Last month we noted that the Columbia, Mo., Daily Tribune declined to conduct a dialogue about divestment in its pages. Well, the Tribune is getting right with the lord. Today it publishes a George Smith piece about the Nakba that ends by calling for granting West Bank Palestinians a right to vote, come what may:
Zionist mythology paints the war of independence as a heroic epic in which a tiny Jewish nation fought desperately for survival against an onslaught of invading Arab armies. Well-documented facts tell a less flattering story. From the beginning, the Zionist leadership had no doubt about their ultimate victory. Palestinian resistance, they knew, would be negligible after the suppression of the 1936-1939 revolt. Arab armies didn't intervene until May 14-15, 1948, by which time 250,000 Palestinians had already been expelled. Those armies were greatly outnumbered by the Zionist forces and, with one exception, were ill-equipped, poorly trained and ineptly led. The one disciplined force that actually posed a threat to the Zionist takeover was the British-led Arab Legion of Transjordan. It conquered the West Bank but chose not to interfere with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the remainder of Palestine, possibly because of a secret agreement with the Zionists.
That is why the Green Line that defines the present state of Israel excludes the West Bank. In June 1967, Israel conquered the remainder of Palestine, and it has subjected the millions of Palestinians living there to an increasingly oppressive occupation ever since, dispossessing them of 40 percent of their remaining homeland to accommodate more than half a million Jewish settlers.
The Nakba and its aftermath are a shameful chapter in Jewish history. For Jews of good conscience everywhere, repudiating and resisting the injustice perpetrated in their name is an urgent mitzvah. This doesn't mean Israeli Jews must be expelled from their homeland, for that would be to pile a new injustice on the old one. But it does mean the Jews of Israel must at long last grant the Palestinians they've ruled for so long the same rights as they themselves enjoy, even if it means an end to the ethnically exclusivist Jewish state.
George P. Smith is a nonreligious member of Congregation Beth Shalom.
Meanwhile lefty PEP moneybags Irving Moskowitz, joins Neocon moneybags Sheldon Adelson in donating to anti-Obama superPacs. link to israelmatzav.blogspot.com
“lefty PEP moneybags Irving Moskowitz”???? What evidence is there that Moskowitz is in any sense a progressive on any issue?
wow, excellent..looking forward to reading the comments at the tribune if/when they flow in.
I wish I’d called myself an “unconverted” rather than a “nonreligious” member of Congregation Beth Shalom. I’m not Jewish, and neither I nor our (ultra-Zionist) rabbi Yossi Feintuch would countenance a hypocritical “conversion” just so I could say I spoke as a bone fide member of the tribe. But the congregational community does welcome me as family–even those who like Yossi vehemently disagree with my jeremiads on Palestine.
thanks for commenting george. i’m glad they welcome you as a family.
i visited the home page of the columbia tribune and i couldn’t find reference to your excellent article. maybe i wasn’t looking in the right place. have you gotten much local feedback?
link to columbiatribune.com
George, and Annie, has this most courageous woman ever been discussed here before, or anywhere, or is that just me? What an antidote she is for Joe Lieberman: link to leewhitnum.com
Gotta send Lee Whitnum some cash and spread her POV across the social network! She give me hope.
Get a load of this: link to rawstory.com
wow
link to leewhitnum.com
Mr. Smith,
Thank you for writing this piece. You covered some important issues in a clear, succinct way – not easy to do. Who knows, maybe by expressing your your views so publicly, come what may, you’ll inspire some of your fellow congregants to folow suit. You may have started a small revolt in your synagogue.
Thanks Citizen,
Apparently, Whitnum has made it her mission to expose the toxic US/Israel partnership. Good for her, I hope she succeeds in getting some attention. She’s assertive but, unfortunately, she comes across as a mud slinging whiner and a bit of a crank. She doesn’t package her critique effectively, even to Americans who may nominally share her views.
Annie, anybody, did you watch her video clip here, speaking frankly to potential voters re her campaign for the US Senate? link to leewhitnum.com
Can you imagine her getting on US TV at prime time and speaking so? Very plain speaking about the “it’s so complicated” issue–and not a single bold note of it is wrong in the slightest! She intends to make waves; will the US mainstream media follow her?
