New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, former editor at the Wall Street Journal and former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, was in the news last December after claiming in a NYT column that Ashkenazi Jews have superior intelligence (“The Secrets of Jewish Genius“).
This proved such an embarrassment that even Fox News picked up on the racism. The NYT responded to the outrage only disingenuously: it removed reference to a 2005 paper Stephens had cited “that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews”, but only because “after publication [it was] learned that one of the paper’s authors … promoted racist views”. Blame was transferred from the passage itself, which had caused no concern, onto Stephens’ and his editors’ alleged ignorance of one of its authors.
All such pretenses of ethnic or racial superiority ultimately have to do with Israel in this context. And so, in contrast to fudging his claims of Ashkenazi genetic supremacy, Stephens has stood by his 2017 reference to “the disease of the Arab mind”.
His January 30 piece, “Every Time Palestinians Say ‘No,’ They Lose“, about the Trump “peace plan” for Palestine (full document here) is no less premised on racist invention, beginning with its history lesson on why Palestinians “lose when they say ‘no’.”
[The Palestinians] rejected the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, which would have created a Palestinian state on a much larger footprint than the one that was left after Israel’s war of independence.
Yes, the Palestinians did reject Resolution 181 — which, in my view, was simply the 1947 version of the Trump-Kushner peace plan. But yes, if implemented that plan would indeed have created a Palestinian state about twice the size of the post-1948 spoils occupied by Jordan and Egypt, and since 1967 by Israel.
What the reader is led to believe, however, is myth: the insinuation is that had Palestinian negotiators endorsed 181, the prescribed Palestinian state would have come to be. The historical record is clear: nothing the Palestinians could have done would have seen their half of the deal fulfilled. Zionist negotiators never had any intention of abiding by any resolution that “gave” them anything less than an ethnocracy in all of historic Palestine. The Jewish Agency had worked feverishly for years to defeat any coming Partition, went into overdrive as it feigned acceptance within the UN’s walls, and began abrogating 181 even before its ink was dry.
Today’s so-called “conflict” is simply that unfinished business.
Conspicuously missing from Stephens’ narrative is the most obvious question: Why did Israel seize so much Palestinian land in 1947-49, even before any Arab resistance? And why, having done so, didn’t Israel simply return to its legal borders, as both the Armistice and Israel’s admission to the UN required it to do? Was that, too, due to Palestinian intransigence?
Stephen says the next time “the Arab side” (as he puts it) said No was the 1967 war when, he writes, Jordan “refused Israel’s entreaties not to attack”, resulting “in the end of Jordanian rule in the West Bank”. The assertion is that the 1967 war began on the eastern front because of a Jordanian attack against Israel, despite the latter’s “entreaties” for peace.
To untangle this fiction: Israel remained the belligerent power after 1948, as it refused to return to its borders, blocked the return of the refugees, and continued to ethnically cleanse more non-Jews. It conducted frequent military incursions into Gaza and the West Bank, some resulting in massacres. There were of course frequent “incursions” by Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into “Israel” — but “incursions” and “Israel” are in quotes because the land on the Israeli side of the Armistice Line was occupied Palestinian land, not Israeli, according to the very Resolution Israel claims as its international endorsement. The Palestinian “infiltrators” (as they were called) were infiltrating into their own land.
Some of the “infiltrators” did actually enter the Israeli side of Partition; but most did so because, again, they legally lived there. They were attempting to do nothing more than return to their own homes, orchards, businesses, and family, which they had every right to do, reaffirmed by the UN — but were killed on sight or imprisoned for the attempt. Fast-forward to today, and Israeli shoots dead anyone who even approaches the Armistice Line in a symbolic attempt to return home from their Gaza internment camp.
Actual violence against Israeli civilians by Palestinians was rare, and however unjustified, was provoked by years of far worse Israeli state violence, compounding the more than three-quarter of a million Palestinians who remained displaced by Israel, now living in squalor.
Stephens simply selects Jordanian cross-Armistice violence close to 1967 and invents it as the reason Israel launched the 1967 war. Israel attacked in 1967 to expand its territory but, as has always been the case, couched it in the guise of self-defense. (The Trump plan refers to any Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, past, present, or future, as a “security footprint”.)
He tells the reader that the Trump plan “offers [the Palestinians] a sovereign state”. No, it offers no such thing. It sets a series of Israeli-imposed conditions that if, according to Israel’s judgement, Palestinians meet them over the four next years, Israel may discuss such a possible “state”, but a state only in name. It would have some internal window-dressings of a state, but with no more actual sovereignty than the Palestinian Authority has now.
