Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 12

Zionism is the most successful anti-imperialist movement in history 

Ever had trouble falling asleep? Try counting sheep, people say. Well, it’s never worked for me. 

Here’s another idea, and one that’s tailor-made for "woke" young Europeans suddenly stumbling across their continent’s inglorious imperial past. Count the number of foreign invaders who have conquered Israel. It’s such a long list that you’re bound to doze off before reaching the end: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, British….. 

On second thoughts, perhaps you should revert to counting sheep – that list of 17 imperial powers is guaranteed to startle the most somnolent of readers. (That’s a minimum figure – the Babylonians and Arabs each invaded at least twice and Napoleon’s ill-fated campaign of 1799 should perhaps also be added). Some of these regimes employed shockingly cruel tactics including mass deportations, enslavement and massacres. Two examples will turn the strongest stomachs: Roman Emperor Hadrian’s brutal suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century is believed to have cost around 600,000 Judean lives, either through violence or starvation, while the Crusaders (11^th-13^th centuries), after murdering tens of thousands of European Jews en route to the Holy Land, had a particular predilection for incarcerating Jews inside their synagogues and burning them alive. 

Yet this long history of dispossession, suffering and death reached a joyful (if precarious) ending. The rebirth of a sovereign Israel in the ancestral homeland is testament to the capacity of the oppressed to overcome the injustice of the oppressor. Not once but 17 times. 

It also exposes a huge lie, one that is touted as an irrefutable fact by antiZionists. They allege, against all the evidence, that Zionism is an imperialist, colonialist venture, a tool of the Great Powers who carved up territories conquered in the Great War to enhance their hegemony and wealth. Here’s what the respected UK Open Democracy political website proclaims (echoing countless others): “The foundations of Israel are rooted in a colonial project that has modernized its face but continues to subject Palestinians to military occupation, land dispossession and unequal rights.” [1]. It’s pure fiction. Yet millions believe it. 

A reminder: Jews (“Judeans”) were the original indigenous inhabitants of today’s Israel, Palestinian Authority and part of Jordan. There is ample historical, archaeological and even genetic evidence to support that view. The Hebrews arrived in that land in the second millennium BCE and established the Kingdom of Israel that subsequently split in two – Israel in the north and Judea to its south. After a brief period of uninterrupted sovereignty, it was then occupied by a succession of colonial powers right up until the British Mandate of the twentieth century. As is often observed, had it not been for foreign conquest and expulsion, Israel today would be over 3,000 years old.

The Palestinians, by contrast, are relative newcomers. Though a minority were indigenous, a sovereign Palestine never existed and modern Palestinians are believed to have originated from three main groups: Muslim invaders, Arab immigrants and local converts to Islam. Indeed the Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine in the seventh century is a textbook example of settler-colonialism. This is not just an Israeli claim: Hamas minister Fathi Ḥammad, cited by Joffe [2], asserted that “half the Palestinians are Egyptians and the other half are Saudis.” (That history of inward migration doesn’t invalidate the contemporary Palestinian self-definition of peoplehood, nor have Zionist or Israeli leaders sought to deny their right to self-determination in the context of peaceful co-existence with Israel).  

A key question that the antiZionist accusers have never answered is this one posed by Alan Dershowitz: “If the Jewish refugees who immigrated to Palestine in the last decades of the nineteenth century were the tools of European imperialism, for whom were these socialists and idealists working?” [3] In reality, the Zionist pioneers had to overcome opposition from Turkish, British and pan-Arab imperialists to achieve their goal of self-determination (or even, as many sought at that time, merely autonomy). It took the mass upheaval of the First World War to undermine and eventually overcome the hostility of the imperial powers.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the San Remo Resolution (“the Jewish Magna Carta”) were stunningly unambiguous anti-imperialist statements. Both these milestone documents prioritised the rights of the indigenous inhabitants with three millennia of attachment to the territory over those of the imperial Turkish occupiers. How ironic that the British, who had trailblazed the principle of self-determination (articulated by US President Woodrow Wilson), should have then so callously turned their backs on it, reneging on their legal commitments to the Jewish people that had been enshrined in the Palestine Mandate. 

The effects of the British U-turn on the Jews of Europe, desperately struggling to survive under the Nazi jackboot, were predictably disastrous. The United Kingdom became the latest – and arguably most pitiless – of the long list of colonial occupiers of the Jewish homeland. Throwing off the suffocating straitjacket of British rule became the latest (and ultimately successful) battle of the long Jewish war against imperialism. 

But the imperialists weren’t done with the Jews. Immediately following Israel’s declaration of independence on 14^th May 1948, five Arab armies, acting as the spearhead of an expansionist pan-Arab nationalist movement, prepared to snuff out the reborn Jewish state. As we know, Israel won and survived. Another foreign invader intent on massacre and mayhem had been repulsed.

It was a close-run thing. As Israeli academic Shany Mor [4] has written: “Israel’s national liberation, unlike so many other post-colonial births, wasn’t just the end of one foreign domination, it was also the most threatening moment of another. Having to fend off a combined Arab invasion united disparate pre-statehood factions as no ideology could have.”

The truth that modern antiZionists and their self-styled “progressive” allies seek to conceal is that Zionism is the most successful anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movement in history. Yet legions of Israel’s academic critics cling to an invented inversion of history: they assert that Israel is predicated on an inherently colonialist ideology. Why do they do this and how do they get away with it?

Israeli journalist Ben-Dror Yemini [5] provides some answers. “The Israel depicted by these scholars bears virtually no relation to the actual Israel or its history, intentions, or influence. These scholars rely, whenever they can, on fabricated or discredited sources, on true facts taken grotesquely out of context, and on narratives that serve neither truth nor peace. They have built a web of pseudo-scholarship, a paper trail that allows each writer to cite the works of others in the circle, sharing a unified purpose that is political rather than scholarly: to discredit a country and to rally troops to that end.”

