace and dialogue will we be able to create an atmosphere of trust. While the Palestinians have tried terrorism, and subsequently attended peace conferences, they have not uttered the single most important word: yes.

The Palestinian Authority has yet to say yes to Israel, yes to peace and yes to living side by side with the Jewish state. Israel’s outstretched arms extend until the day the Palestinians say, Yes, we are ready to join our neighbor Israel in taking the difficult step toward peace.

Organizing people to protest is much easier than organizing people to make compromises for peace, a compromise that both sides must make.

SHAHAR AZANI
Spokesman Consulate General of Israel, New York

P.S. Typical that independent activists responded quicker than the Foreign Ministry folk.

^

Revisionist History

If you were an Arab or a supporter, and you wanted to wipe out any Jewish connection to the same land you desired for your own, ignore the historical record and simply engage in propaganda, how would you describe the chronology of "Palestine"?

Well, if you were really cheeky (or is that chutzpadic?), you'd write something like this:

Palestine was under the rule of the Eastern Roman Emperors since 400 AC and until it was conquered by Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, who was given the keys of Jerusalem from Patriarch Safronios in 638 AC. The city then remained under Islamic-Arab rule until the Crusaders captured it in 1099 AC. Christian rule lasted until 1187 AC when Salah Eddin reconquered the city, which then was ruled by the Ayyubids until being recaptured by the Crusaders in 1129. Some 15 years later, the Arabs regained Jerusalem and the city remained in their hands until 1917.

In 1517, Turkish Sultan Selim I conquered Jerusalem and Palestine and incorporated both into the Ottoman Empire, which remained in control until the British occupation in 1917, with the exception of a short period of Egyptian rule (from 1831 until 1840). In the course of World War I, the Ottoman forces capitulated in Jerusalem on 9 December 1917 and mayor Selim Effendi Al-Husseini surrendered to the allied forces led by British Gen. Edmond Allenby, who officially entered the city two days later and established the British military administration in Jerusalem. In April 1920, the San Remo Conference awarded administration of the former Turkish territories of Syria and Lebanon to France, and Palestine, Transjordan and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Britain. On 24
July 1922, the League of Nations Council approved the Mandate for Palestine without the consent of Palestinians (The terms of the Mandate became official on 29 Sept. 1923, until which time British military rule remained in place).

Source

That's from PASSIA in early 2002.

Jews anyone?

Have they, er, improved?

Let's Hear It for the American Congress

Eli Hertz reminds us of:

The United States Congressional Record
1922 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
National Home for THE JEWISH PEOPLE JUNE 30, 1922
HOUSE RESOLUTION 360 - UNANIMOUSLY ADOPTED

"Palestine of today, the land we now know as Palestine, was peopled by the Jews from the dawn of history until the Roman era. It is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. They were driven from it by force by the relentless Roman military machine and for centuries prevented from returning. At different periods various alien people succeeded them but the Jewish race had left an indelible impress upon the land.

Today it is a Jewish country. Every name, every landmark, every monument and every trace of whatever civilization remaining there is still Jewish. And it has ever since remained a hope, a longing, as expressed in their prayers for these nearly 2,000 years. No other people has ever claimed Palestine as their national home. No other people has ever shown an aptitude or indicated a genuine desire to make it their homeland. The land has been ruled by foreigners. Only since the beginning of the modern Zionist effort may it be said that a creative, cultural, and economic force has entered Palestine. The Jewish Nation was forced from its natural home. It did not go because it wanted to.

A perusal of Jewish history, a reading of Josephus, will convince the most skeptical that the grandest fight that was ever put up against an enemy was put up by the Jew. He never thought of leaving Palestine. But he was driven out. But did he, when driven out, give up his hope of getting back? Jewish history and Jewish literature give the answer to the question. The Jew even has a fast day devoted to the day of destruction of the Jewish homeland.

Never throughout history did they give up hope of returning there. I am told that 90 per cent of the Jews today are praying for the return of the Jewish people to its own home. The best minds among them believe in the necessity of reestablishing their Jewish land. To my mind there is something prophetic in the fact that during the ages no other nation has taken over Palestine and held it in the sense of a homeland; and there is something providential in the fact that for 1,800 years it has remained in desolation as if waiting for the return of the people."