He alleges this state-that’s-not-a-state would feature “mostly contiguous territory”. Forget the thirty mile (!) tunnel needed to connect Gaza and the West Bank. Even within the West Bank, the Trump plan stretches the definition of “contiguous” to a farce.
Stephens goes on to boast that the Palestinians would get “$50 billion in economic assistance” — further dehumanization of the victims as people expected to barter their freedom, and with no mention of Israel’s seven decades crippling the Palestinian economy and stealing its natural, touristic, taxation, and commercial resources — nor indeed of the wholesale theft of Palestinian assets in 1948. But it is interesting to note that among the parcels “given” to the Palestinians in the Trump plan is a manufacturing zone surrounded by Israel and the Egyptian border. Surely, it would be conspiratorial to suspect that this prescribed manufacturing zone, completely unconnected to any other part of Palestine, is envisioned as a sweatshop for Israel?
To be sure, Palestinians must first prove themselves worthy of this make-believe state being dangled like a carrot in the murky future. “Anti-Jewish bigotry in school curriculums” must stop, “legitimate political authority” must be restored in Gaza, and “terrorist militias” must be dismantled. But Stephens is nonetheless spot-on when he claims that P.A. President Abbas has not been serving the interests of Palestinians:
If Abbas — now in the 16th year of his elected four-year term of office — really had Palestinian interests at heart, he would step down. So would Hamas’s cruel and cynical leaders in Gaza.
Israel and the US, and before them the British, have all along blocked Palestinians from running their own affairs, up through and including the 2006 election for a government with no sovereign power, and in which Israel and the United States dictated who may run, who may win, and what they may do. But Stephens twists the theft of Palestinian sovereignty to prove that the natives are not yet up to the task of governing themselves, a vestige of the days of colonial self-justification.
Abbas’s failing is the opposite of what Stephens alleges: his Palestinian Authority has merely served as the subcontractor for Israel. Where would Israel be today without the choreographed dance of the PA pretending to “stand up to Israel” as it does its bidding, and of Gaza serving as Israel’s ever-present Gog and Magog and weapons testing ground?
Not once did Stephens, or the Trump plan, or indeed Oslo, consider what the Palestinians are legally and morally entitled to. Concepts of equality and justice — the possibility of simply removing the shackles — never enter Stephens’ parlance. When Palestinians refuse to nod “yes” to injustice, we further tighten the noose. They had better go along with the next charade, or we will tighten it yet more. “The best thing the Arab world could do for itself is learn from Israel, not demonize it,” Stephens concludes, his amorphous “Arab world” itself code.
A “master” promulgates racist fictions against a people in order to justify their enslavement, and when confronted with cries for freedom heard around the world, decides what form of pseudo “freedom” they may have and how high they must jump to beg for it. Before he even gets to historical fiction, Stephens’s starting point is one humanity should have left behind long ago.
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More in Mondoweiss on Bret Stephens:
On Bret Stephens’ hate speech
Bret Stephens’s greatest hits
Palestinians can have human rights when they start winning Nobel Prizes — Bret Stephens
Bret Stephens equates anti-Zionists with white nationalists in the ‘New York Times’
Times super-Zionist Bret Stephens commits fallacy and falsehood, on Jerusalem
Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss can’t wait to call you an anti-Semite in ‘The New York Times’
In a NY synagogue, Roger Cohen demolishes neoconservative Bret Stephens
NYT’s Bret Stephens says US Jews won’t abandon Israel because Israelis are ‘hot’
Trump’s America is fascist, says Bret Stephens, but Netanyahu’s Israel smells like a rose
Bret Stephens echoes Stephen Douglas, defending Israel’s new law in ‘NYT’
Bret Stephens is using the logic of a violent rapist. “When you say ‘no,’ I hit you. So why don’t you just stop saying ‘no’? If you just give me everything I want, I’ll still degrade you, I’ll still abuse you. But it won’t hurt so much. So why don’t you just go along with this? You don’t want me to hurt you as much as last time, baby, do you? I don’t want to have to *cut* you. You want to be maimed forever? Make it easy on yourself.”