I often wonder how such "scholars" can internalise such patent mendacity. The only answer I can offer is that they don’t care; the cause is too important for them to allow themselves the luxury of being deflected by the facts. A tsunami of post-modernism has swept across western academia and civil society in recent decades. This bizarre form of groupthink asserts that history merely reflects competing narratives and that ideology trumps all. In the words of revisionist historian Ilan Pappé, “Who knows what the facts are?”

I have an answer for the campaigning prof. We do. And so do all fair-minded people who care about the truth. I also have a question for him. How do you – and other antiZionist academics who have bothered to fact-check – manage to sleep at night in the knowledge that you are deliberately peddling falsehoods?

[1] Avelar D, Ferrari B. Israel and Palestine: a story of modern colonialism. Open Democracy, 2018

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/north-africa-west-asia/israel-and-palestine-story-of-modern-colonialism/

[2] Joffe A. Palestinian Settler Colonialism. Ramat Gan, BESA Centre, 2017 https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/palestinians-settlers-colonialism/

[3] Dershowitz A. The Case for Israel. Hoboken NJ, J Wiley and Sons, 2003

[4] Shany Mor. The accidental wisdom of Israel’s maligned electoral system, Fathom, 2019

[5] Yemini Ben-Dror. Industry of Lies. New York, Institute for the Global Study of Antisemitism and Policy, 2017

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 11 

The ethnic cleansing of Mizrachi Jews has been erased from history

I have a confession to make. I am not a huge fan of shakshuka. For the uninitiated, this is an Israeli breakfast dish believed to have originated in Tunisia, Libya or possibly Yemen,  and brought to Israel by immigrants from those countries in the 1950s. Much modern Israeli food hails from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Indeed much contemporary Israeli culture, including literature, music, architecture, religion and politics, is strikingly Middle Eastern in its character. Given that the original Zionist pioneers were, in the main, European, it’s worth asking a serious question, one that goes beyond the vagaries of culinary fashion: how did this Orientalisation of Israel come about? 

The answer is chilling.

On 20^th March 2017, the UN Human Rights Council held one of its thrice-yearly sessions in which it ritually condemns Israel under agenda item 7, the only item that targets a specific country. On this occasion, however, something highly unusual occurred. Hiller Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch, was granted a few minutes to address the Council. After the PLO, Qatar, Syria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and other Arab regimes had again accused the Jewish state of racism, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, Neuer said this: 

Once upon a time, the Middle East was full of Jews. Algeria had 140,000 Jews. Algeria, where are your Jews? Egypt used to have 75,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? Syria, you had tens of thousands of Jews. Where are your Jews? Iraq, you had over 135,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? [1]

The listeners sat in stunned silence. They had no answer. Which is a shame, because it’s an important question to which few outside Israel are prepared to give the time of day let alone offer a truthful answer. 

Roughly 60% of the six million Jews who today live in Israel originated from the Muslim countries of the MENA. The majority of these Mizrachi (Eastern) Jews, like their European Ashkenazi counterparts, didn’t visit Israel as tourists and decided to stay on to enjoy the sunny Mediterranean lifestyle but were fleeing discrimination, persecution and violence. 

Jews have inhabited the Middle East for around 3,000 years. Though most were expelled from their homeland by the Romans in the first century, large numbers resettled throughout the MENA, put down firm roots and contributed immeasurably to their adoptive nations. When Jewish sovereignty was re-established in 1948, the Jews residing in these countries were deemed by the Arab League to constitute “the Jewish minority of Palestine” and became targets of riots, pogroms and intensified official persecution. The result of this tsunami of anti-Jewish hostility was a mass exodus of 850,000 Mizrachi Jews. About 650,000 arrived in Israel, where they were housed in primitive refugee camps (ma’abarot) for up to ten years, the remainder finding refuge in the West. A tiny minority succeeded in clinging on to a precarious existence in their MENA homes. 

As with the Palestinian refugees, whose collective trauma is passionately and publicly commemorated as their Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), controversy still surrounds the precise proportions of the Jewish refugees who fled in fear or were expelled. One issue is beyond doubt: unlike the Palestinian refugees, there has been no international acknowledgement of their plight. No special international agencies were established to meet their needs, no resources were allocated to alleviate their hardship, and no UN resolutions condemned their treatment at the hands of their oppressors. The Jewish Nakba, that resulted in the displacement of many more Jews than Palestinians from their homes, has been all but erased from history while the Palestinian experience has been fetishised. 

Although the term Nakba can be applied to both these human tragedies, there is no moral equivalence between them. The roughly 710,000 Arab refugees from Western Palestine had been caught up in a war that their leaders (along with neighbouring Arab states) had declared on the nascent Jewish state. They were not victims of ethnic cleansing – otherwise, how could 160,000 Arabs have elected to stay? By contrast, the MENA Jews, having suffered second-class dhimmi status for centuries, were dispossessed violently or under threat of violence merely for being Jewish (by now redefined as “Zionist”). These Jews were indeed ethnically cleansed, either in single, brutal assaults (such as Jordan’s expulsion of the Jews of Judea and Samaria (that they promptly renamed the West Bank) or in the course of sustained campaigns of intimidation and abuse (as in Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria). 

Some commentators have suggested that a useful way to view this double refugee problem is to accept that an exchange of populations took place and that the moral slate is thereby wiped clean. If only life were that simple. That formulation won’t work for many reasons.

