M.J. Rosenberg on Anti-Semitism

I don't about "Dershowititis". By that I assume you mean a revival or initiation even of Zionist sentiment.

I was also surprised when my liberal father and aunt began speaking of their love and sometimes defense of Israel in the 80's, when they reached their 60's. I guess that's younger than your father.

I turned to a more conservative perspective in response to two events in my life.

One was when I had children and faced the question of how would I bring them up. What values, what commitments, should I encourage and more.

I really heard for the first time the meaning of the term l'dor v'dor, which is most often referred to as the transmission from father to son of the commitment to be a full mensch, and attempt to bring goodness to the world.

Its BOTH a substantive commitment and transmission of values and of association. The transmission is by blood, as well as by household or mentorship.

The second influence that enhanced my Zionist sympathy, was after starting the Green Island Cooperative Library which included a large collection of interviews with prominent dissenters, including an archive of Noam Chomsky lectures and interviews (thank you David Barsamian and Roger Leisner).

I heard 200 Chomsky presentations in the course of a couple months. While I loved many comments of Chomsky, I observed him making logical jumps in his conclusions, that seemed prejudicial to me. (By prejudice I don't mean anti-semitic, but more prejudicial in predetermining conclusions prior to research.)

And, I experienced first hand an upsetting degree of passive acceptance of his conclusions to the point of near-violent dogmatism.

I visited Israel and the West Bank in 1986, and although a couple years had passed since then, and certainly things had changed, his comments did NOT resemble the Israel or even the West Bank that I experienced, worse than "did not resembled".

So, having a family, that also compelled me to focus more close to home with vocation, paying bills, dealing with personal needs, shifted my thinking from pretense of "objectivity" to acknowledgement that I was part of some "we".

It still is a good moral effort, a necessary one, to attempt to do as good as one can with the degree of influence that one has, but that necessarily happens on individual terms.

Its up to me individually, up to citizens individually, to determine what we/they are convinced of and why.

I know you read the Phillip Roth book "The Plot Against America" about a fictional revision of early 40's history, in which Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election and "kept America out of the European war".

It evoked fear. But, it did so because the plot line was plausible, and even currently so.

Sentiment is determined by "tipping points", that have tremendous repurcussions.

If only 1% more voted against George Bush in 2000, the world would be different today. There would still probably have been a 911, but it is very unlikely that the US would have invaded Iraq.

There is HATRED against Israel, that predates 1948, 1967, the intifadas, the settlements.

That is part of the real environment of the place, so even if we were to hope that Israel doing what is the right thing would result in peace in the region, its not a sure thing.

The consequence of continued terror even with the green line as border, or even with a single one-person one-vote state, is a possibility, actually likely.

It still might be the right thing.

But, it needs to be presented and actually formed in a way to convince, so that it can be enthusiastically pursued.

Its a real tough nut though, given the history and ideological roots of the militant Islamic movements in Palestine and Southern Lebanon.

Zionism wasn't about taking over, prior to 1948, nor for most people long long after.

Its not about taking over for the majority of Israelis now.

In the 1930's and 1940's, the issue was survival.

In the thirties, there was merely fascism and mass executions (the fascism included the states of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Stalinist Russia). In the fourties there was continental wide genocide, with the "accomplice" of highly restrictive immigration policies in Europe and the US. Even after WW2, the US and Western Europe allowed in only a small proportion of refugees.

They LEFT that world. A good choice.

That the leadership of much of the Palestinian Arab movement was a nazi, is not insignificant. The collective effort was genocide, not exclusion, not absorption.

"What did they expect?"

They expected humanity.

"Zionism wasn't about taking over."

What kind of arrangement with the inhabitants did they have in mind, Richard?

"That the leadership of much of the Palestinian Arab movement was a nazi, is not insignificant. The collective effort was genocide, not exclusion, not absorption."

Richard, one advantage of having you on this blog (even though there is a bit too much of you)is that you bring out the Zionist myths one by one which gives us the opportunity to shoot them down (for the so manieth time).

I repeat here most of a post that I put elsewhere almost three years ago and that cannot now be traced.

I take it that with the rather grandiose term ‘leadership’ you are referring first and foremost to the ‘Grand Mufti of Jerusalem’, Haj Muhammad Amin al-Husseini. If there hadn’t been a Grand Mufti the Zionists would have had to invent him. In fact they seem to have partly succeeded in doing so. Let us have a look at his case.