Nathan Thrall’s recent editorial in the New York Times (“Trump’s Middle East Peace Plan Exposes the Ugly Truth”) is now available online, and it’s relevant to this piece:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/trump-peace-plan.html
For over a century, the West has supported Zionist aims in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population. In 1917, the British government promised to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, where Jews made up less than 8 percent of the population. Thirty years later, the United Nations proposed a plan to partition Palestine: The Jews, who made up less than a third of the population and owned less than 7 percent of the land, were given the majority of the territory. During the ensuing war, Israel conquered more than half the territory allotted to the Arab state; four-fifths of the Palestinians who had lived in what became the new boundaries of Israel were prevented from returning to their homes. The international community did not force Israel to return the territory that it had seized, or to permit the return of refugees….There are now more Palestinians than Jews living in the territory under Israel’s control, according to the Israeli military. Whether in Mr. Trump’s vision or Mr. Clinton’s, American plans have confined most of the majority ethnic group into less than a quarter of the territory, with restrictions on Palestinian sovereignty so far-reaching that the outcome should more appropriately be called a one-and-a-half-state solution.
Dealing with Bret Stephens is like shooting fish in a barrel:
Regarding UNGA Resolution, 181, the 1947 Partition Plan:
Firstly, to quote Allan Hart: **
“According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.”
•”In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
•”Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
•”The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
“•So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration. ”
**Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews).
Furthermore:
On 29 November 1947, recommendatory only (i.e., no legal status, contrary to the terms of the British Class A Mandate and the Atlantic Charter, never adopted by the UNSC and grossly unfair to the native Palestinian Arabs) the Partition Plan (Res. 181) was passed by the UNGA.
Despite massive Jewish immigration during the British Mandate, Jews comprised just 31% of the population & privately owned only 6 to 7% of the land in 1947. Outrageously, the Partition Plan recommended Jews receive 56% of Palestine as a state!!
For the record: In 1947, native Arab Palestinian Jews comprised 10% of the Jewish population and were opposed Zionism. (Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem: “The religious Jews of Jerusalem and Hebron and the Sephardim were strongly opposed to political Zionism…”) (Storrs, Ronald, “Orientations,” 1945)
48% of the total land area of mandated Palestine was privately owned (‘mulk khaas’) by Palestinian Arabs. (To repeat, total Jewish privately owned land was between 6% and 7%.) About 45% of the total land area was state owned (i.e., by its citizens)* and it was comprised of Communal Property (‘mashaa’), Endowment Property, (‘waqf’), and Government Property, (‘miri’.) The British Mandate kept an extensive land registry and the UN used the registry during its early deliberations. It has in its archives 453,000 records of individual Palestinian owners defined by name, location & area. *Only 30% of the Jewish immigrants had taken out citizenship & tens of thousands were illegals.
Land ownership in all of mandated Palestine on Nov. 29, 1947: By Sub district – Acre: 87% Palestinian owned, 3% Jewish owned, 10% state owned; Safed: 68% Palestinian owned, 18% Jewish owned, 14% state owned; Haifa: 42% Palestinian owned, 35% Jewish owned, 23% state owned; Nazareth: 52% Palestinian owned, 28% Jewish owned, 20% state owned; Tiberias: 51% Palestinian owned, 38% Jewish owned, 11% state owned; Jenin: 84% Palestinian owned, less than 1% Jewish owned, 16% state owned; Beisnan: 44% Palestinian owned, 34% Jewish owned, 22% state owned; Tulkarm: 78% PalestinIan owned; 17% Jewish owned, 5% state owned; Nablus: 87% Palestinian owned, less than 1% Jewish owned, 13% state owned; Jaffa: 47% Palestinian owned, 39% Jewish owned, 14% state owned; Ramleh: 77% Palestinian owned, 14% Jewish owned, 9% state owned; Ramallah: 99% Palestinian owned, less than 1% Jewish owned, less than 1% state owned; Jerusalem (West and East): 84% Palestinian owned, 2% Jewish owned, 14% state owned; Gaza: 75% Palestinian owned, 4% Jewish owned, 21% state owned; Hebron: 96% Palestinian owned, less than 1% Jewish owned, 4% state owned; Bersheeba: 15% Palestinian owned, less than 1% Jewish owned, 85% state owned. (Village Statitistics, Jerusalem: Palestine Government, 1945; subsequently published as United Nations Map no. 94b, August, 1950)
Regarding land ownership in West and East Jerusalem in 1947: The total land area of West Jerusalem (the New City) was 19,331 dunams (about 4,833 acres) of which 40 per cent was owned by Palestinian Muslims and Christians, 26.12 per cent by Jews and 13.86 per cent by others, including Christian communities. Government and municipal land made up 2.90 per cent and roads and railways 17.12 per cent.