“Stand with us to take back our country; we must get back on track. “…Lee Whitnum
Amen to that. Send this woman money and tell her why.
American, done. She wrote me back.
Annie et al.:
The main Columbia Daily Tribune web page is link to columbiatribune.com. Within that webpage, you click on the Commentary tab to get to editorials.
You get 10 free views per 30 days at the website without subscribing.
So far there are no comments on the editorial.
Mr Smith I have read many an article/book on the Nakba and yours is a very fair analysis. Thank you. Your heart is in the right place.
Great, are they going to change the headline then?
Nonreligious is somewhat ambiguous when a lot of people state they are atheist Jews and some atheist Christians or Muslims. On the other hand, it seems perfectly correct summary when describing oneself as a member of a congregation of a religion to which you don’t belong. I hope the community continues to welcome you. More, I hope they welcome your ideas on equal rights. You don’t come right out and say you advocate the right of return, well, perhaps it would be too much for the Beth Shalomers.
Unconverted seems to say the idea of converting has some attraction. Just imagine, you wouldn’t just be becoming a Jew, you’d be converting to an anti-semitic Jew! Well, better that than the rage-filled zionists I occasionally encounter who’ve called me unmentionable names and seemed ready to physically attack me.
As a lifelong citizen of the midwest, I can safely say, I believe, that you would be lucky to find three articles a year that would be this honest, informative, and, though others would surely disagree, non-partisan.
I thank the author for writing this piece and the Tribune and Mondoweiss for publishing it.
“Awakening” indeed
This piece and others like it are so encouraging to me as an older man. It is very easy to become cynical and hopeless in times like ours. We need people who will speak truth to power like George here and Phil and Adam and the rest of the Mondoweissers and Walt/Mearsheimer, Beinart, etc. to give us the strength to fight on for peace and justice until those battles are won.
Lobewyper: I’m an alter kaker too: age 71. And I would thoroughly agree about the young people who have emboldened older people like you and me to be less pusilanimous.
Thanks, George. Succinct and wonderful article. The tide is turning and we are gonna win this!
Thank you, George Smith; your article was great! I sent it to everyone I could think of–get any feedback other than here?
The one disciplined force that actually posed a threat to the Zionist takeover was the British-led Arab Legion of Transjordan. It conquered the West Bank but chose not to interfere with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in the remainder of Palestine, possibly because of a secret agreement with the Zionists.
No that’s shopworn propaganda. The British Government had okayed the entry of the Arab Legion into Palestine, but only on condition that it stay out of the territory allocated to the Jewish State. The plan only called for the Legion to hold Central Arab Palestine – and that didn’t even include the Corpus Separatum, which was not allocated to either state. The Syrians and Iraqis had been assigned the northern part of the Arab territory, while Egypt had been assigned Gaza and the southern territory around Beersheba.
Anyone with military experience knows that the Arab Legion was like a package of Kool-Aid in an Ocean. It had no Air Force or arms manufacturing capabilities and only about a 9,000 man force. They had been an integral part of the nearly 100,000 man British force that failed miserably to control the 80,000 or so fighters and auxiliaries that the underground Jewish militias eventually fielded. There was never any possibility that a force that small could have held an area the size of the territory allocated to the Arab State by themselves, much less rescue the remainder of Palestine.
The modus vivendi agreement with the Zionists was needed to prevent unnecessary clashes that would have resulted in heavy losses of skilled soldiers and equipment that Abdullah couldn’t replace. The Jewish assault on Jerusalem forced the Legion to alter their plans and intervene, but the Legion wanted to avoid getting bogged-down in heavy house-to-house urban fighting like that.
Hostage: I don’t really disagree with this. Compared to the more than 100,000 troops ultimately deployed by the Yishuv (and the state of Israel), the Arab Legion’s 8,000-12,000 men at arms was tiny. My counterfactual scenario envisioned Arab Legion “intervention” in the ethnic cleansing, not blocking or reversing it altogether. Suggesting that the Arab Legion “actually posed a threat to the Zionist takeover” is admittedly venturing beyond the facts. My arguable exaggeration of the strength of the Arab Legion was rhetorical, ceding even more than I needed to to the Zionist myth of an overwhelming Arab “assault” on a nearly defenseless infant nation. I don’t understand in what sense this is “shopworn propaganda.”
