The Folly of Fools (37 page)

One consistent feature of the mythology is that the Zionists have always reached out in peace to their Arab neighbors, wanting only their fair share of the land, but these overtures always have been met by hostility and rejection. “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” in the memorable phrase of Abba Eban. The first happened in 1928, when the British offered an assembly of Arabs and Jews. The Zionists accepted the proposal; the Arabs rejected it and grew restive. Yes, indeed, but the assembly was to be divided 45 percent to the Arabs and 45 percent to the Jews with the controlling 10 percent going to the British, who were already on record as pro-Jewish and were busily promoting Jewish migration (to the Holy Land). But the Arabs were roughly ten times as numerous as the Jews, so they would have been disenfranchising themselves by 90 percent as well as giving up all control. This is typical: a grossly unfair offer is made to the Palestinians, who reject it, and their rejection is described as a rejection of peace.

Again, as the story goes, Israel made a far-reaching compromise in accepting the UN Partition Resolution in November 1947, thereby recognizing Palestinians’ right to their own state—all in the hopes of achieving peace with the Palestinians. But the Palestinians totally rejected partition and decided to launch a war on the new Jewish state, forcing it into a defensive war lest it be killed off before it could even begin. Actually, the war was launched in violation of the UN mandate by the Zionists as part of a tactic in a larger strategy of expansion and dispossession. The main aim was to increase the size of Israel, while preventing the formation of a Palestinian state. The latter was helped by a secret agreement with Abdullah of Transjordan, whose annexation of the territory meant for a Palestinian state was part of his own dreams of territorial expansion.

Although the war of 1947–1948 is often presented in retrospect as Israel barely escaping a new holocaust, the fact is that the Zionists were better armed, organized, prepared, and motivated than the surrounding Arab armies, and everyone knew it. The Arabs almost never launched an attack on Israel itself and did not try to intervene in the ongoing ethnic cleansing, even when they were observing it directly from a safe distance. Their function was to protect their own borders against Zionist encroachment. Israeli policy since then hardly seems to have changed. The country pretends in public to be interested in peace and a fair settlement, but these appear to be delaying tactics to camouflage the exact opposite: complete dispossession of the Palestinians and continual seizure of everything of value, especially land and water.

VOLUNTARY FLIGHT OR ETHNIC CLEANSING?

The original myth asserted that the flight of Arabs before and after the birth of the state of Israel was in response to calls from the surrounding Arab armies and occurred despite strenuous efforts by Jewish leaders to persuade them to stay. This is complete nonsense. An invading army far from home has a serious supply problem, and a receptive local population is exactly what it needs. More to the point, directly after World War II, the Zionists appear to have adopted a secret plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, by force of arms, terror, encirclement, starvation, and murder. At no time did they beg the Palestinians to stay behind. When the time came, the expulsion was followed by the deliberate destruction of the deserted villages to prevent the return of the displaced people to their homes and their land. There was an immediate economic incentive for the latter. The cost of settling fresh Jewish arrivals was nearly five times as high if they were settled on land that had not been recently “cleansed.”

Then the Israelis set up the special Minority Unit to prevent the return of the Palestinians, even those merely trying to retrieve their possessions or harvest crops they had planted and their trees bearing fruit. Designated “infiltrators,” they were shot on sight or “successfully shot,” as it was put in official reports. This euphemism is echoed in current Israeli policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders or (much more often) low-level “militants” by specially trained assassination squads, said only to be engaged in “targeted killings” (a policy and terminology recently adopted by the United States). Actually, the policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders started long before Israel was founded, being a Zionist ploy used from the late 1970s onward, a kind of mal-genetics, in which the top end of a society is regularly purged to weaken the group generally.