UPDATE: And this from Dr. Andrew Bostom,

On June 30, 1922, a joint resolution of both Houses of Congress of the United States unanimously endorsed the “Mandate for Palestine,” confirming the irrevocable right of Jews to settle in the area of Palestine—anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The Congressional Record contains a statement of support from New York Rep. Walter Chandler which includes an observation, about “Turkish and Arab agitators… preaching a kind of holy war [jihad] against…the Jews” of Palestine. During this same era within Palestine, a strong Arab Muslim irredentist current—epitomized by Hajj Amin el-Husseini—promulgated the forcible restoration of Shari’a-mandated dhimmitude for Jews via jihad. Indeed, two years before he orchestrated the murderous anti-Jewish riots of 1920, i.e., in 1918, Hajj Amin el-Husseini stated plainly to a Jewish co-worker (at the Jerusalem Governorate), I.A. Abbady, “This was and will remain an Arab land…the Zionists will be massacred to the last man…Nothing but the sword will decide the future of this country.”

(Kippah Tip: Pam G.)

On Forest Fires and The Writing of History

Gershom Gorenberg opens his book review essay in the latest New York Review of Books recounting a A.B. Yehoshua story:

In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel's newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in "the war" — meaning Israel's war of independence in 1948 — and the Arab's young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.

At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: "And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past." As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.

And in the past decade despite the campaign of the New Historians and the Post-Zionist academics and groups like Zochrot that have done much to revise history and also reveal history, the Arabs are still burning our forests despite no need - real or imagined, to unerase their past.

Here:

Fire Causes:
The first and most important cause of forest fires in Israel is arson (Table 2). In the 1980s and early 1990s arson comprised about one-third of all forest fires in Israel -- a very large proportion. Some of the sources for this arson were identified as the work of criminals whose sole aim was to collect insurance money. Many cases of arson in the late 1980s, however, were directly related to the Palestinian uprising (Intifada). Palestinians used fire as a means of their resistance movement as early as the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1980s it was adopted as a highly visible action against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Arson was found to be easy to execute: all one had to do was cross the old border, which was unguarded and open to all, start a fire in one of the many forests which straddle the mountainous areas near the border, and then disappear. The occurrence of forest fires in areas adjacent to the old "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank was very frequent: in the years 1988-1990 between 288 and 388 forest fires were caused by arson and took place in areas near the old pre-1967 border (Kliot and Keidar 1992). In some of the fires which took place in northern Israel, Israeli Arab Palestinians were found to be responsible. These fires were extremely remarkable because 1988 was also rich in precipitation and, as a result, the vegetation concentration was highly combustible. Intifada-induced arson gradually faded out as the uprising started to die out in the early 1990s.

Guess either they don't like trees or they very much don't like Jews.

Getting back to the review essay, Gershom can't forgive Benny Morris his "dizzying movement rightward", that Morris' book is "unavoidably one with its own slant". Gee, that's so terrible. Are his facts wrong?

Gershom uses "1948 veteran Amos Keinan" to justify the showing of the Hirbit Hizah but neglects to note that Keinan himself participated in the conquest of Deir Yassin.

He also congratulates Morris:

"Morris is an unbending believer in the value of the paper trail: documents establish fact; interviews with participants are too subjective."

Ah, but who writes up reports? Objective persons?

Another point:

"Morris is using Arab statements from sixty or eighty years ago to make sense of today's stalemate; but it seems he is also reading those statements through the lens of today's events".

Or, of course, Gorenberg, et al., have been avoiding the "Mufti angle", that the so-called "Palestinian nationalism" has always been of a character of the most negative Islamic essence. That religious fanaticism is the basis of their movement, denial first, along with a horrendous capacity for hate and death although when forced to deal with a third book there on the issue, Gorenberg must conclude:

Exploiting Islam, al-Husseini succeeded in making Palestine a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic issue.

Gershom could have done more with this:

Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled— but they could do so rarely, for the simple reason that the Arabs had few opportunities. They were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Jordan's Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of the religious kibbutz Kfar 'Etzion after they surrendered.

He could have mentioned Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, Bet Haaravah, all of Gush Etzion (Masu'ot Yitzhak, Revadim, Ein Tzurim) which he left out.

And he reveals his own slant:

This time, he leaps back much further: "The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries," until the Romans crushed the last, brief Jewish bid at independence in the second century CE. Later Muslim rulers never treated it as a separate province. By the nineteenth century it was an "impoverished backwater"—albeit one where Arabs outnumbered Jews by a ratio of eighteen to one.

Morris's underlying point here is that Jews were returning to their ancient homeland. In itself, this is correct, and is essential background to the events of 1948. But it is also a classic Zionist account, and is just one face of history.

Just one? It isn't factual? Gorenberg prefers prejudices one must assume.