andrew r This user account status is Approved Comments Comments Posts Posts 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. On Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing 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. On Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing 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. On Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing 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). On Israeli historian Benny Morris doubles down on his advocacy for ethnic cleansing 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. On Organizer of the Great March of Return says protests in Gaza ‘must go on’ 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. https://disqus.com/home/discussion/od-ourkingdom/tackling_antisemitism_doesn039t_mean_clamping_down_on_criticism_of_israel/#comment-3073395039 On You can no more be a socialist Zionist than you can be a meat-eating vegan I can't read the wapo article because of the paywall, but tried to suss out Jill Jacobs' views of the Gaza protests on twitter. Retweets: "Israel has right to defend itself. Every nation does. I pray the government will use non-fatal measures with protestors. Too much Israeli blood. Too much Palestinian blood. Too many grieving. Too many tears." "More Naomi Paiss Retweeted Sarah Leah Whitson More specifically, shooting unarmed Hamas members is like saying it’s ok to murder settlers because they shouldn’t be there in the first place. Wrong, wrong, wrong." Her own tweets: "On day on which 45 Palestinians have been killed & thousands injured & a day after right wing marchers reminded us how divided the city is, @netanyahu calls this a great day for peace." "Between when this email went out less than an hour ago & now, death count in Gaza has gone from 7 to 16. Need response that avoids live fire, and ultimately, need to make Gaza liveable, including by easing siege." It's not that surprising she would draw a line in the sand for acceptable criticism of Israel by Palestinians. Note how she still accepts Israeli power over Palestinians as a given; she simply has a problem with the specific use of that power. On Falsely accusing Palestinians of anti-Semitism is malicious The fact that the court accepted the lyncher's defense that he mistook the victim for a "terrorist" only reminds me Zionism with its "Jewish" state is hostile to non-Jewish civilians. This ideology oozes down from the founders of the movement to its lowliest rank and file, absolving them of responsibility for the conflict they chose by pursuing a state for their "chosen" people. On Israeli killer gets community service– and Ahed Tamimi gets 8 months for slapping The Jews needed a homeland. History proves that. Assimilation never worked; the Holocaust was no more than a culmination. Those apologists for Israel who use the Holocaust as emotional blackmail need to understand that had a "Jewish" state existed in 1939, there's no guarantee it would've saved substantially more Jews than had survived the war in Palestine. Nor is it likely the Jewish Agency leadership would've even made a serious effort. In fact, the immigration quotas imposed by the British were used as a cover for their own policies. http://mondoweiss.net/2017/04/map-map-on-the-wall-whos-most-existing-of-them-all/#comment-878776 On Privileged American Jews are safe thanks to ‘Israel’s might’– Roger Cohen Support for a Jewish state and the need for a Jewish majority. It is entirely possible to construct a Jewish state without a Jewish majority. America is a state has strong property protections, the majority don’t own a lot of property but support these protections. A Jewish state at a minimum requires the majority to be at least cooperative with this goal. Jeff, you're definitely confusing your personal positions with an intelligent evaluation of the early Zionist movement based on the actual positions taken by its historical figures. Let's start with the "Jewish" majority: Ruppin, Weizmann, DBG, Moshe Sharett and Jabotinsky all explicitly expressed desire for just that in the hypothetical "Jewish" state - I can supply citations if you really need them but I'm pressed for time right now. For his part, Nahum Sokolow (who basically sounded out the French on the idea of a Jewish "national home" and was later WZO president) wanted Jews to be the "predominant people in Palestine" (Schneer, "The Balfour Declaration," 149). That this was a normative aim of the Zionist movement across its political spectrum is a foregone conclusion. And it's also an adversarial aim since the presence of any non-Jewish person was an obstacle to its achievement. So to address the remark, "Your claim was the intent was always violent expulsion," that's not my claim per se, but that it wasn't possible to achieve their normative aims without some form of persecution against non-Jewish persons. Even if in their heart-of-hearts they wanted to achieve everything without such, they were still 100% morally responsible for setting themselves on a violent course of action. And they were lucky enough to have the British knock out much of the dirty work. Now, to save space, here's a comment I wrote on Disqus detailing the policy of the WZO Palestine Office vis-a-vis the earliest Jewish Yemeni migrants to the New Yishuv (most of it citing from Land, Labor by Gershon Shafir). In short, they were completely barred from the new settlements built by the WZO and even had to sleep in barracks built away from the First Aliyah settlements they worked at. https://disqus.com/home/discussion/od-ourkingdom/tackling_antisemitism_doesn039t_mean_clamping_down_on_criticism_of_israel/#comment-3073395039 Your comments about the Arab Palestinians assimilating into the New Yishuv are completely and utterly risible in view of this information. Yes, Judaism is an inclusive religion, but not the Yishuv built by Ruppin, Weizmann and their fellow travelers. No Arab Palestinian could have joined Degania by converting to Judaism - Mideastern Jews weren't accepted there (in fact Jewish Yemenis were expelled from Kinneret). Had numerous Muslim Palestinians learned Hebrew and expressed desire to convert to Judaism so they could join the Yishuv, they almost certainly would have exposed Zionism as the wannabe white supremacist movement it actually was. On Jews have religious commandment to support Israel and fight BDS — American Jewish Committee load more comments
