Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 16 

 

The notion that Israel owes her existence to the United States is a myth rooted in antisemitism

 

How many times have you heard or read a journalist explaining that Israel’s actions – or even survival – are, to a large extent, a product of unwavering American backing? That perception has long been a feature of much media and academic commentary throughout the world. 

 

It is, and always was, nonsense. And it arises from a racist assumption. To help us identify its origin, let’s rewind to the Six Day War.

 

On 9^th June 1967, Egyptian President Nasser broadcast these words to his people: 

“In the morning of last Monday, 5^th June, the enemy struck. If we say now it was a stronger blow than we had expected, we must say at the same time and with complete certainty that it was bigger than the potential at his disposal. It became very clear from the first moment that there were other powers behind the enemy.” [1]

 

Nasser was referring to the UK and, especially, the USA. In the jargon of his political backers in Moscow, who had exploited dysfunctional authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East for their own geostrategic purposes, the Arab defeat was result of the intervention of the “imperialists” in the early hours of the war. That scenario was, of course, pure fiction. It had been invented to save the faces of both the Soviet and Arab leadership.

 

The Soviet Union viewed Israel as a US outpost, a colonial creation of the capitalist West, and one that had severely embarrassed their Arab allies to whom they had supplied state-of-the-art weaponry for many years. Israel’s victory in 1967 compromised the reputation of the USSR itself and so any alibi, however implausible, was useful. 

 

But the speech was revealing in another way: it exposed the contempt with which Nasser, schooled in all matters Jewish by the antisemitic Muslim Brotherhood, viewed Israelis. That contempt had deep roots. For most Arabs, it was axiomatic that Jews – an inferior dhimmi minority throughout the Muslim world for centuries – were cowards who couldn’t fight and were therefore incapable of winning a war without the help of a powerful ally. To this day, the “Arab street” believes two specific fabrications: that America, forced into action by the Jewish lobby, won the Six Day War for Israel and that, as a result of American hesitancy, Egypt and Syria won the 1973 (Yom Kippur) War for the Arabs. 

 

In the twenty-first century, the idea of Israel and the US scheming in lockstep to dominate the Middle East is a core belief of the “progressive” left that seeks to apply the intersectionality principle to Zionism, imperialism, slavery and other forms of oppression. On this issue, ideologists of the far left and far right, cheered on from the sidelines by Islamists, are of one mind – that Jews control the US government through the dark arts of a near-invincible pro-Israel lobby. In their racist paranoia, they are aided and abetted by a coterie of western academics such as Mearsheimer and Walt [2] who invoke the classic antisemitic trope of a Zionist conspiracy manipulating American foreign policy to serve Israel’s interests. 

 

But surely, I hear my reader protest, the US is indeed a staunch ally of Israel? Well, yes and no. US friendship for Israel is far from the unshakeable constant that is widely assumed. As so often, the historical evidence points to the need for a more nuanced view. 

 

Although the US supported both the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the subsequent League of Nations Mandate – that instructed Britain to re-establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine – it declined, at the Evian conference of 1938, to offer the trapped Jews of Europe sanctuary from the murderous Third Reich. 

 

As for Jewish efforts to reverse the British betrayal of the Mandate and establish a safe haven for the remnants of their people after the Holocaust, the US was unenthusiastic about the UN partition plan of 1947 and offered no assistance whatsoever to Israel during her War of Independence. 

As historian George Simpson [3] explains: “Washington’s actual support for the Zionists was ambiguous, halting, and limited. Its support for partition followed that of Moscow and was virtually confined to the White House, which acted against the staunch opposition of the Department of State and the Pentagon. Indeed, not only did the State Department collaborate with the British to exclude the Negev from the territory of the prospective state of Israel (only to be foiled by Truman), but in late 1947, State [Dept] orchestrated a regional arms embargo that left the Palestine Jews highly disadvantaged.”

 

After an unpropitious start, the American posture towards Israel lurched back and forth in the succeeding decades. Yet the much-touted economic, military and diplomatic US-Israel alliance is often regarded as the ultimate secret weapon in Israel’s armoury. The facts suggest otherwise.