First, the Palestinian refugee issue has been an effective stick with which to beat Israel for decades. By defining refugee status (in this case only) as inherited, Israel’s enemies, aided and abetted by UNRWA and other agencies, have ensured that the refugee population expands relentlessly as a permanent irritant in the region and a ceaseless demographic threat to Israel through their insistence on the mythical “right of return.” Never has a humanitarian cause been so effectively weaponised for a malign political purpose.  

Second, the majority of Jewish refugees from Muslim countries have been successfully absorbed into Israel and other countries (at great personal and collective cost) and have no wish to don the mantle of victimhood in their struggle for recognition. In that sense, they play into the hands of those who are inclined to shrug their shoulders and move on. 

Third, the Mizrachi Jews deserve their story to heard and to be offered recompense. That is a matter of a natural justice. It is also an urgent prerequisite for peace. The lack of acknowledgement, let alone resolution, of the issue has been a running sore both within Israel (where many Mizrachim have been deeply sceptical of attempts at rapprochement with the Arab world) and in Israel’s relations with countries of the MENA as well as with the rest of the world. Journalist Matti Friedman has described the displacement of Mizrachi Jews as one of the hidden dynamics of the Arab-Israeli conflict [2]. 

In her landmark book on the subject of the dispossessed Jews of the MENA, Lyn Julius [3] lamented the undeniable fact that successive Israeli governments have come so late to this realisation. Only since 2010, when the Knesset passed a law binding Israeli leaders to secure compensation for the Mizrachim, has the subject even been on the negotiating table. The mechanism for achieving this more balanced approach to the double refugee issue might be to create an international fund, as proposed by President Clinton. This would be used to compensate both refugee populations, Palestinian and Jewish (taking account of the previous allocation of billions of dollars to the former and none to the latter). Julius quotes Levan Zamir, head of the Israeli organisations representing Jews from Arab lands: “Peace will not bring about the international fund, the international fund will bring about peace.” 

Next time you sitting in an Israeli restaurant tucking into your kubbeh, couscous or even (sigh) shakshuka, remember the bitter provenance of these culinary favourites: the unrecognised, unfathomable and unresolved calamity – the invisible Jewish Nakba – that propelled them to the centre of Israeli life.

[1] https://unwatch.org/algeria-jews-hillel-neuer-u-n-human-rights-council/

[2] Friedman M. A different history of displacement and Loss. Times of Israel, 15 May, 2012.https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-different-history-of-displacement-and-loss/

[3] Julius L. Uprooted: How 3000 years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2018

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 10

Israel has been threatened with political and physical annihilation every day of her existence 

Try this thought experiment: imagine how the world would react if a small country like, say, Denmark, was denounced by her neighbours as a cancerous tumour deserving nothing but total extirpation, accompanied by the massacre of most of her citizens? Furthermore, think of the consequence of Denmark being subjected to actual physical assault, in the name of a ruthlessly annihilationist ideology based on alleged grievances about her rule over Greenland, on a near-daily basis? 

Such egregiously aggressive behaviour towards a member state of the UN would, in normal circumstances, prompt global political condemnation, emergency meetings of the Security Council, the application of punitive sanctions, the establishment of commissions of enquiry, referrals to the International Criminal Court, and relentlessly critical media coverage. 

But “normal circumstances” is a concept relevant to all nations except Israel. The dire reality of the Jewish state’s struggle for survival in the face of ceaseless attacks on all fronts is ignored by most media, politicians, academics, religious leaders, trade unions, NGOs, the UN, and an enormous army of full-time human rights activists, all of whom seem to suffer an unaccountably defective capacity for human compassion when it comes to Israel. 

Unlike other conflicts over territory around the world, Israel's enemies have expressed their declared aim of obliterating the country. They do this in the name of antiZionism, the denial of the right to self-determination of the Jewish people. That is, in itself, a racist policy that violates a fundamental principle of the UN charter. But it gets worse; in addition to politicide, genocide has long been firmly on the agenda. Extremist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, aided and abetted by Iran (of which more later), regularly and publicly declare that their avowed aim is to destroy Israel and massacre most of her inhabitants i.e. Jewish Israelis who comprise 75% (chillingly around 6 million) of the country’s population. 

The threat of annihilation is not new. Shortly before Israel declared her independence, Azzam Pasha, the Arab League’s secretary-general, promised a “war of extermination and momentous massacre.” He was as good as his word – during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1947-49, the attacking Arab militias and armies deliberately targeted civilian settlements wherever they could. This was a pattern of officially-sanctioned Arab anti-Jewish violence that has ancient historical roots and is one that has continued to the present day. 

What motivates this murderous ideology? In a word: antisemitism. It has three overlapping elements: the traditional bigotry towards Jews in the Arab and Muslim world from the 7^th century that was revitalised by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s initially in Egypt and then spread as violent Islamism throughout the Middle East; a noxious brand of Nazi-inspired hatred that was imported from Europe, also in the 1920s, to turbocharge “political” antiZionism; and far-left conspiracy theories that were injected into the conflict following Stalin’s lurch into antisemitism just before his death in in the early 1950s. 

These three strands of Jew-hatred became mutually reinforcing. The centuries-old dhimmi status of minorities in Muslim lands, where Jews were obliged to wear distinctive clothing or patches, inspired the Nazis to introduce the yellow star as a means of identification of European Jews. The Muslim Brotherhood and National Socialism amplified each other’s conspiracy theories about Jewish plans for world domination and forged a toxic alliance that, among other troublesome consequences, propelled Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arab bestseller lists where they have remained ever since. Both Marxist-affiliated Arab nationalists and ultra-reactionary jihadist terrorists are prone to chant the homicidal war cry: Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud – “Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning.” Khaybar was the site of the Prophet’s victory in 628 in which hundreds of Jews were killed. 

