Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 14 

 

Israel is the world’s most contractionist state

 

In the course of an otherwise sober discussion about Iran’s politicidal threats against Israel on BBC radio’s Today programme, former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw startled listeners with a Tourette-like outburst: “When will Israel stop stealing Palestinian land?” he snarled. Straw knew that he was way off-topic but his anger was clearly so intense that he just couldn’t help himself.

Straw wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to hurl an allegation at Israel that is based on a false premise but I have a sneaking sympathy for him. Underlying his outrage lies a powerful belief system. Many millions of people around the world accept the following as gospel truth: that Israel is always continuously extending its borders through a combination of illegal foreign conquest, blatant theft of Palestinian territory and ethnic cleansing. Many also believe that this reflects its underlying Zionist, colonialist nature that is infinitely, ravenously hungry for more and more real estate. That none of the above is true is neither here nor there as their opinions are more akin to religious conviction than to political judgement.

Spare a thought for the faithful, for they must be more than a little perplexed by recent developments.

In August 2020, Israel’s government reversed its policy decision of some months earlier to extend its sovereignty into just under a third of the West Bank (half of area C where about 400,000 Israelis live) in exchange for signing a peace treaty with a relatively small, if wealthy, Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates. Why would Israel, a country allegedly hell-bent on expansion, desist from the opportunity presented by an unprecedentedly friendly White House, to absorb into Israel all the major settlements plus a slice of strategically important acreage in the Jordan Valley?

To find an answer, I suggest that we look at a few key facts.

Although Israel is one of the smallest countries in the word (1/600th of the size of the Arab world), she once held or aspired to hold a much larger land mass. The Herut movement, founded by Menachem Begin in 1948 and forerunner of Netanyahu’s Likud, trumpeted the slogan Both Sides of The Jordan – meaning that Israel should extend its borders eastwards into today’s Hashemite Kingdom to try to match those of its ancestral homeland. It didn’t happen, and not only because Begin was rejected by the Israeli electorate for three decades, but because Zionist and Israeli leaders (including Begin himself) have always sought territorial compromise in their efforts to achieve peace.

Few realise that these early Herut activists, widely denounced as fanatics by their socialist Zionist colleagues, weren’t merely spouting messianic fantasies of a return to biblical boundaries. The original Jewish National Home, as embodied in international law by the San Remo Resolution of 1920 and confirmed by the Treaties of Sèvres and Lausanne (that disposed of the Ottoman empire), comprised two of today’s countries, Israel and Jordan. In 1922, the British unilaterally carved Transjordan [1] out of 78% of the Mandate (east of the Jordan river) to which mainstream Zionist leaders promptly (if reluctantly) renounced claims.

So Mandatory Palestine was partitioned into a prospective Jewish state and a much larger Arab state – and the Jewish leadership accepted it. The future Jewish state had contracted to 22% of the Jewish National Home.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission proposed a further partition, in which the Jews would have been granted a derisory 20% of Western Palestine [1] or under 5% of the original Jewish National Home. Unsurprisingly, the Jewish leadership was unhappy with the idea but accepted it as a basis for negotiation if it would lead to peace.

In 1947, the UN Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) offered the Yishuv a more reasonable 55% of Western Palestine. This was denounced as unfair by the Arabs on demographic grounds. But that’s nonsense: based on their population in the former Ottoman Empire, the Jews should have been granted seven times that offered by UNSCOP [2]. Nevertheless, the Jewish leadership accepted a plan that would have deprived them of their historical heartlands of Judea and Samaria and of Jerusalem, their most sacred city and the focus of two millennia of yearning.

Following the 1967 Six Day War (the declared aim of which was to destroy Israel), Israel gave up vast swathes of territory (much of which was strategically important and in which she had invested substantial resources), dismantled hundreds of settlements – in Sinai, Gaza and West Bank – and offered to relinquish even more in an attempt to achieve peace. In returning the whole of Sinai to Egypt, Israel (under the arch-expansionist Menachem Begin) relinquished close to 90% of the land she captured in 1967. This was equivalent to almost three times Israel’s pre-1967 land mass. And she did it in exchange for nothing more than a paper agreement. The “cold peace” between Israel and Egypt has held – just – but relations between the two countries have never approached the level that most Israelis had hoped (and had been promised).

Such a move was unprecedented. All countries that take territory in the course of a defensive war have been permitted to retain a substantial part of it – except Israel. Even the Temple Mount – the holiest site to Jews – is not under Israeli jurisdiction today, despite being located in the country’s capital city, but remains under the supervision of the Jordanian-Islamic Waqf. Moreover, for the sake of promoting peace, Israel has agreed to the Arab demand that only Muslims should be permitted to pray there.

In 1994, Israel withdrew from parts of the northern West Bank to clinch a peace treaty with Jordan. Again, peaceful relations have been uneasily maintained. The Jewish state had contracted again, this time giving up historically and militarily important territory that had been part of the Jewish National Home, as enshrined in international law. 