 

Middle East analyst Sean Durns [4] sets the record straight. “It is a common, albeit false, assumption that the United States and Israel closely cooperated since the Jewish state’s recreation in 1948. The State Department and the Pentagon had argued that US support for Israel would be a strategic liability. America, in turn, often kept Israel at arm’s length, both forcing the Jewish state to give up territory won in the 1956 Suez War against Nasser and prohibiting weapon sales until 1962.” 

 

The US remained pointedly cool to Israel throughout the fifties, when first Czechoslovakia and then France provided most arms at a period of greatest danger to the renascent Jewish state. In a stunning revelation by Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien [5], the US abandoned Israel at least three times in the face of threats by the Soviet Union to annihilate the tiny country – in 1956, 1970 and 1973 – by declining to offer Israel protection under its nuclear umbrella. This alarming fickleness on the part of her “ally” must have been a major factor in Israel’s decision to develop and retain an independent nuclear deterrent. 

 

In the 1980s, the pro-Israel Ronald Reagan publicly criticised Israel’s actions in Lebanon and annexation of the Golan Heights. He punished Israel by temporarily holding up arms deliveries and suspending strategic cooperation. Reagan also clashed with prime minister Menachem Begin over the sale of AWACS (an airborne early warning system) to the Saudis. 

 

As for formal alliances, Israel’s claim on US support in times of crisis is weaker than that of Montenegro or Albania, both NATO members, unlike Israel. Bizarrely, if Turkey, an increasingly Islamist and anti-Western NATO country, is threatened with attack, the US is obliged to help her. Israel has no such protection. 

 

US diplomatic support for Israel in the UN is often characterised as permanently protective of Israel and obstructive to the reaching of a fair settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. This is demonstrably false.

 

When President Barack Obama, one of the most pro-Palestinian US leaders, refused to veto the harshly anti-Israel UNSC resolution 2334 in 2016, it was followed by no discernible progress towards peace – if anything, Palestinian positions hardened. Obama may have been influenced by the growing culture of anti-Zionism in his academic circles. In this respect he resembled his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, whose stridently expressed policy of creating “daylight” between the US and Israel led to his rejection by a majority of Jewish voters, whom Carter falsely blamed for his 1980 re-election defeat. According to former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren [6], Obama (like Carter) saw Israel as persecutor rather than victim. And (also like Carter), he blamed US peace-making failures on Israel – despite the previously hawkish Begin’s agreement to withdraw from all of Sinai, to secure a peace treaty with Egypt, at Carter’s behest.

 

What about economic support for Israel’s armed forces? We keep hearing that the US Treasury virtually underwrites Israel’s purchases of advanced weaponry to maintain her qualitative military edge. That’s another half-truth, at best. The US only provided substantial financial support to Israel after 1978 – and then it was conditional on recycling most aid back to the US. Currently 75% of US military aid to Israel must be spent in the US – a figure that will rise to 100% in a few years – and thus supports the American rather than the Israeli economy. Much of the rest is spent in joint projects (e.g. the Iron Dome missile defence system) that benefits US as well as Israeli security. 

 

Few are aware that US military support to the Arab and Muslim world dwarfs (by a factor of around six) that given to Israel. [7] Even Donald Trump, said to be the most pro-Israel president in US history, insisted on selling a massive package of F-35 fighter jets and MQ-9 unmanned systems to the United Arab Emirates as part of the 2020 Abraham Accords – with more lucrative arms sales to Arab states in the pipeline – riding roughshod over the Israeli defence establishment’s explicit opposition. 

 

In summary, while many US presidents have been sympathetic to Israel, US foreign and defence policy is generally moulded by the State and Defence departments that have been consistently indifferent and at times openly hostile to Israel’s predicament. 

 

Those who mistakenly believe that the US is and always has been the final guarantor of Israel’s security will, if they have been genuinely misinformed, revise their opinions in the light of the evidence presented here. But those who continue to peddle the Nasserian myth of an unbreakable US-Israel axis, forged by the hidden tentacles of a global Zionist conspiracy and sustained by an irresistible American pro-Israel lobby, should be called out for what they are: purveyors of an antisemitically motivated falsehood.   