Specifically Palestinian Arab antisemitic violence may be traced back primarily to the sinister figure of Haj Amin al-Husseini who was appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem by the British in 1921. This self-proclaimed leader of the Arabs of Mandatory Palestine was not merely a Nazi sympathiser; he forged an agreement with Hitler to extend the Final Solution to the Middle East and eradicate every Jew – not just the ones in British Palestine but all the Jews in all the Arabs lands. When Hitler committed suicide in the Berlin bunker in 1945, the Mufti was undeterred in his pursuit of a posthumous victory for his beloved Führer – the obliteration of the old-new archenemy, the Jews. 

All of this lethal hatred long antedated the Six Day War of 1967, the “illegal occupation” and the settlements. Blogger Mark Pickles [1] calls it the Nazi elephant in the room: “The primary and sustaining cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is genocidal antisemitism; the rest is footnotes. It’s as simple as that. And it’s as serious as that.” 

Joining the dots between antisemitism of the past and present is rarely done. Even rarer is an acknowledgement by Western observers that antisemitism has played any part in the dynamics of Arab/Iranian-Israeli conflict. That failure is, arguably, itself a form of antisemitism for it legitimises a poisonous world-view that denies the lived experience of the Jewish people. At the very least, it represents a shocking moral failure on the part of the international community. How else can we explain the nauseating sight in January 2020 of world leaders solemnly intoning Never Again at Jerusalem’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, then immediately beating a path to embrace the Holocaust denying Mahmoud Abbas who rewards terrorists financially in proportion to the number of Jews they kill? Or European powers, led by Germany, of all countries, straining every sinew to rescue the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran’s Islamo-fascist dictatorship that has not ceased for a single day to reiterate its intention to wipe Israel – “the little Satan” – off the face of the earth? 

Iran presents Israel with the greatest existential threat in her history. Even before the Trump administration’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Obama-sponsored nuclear deal, Iran unveiled its first international “Hourglass Festival” that is designed to count down the clock to the day of Israel’s destruction predicted, by Supreme Leader Khamenei, to occur by 2040. 

The mad mullahs’ target is not merely “the Zionist entity” but Jews worldwide. The well-documented call for the murder of all Jews in the founding charter of Hamas, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that has ruled Gaza by force since 2007, is hardly an isolated example. Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy militia in Lebanon, came perilously close to offering ironic support for the Zionist “ingathering of the exiles” when he explained in 2002 how convenient it was that “the Jews were gathering in one place – and there the final and decisive battle will take place.” 

Any country facing this degree of unremitting danger would do the following: establish military deterrence through the readiness of its armed forces; ensure that hostile intentions on all fronts are continuously monitored and, if showing signs of becoming active, quickly subdued; and determine that any withdrawal from captured enemy territory doesn’t jeopardise the security of its citizens. That doesn’t mean that Israel will never take risks to achieve peace – on the contrary, she has frequently demonstrated a willingness to do just that. As Brett Stephens [2] wrote in 2019 in the New York Times: “In proportion to its size, Israel has voluntarily relinquished more territory taken in war than any state in the world.” 

Yet the world’s commentariat treats Israel as if the dark shadow of annihilationist antisemitism simply doesn’t exist. Ignorance can hardly explain this oversight as the evidence is easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. More likely, it’s an inconvenient truth that undermines the near-universal narrative of Israeli blameworthiness for the absence of peace. 

A touch of political bias here and there is barely significant, but wilful blindness to threatened genocide is potentially catastrophic. Shining a bright light on this murky corner of reality is probably the single most important thing that anyone genuinely seeking peace between Israel and her neighbours can do. 

1. https://markpickles.wordpress.com/2019/08/01/the-arab-israeli-conflict-made-simple/

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/08/opinion/sunday/israel-progressive-anti-semitism.html

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 9 

Israel has moved steadily leftwards politically over time 

Want to enliven a dreary dinner party conversation? Recite this sentence to the assembled company: Israel has moved steadily leftwards politically over time. (You might want to stir things further and throw in the exhortation that all true progressives should support Israel – a sentiment that permeates all my blogs and one that I plan to address specifically in the future). Then sit back and watch. Reactions will range from stunned silence to guffaws of ironic laughter. It’s unlikely that anyone will agree with you. Don’t be deterred. The truth is often counterintuitive and sometimes frankly unbelievable. 

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember how Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War began a process whereby her image morphed from that of a plucky little David to an overbearing and bullying Goliath while the Arabs (especially the Palestinian ones) moved in the opposite direction. The rot spread further, according to the progressive narrative, as the country became an entrenched occupier and settler of Arab land. You may also recall the panic-stricken editorials in the western media that greeted the election of the allegedly “far right” Menachem Begin as Israeli prime minister in 1977. We were regaled with apocalyptic predictions of war about to engulf the region following the Likud victory over a Labour Party (rebranded Alignment) that had held power for nearly 30 years. 

The prophets of doom were wrong. Ostensibly hawkish on foreign policy, Begin soon displayed ultra-dovish tendencies. When Sadat opted to be the first Arab leader to make peace, Israel withdrew from every last inch of the Sinai desert and uprooted thousands of settlers, taking a huge security risk in the process. 

Socio-economically too, the Likud was far from a traditional right-wing party that would shore up privilege and roll back the state: on the contrary, it drew its strongest support from the poorer (largely Sephardi/Mizrachi) urban working classes who had felt abandoned by (largely Ashkenazi) Labour politicians whom they regarded as elitist and intent on preserving their wealth and power across key sectors of society, notably within the Histadrut (trade union federation) and the kibbutzim. One of Begin’s first moves was to bring the third largest party, Dash (Democratic Movement for Change), a liberal offshoot of Labour, into his government. 