I don’t understand in what sense this is “shopworn propaganda.”
The notion that the Arab states prevented the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine or that Abdullah colluded with the Zionists for some sort of sinister purposes has been exploited by the Zionists and others ever since 1949. Efraim Karsh, “Palestine Betrayed” is one of the more recent examples. Avi Shlaim noted that the meetings between Golda Meir and King Abdullah in November 1947 and May 1948 have even featured in popular films.
The UN partition plan was notable for being the only proposal in two decades that didn’t incorporate Transjordan in the proposed Arab State. Declassified documents from our own US archives indicate that the Mufti was still regarded as a war enemy and that neither the US nor UK intended to support any government associated with him. The US publicly supported Bernadotte’s proposal for a union of the former Arab territories of the mandate, e.g. See Foreign relations of the United States, 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa Volume V, Part 2, Pages 1447-1448
After the fall of Haifa most Palestinians would have been glad to see Abdullah annex all of Palestine. Bernadotte’s diary said the Mufti had no credibility with Palestinians on account of his unrealistic predictions regarding the defeat of the Jewish militias. He observed “It would seem as though in existing circumstances most of the Palestinian Arabs would be quite content to be incorporated in Transjordan.” see Folke Bernadotte, “To Jerusalem”, Hodder and Stoughton, 1951, pages 112-13.
Avi Shlaim has toned down his own account of the negotiations between the Jewish Agency and King Abdullah. Historian Neil Caplan described the preface of Shlaim’s more recent editions:
— See Zionism and the Arabs: Another Look at the ‘New’ Historiography
Reviewed work(s): Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 by Benny Morris; The Israel/Palestine Question by Ilan Pappe; The Politics of Partition: King Abdullah, the Zionists and Palestine, 1921-1951 by Avi Shlaim, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 345-360.
The details about the Jordanian Prime Minister’s meeting with Bevin have been available in John Bagot Glubb “A Soldier with the Arabs”, Harpers, 1957, pages 63 & 66 for a long time. The key points were:
The Arab League had not yet decided to intervene.
*Tafiq Pasha explained:
1) The Jews had prepared a government that was ready to assume power;
2) The Palestinian Arabs had made no preparations to govern themselves;
3) There were no leaders in the country capable of organizing an administration;
4) The Jews had a police force and more importantly they had an army in the form of the Haganah;
5) The Palestinian Arabs had no armed forces and no means of creating an army.
6) If things remained as they were, there would be one of two possible outcomes. The Jews would neglect the UN Partition Plan and seize the whole of Palestine up to the River Jordan; or else the Mufti would endeavor to return and make himself the ruler of Palestine.
Neither of those results would suit the UK, US, or Transjordan. The Mufti was the bitterest enemy of Great Britain and a rival of King Abdullah. He had spent the war with Hitler in Berlin. King Abdullah had received petitions and was still receiving many more from Palestinian notables begging for protection and assistance after the British withdrawal. The government of Transjordan proposed sending the Arab Legion to occupy that portion of Palestine awarded to the Arabs which was contiguous with the frontier of Transjordan.
*Bevin:
1) Said that “It seemed the obvious thing to do, but don’t go and invade the areas allotted to the Jews.”
*Glubb: Advised that the Legion could not occupy the Gaza area or Upper Galilee, and did not have the forces to invade the Jewish areas, even if they so desired.
In Eugene L. Rogan, Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, Rogan devotes a chapter to “Jordan and the persistence of an official history” (page 104) which presents the evidence for and against the betrayal theory. It compares the account of Col. Abdullah al Tal’s book which was published in Egypt after an abortive coup to topple the Hashemite regime with the accounts published by Glubb and by Abdullah himself in “Al-Takmilah” My Memoirs Completed, trans. Harold W. Glidden, Longsman, 1978, Forward page v and Chapter 4 page 77.