In 2000, prime minister Ehud Barak ordered the withdrawal of the IDF from all of South Lebanon in 2000, since re-occupied by Hezbollah, an organisation sworn to the obliteration of Israel. Barak also offered to trade the Golan (that was also part of the original Mandate) for peace with Syria, and East Jerusalem (from which Jews were ethnically cleansed in 1948) for peace with the Palestinians. 

In 2005, prime minister Ariel Sharon – in a breathtaking reversal of his hawkish political past – pulled all Israeli troops, along with 9,000 civilian settlers, out of the Gaza Strip, instantly creating a power vacuum. It was gratefully filled by Hamas, the genocidal Iranian-backed terrorist organisation, that has been attacking Israeli civilians ever since with a panoply of lethal weapons including rockets, tunnels, and incendiary balloons.

Fast-forward to 2020: the suspension of the “annexation” moves in the West Bank (by a supposedly hard-right government) to secure a peace treaty with UAE was another example of Israel’s willingness to concede territorial claims for the sake of peace.

But the issue of Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank will return to the agenda at some point as there is a consensus across the mainstream Israeli political spectrum that it is vital to Israel’s security, a view endorsed as long ago as 1967 by the UN Security Council. Let’s assume that Israel’s maximalist claim today, under a nationalistically inclined Likud-led government, is as follows: pre-1967 Israel or 20,796 sq km plus 30% of the West Bank or 1,696 sq km equals a total of 22,492 sq km. This is 19.4% of the original Mandate (115,766 sq km).

Even that rump state on less than a fifth of the Jewish National Home isn’t contraction enough for Israel’s enemies.

Why were these repeated and severe territorial shrinkages, both actual and potential, met with continued hostility by most of Israel’s neighbours? The answer is simple. Israel’s enemies have never wanted the hated “Zionist entity” to relinquish territory or to minimise her territorial claims; they want Israel to disappear. Abba Eban memorably said that this was the only conflict in which “the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.” He was being polite. In this context, unconditional surrender required Israel to commit national suicide.

History reveals that Israel is the opposite of expansionist. The reality, as opposed to the fevered imaginations of her many critics – Jack Straw amongst them – is that Israel, far from being expansionist, is the world’s most contractionist state.

But there’s a limit to her willingness to cede territory indefinitely. She won’t, under any circumstances, agree to her own demise. And Israel’s enemies won’t agree to anything less. That’s why the conflict remains unresolved after a century of bloodshed.

Israel’s disappearance would nevertheless yield one outcome that many would welcome. A Middle East without Israel would, finally, be enough for Israel’s enemies.

 

1. Laqueur W, Rubin B. The Israel-Arab Reader. New York, Penguin, 2008

2. Wilf E, Schwartz A. The War of Return. New York, All Points Books, 2020

Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 13 

Israel has one of the world’s most successful economies despite bearing the world’s heaviest military burden

It’s the economy, stupid was Bill Clinton’s winning campaign mantra in 1992. Politicians around the world have followed it religiously, often with great success. In Israel, things are a little different. “It’s security, stupid,” has as much or greater resonance with Israeli voters. 

Not that Israelis are comfortable with soaring unemployment, hyperinflation or crippling taxes. Far from it – they’ve regularly had to cope with all three and complain bitterly about them. There’s a strong collective memory of the desperate, poverty-blighted years of austerity (Tzena) in the 1950s when the young country teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and depended on German reparations to pay for her army as well as her unwieldy Soviet style bureaucracy. The problems were compounded by the huge debt incurred by the war of independence, and the doubling of her population through immigration in her first three years of statehood. 

Over the subsequent decades, an economic miracle occurred. In 1960, the per capita income of Israelis was just over $1,000 per year; by 2019 it was $40,000 – a growth rate comparable to the world’s highest income countries including the oil-rich Gulf states. All Kuwaitis had to do was to dig a few holes in the desert, while the wealth Israelis generated was won through their blood, sweat and tears. Israel today has a vibrant mixed economy that has raised living standards beyond recognition. She proved more resilient than most in the face of the global economic crash of 2008-9 and was rewarded with an invitation to join the club of the world’s richest nations, the OECD, in 2010 [1]. (Whether that resilience will stand up to the even greater stress-test of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 remains to be seen). 

Known as one of the most innovative countries in the world, especially in the fields of hi-tech, science and healthcare, Israel – the Start-up Nation [2] – has attracted massive inward investment. The recent boom in tourism, the discovery of vast gas reserves off her coast, the expansion of the green energy sector, notably solar power, and the increasing strategic cooperation with her Eastern Mediterranean and even some Arab neighbours, has set the country on course for further spectacular success. Israelis are understandably keen for those trends to continue. 