Since that revolutionary year of 1977, general elections have tended to send roughly equal numbers of representatives from the right and left to the Knesset. (In September 2019, the left bloc won 57 seats while the right won 55). Nevertheless, the gradual leftward policy drift within both mainstream parties continued. It did briefly stall a couple of times in the 1980s after the treaty with Egypt produced a disappointingly “cold peace,” and a series of major crises (the divisive first Lebanon War, a wildly overheated economy, the First Intifada) shook Israeli society to the core. But the public soon grew weary of the nationalist rhetoric of Begin and Shamir – although they had both demonstrated a willingness to compromise on their most cherished principles in pursuit of peace – and returned to power the old left in the personages of Rabin, Peres and Barak. Even the shock of Arafat’s bloody post-Oslo terrorist campaign, the Second Intifada, failed to dampen Israelis’ willingness to take risks for peace as the “right wing” Sharon and Olmert adopted startlingly conciliatory policies in their attempts to end the conflict. 

Just before Israeli general election in 2013, Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, in one of his frequent spasms of liberal angst about Israel, predicted (wrongly) that Israeli voters were about to elect an intransigent, hard-right government. He argued (as did many others) that this was the near-inevitable outcome of the Israeli electorate’s propensity to move steadily rightwards over the years and that the process was accelerating, making the continuation of any vestiges of a peace process impossible. If Freedland had been writing around 1985 he might have had a point. Three decades on, he didn’t. 

The charge of a rightward drift most often focuses on the twin issues of land and settlements. Foreigners regularly urge Israel to pursue territorial compromise as if this was a novel idea. If they’d been paying attention they might have noticed that Israelis have been doing just that since the early 1980s – relinquishing the whole of Sinai to Egypt, dismantling dozens of settlements and military bases in Sinai and Gaza, totally withdrawing the IDF from Lebanon, Gaza and large tracts of the West Bank, and forcibly uprooting of militant settlers from dozens of West Bank outposts. Throughout this period, the expansionist Greater Israel movement virtually collapsed despite the bitter disappointments of the land-for-peace Oslo Accords of 1993-95. The last five prime ministers have all expressed support for the establishment of a Palestinian state, with appropriate safeguards. 

Domestically, all the key political trends have also long faced leftwards: the consensus on drafting Charedim into the army, the provision of universal health care, the passage of  progressive human rights legislation, the official recognition of non-Orthodox Jewish religious streams, the banning of far right political parties such as Kach, and the recent upsurge of centrist political parties at the expense of the hard right and religious ones. These developments would have been inconceivable in the early years of the state.

Wait, I hear my wokest reader protest, what about that perennial bogeyman of the left, Binyamin Netanyahu? Isn’t he an unreconstructed reactionary that has pulled Israel sharply rightwards since gaining power? On the contrary, his dovish policies (as opposed to his rhetoric) would have warmed the heart of Abba Eban. In foreign policy, his three key acts were his signing of the Oslo-related Hebron Agreement (1997) and Wye River Memorandum (1998), his public recognition of the right of the Palestinians to achieve sovereignty, peacefully, alongside Israel, and his freezing of settlement activity for 10 months in 2009 to try to kickstart negotiations with the Palestinians. Domestically, he committed successive administrations to reducing social inequalities by a variety of means, notably via Resolution 922 that involved an unprecedented investment in the Arab sector that (according to initial evaluations) has already yielded significant social, economic and educational benefits [1].

What is even more remarkable about this seismic shifting of the Israeli political landscape is that it has occurred against a background of perpetual warfare, terrorism, demonisation, delegitimisation, and the rise to power of an EU-subsidised authoritarian, revanchist kleptocracy in the West Bank along with Islamo-fascist, genocidal regimes in Iran and Gaza – all aimed at destroying the world’s only Jewish state.

Yet we are told that it is Israelis – not Palestinians, other Arabs or Iranians – who are jeopardising peace by drifting inexorably rightwards. It wasn’t true in the past and it’s not true today. 

Israel is not a socialist paradise nor is it free of anti-liberal elements. But the overall direction of travel is clear. Liam Hoare [2] succinctly summarised the phenomenon: While the left did indeed lose the electoral struggle after the turbulent 1990s and bloody Second Intifada, it won the war of ideas... the right and centre having appropriated part of its raison d’être.

Here’s a challenge: name another country that, in such unpropitious circumstances, has moved so unambiguously leftwards over such a prolonged period. If you can, I’ll buy you a falafel in pitta – with all the trimmings – from the most woke kiosk you can find in Tel Aviv.

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/working.papers/99_final.pdf

[2] http://fathomjournal.org/israelvotes2019-2-nitzan-horowitz-the-new-leader-of-the-israeli-left/

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 8 

Relative to her population, Israel has absorbed more immigrants than any other country in history 

Visitors to Israel are often surprised when they encounter the staggering diversity of Israelis. From the moment they step off the plane, they see a myriad of faces of every conceivable ethnic origin.  “But they don’t look Jewish” is a frequent observation, and not just by a prejudiced minority. There is a common misconception that all Israeli Jews are (or at least should look like) ethnically white Europeans, and that if they’re not, they must be Arabs. Like many stereotypes, it is completely untrue. 

Another frequent (and related) accusation, especially prevalent in some modern “progressive” circles, is this: that while there may be a few black or brown Jews, Israel (being an allegedly racist, apartheid state) prioritises white Jewish immigration. This notion is so absurd it is laughable: Israel today is a multi-ethnic society that has a larger proportion of non-whites than most western nations. Look at the figures: the (approximate) proportion of non-whites in Australia is 9%, in France 15%, in the UK 18%, in the USA 23%, in Canada 27%, and in Israel 68%.