Israeli Military historian David Tal says that the Jewish Agency did not intend to partition Palestine between themselves and Abdullah. They agreed to the deployment of the Arab Legion in Palestine to maintain law and order, as they had in the past. But the Agency hoped that the Legion would eventually be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. He also points out instances where the archives or other sources do not support Abdullah al-Tall’s account. See David Tal, War in Palestine, 1948: strategy and diplomacy, Routledge, 2004, page 471 & 464
King Abdullah had received hundreds of petitions from Palestinian notables requesting protection upon the withdrawal of the British forces. Eugene Rogan says that those petitions, from nearly every town and village in Palestine, are preserved in “The Hashemite Documents: The Papers of Abdullah bin al-Husayn, volume V: Palestine 1948 (Amman 1995)”. See Chapter 5, Jordan and 1948, in “The war for Palestine: rewriting the history of 1948″, By Eugene L. Rogan, and Avi Shlaim, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Thanks for the clarification, Hostage.
I’d be interested in your take on a fundamental question: Did the Arab Legion prevent the Zionist forces from taking over what is now the West Bank, as is usually contended? Absent the Legion, would Israel have expanded its control to encompass the West Bank, as it did so many other areas assigned to the Arabs in the 1947 UN Partition Plan?
I don’t suppose the Zionists of 1948 could have anticipated the economic importance of the West Bank to the future of the Israeli state. Most importantly, it is now an indispensable source of water (unless perhaps Israel were to abandon its agricultural sector = ~50% of high-quality water consumption and ~3% of GDP). Whatever their understanding of the water situation, the Zionists of 1948 certainly placed a high value on Jerusalem, as witnessed for example by their multiple assaults on Latrun in order to preserve the corridor connecting Jerusalem to the coastal plain.
I’d be interested in your take on a fundamental question: Did the Arab Legion prevent the Zionist forces from taking over what is now the West Bank, as is usually contended? Absent the Legion, would Israel have expanded its control to encompass the West Bank, as it did so many other areas assigned to the Arabs in the 1947 UN Partition Plan?
No I don’t think the Legion was the deciding factor. The Israelis and Abdullah were conducting de facto armistice negotiations under the guise of the UN cease fire talks to avoid criticism from the Arab League that Transjordan had accepted partition. See the footnote here: link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu
By December of 1948 the Israeli economy was suffering from the prolonged mobilization. The negotiators advised Transjordan that they were no longer interested in an armistice agreement. They issued an ultimatum of peace or war and insisted on immediate peace negotiations. The officials in Transjordan advised the State Department that a Jewish attack on the Iraqi positions would render their own situation hopeless.
Abdullah continued to demand that the refugees from Jaffa, Lydda, and Ramle be allowed to return to their homes as sign of good faith, but he quickly accepted the terms that were offered by Israel. See the text and the footnote here: link to digicoll.library.wisc.edu
I believe that the only thing that prevented the Zionists from assuming control of the whole of Palestine was behind-the-scenes arm twisting and blackmail on the part of the Truman administration and mounting pressure from American Zionists in May of 1948 to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes (more below).
Ben Gurion simply scaled back the Jewish Agency’s phased contingency plans to take control of all of the territory of Palestine at the earliest opportunity – with or without the non-Jewish population. They had planned to kill or exile any Arabs that offered resistance and to impose martial law on the remaining population in order to drive them off their lands and into isolated ethnic enclaves.
A variety of sources report that, from 1937 onward, Ben Gurion directed the Jewish Agency to develop and update plans to partition Palestine. At the same time, he directed the Haganah to develop and update plans to assume control of all the territory of Palestine after the anticipated British withdrawal.
*David Tal explains that the reason the Jewish leadership accepted the UN partition proposal, was because it had been an integral part of their plans for war against the Palestinian people all along. See War in Palestine, 1948: strategy and diplomacy, page 471.