Many of the larger cities were deprived of their Arab populations (“de-Arabized”) very directly. Haifa was a particular horror, right after the massacre of the entire village of Deir Yassin. The orders to the Jewish troops were simple and direct: “Kill any Arabs you encounter: torch all inflammable objects and force doors open with explosives.” On the April 22, 1948, the Arabs were streaming to the market and harbor under orders to evacuate. To make sure everyone got the idea and moved in the right direction, the Zionists then stationed three-inch mortars on the mountain slopes overlooking the market and port. The idea was to force the Arabs into the sea. When the shelling of the market began, the crowds did indeed rush in a panic toward the port, trampling one another to death and, in a desperate attempt to survive, attempting to commandeer all boats, many of which soon were swamped and sank. It is more than some passing irony that the Israelis often claim that the goal of the Arabs is to drive them into the sea, when historically the movement has been entirely in the opposite direction.

It is understandable why a people so recently and completely traumatized could believe that the end of their own safety justified any means. But what about today’s people? Do they really wish to repeat these crimes? The challenge now is to talk about all these events honestly. At no time up until the present has Israel allowed any consideration of a “right to return” or to receive monetary compensation of any sort. Indeed, this has been explicitly ruled out while continuing to assert Israel’s divine right, in principle, to all of Palestine. Jewish people have energetically sought and received compensation for property stolen by Nazis (or, say, their Swiss bankers) some sixty years later, but they fail to acknowledge any contradiction between this policy and the one they have taken when the shoe is on the other foot. They have the right to return to truly ancient land and the right to compensation for gross theft immediately prior to 1946, but Palestinians have no right to return to land stolen from them in 1948, land that they and their ancestors occupied for centuries. Nor do they have any right to compensation. To buttress both arguments, the Palestinians had to be stripped historically of ownership of their own land. This, as we have seen, was achieved both by denying their history and creating false versions of it.

ARAB DECEIT AND SELF-DECEPTION

The principles we are describing are universal. Surely if Jews in Palestine practiced deceit and self-deception, then so did the Arabs, and surely if Zionists do it today, anti-Zionists do it as well. There are, however, two important variables that one overlooks at one’s peril: relative power and relative justice. If there is a growing difference in power, with the powerful more prone to self-deception, their unjust behavior requiring cover-up and rationalization, then there will be a positive association between power, injustice inflicted, and degree of self-deception. If you are the victim of injustice, simply telling the truth about it may be your best move.
Nakba
, or disaster, is the Arab word for what happened in 1948, and it is no accident that some right-wing Israeli politicians echo their worst Turkish counterparts in now insisting that the use of the word itself be made illegal.

Nevertheless, I see several strains of Arab self-deception. Certainly the Palestinians were slow to realize the danger they faced, they were slow to organize in response to it, and, perhaps worst of all, they often put their faith in neighboring Arab countries, whose leaders were too corrupt to act positively, instead often posturing and promising while secretly sabotaging them. King Abdullah of Transjordan was an early example, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt a more recent one. This kind of public posturing continues to this day, with Arab leaders, for example, begging the United States in private to attack Iran while maintaining a public illusion of impartiality.

Under Mubarak, though the Israelis denied vital supplies to those living in Gaza, so did the Egyptians, who shared a border with Gaza but showed scant concern for the welfare of their Arab brethren. Indeed, Egypt long ago sold out to the United States, whose large annual subsidies serve to build up “crony capitalism,” which tends to enrich a favored few at a cost to the larger nation. In addition, Egypt’s plutocrats faced the Muslim Brotherhood, a much more serious and principled set of people than themselves, and these people resembled Hamas too much for the comfort of the then-rulers of Egypt. Better to starve their Arab “brothers” in Gaza. The same pattern is true of much of the Arab world, interests of the people sold out to an elite often based on explicitly anti-Islamist views, in tandem with US and European interests. Sometimes conflict with Israel is also used to rationalize the suppression of one’s own citizens. A forty-nine-year state of emergency in Syria has included every kind of arrest, torture, and murder based on the theory that they are at war with Israel. Yes, Israel still has Syria’s Golan Heights (and is busy “settling” it), and yes, Syria has been very good at arming and supporting the only successful anti-Israel force, Hezbollah of Lebanon. But what does this have to do with suppressing their own people? Why a state of emergency to arm Hezbollah? And what is being done about the Golan Heights?