More numbers: in 1948, Israel’s population was 800,000; today, it exceeds 9 million. Most of this spectacular increase has been due to two main factors – births and immigration. Nowadays, the former contributes the overwhelming majority of new Israelis but that was not always the case. The country has received newcomers from more than 100 countries, doubling her population in the first three years of her existence and tenfold in her first 50 years, a scale of increase took the world as a whole 500 years to achieve. This makes Israel the largest immigrant absorbing nation, relative to her size, in world history. This unique achievement occurred against a background of perpetual war, terrorism and threatened annihilation. How did this demographic explosion come about?

The waves of Jewish immigration (Aliyah) following Israel’s rebirth originated from two main sources: survivors of the Holocaust and refugees from the Middle East and North Africa. Few were able to bring personal possessions or money placing an even greater burden on state resources. As well as having experienced serious trauma and social dislocation, many were poorly educated or lacked appropriate skills for their new lives, or were otherwise disadvantaged through sickness, disability or old age. These Olim (immigrants) inevitably posed an enormous logistical challenge to the host community. 

What about non-Jews? Doesn’t Israel strain every sinew to keep them out? That’s another propagandistic smear. The answer is emphatically no. While Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, she is far from exclusively Jewish, let alone the ethno-nationalist Jewish state that is alleged by her detractors. When most of the rest of the world was closed to the Vietnamese “boat people” in the 1970s, prime minister Begin ordered Israel to open her doors to several hundred of the Asian refugees – hence the curious modern phenomenon of ethnically Chinese Israeli citizens. Around 25% of Israel’s current population are non-Jewish, 80% of whom are Arabs, a community that also includes numerous immigrants; many Muslim and Christian Arab citizens of Israel originated from neighbouring countries, including Lebanon, Syria and, in more recent times, the Palestinian Authority. 

Indeed Arab immigration to Israel antedates the establishment of the modern state. The Zionist revival of the Jewish homeland attracted hundreds of thousands of workers from all over the Middle East; their descendants today comprise a large proportion of today’s Palestinians. In the Boston Post in 1948, Robert Kennedy wrote: “The Jews point with pride to the fact that over 500,000 Arabs, in the 12 years between 1932 and 1944, came into Palestine to take advantage of living conditions existing in no other Arab state.” (Incidentally, this growing non-Jewish labour force was treated exactly the same as Jews in terms of working conditions, pay, trade union rights and welfare provision). 

Since 1948, tens of thousands of Palestinians, including refugees or their descendants, have immigrated to Israel, legally and officially, under the government’s little-publicised family reunification programme. This is effectively a controlled implementation of the Palestinian demand for “return” in a manner that seeks to avoid jeopardising either Israel’s Jewish majority or, more crucially, her security. The programme has been intermittently suspended due to its cynical exploitation, notably during the Second Intifada (2000-2005), by terrorists who used it as cover to infiltrate into the country and perpetrate violent attacks. In addition, there are an unknown number of illegal Palestinian immigrants.

So let’s lay to rest the old canard that Israel only accepts and grants citizenship to Jews. There’s a natural emphasis on Aliyah since providing a safe haven for Jews was the raison d’etre for the rebirth of Israel, fully endorsed as such by the international community. But non-Jews have always been attracted to the country and their contribution has been welcomed. Even under the Law of Return, that ostensibly favours Jews, large numbers of non-Jewish immigrants have been successfully absorbed over the decades, including hundreds of thousands from Russia, Ukraine and other eastern European states. Today more than half of all immigrants are not considered Jewish by the immigration authorities, though many claim Jewish heritage, identity or ancestry. 

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t gloss over the problems that Israel faces in absorbing newcomers. Almost all of the multiple ethnic, religious and national groups – Jewish and non-Jewish – have complained of discrimination to some degree. In recent times, illegal African migrants, most claiming refugee or asylum status, have fared particularly badly. These migrants are predominantly men who entered Israel surreptitiously via Egypt from Eritrea or Sudan (the latter having no diplomatic relations with Israel, thereby complicating matters). Their arrival has generated heated controversy in the country and public opinion is generally resistant to their large-scale absorption. Some populist politicians denounce them as a source of criminal or terrorist activity, while liberals demand that the government (that classifies most of them as economic migrants rather than refugees) should desist from deporting them, citing Israel’s moral obligation to distressed peoples everywhere. Until their status is clarified, their future remains precarious. In 2018, however, Israel agreed a five-year plan of action with the UN that would enable the majority to remain in the country.  

Israel is far from alone in having to confront this dilemma: almost every European country is currently engaged in a similar crisis. Unlike them, however, Israel is a tiny country that, despite being permanently surrounded by enemies who strive ceaselessly to murder her citizens and bring about her destruction, has a long and praiseworthy record of absorbing people of all backgrounds. Although the consequences for security, public expenditure and social cohesion have been massively burdensome, Israel has always been a quintessentially immigrant society and is justifiably proud of that record. 

Israel has shown, time and again, that she can rise to the challenge of absorbing millions of desperate, homeless people. Many other states now face that challenge. The UN predicts that global migration will increase dramatically in the coming decades – up to one billion by 2050 through environmental causes alone. It is unarguable that Israel has much to teach the world about coping with mass immigration. The key question is: will the world listen? 