*Schlomo Ben Ami reports that in May of 1947 Ben Gurion told the Mapai Central Committee that his acceptance of the principle of partition was only a tactic to gain time until the Jews were strong enough to fight the Arab majority. Ben Ami notes “The paradox of the winter of 1947 was that the Jews, who accepted Resolution 181 – the Jewish public acclaimed its endorsement by the UN with genuine outbursts of jubilation – were ready and well deployed to face a war should this [the partition borders] be the outcome” — See Scars of War Wounds of Peace, page 34 link to books.google.com
* Yossi Katz explains that the Jewish Agency spent a decade working on its own partition plan and that it originally envisioned a transfer or an exchange of populations with Transjordan. Katz says that the same people who developed the Agency’s plan were assigned to work with the UNSCOP subcommittee. He claims that, for the most part, the details of the UN plan matched those contained in the one developed by the Agency. See Yossi Katz, “Partner to Partition: The Jewish Agency’s Partition Plan in the Mandate Era”, Routledge, 1998, starting on page 163.
*On 18 February 1948, Moshe Sharett wrote “We will have only enough troops to defend ourselves, not to take over the country.” Ben Gurion replied:
As you probably already know, even after the US position was communicated to the People’s Council, Ben Gurion still decided to leave the question of borders “open to developments”. Here is Shertok’s report on discussions with US officials:
– Shertok’s remarks from the verbatim minutes of the People’s Council.
The Jewish leadership (Va’ad Leumi/Jewish Agency Executive) were already being pressured by their counterparts in America to address the return of the Arab population to their homes before the Declaration of Independence or the first meeting of the Provisional Government of the State of Israel. See the Minutes of the Meeting of the National Administration in Tel Aviv on Wednesday, May 13, 1948:
link to books.google.com
George, what a great editorial, though I am puzzled by your reference to the 1947-1949 ethnic cleansing of one quarter of a million, rather than three quarters, the generally accepted estimate. Elsewhere you note that one quarter million had been expelled by May 15, 1948. Still, it’s great to see this published.
Indeed. From Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing Of Palestine”:
“Zionist supporters like to bring up the fact that on November 29, 1947 the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. What is left out of the Zionist story is that within one year of the vote Israeli forces had managed to capture close to 80% of Palestine, destroy close to 500 Palestinian towns and villages, kill scores of unarmed civilians and force the exile of some 800,000 Palestinians.”
However, The nakba started decades before 1948. In 1907 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed out of Marj ben Amer in Northern Palestine when the Rothschilds bought up 200,000 dunams of land.
During the British mandate too there were incidences of ethnic clearances but not on the scale we saw between 1947-49.
Excellent documentary on alnakba here:
link to youtube.com
Oops! Indeed, I meant three quarters of a million.
No problem personally I thought it was a typo.
>> The Nakba and its aftermath are a shameful chapter in Jewish history. For Jews of good conscience everywhere, repudiating and resisting the injustice perpetrated in their name is an urgent mitzvah. This doesn’t mean Israeli Jews must be expelled from their homeland … [b]ut it does mean the Jews of Israel must at long last grant the Palestinians they’ve ruled for so long the same rights as they themselves enjoy, even if it means an end to the ethnically exclusivist Jewish state.
Amen.
Wasn’t the origin of The Arab Legion a product of Brit fear at the time that Rommel was winning?
Wasn’t the origin of The Arab Legion a product of Brit fear at the time that Rommel was winning?
No. It was established by Secretary for the Colonies Winston Churchill after the Cairo Conference of 1921 as a cost savings measure. The British and French governments were under pressure to bring the troops home and could not afford to place garrisons in the Arabian interior to protect their joint oil ventures. The Hashemites were installed in Iraq and Transjordan in partial fulfillment of Britain’s war time promises and to protect Great Britain’s pump stations and pipelines located between the oil fields of Iraq and the port of Haifa in Palestine.
The projected saving in Iraq alone amounted to 23 battalions and 5 million pounds. In Palestine troop strength was projected to be cut from 25,000 to only 5,000.
See the 5 page Secret Report
CP 2751
Title: Palestine Policy and Garrison.
Author: Winston S Churchill
Date 18 March 1921
Catalogue reference CAB 24/121
link to nationalarchives.gov.uk
and the 213 page Secret Report
: CP 3123
Title: Report of the Cairo Conference.
Author: Winston S Churchill
Date 11 July 1921
Catalogue reference CAB 24/126
link to nationalarchives.gov.uk