A Mocked and Paid Litany

This Mick Hartley post quotes this Guardian article, and I excerpt:

Regarding Jews in Arab states:

Today 99.5% – all but 4,500 – have gone. As the historian Nathan Weinstock has observed, not even the Jews of 1939 Germany had been so thoroughly “ethnically cleansed”.

The displacement of Jews from Arab countries was not just a backlash to the creation of Israel and the Arabs’ humiliating defeat. The “push” factors were already in place. Arab League states drafted a law in November 1947 branding their Jews as enemy aliens. But non-Muslim minorities, historically despised as dhimmis with few rights, were already being oppressed by Nazi-inspired pan-Arabism and Islamism. These factors sparked the conflict with Zionism, and drive it to this day.

The Jewish “Nakba” – Arabic for “catastrophe” – not only emptied cities like Baghdad (a third Jewish); it tore apart the cultural, social and economic fabric in Arab lands. Jews lost homes, synagogues, hospitals, schools, shrines and deeded land five times the size of Israel. Their ancient heritage – predating Islam by 1,000 years – was destroyed. [emphasis added]

…

Over 120 UN resolutions deal with the 711,000 Palestinian refugees; not one refers to the greater number of Jewish refugees.

…

The resolution is about recognition, not restitution, although Jewish losses have been quantified at twice Palestinian losses. Such resolutions could lead to a peace settlement by recognising that there were victims on both sides. Thus justice for Jews is not just a moral imperative, but the key to reconciliation.

Moreover, a major hurdle to peace could be removed if the Palestinian “right of return” were counterbalanced by the Jewish right not to return to Arab tyrannies, recognising a de facto population exchange of roughly equal numbers.

I have conservative Jewish friends who would leap from this to the conclusion that criticism of the Israeli state and leadership for the situation in Gaza and the West Bank is unnecessary and irrelevant, but this is cowardly. It’s about time that the friends of Israel realise that a real friend will criticise, whilst standing by them. I’m serious when I say that I support the state of Israel, which means I have no reservations about fiercely criticism its government and its policies. We should shun those who focus unfairly on Israel while ignoring countless other problems elsewhere in the world, often on their own doorsteps, in order to advance their own agendas, but we should not let the dishonesty of others subvert our own sincere efforts at reason and progress.

Still, this is a side of the story that I think we could do to hear more of. It’s not as if our media is biased against Israel – far from it – but people seem curiously unable to make such elementary points as these in support of their own positions. The socialist nature of the Zionist project during the 40s is another little nugget I learned recently that I’m sure would make the “anti-Zionist” (we’re not anti-semites! we swear! we just have anti-semitic friends!) Resistance and Socialist Alliance comfortably uncomfortable.

I think it’s about time that those who hawk newspapers bleating “STOP THE PALESTINIAN HOLOCAUST” are made to see just how silly they sound. Being nonchalant about the legitimate concerns of the Jewish side of the Israel/Palestine question, and pretending an overnight two-state solution combined with the removal of U.S. influence would solve the problem, doesn’t make you bold and doesn’t make you a revolutionary. It just makes you look unserious about justice and real progress.

Far too many ‘idealists’ think that if a solution or a bit of change isn’t completely idealistic, it must be rejected wholly. This is how ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’ have become forces for conservativism, and it’s a shame.