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 7

Israel is the only country in the world to have implemented a successful and entirely voluntary form of communism

Like many of the post-war baby-boomer generation, I was a committed radical socialist in my youth. Clutching my pocket-sized copy of Mao’s Little Red Book as I headed for the latest anti-war demo or campus sit-in, I was consumed by an insufferably self-important sense of political correctness and buoyed by the unimpeachable rectitude of my cause. This state of deluded faux-grace lasted a handful of years. 

What happened? It passed. It was a mere fad, a phase of adolescence. I grew up. Yet even now I sheepishly harbour a nostalgia for aspects of that distant youthful idealism. I respect the desire of many of today’s youngsters to make the world a better place in which individualistic consumerism is subservient to the wider needs of the community. I remain instinctively sympathetic to the collectivist impulse that energises so many young people today. There, I’ve confessed – I’m an unrepentant, crypto-progressive. And I don’t see any need to apologise for it. 

Except there’s a problem. An elephant-sized one.

Something seriously odd is happening to the global left. It can be summarised in a word: intersectionality. That means if you’re anticapitalist or antiracist or (especially) antisexist, you have to adopt a whole lot of other “anti-oppression” postures too. One of these is antiZionism. That’s because, as all sixth formers know, “Israel oppresses the Palestinians.”

It’s a mind-blowingly banal political theory, a sort of Buy-One-Get-Six-Free offer for the intellectually lazy, yet it is rapidly acquiring doctrinal status within the modern left. The result is that it is now de rigueur for all card-carrying progressives to express their loathing for Israel even more passionately than their deranged counterparts on the far right. This is despite Israel’s legitimate claim to be one of the most liberal countries in the world, and certainly the torchbearer for progressive values in the Middle East. Such arguments, however, don’t wash with Israel’s socialist critics.

But there’s one undeniable fact I have found to exert such rhetorical potency that it regularly reduces Israel’s “woke” detractors to speechlessness: Israel is the only country in history to have invented a successful, voluntary model of communism. I am referring, of course, to that uniquely Israeli creation known as the kibbutz (“clustering”) or collective farm. It’s an institution worth examining in detail for, amongst its other numerous virtues, its mere existence blows to smithereens the canard that Israeli society is built upon irredeemably reactionary foundations. 

The kibbutz is probably Israel’s most famous invention and yet is one of the least understood. It is based on an extraordinary synthesis of two ideologies that many, in their ignorance, regard as mutually incompatible: socialism and Zionism. The early members were largely immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who regarded themselves as epitomising the realisation of both Jewish and universalist values. These pioneers aspired to a fully functioning, egalitarian society based on the Marxist maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In many kibbutzim, personal financial transactions were entirely forbidden; any income generated by the members was used entirely for communal purposes. In short, the model society being promoted by the kibbutz movement was as close to being a truly communist one as is possible to achieve by voluntary means. 

     

From the start, emphasis was placed on collective ownership and responsibility, and the application of cooperative principles to farming, marketing, and governance. The pursuit of profit through the exploitation of manual workers (including, notably, Arab labourers) was anathema. The founders’ prevailing ethos was one of mutual support, social equality, and the dignity of labour as espoused by the socialist visionary AD Gordon. The first kibbutz was established at Degania in the Galilee region in 1909. By 1989, 129,000 people lived on kibbutzim throughout the country.

The kibbutz lifestyle is a challenging one that is not for everyone. The intimate living conditions, the relentlessly democratic decision-making processes, and the subservience of individual needs to those of the group can generate major tensions and, in some cases, blatant abuses. In the early days, many kibbutz residents lived in conditions of austere and, at times, intolerable hardship. (The ideologically softer spinoff, the moshav, attracted many defectors from the kibbutzim and often proved itself to be an economically more efficient as well as a less demanding alternative). 

Successive Labour governments bolstered the kibbutzim politically and economically. Ironically, that partisan support became the greatest threat to their viability; the kibbutzim came to be viewed by working-class Israelis as bastions of the Ashkenazi elite, a resentment that Menachem Begin brilliantly mobilised to win power for the Likud in 1977. Thereafter, government subsidies were drastically reduced and many kibbutzim suffered serious financial crises necessitating government bail-outs. Merely to survive, the kibbutz movement was forced to adopt alternative economic models, including privatisation. 

There are currently some 250 kibbutzim in which a mere 125,000 people live. Although comprising a small minority (1.4%) of Israel’s population, the kibbutzim have always contributed disproportionately to agriculture, industry, the army, politics, and the wider national culture. The kibbutz movement is mainly secular (though there are a few religious kibbutzim). Today, kibbutzim are continuing to renew themselves in innovative ways – including the adoption of sustainable, environmentally friendly agricultural and industrial practices – and still play a prominent role in national life. Fascinatingly, most have been able to retain a contemporary version of their highly-valued ethic of egalitarianism that was so critical to their foundation in the early years of the Twentieth Century. 

To return to our misguided intersectionalists: we need to educate them about the astonishing, mould-breaking kibbutz story. When pressed, progressives generally reject forced collectivisation as practised in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba as an unacceptable violation of human rights. Yet they seem simultaneously unaware or dismissive of the most successful experiment in collectivisation in history, one that was implemented without compulsion or the wholesale crushing of human rights that was the norm elsewhere. 

           Voluntary collectivism is arguably the quintessence of true progressivism. Liberals, progressives and socialists the world over should unhesitatingly hail the Israeli kibbutz as an inspiration to all who seek a fairer, less materialistic and more equal society. If they don’t, their claim to be taken seriously on any subject – especially Israel – will carry about as much weight as the  lyrics of The Internationale.      

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 6     

The impact of Israel on the health of Palestinian Arabs has been overwhelmingly positive

The other day I happened to tune in to an earnest but dull discussion on the UK health service on BBC radio. I was about to switch off when a medical expert offered this opinion: “How can I tell if someone is committed to evidence? When they’re willing to change their minds.” I punched the air in agreement.

