Today the New York Times published a pro-Israel promotion by the reliable Jodi (“I come knowledgeable about the Jewish American or Jewish Israeli side”) Rudoren. The article is about an early draft of the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948 by a Ukrainian-born lawyer who cribbed the American Declaration of Independence. The headline of the piece is “What’s Hebrew for ‘When in the Course of Human Events’?” Rudoren begins her story like this:
Israeli and American officials often speak of the two countries’ shared values. It turns out that early drafts of the Jewish state’s founding document borrowed liberally from the American Declaration of Independence.
There is no news hook, beside the fact that an Israeli auction house wanted to sell the early draft last year but was prevented by a court from doing so. As Donald Johnson wrote to the public editor today:
“I know what the justification for this story would be– it’s a minor piece of news about history. But the hook is the claim referenced in the first sentence, that the US and Israel share values. But it’s a truism that early America was a society whose leaders believed in democracy while holding an almost messianic belief in the right of white men to take the land from Native Americans. And a very similar belief was held by Israelis, who had to get rid of enough Palestinians in order to establish a majority Jewish state. And this belief is still held.
“I know that politicians gloss over this as a matter of course, but for a newspaper to do this without so much as a glancing reference to what “shared values” they actually had in common is inexcusable. The New York Times would never do this in another situation. The founders of the confederacy also shared values with Jefferson. The Boers resembled early American pioneers. It’s because this is Israel that the ugly aspect of the shared values goes unmentioned and one has this cutesy story about a very minor bit of feel good historical trivia.”
There is no place for comments on this insultingly stupid bit of propaganda.
Today Haaretz offers a very different foundational narrative. Here is the headline: “Israeli Soldiers Murdered Dozens of Captives During One of the Wars the IDF Fought in the First Decades of Israel’s Existence.”
According to testimony obtained by Haaretz, captives were ordered to line up and turn around, before they were shot in the back. The officer who gave the order to kill the prisoners was tried, but got off with a ridiculously light sentence. His commander was promoted to an extremely senior post and the entire affair was hushed up.
Rudoren would have been more objective and more humane had she asked how the idea of ‘shared values’ is viewed from the Palestinian side. Do they say ‘The values of the two Declarations are in complete conflict’ or do they say ‘Those values are shared only too well’?
The atrocity mentioned here surely has Western and Anerican analogues. We too have talked Enlightened and acted Shadowy.
The language-borrowing was certainly an attempt to claim shared values, a claim essential to Israel’s survival. It might be interesting, though surely rather painful, to compare different editions of the Declaration and to see how strongly the claim was pursued. The claim is not much in the way of evidence for its truth, of course.
It was at least remarkably ingenious to combine Enlightened and Biblical in the way the standard apologia for Israel has.
Yeah. Yeah. Even if you suspend your giant wall of disbelief for a sec and give Rudoren credit for a tiny sliver of truth, the US Declaration was quickly followed by stable, yet living/amendable, black-letter Constitution guaranteeing basic rights and capable of adding more.
End of Israel analogy and the whole “shared values” manipulation.
But then, we are now in the process of importing Israeli “values” (c.f. anti-BDS legislation) designed to shred or ignore our written Constitution and make us more like Israel. So maybe Rudoren gets the last “ipso facto” laugh after all.
And both major party presidential candidates (and at least the last two presidents) say “Amen! Hallelujah!!”
Sad. Tragic actually. How does one shifty little perrenial [known] bad-actor backwater country have SO much global reach that it can make seemingly everyone else abandon all our ideals and/or aspirations and adopt its diseased/repressive-as-first-resort/Jerry-Springer-show-racist political pathology as our own?
And the trolls say just asking the question is a proverbial “trope” and assert that we ban burkinis (and worse, like defunding health care for the poor in the US to provide record military/repression/killing aid for Israel) because we have independently deemed that to be in our own best interests to do so. Heh. Right-y-o.
Thanks for these articles PW and DJ and (((JN))). They really highlight the chasm between what is and what we have been rhetorically “nose-ringed” into believing “is” is. (h/t Boomer for the Juan Cole link the other day)
Interesting how the 1948 Israeli stance points to the noble European Enlightenment language usage of the 18th Century white founding fathers who limited voting to white propertied males and evolves into the ethnic cleansing of the native Americans, totally ignoring what happened in the very years the Zionists were creating their state via terrorism: the Nuremberg Trials, Tokyo Trials, and Geneva IV–all the only thing universally good that came out of so many deaths in World War Two. Further, the current Zionist stance continues to ignore the demolition of Jim Crow in the US South, and the anti-white supremacist 1965 US Immigration Act. It’s really frustrating that my government, the US government, continues to fund heavily a foreign state that has resurrected all “exceptionalist” values American US kids are taught to reject from infancy. US taxpayers actually fund the IDF more than Israeli taxpayers do. Jewish Israelis get more funding from the US government per capita than US citizens without dual US-Israeli citizenship.
According to Richard Silverstein the commander who was promoted was Avraham Joffe.
Hey Phil/Donald:
Today Haaretz offers a very different foundational narrative. Here is the headline: “Israeli Soldiers Murdered Dozens of Captives During One of the Wars the IDF Fought in the First Decades of Israel’s Existence.”
According to testimony obtained by Haaretz, captives were ordered to line up and turn around, before they were shot in the back. The officer who gave the order to kill the prisoners was tried, but got off with a ridiculously light sentence. His commander was promoted to an extremely senior post and the entire affair was hushed up.
I clicked on the Haaretz link but don’t have a membership so couldn’t read the article. Is it about Deir Yassin? If it is, the phrase “testimony obtained by Haaretz” is interesting. I assume this would be recently acquired testimony by Haaretz, aside from what I’d understood to already be a good amount of solid testimony and historical records on this event, and others like it? Independence indeed…