East Jerusalem (the Old City) consisted of 800 dunams (about 200 acres) of which five dunams (just over one acre) were Jewish owned and the remaining 795 dunams were owned by Palestinian Muslims and Christians. (“Assessing Palestinian Property in the City,” by Dalia Habash and Terry Rempel, Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War, 1999, pp. 184-85)
Although the Philippines initially opposed the Partition Plan, UNGA Res. 181, and Liberia and Haiti wanted to abstain, the United States and the Zionists pressured these countries to vote in favour, thereby gaining the necessary two-thirds approval. “Under threat of a Jewish boycott of Firestone rubber and tire products, Harvey Firestone told Liberia that he would recommend suspension of plans for the expansion of development there if Liberia voted against partition.” (Michael Cohen, Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945-1948, 1982)
These bullying tactics were aptly described by James Forrestal, then U.S. Secretary of Defence: “The methods that had been used…to bring coercion and duress on other nations in the General Assembly bordered closely onto scandal.” (Millis, Walter, ed., The Forrestal Diaries, New York: the Viking Press, 1951)
Tom~ thank you for this excellent skewering of the always dishonest, always racist Zionist Bret Stephens.
I cannot fathom how and why the NYT and others get away with their continued hasbara and emesis on behalf of Apartheid Israel. How I wish that more subscribers would dump them and tell them why.
From Odeh Bisharat, today:
“To Trump, Israel’s Arabs Are Objects …
The section of U.S. President Donald Trump’s peace plan about the possibility of the Israeli Arab “Triangle” communities joining a Palestinian state testifies to an attitude that sees people as objects, as animals, or in the best case, as slaves.
That last reading almost certainly informed the esteemed members of the U.S. peace team when they came up with this crazy idea. At the glitzy party held last week in the White House, it was possible to see many spiritual grandchildren of slaveowners, who carry this tradition in their veins, even if that accursed era ended long ago.
I saw delighted people, dressed up in their fancy coats and ties. And I wondered how such people could feel the pain of the Palestinian in the refugee camps or in the shade of the barrier that separates him from his land. Or of the Palestinian living within Israel, where racist groups are closing in on him from every side.
Such people – after they seal the fate of simple people across the seas – will go on to the next cocktail party to seal the fates of miserable people inside the United States, too. They’ll jail the children of immigrants. Or impose sanctions on yet another rebellious country, and cause real starvation among its unfortunate citizens.
This is the essence of the new “broker” who sits in the White House. Donald Trump does not see people; he sees objects or slaves. For now, his goal is to be reelected, by all means necessary. The day is not far off when he will turn his back on the Jews of the United States, too. In his next term, he will also no longer need the evangelicals; the election will already be behind him. …
So what we’re talking about is the transfer of ownership from a country where the Arabs are discriminated against but still citizens, to a country that is more a prison surrounded by barbed wire fences and split up by checkpoints – and where the bedrooms of its prisoners are subject to nighttime visits of soldiers from the neighboring country.
What is this schadenfreude about? Instead of being embarrassed about what you’ve done to your neighbors – starved them, crippled them and expelled them, until even Donald Trump lamented their situation – you come and boast.” …
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-to-trump-israel-s-arabs-are-objects-1.8477516
Bret Stephens is yet another zionist blinded by his desire to help Israel steal all they can, at the expense of the Palestinian people. Here he is, showing outrage that the Palestinians are not showing appreciation, and grabbing the crumbs, Trump, Netanyahu, and Kushner throw at them.
I have seen nothing but disdain for the Palestinians and arrogance coming from this lot, including the man who read 25 books, and thinks he is a “brilliant” broker, Kushner. What kind of peace plan is this, when it was written by the criminals who have been stealing lands, and condemned by the world? Usually when these plans are announced you see all parties concerned being represented, but as we all saw, it was a one sided farce of an announcement.
The zionists in the media, are trying hard to sell this, and Stephens not surprisingly shows his bias once again. Disgraceful man.
At least the Arab League so far has rejected this one sided peace plan. Bin Salman would love to accept it, to please his best buddies, but apparently his father does not.
https://www.juancole.com/2020/02/humiliating-palestine-relations.html