The evidence that somehow he was more or less intimately involved in the 'collective effort' (your words)to commit genocide is, at best, a matter of double hearsay, the kind of thing that would be thrown out in any decent court.

Dr. Rudolf Kasztner, a Zionist leader, allegedly testified that Dieter Wisliceny, a deputy of Eichmann, had told him that he ‘was convinced’ that the Mufti ‘had played a role in the decision to exterminate the European Jews…’ (Wikipedia’s ‘free encyclopedia’).

Now this Kasztner was, in fact, a rather controversial character who eventually got involved in a libel case in Israel concerning his wartime past and was subsequently murdered (by an Israeli Jew).
There was, as is well known, another Zionist leader, Joel Brand (no relation), who in his – doomed – effort to save the lives of one million Hungarian Jews, was in contact with Wisliceny and Eichmann at roughly the same time and place as Kasztner. Since he, contrary to Kasztner, came out of that affair with an unsullied reputation his testimony on the role of the Mufti, if any, might be slightly more interesting. I have, however, not been able to find anything on this.

It has also been claimed that Wisliceny repeated, at Nuremberg, this accusation regarding the Mufti’s role in the ‘final solution’. However, the testimony he gave at Nuremberg on 3rd January 1946, as a witness for the prosecution, on what he knew of the ‘final solution’ makes no mention of the Mufti at all. Wisliceny wasn’t high up enough in the Nazi hierarchy anyway to know at first hand what went on at the Wannsee Conference (where neither he, nor, needless to say, the Mufti, were among the 15 participants – who, themselves, belonged to the second echelon of Nazi leaders).

Yet the role of the Mufti in this all, has, mainly on the basis of this shaky 2nd or 3rd hand testimony of Kasztner, assumed mythical proportions.

Peter Novick, whose reputation as a scholar has probably largely saved him from that easiest of accusations, to be a ‘self-hating Jew’, wrote in his path breaking study ‘The holocaust in American life’:
"The claims of Palestinian complicity in the murder of the European Jews were to some extent a defensive strategy, a preemptive response to the Palestinian complaint that if Israel was recompensed for the Holocaust, it was unjust that Palestinian Muslims should pick up the bill for the crimes of European Christians. The assertion that Palestinians were complicit in the Holocaust was mostly based on the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem, a pre-World War II Palestinian nationalist leader who, to escape imprisonment by the British, sought refuge during the war in Germany. The Mufti was in many ways a disreputable character, but post-war claims that he played any significant part in the Holocaust have never been sustained. This did not prevent the editors of the four-volume ‘Encyclopedia of the Holocaust” from giving him a starring role. The article on the Mufti is more than twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goering, longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann – of all the biographical articles, it is exceeded in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler."

Spurred on by this I checked this Encyclopedia for a few things myself. I looked, first of all, for an entry on Hans Albin Rauter, the Austrian SS-General, who during the war years was the highest SS and police leader (like Heydrich he had the SS rank of 'Obergruppenfuehrer') in occupied Holland and played a crucial role in the destruction of more than one hundred thousand Dutch Jews (the Dutch executed him in 1949). To my surprise there was no entry for him at all.

Then I checked up on Seyss-Inquart, Hitler’s deputy in Holland (executed at Nuremberg), and Anton Mussert, the leader of the Dutch Nazis (executed in Holland). These both had entries but together they only mustered about 60 % of the space allocated to the Mufti.

It seems to me plain what has happened here. A man, who in the Nazi scheme of things, was probably no more than a pawn, has, exactly for the reasons suggested by Novick, been transformed into a main player.
What seems to be clear is that the Mufti sought to prevent the transfer to Palestine of any such Jews who the Nazis might decide to expel. He has also been accused of having played a role in the formation of regiments of Bosnian (not Palestinian!) Muslims who fought on the side of the Germans.

All in all his role doesn’t seem to have been very much different from that of another nationalist leader who organized fighting units (in his case of his countrymen) on behalf of the Germans: Subhas Chandra Bose, president of the Indian National Congress. I think that both the Mufti and Bose acted on the same motto: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I cannot recall, however, that the British ever argued that Indian rights to independence should be curtailed because of Bose’s wartime role; because here is a point that holds for both Bose and the Mufti and needs to be made most explicitly: one cannot claim that the Indians, respectively the Palestinians, were implicated collectively in the wartime deeds of these leaders.

To focus on the Mufti again: even if he committed the dire deeds he is being accused of he did not receive instructions on these points from a representative body of his countrymen. It can even be questioned to what extent he could at that stage still be regarded as a ‘national leader’ at all.