 

1. Laqueur W, Rubin B (eds). The Israel-Arab Reader. London, Penguin Books, 2008

2. Mearsheimer JJ, Walt SM. The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

3. Simpson GL. Revisiting the US role in three Middle East crises. Middle East Quarterly, Summer, 2018 

https://www.meforum.org/7242/revisiting-the-us-role-in-three-middle-east-crises

4. Durns S Black September remembered: how the PLO forged the modern Middle East. The National Interest, 21^st August 2020. 

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/black-september-remembered-how-plo-forged-modern-middle-east-167531

5. O’Brien, CC. The Siege. London, Paladin Books, 1988

6. Oren M. Ally. New York, Random House, 2015

7. Shindman P. Understanding US foreign aid to Israel. Honest Reporting, 2019 https://honestreporting.com/us-foreign-aid-israel/

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 15  

Israel’s world-class humanitarian programmes are an expression of the country’s core values 

 

A quiz question: who said this? Whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.”
 
It’s the final (clunkily translated) line of Theodor Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet The Jewish State [1], widely regarded as the foundational document of modern Zionism.
 
Herzl was a secular Jew. Yet his statement resonates powerfully with Jewish religious aspirations of Tikkun Olam – repairing the world – a notion that translates into a highly contemporary ideal of improving society through individual and collective action. According to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, the Jewish injunction to act as an Or Lagoyim – a light unto the nations – should be the “guiding star” of Israeli behaviour.  
 
David Kramer [2] has written that Israel’s extensive humanitarian efforts, at home and abroad, are a manifestation of the modern Zionist vision as imagined by Herzl long before the State was established. It may also be interpreted as a practical response to the historical Jewish experience of marginalisation and abuse at the hands of colonial powers.
 
While Jewish and Zionist ethical values undoubtedly motivate Israel’s commitment to extending aid and succour to those in need around the world, that generosity of spirit is frequently greeted with disbelief, cynicism and contempt. Abir Kopty [3], writing in Middle East Eye, informed her readers that it amounted to a monstrous deception designed to conceal Israel’s inhumanity: “The use of humanitarian aid to whitewash Israel's record of occupation and human rights violations is not new. From Nepal to Haiti, Uganda to Fiji, this humanitarian aid is always followed by a propaganda effort to tell the world how ‘Israel is human’, something that is far from reality.” 
 
That’s the view of a hate-filled extremist, of course, but it nevertheless contains a tiny kernel of truth. Providing aid to people in need unquestionably assists the desire of donor countries to project a positive image. There’s no shame in that. The UK government’s British Council, an organisation that says it “builds connections, understanding and trust between people in the UK and other countries,” openly asserts that national self-interest should inform policy in this sphere. A House of Lords Select Committee [4] goes further: “the promotion of British values through the funding of international development projects can yield significant soft power gains.” 
 
The strategy of providing aid in the hope of reaping at least some political dividends worked for a while during the first two decades of Israel’s existence. It came to an abrupt halt when developing countries in Africa and Asia succumbed to pressure from the Arab League to sever diplomatic and commercial links with the Jewish state in the wake of the 1967 and 1973 wars. But that didn’t damage this strand of Israeli foreign policy for long though it did generate a degree of cynicism in the political leadership. It may partly explain why Israel’s official aid budget accounts to a mere 0.1% of GNP, well short of the 0.7% recommended by the UN. The former figure is misleading, however, as it seriously underestimates the totality of Israel’s aid efforts across multiple governmental, civil society and private sectors, often in conjunction with third parties or with Jewish groups abroad. 
 
The main official Israeli channel for delivering foreign aid is Mashav [5], the Hebrew acronym for the Agency for International Development Cooperation​​​​. Launched in 1958 by foreign minister Golda Meir following her return from Africa, it represented Israel’s defiant response to the Bandung Afro-Asian conference of 1955 from which Israel had been pointedly excluded. The agency coordinates Israeli agricultural, educational and medical programmes in developing countries, particularly those that suffered under the yoke of colonialism and foreign exploitation. Since its establishment, around 300,000 professionals from more than 132 countries have participated in Mashav's training courses. 
 