It’s widely believed that the buoyant Israeli economy has been the secret of Binyamin Netanyahu’s prime ministerial longevity. But that’s only part of the story. When Israelis find themselves, as they frequently do, inside that voting booth, the physical safety of their family, community and country tends to trump all other considerations. That’s hardly as surprise for a nation that hasn’t experienced a moment of real peace in the more than seven decades of her existence. Crucially, Netanyahu is viewed as a safe pair of hands in confronting the country’s numerous murderous foes. In most countries, elections focus on the economic outlook; in Israel they are also about life and death.

This is no abstract anxiety. Terrorism, war and threats of annihilation are inescapable facts of Israeli life. If you’ve spent any time in the country, you’ll be aware of the extensive network of public bomb shelters as well as the protected spaces that are a required featured of all buildings. You may also have had the unpleasant experience of running to safety with the crowd on hearing the sirens warning of an impending rocket attack by Hamas or Hezbollah. Living with ever-present menace of violence exerts a corrosive effect on collective morale, on individual mental health, and economic well-being. 

Protecting Israelis against those who would do them harm costs money, shedloads of the stuff. Billions of shekels have been expended on maintaining an army, shoring up civil defence, deploying Iron Dome anti-missile batteries, and all the other paraphernalia of effective security. Israel spends more per person on her armed forces than any other country [3]. Per capita military spending is now well over $2,000 per annum – double that of the UK and about the same as the US [4]. That equates to 5% of GDP – far higher than most democracies – but even that has come down from the eye-watering peaks of 30% in the 1970s (coinciding with the Yom Kippur War) and 25% three decades later (during the Second Intifada). 

But let’s look at these figures through the other end of the telescope, as it were, for they conceal a truth that is tragic in its dimensions. 

Putting aside the lives destroyed, the families broken, the children traumatised by this endless and avoidable conflict (and we shouldn’t, of course, do any of that), let’s ask a related question: how much more productive, prosperous and contented might Israelis have become had they not had to shoulder this colossal burden? That’s a difficult question to answer, given the irony that much of Israel’s entrepreneurial talent was nurtured in the army. What we can do is calculate roughly the extra finance that would have been available to the Israeli treasury had peace prevailed for the last seven decades. 

Think of the resources swallowed up directly by the conflict, as well as the astronomical debts incurred as a result, plus the enormous financial obligations of running the West Bank and Gaza Strip from 1967 to 1995 and 2005 respectively. Think also of the indirect economic damage wrought by the disruption to normal life caused by plucking hundreds of thousands of workers from their jobs every year to serve in the reserves. And think of the millions of tourists who are deterred from visiting a war zone or, at best, a country that is constantly pilloried in the media and elsewhere, thereby depriving Israel of much-needed foreign income.  

Taking the earlier cited figure for current military spending of $2,000 per capita – a relatively low one, in real terms, in the country’s history – and applying it to the total population in 1984 of just over 4 million (the mid-point between 1948 and 2020), comes to $8 billion per year or $576 billion over 72 years. (That’s a conservative estimate as it doesn’t take account of the conflict’s indirect costs – but let’s discount them on the assumption that the savings from those would have been needed to run a “normal” army).  

That impressive sum could have been spent on meeting Israel’s numerous domestic challenges – an underperforming educational system, below average GDP per capita, low worker productivity, lack of skills (especially in the Charedi and Arab sectors), poor public transport, and an inefficient government bureaucracy. All of these are being addressed but it’s a huge struggle in the context of Israel’s unrelieved military obligations, and one that could have been mitigated by the diversion of funds from the defence budget. 

The frustration at being unable to unleash her full economic potential is a key reason (along with the desire to save lives) why Israel has been trying to reach a peaceful accommodation with her neighbours since 1948. Her citizens know it and so do her enemies. That’s why they target her economic wellbeing, first through the Arab League boycott (launched before Israel’s establishment) and then the BDS movement, as a first step towards her destruction. To date, they have failed but one thing is certain: they will keep trying. Having deployed conventional warfare and multiple terrorist campaigns, they may resort to even more extreme tactics, up to and including the nuclear option. In response, Israelis will do as they have always done: prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That will involve combining a high level of military expenditure with a can-do, anything’s possible mentality. 

Bill Clinton’s advice has been heeded by Israeli governments of all political hues in the past and will likely do so in the future. Yet all Israelis know that their economic future is severely constrained by the conflict. 

Reflecting on all this the other night, I reached a startling conclusion: if only Israel’s enemies felt the same, a peaceful Middle East could usher in an era of prosperity for all the peoples of the region. 

And then I woke up. 

[1] Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD): accessed 21/7/20

 https://www.oecd.org/israel/israelsaccessiontotheoecd.htm

[2] Senor D, Singer S. The Start-Up Nation. The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Boston, Twelve, 2009

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditure_per_capita

 Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute; accessed 27/7/20. 

[4] Our World in Data, University of Oxford; accessed 21/7/20  https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/military-expenditure-per-capita-constant-2015-us?country=CAN~IRL~DNK~ITA~BRA~ISR~FRA~IND~PAK~ESP~GBR~USA

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?