Yaacov Lozowick (recently retired from being Israel’s state archivist) tweeted the story about the High Court decision with the comment, “Bookmark this for the next time anyone tells you about Israeli Apartheid.” Seems to be an accidental admission that Israel would more closely resemble South Africa pre-1994 if the ban on Balad-UAL had gone through.
“Even if Meir Kahane (yes, I understand he was an extremist)”
I suspect Kahane’s party was banned because he publicly advocated expelling Arab citizens of Israel. At the time Israel’s govt. still consisted of ’48 vets. They didn’t need some newcomer loudmouth risking an examination of what they did at the time. But no, advocating expulsions isn’t extremist in Zionism – it’s the norm.
There’s plenty of evidence that the Zionists would’ve created a hierarchical state under any circumstances – they even banned Middle Eastern Jews from the first kibbutzim. If anything, that defunct UN resolution was weak sauce for only calling out Israel’s alliance with South Africa.
And we don’t need a special phrase to replace “PEP” because there’s already one word to describe such people: charlatans.
Bari Weiss: while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority.
This looks like a clumsy bit of self-contradiction. The most nauseating hypocrisy apologists for Zionism tend to display: the Palestinians brought the refugee crisis on themselves for rejecting the UN partition plan and at the same time should’ve accepted they could never return to their homes like those Indians and Pakistanis who fled their respective homes in 1947 — which happened because a partition plan was implemented. It’s possible for someone to stand on two mutually-exclusive moral highgrounds and have no shame.
In the case of the Khisas attack, it’s worth noting that the raid wasn’t authorized by the Jewish Agency or Haganah General Staff – this resulted in a meeting by the former where some JA officials wanted to throw the Haganah officer behind the raid under the bus. In the end no one was disciplined (of course). The HGS ordered the brigades to refrain from “unauthorized operations” but this apparently did little good. (Morris, 79-80)
The problem with Morris’s narrative is that while he emphasizes the JA’s fretting over what their operations might result in and their determination to avoid excessive non-combatant casualties, he faintly hints they didn’t do a very good job in that area and refrains from seriously evaluating the impact of Haganah operations. Which I think is a sign of his political bias seeping into his technical research.
That said, I don’t like falling into the trap of going over the events of 1947-49 with a fine-tooth comb. It’s not that important who immediately started the violence after the UNSCOP plan was passed, not only because the Haganah and two Revisionist groups were already in a low-level campaign to conquer Palestine from the British. What matters is that the Zionists arrived in a country where they had no citizenship with the conceit it was their right to exercise state power. This makes them hostile and morally responsible for all acts of violence to achieve their goal.
I’ve noticed Israelis (and supporters) tend to get a bit smug about civil wars happening in Arab states while Jewish Israelis live peacefully with each other. Which makes me wonder what they’d be doing without the Palestinians to kick around.
This could be extended to the entire Cold War itself. Had the Germans won the war and succeeded in Germanizing the Soviet Union, the resulting unipolar world would’ve had no civil wars in Greece, China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, no US intervention in SE Asia, no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, etc. Of course the Germans probably wouldn’t have stopped at Europe and could just as easily have invaded the MENA.
Since I took the trouble to read one book of Morris’s, “Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited” (2003), here’s a theme running through the early part of the book that shows the cognitive dissonance between the facts and the typical nakba apologist view that the Palestinians had to be ethnically cleansed because they started the war:
“Ben-Gurion, like Hapoel Hamizrahi Party’s Moshe Shapira, was concerned lest over-reaction by the Haganah would push the Arab masses, until then uninvolved, to support Husseini and his
gunmen. Yosef Ya‘akobson, a citrus grove-owner and senior Tel Aviv Haganah figure, was concerned about Haganah destruction of groves, as proposed by Ben-Gurion, lest this lead to Arab retaliation in kind. (71)
“Ben-Gurion pointed out that the disturbances were so far limited to the three big towns, Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem, and the northern Negev. The Arab rural communities were not engaged, and the Yishuv had to take care not to provoke them. He was worried lest Haganah retaliatory
strikes lead to Yishuv–British clashes (‘let us not rush into war with the English army’). (73)
“The main Haganah response to Arab attacks, down to the end of March 1948, remained the retaliatory strike, either against traffic or against specific villages. The reprisal policy was thoroughly aired in a protracted two-day meeting between Ben-Gurion and his military and
Arab affairs advisers on 1–2 January 1948. The discussion was trig-gered, in some measure, by a series of unauthorised or ill-conceived Haganah attacks in which innocent civilians were killed. The guiding as-sumptions were to avoid extending the conflagration to as yet untouched
areas, to try to hit the ‘guilty’, and retaliation as close as possible to the time, place and nature of the original provocation. 48 (77)
“The problem of killing non-combatants continuously exercised the Haganah commanders. Occasionally, indeed, raids were aborted out of fear that atrocities might result (as when a unit that set out to blow up buildings in Kafr ‘Aqeb, north of Jerusalem, decided to withdraw when
it heard ‘the voices and screams of children’ emanating from a house they were about to destroy 65 ). But more common were cases of ex-cessive behaviour. On 12 January 1948, militiamen from Kibbutz Ramat Hakovesh, contrary to explicit Haganah orders, shot at two Arab women, perhaps cultivating a field, nearby; at least one was injured and may have died. The matter was the subject of an internal investigation. No one appears to have been punished. 66 At the end of February, Haganah guards murdered an Arab peasant and his wife near Kfar Uriah, ‘without any provocation’, according to HIS. 67 On 24 January, four Palmahniks boarded a taxi in Tiberias and murdered the Arab driver (who may have been connected to irregulars). 68 Ben-Gurion was probably referring to such incidents when he criticised ‘condemnable acts against Arabs’ at
a meeting of the Defence Committee in early February. 69 (80)
“The Haganah’s difficulty during December 1947 – March 1948 was that while it sought to maintain quiet wherever possible, its reprisals, some-times misdirected, sometimes excessive, tended to suck into the mael-strom more and more Arabs. Only strong, massive, retaliatory action,
it was felt, would overawe and pacify the Arabs. But the reprisals often hit the innocent along with the guilty, bred anger and vengefulness and made additional Arab communities amenable to the Husseinis’ militant-nationalist appeals, despite great initial reluctance to enter the fray. 96” (85)
What’s interesting about this point is that while Morris discusses it at length for almost 20 pages, he doesn’t pass any committal judgement as to whether the Haganah practice of “retaliation” did in fact spread the war to the countryside. And this is before going into the series of local non-belligerency agreements made between Arab villages and Zionist settlements, including that between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul (which the Irgun broke with Haganah collusion).
It bends the U.N. to her every whim and controls the OIC and OPEC.
Like for example UNSC resolution 678 authorizing “all necessary means” to force Iraq out of Kuwait; no UN resolution has ever taken such language with Israel. Or UNSC 1973 which authorizes a “no-fly zone” over Libya; again, the all-powerful State of Palestine can’t get that for themselves.
So basically, you’re a crank.
I just want to add that Mideastern Jews were also barred from the new settlements built by the WZO (and those who worked in first aliyah settlements had to live in separate barracks built away from them). This is significant for demonstrating Zionism’s (not only Labour Zionism) aptitude for segregation.