Other notable sources of Israeli aid include IsraAID [6,7], an NGO that has delivered extensive programmes to more than 50 disaster-affected countries since 2001, and Save A Child’s Heart [8] that has provided free lifesaving cardiac care to over 5,000 children (half from the Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority) in 62 countries since 1995. SACH was awarded the UN’s Population Award in 2018. 
 
A key provider of overseas aid is the military. The IDF was a pioneer in eliding humanitarian and military objectives. Its first formal humanitarian operation was in 1953, when an earthquake had cost over 1,000 lives in Greece. Although Israel was struggling for survival, physically and economically, Israeli navy ships were diverted from an exercise to assist the survivors and give them necessary medical care. Since then, teams from the IDF Medical Corps and Home Front Command have provided rescue and medical services across the globe, including after an earthquake in Turkey in 1999, an earthquake in Haiti in 2010, a typhoon in the Philippines in 2013 and an earthquake in Nepal in 2015.
 
The Mexican Ambassador to the United Nations [9] spoke of Israel’s immediate response to two devastating Mexican earthquakes in 2017: “Other countries can absolutely learn from Israel’s rapid reaction time and its ability to be on site, build field hospitals and have the necessary human resources and infrastructure in place mere hours after a natural disaster occurs around the world.”

Israel’s emergency assistance has even extended to her enemies. For around two decades from 1978, the IDF ran a medical unit near the Lebanese border where victims of the prolonged civil war were treated - it became known as The Good Fence. And for many years, including during the most recent full-scale conflict with Hamas in 2014, Israel has permitted essential supplies such as food, clothing, medicines, fuel and electricity to be transferred daily from Israel into Gaza. Despite repeated rocket attacks from that territory, she has continued to facilitate the entry of Gazan patients (including two relatives of the Hamas prime minister) to Israel for specialist medical care, and established clinics near the Gaza border to enable injured Palestinians to be treated by experienced trauma surgeons.

The horrific Syrian civil war prompted the army's Northern Command to launch Operation Good Neighbour in 2016. This bold initiative served 200,000 residents of south-western Syria via a coordinated programme of medical and civilian humanitarian aid that had actually started in secret several years earlier. Its central feature was the establishment of a field hospital at a military post in the Golan Heights near the Syrian border where 7,000 patients received care in the day clinic. More than 4,900 injured Syrians, including 1,300 children, were treated there then transferred to Israeli hospitals. The operation was forced to close down when Assad’s forces took control of southern Syria. 
 
In the same year, the World Health Organization [10] recognized the IDF’s expert emergency medical team, as “number one in the world.” That’s high praise indeed from an organisation not generally known for its friendliness to Israel.
 
Just as Herzl prophesied the rebirth of the Jewish state by the mid-twentieth century, he was equally prescient about its benign role in the world thereafter. That the world too often fails to reciprocate with a commensurate appreciation of Israel’s impressive contribution to humanity doesn’t change the reality. Nor will it deter future Israeli governments of all hues from continuing to assist those in need wherever they live or however hostile their regimes. This powerful philanthropic impulse is a national characteristic around which all Israeli citizens can unite with genuine pride.
 

1. Herzl T. The Jewish State. London, Penguin, 2010 (originally Der Judenstaat, Vienna, 1896).

2. Kramer, D.  https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/my-state-of-the-heart-with-coronavirus/

3. Kopty A. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/there-nothing-genuine-about-israels-humanitarian-aid-syrians, July 2018.

4. House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and UK's Influence, London, UK, 2014. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldselect/ldsoftpower/150/15008.htm#n338

5. Mashav https://mfa.gov.il/MFA/mashav/AboutMASHAV/Pages/Background.aspx

6.IsraAID  https://www.israaid.org/about

7. Gradstein L, Jerusalem Post, 27 September 2020 https://www.jpost.com/magazine/israaid-fixing-the-world-one-disaster-at-a-time-643412

8. Save a Child’s Heart https://saveachildsheart.org

9. Wurtman R. Honest Reporting, 20 January 2020 https://honestreporting.com/idf-humanitarian-aid-missions-saving-the-world/

10. Gross JA. Times of Israel, 13 November 2016 https://www.timesofisrael.com/un-ranks-idf-emergency-medical-team-as-no-1-in-the-world/

 

 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