In one of the most important pre-war decisions for instance, the acceptance, or otherwise, of the 1939 British White Paper, he found, according to Rashid Khalidi, ‘most of the rest of the Palestinian leadership’ (which was in favour of acceptance) against him. The Mufti, assisted by some ‘younger and more militant advisors’, carried the day, but in exile, says Khalidi, he ‘was increasingly out of touch with events on the ground, and his policies became more and more unrealistic in the years that followed’.

Arie,
Its true that collective punishment is wrong.

We were talking about the context of the formation of Israel, with the implication that Jews should not have sought to reside there, nor sought to self-govern there.

Its not a distraction to speak of the Mufti, but a description.

That is the point about collective punishment.

I won't change my perspective that the Jewish people have a right to self-govern, and in safety.

I doubt that I'll change my perspective that the Palestinian people are a people and have the right to self-govern.

How to get there, in fact, is the only practical question.

I saw a Cornel West presentation on You Tube this evening, in which he articulated his sense of what it means to be a leftist in the modern world.

But, he ended with the assertion that "the leftist appeal is UNLIKELY to result in the changes desired, that the majority of the world speaks through other narratives." (Its not a direct quote.)

I agree with that, that when the left or Palestinians or Israel for that matter, pose a list of conditions that all must be met to be accepted, that that ends up a failure, nearly inevitably.

In this regard, the demands include

1. Israel admit that Zionism (self-governance by the Jewish people) is a crime inevitably
2. Israel withdraw all of its military from the West Bank
3. Israel open its borders to permit free travel between the West Bank and Gaza
4. Israel grant the right of return to all that claim to be descendants from former residents (as a class, not by specific claims)
5. Israel remove all Jews from the West Bank and Gaza, while leaving all the infrastructure and buildings intact
6. Israel renounce national claims to Jerusalem and particularly to the Temple of the Mount/Al Aqsa Mosque, in favor of UN jurisdiction, but somehow that individuals in East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem have enencumbered access to the sites

Further, that Israel make no effort to restrict international access to ANY Muslim regardless of history or association with terror. (The significance of this is that the Al Aqsa Mosque grounds, and the Western Wall grounds, are tens of meters apart.)

7. That Israel remove its functional and actual blockade of Gaza, and permit Gaza to administer its borders entirely independantly.

Additional indirectly related demands include:

1. That Israel ignore Iran's funding, arming, training proxy militias that periodically randomly shell Israeli civilians.

2. That Israel ignore statements issued by radical Islamicist movements stating that it is a Muslim's duty to kill any Jew they encounter. (Including statements made by Hamas officials and clerics.)

The only one of these claims that I sense is possible to occur is to remove Israeli military from the West Bank.

I think that is possible only with the confidence that the West Bank will NEVER allow itself to be a staging ground for terror activities against Israeli civilians, that it will AGAINST THE LAW, and enforced.

By jove, he's cracked it:

The Witty 9 Point Peace Plan.

Truly a Nixon goes to China moment. We must get Dennis Ross working on it straight away.

Richard, is Benny Morris a "progressive" source, given what he says about the ethnic cleansing in 1948? (Not extreme enough for his taste.)

Now I've also read Tom Segev and Avi Shlaim, who are, I presume, "progressive", and what comes through there is that there was a minority of Zionists who wanted to live in equality with the Arabs, but the majority wanted domination one way or the other. The revisionists were just more open about it. As for "progressive" vs. "nonprogressive" sources, Tom Segev gives the impression of someone trying to be fair to all sides. I think every American at all interested in the subject is acquainted with the Zionist version of events–the one where idealist Zionists came to live in a desert inhabited by backward Arabs (to the extent there were any inhabitants before the Zionists brought prosperity to the region) who reacted with irrational hatred and who ultimately fled their homes at the order of their leaders, despite the pleas and entreaties of their Zionist neighbors to stay.

There's nothing wrong with Zionism (or nothing more wrong than any other brand of nationalism, though if you ask me the whole idea of nationalism has been disastrous). Where it went wrong historically is encapsulated in that slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land." If you try to settle in an already inhabited region you're going to have to engage in a considerable amount of deception, both with yourself and with others, if you want to maintain the notion that your movement is democratic.

And yes, I recognize that Zionism was a reaction to centuries of antisemitism. But the solution created a new group of victims.

The Geneva Accords are probably the least bad possibly achievable solution. Not a good solution–just the least bad one.