We should all be open to changing our minds if the evidence requires it of us. Sometimes it’s a counter-intuitive, profoundly painful process – like having to bid farewell to an old friend or lover. That’s why many people are extremely reluctant to do it. And that’s why “conventional wisdom” is so often misleading or just plain wrong. Nowhere is this more manifest than in the arguments that rage around Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians. 

It’s axiomatic that any conflict between two groups of people is a bad thing and especially for the weaker side. As the Palestinians are unarguably weaker than Israel, as we are constantly reminded, the impact of the latter on the former must inevitably be highly toxic. Take the example of health.

In 2009 Rita Giacaman, Professor of Public Health at Bir Zeit University, wrote the following in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet:

“Between 1967 and 1993, health services for Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory were neglected and starved of funds by the Israeli military administration, with shortages of staff, hospital beds, medications, and essential and specialised services, forcing Palestinians to depend on health services in Israel.”

That sounded a little harsh to me at the time but probably not a million miles (I surmised) from the truth. 

Here’s what Dr Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet had to say in the same year:

“The people of the Palestinian territory matter, most importantly, because their lives and communities are continuing to experience an occupation that has produced chronic de-development for nearly four million people over many decades.”

Sounds reasonable? I thought so too. The occupation (or “occupation” if you’re more comfortable with quotation marks), even if not Israel’s fault, is bound to have negative effects on Palestinian health. That’s surely an uncontroversial statement. Except for one problem: it’s untrue. Horton’s allegation was a complete falsehood, just as was the Giacaman pronouncement.

Hold on, that’s ridiculous. How could a military occupation be anything but damaging on the health of the people under the thumb of the occupier?  

Well, I have news. In this particular case, Israel’s presence in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem over the period 1967 to 1994 turned out to be enormously beneficial to Palestinian health. I know this because a few years ago I researched the subject at the request of Professor Alan Johnson, the editor of the online Fathom magazine. I embarked on the exercise with a genuinely open mind. After all, my professional integrity was on the line. If Israeli policy was responsible for eroding Palestinian health, I would be duty bound to acknowledge and report it. 

If you have the time and inclination to read the full article, there’s a link at the foot of this blog. Alternatively, let me save you the trouble of wading through the paper’s numerous tables and graphs. 

Here’s a summary of what I discovered.

“Rapid and largely sustained improvements in the health status of Palestinians residing in West Bank and Gaza – as measured by infant mortality rates, life expectancy, immunisation coverage and many other indicators – coincided with the period of Israeli civil responsibility of West Bank and Gaza by Israel from 1967 to 1994.”

Just digest that sentence for a moment. Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza strip from 1967 onwards produced rapid and largely sustained improvements in the health status of Palestinians. That conclusion was entirely evidence-based and had nothing to do with my preconceived ideas (that, let me reiterate, tended towards accepting the notion that occupation – any occupation – is bad for your health). 

Here are a few specific examples of my discoveries: infant mortality (a widely used indicator of the state of a population’s health) tumbled by over 80% over the study period; immunisation rates for diseases such as mumps and measles rose to over 90%; running water and electricity in Palestinian homes became the norm rather than the exception; healthcare facilities, including hospitals and community clinics, were modernised and improved beyond recognition. 

My main conclusions, based on the data, were two-fold. First, the claim that Israel systematically harmed Palestinian health/care post-1967 was not supported by the epidemiological evidence. Second, the opposite was the case: Israel substantially improved Palestinian public health from 1967 onwards as a result of the implementation of a wide range of measures that involved the allocation of considerable organisational, political and financial resources. 

When the Palestinian Authority took over full responsibility for the health of these territories in 1994, many of the Israeli public health measures were sustained, at least in part. Unfortunately, both the Second Intifada that started in 2000 and the violent Hamas takeover of Gaza of 2007 were unhelpful (to put it mildly) and many of the health statistics began to go into reverse.  

The article was published in 2014. So far, not one of Israel’s numerous critics has been able to refute any of my findings. There’s a good reason: the data are unequivocal.

The editor of Fathom circulated the article to all of the major medical journals, including The Lancet. None showed the slightest interest in transmitting the findings to their readers. As for Dr Horton, he has never retracted his libellous and wholly unfounded charge of Israel’s “chronic dedevelopment” of the Palestinian territories. 

It seems that the old saying is true: when you make things absolutely clear, people become confused. Or perhaps their attention span contracts to zero whenever evidence is presented that doesn’t fit their preconceived narrative. Whatever the explanation, Horton, Giacaman and the army of medical “critics” who seize every opportunity to smear Israel with false allegations, are plain wrong. Israel has not only not damaged Palestinian health but has actually achieved the precise opposite. In the face of extraordinary obstacles, she succeeded in bringing about “measurable improvements” in Palestinian health, welfare and infrastructure.

This is a really good news story for both Israelis and Palestinians. It’s time that the international community (including the global medical profession) – that is seldom reluctant to offer an opinion on the conflict – celebrated the achievement for what it is. It’s also time for Dr Horton, Professor Giacaman and others who have, year after year, unfairly excoriated Israel for causing Palestinian ill health, suffering and death, to accept the overwhelming evidence that they were mistaken and change their minds, as I did. I’m not asking much – it’s what all who claim to adhere to an evidence-based approach should be willing to do. 

Five years after the publication of my research, it’s still not too late for Israel’s medical “critics” to do the right thing. (Health warning to readers: don’t hold your breath). 

You can read the full article here: http://fathomjournal.org/has-israel-damaged-palestinian-health/