Perhaps the greatest Palestinian daydream has been the belief that Israel might actually live up to agreements made. In 1994 at Oslo, Palestinians made major concessions in exchange for Israeli promises, which were not kept, and the Palestinians had no leverage to prevent this. Israel continued to settle the occupied territories, install Israeli-only roads, mark off sections of the West Bank as Israeli security zones, and so on, all while pretending not to.

CHRISTIAN ZIONISM

The elephant in the room of Israeli behavior is the United States. No way would Israel act as it does to its neighbors if it did not have the active, massive support of the world’s great superpower. If you have a dispute with your neighbor, and you have a large, ferocious dog behind you, while your neighbor stands alone, you may be tempted to overstate your case. In that sense, Israel has repeatedly acted in a much more aggressive fashion because the United States gave tacit or full support, while underwriting the Israeli military to the tune of more than $1 billion a year. Where does this support come from?

It is usually not appreciated that long before there was the Jewish Zionism of the 1880s, there was something called Christian Zionism. It was alive and well in the United States in 1810 and has been a powerful force ever since. Its roots in Europe go back well into the sixteenth century. The movement has transmuted into various forms, but underlying it is the Bible and a shared story of expansion and ethnic cleansing glorified as God’s will. As the American writer Herman Melville enthused, “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our times; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.”

This was a neat trick, stealing the mantle of the chosen people away from the chosen people, and here’s how it worked. The self-proclaimed chosen people were, indeed, the chosen people because they were chosen to give rise to Jesus Christ the Savior (God incarnate). But when Jewish people then rejected Jesus, they became the unchosen people, while those who embraced Jesus became the new chosen people. The new chosen people had an ambivalent relationship with the old chosen ones. On the one hand, the usual out-group derogation and racism (“Christ killers!”) was practiced. On the other hand, the two shared a book. Jewish people had not just given rise to Jesus, whom they rejected, but also to the Old Testament, which the Christians wanted. Common elements of history only deepened this connection—genocide of surrounding peoples celebrated in the Bible, new land being settled, racial superiority, a shared creed based on God’s own word.

In 1891, four hundred people signed a petition and delivered it to the US president, Benjamin Harrison, calling on him to induce the Ottoman Empire to turn Palestine over to the Jews. Most signing the document were not Jewish but included the country’s elite in all realms, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Speaker of the House, key chairs of committees, a future president, the mayors of major cities, owners and editors of major newspapers, major industrialists, and top Christian clergy of every stripe. This was no plot hatched by a Jewish subgroup. This was US Christianity rising to its full moral heights and anointing Israel the chosen land for the unchosen people. And this ambiguity continued. One advantage for Christians of having Jews return to Israel is that there would be fewer of them nearby.

Harry Truman worked tirelessly after World War II against both his own State Department and Great Britain (the colonial power that had created the mess in the first place) to establish the country of Israel. He was a biblical literalist and a Christian Zionist. He also noted that there were almost no Arab voters (nor rich ones) in the United States. The Old Testament said Jews belonged in Israel. That and being appalled at the Jewish holocaust and the postwar treatment of European Jews was enough to get him on board, contrary to the UN’s plan. Israel circumvented the latter by at once declaring itself a state, going to war, and then using ethnic cleansing to achieve a largely homogeneous state, itself more than 50 percent larger than the one the UN envisioned.

In what must count as one of the more bizarre recent scenes from US Christian Zionism, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in April and May 2003 fed President Bush a daily set of intelligence briefings on the Iraq war whose covers juxtaposed dramatic wartime scenes—a US tank rumbling through the desert—with exhortations from the Old Testament: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” Or along with a picture of Saddam Hussein striking a dictatorial pose: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” Some in the Pentagon were conscious that if these covers were to become public, Muslims (among others) might well interpret this as evidence of yet another Crusade against them backed by biblical prophecy. Rumsfeld appeared intent on manipulating Bush, who was known to frequently quote the Bible (unlike Rumsfeld).