Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 26

 

The struggle of the Jews to defend their homeland has become the longest war in history  

 

Tiglath-Pileser III – now there’s a name to conjure with. The Neo-Assyrian monarch bears the dubious distinction of embarking on the very first conquest of Israel in the 8^th century BCE i.e. some 2,800 years ago [1].

    By my reckoning, that invasion, and the mass deportations that followed in its wake, marked the start of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, thereby making it by far the longest war in history. (Coming way behind in second place is the 781-year Iberian Religious War, or Reconquista, between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Moors living in today’s Morocco and Algeria). 

    Here’s a list of the imperial forces that imposed their rule on the Jewish homeland: Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids, Arabs, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Seljuks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans and British. So that you don’t have to, I’ve counted them – 17. That’s a minimum figure as the Babylonians and Arabs each invaded at least twice and Napoleon had a brief ill-fated shot at it too. 

    For around the latter two millennia of homelessness, Jewish efforts to preserve and then regain sovereignty were ineffectual and disheartening. Religious Jews prayed fervently for the Messiah to no avail. Secular Jews focused on community building and integration into their host societies. All of these efforts floundered in the face of persecution, apathy and assimilation. Until the arrival on the scene of a dapper young journalist called Theodor Herzl in the late 19^th century. 

    Herzl electrified the Jewish world with his revolutionary proposal that the Jewish people return to Zion to establish a fully-fledged modern state. Not all Jews were ready for his radicalism but these refuseniks were largely silenced within a few decades by the growing virulence of antisemitism in Europe – the pogroms and massacres in the east and National Socialism in the west. Self-determination turned out to be the only answer to the existential question posed by the Holocaust. 

    Historians tend to view the British Mandate (1920-48) as the crucible within which the conflict between the Zionists and their neighbours was brewed. In their struggle to recreate their National Home, as promised by the League of Nations and enshrined in the British Mandate, the Jews found themselves waging a trilateral war against both the Arabs and the British. 

    The British decision, in January 1947, to relinquish the Mandate led to the UN partition resolution a few months later and to Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948. Jewish rejoicing was short-lived as their reborn state was confronted by a formidable array of Arab militias and armies bent on reversing the tide of history. Israel’s war of independence cost her dearly in human treasure that she could ill afford but the primary aim – survival – had been achieved. The Rhodes armistice agreement in 1949 was supposed to lead to peace. The Arab states, smarting from defeat at the hands of the ragtag Jewish forces, had other ideas and regarded the ceasefire deal as buying time as they prepared for the “second round.” 

    The 1956 Sinai Campaign (Operation Kadesh) – known as the Suez Crisis in the West, for whom it was a last-gasp projection of fading imperial power – was Israel’s response to escalating Egyptian aggression [2]. Indeed Israel was the only one of the three partner countries that had a legitimate claim to self-defence against attacks on its citizens; Britain and France were simply protecting a colonial-era asset, the Suez Canal. Israel’s actions were legally justified on three grounds – Nasser’s repeated declarations of his intent to destroy the Jewish state (with the help, hardly coincidentally, of former Nazi scientists and engineers), his support for cross-border terrorist attacks on Israel, and his closure of both the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Eilat to Israeli shipping. 

    The 1967 Six Day War was provoked by Nasser’s closing (again) the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and expelling the UN peacekeeping force from the Sinai. The Arab media were instantly filled with predictions of the impending destruction of the loathsome “Zionist entity” and the massacre of its Jewish inhabitants [2]. When Israel launched a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian and Syrian air bases, Jordan’s King Hussein joined the fray despite Israel’s frantic pleas that he should desist. Many commentators identify that war as the crucial milestone in the conflict that entrenched the opposing parties in their current irreconcilable positions (a misleadingly simplistic analysis to which I will return in a future blog). 

   Following that spectacular victory, Israel’s euphoria soon morphed into a complacency that President Sadat exploited in launching the 1973 Yom Kippur war in which the Egyptians attempted to reclaim territory lost in 1967. In the days before the shooting started, the US warned Israel not to repeat a pre-emptive attack of the kind she had employed in 1967. Israel obliged, was nearly overrun by the enemy, and suffered horrendous casualties for her pains. 

    Probably the most controversial episode in Israel’s military history was the 1982 Peace for Galilee campaign that turned into the nightmarish First Lebanon War. The Israeli media dubbed it a “war of choice” though it followed years of Katyusha rocket attacks and gruesome terrorist atrocities perpetrated by the PLO. Again Israel prevailed and the PLO was expelled from Southern Lebanon. 

    Despairing of ever defeating Israel militarily, Arafat and his allies now focused their efforts almost exclusively on terrorism. The two “intifadas” of 1987-94 and 2000-2005 exacted a dreadful price on both sides and achieved nothing for the PLO but that didn’t deter the Iranian proxy militia Hezbollah from mounting renewed attacks on northern Israel in 2006 thereby triggering the Second Lebanon War. When that too failed, the Iranians gave the green light to Hamas, Gaza’s totalitarian rulers since 2007, to test Israel’s southern flank by launching intermittent waves of rocket attacks aimed indiscriminately at civilians over the subsequent 15 years. Whenever Israel responded, as any other country would do, she was yet again hypocritically condemned by the international community for protecting her citizens. 

    Just War Theory posits that there are circumstances in which war is acceptable and even necessary. From St Augustine in the fourth century to the UN Charter in the twentieth, theologians, philosophers and diplomats have sought to define the conditions under which war is justifiable. First and foremost of these is the principle of defending one’s country against an aggressor. Despite its long record of antipathy towards Israel, the UN [3] itself offers legitimacy for Israel’s military record. Here is article 51 of its charter: Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of collective or individual self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations. 

    The legal right of Israel to self-defence is beyond doubt. Israelis have always set the bar for war high for themselves while their critics, true to their discriminatory tradition, set it – for Israel alone – virtually beyond reach. Why does the world tolerate this double standard? An even more important question is too rarely asked: what motivates and sustains the enduring belligerence of Israel’s enemies? The answer is depressingly banal: their violent rejection of the Jewish right to self-determination. 

    This statement from the Friends of Israel Initiative [4] neatly summarises Israel’s predicament: 

“Unlike any other country in the world, Israel has not had to endure wars between periods of peace but has experienced periods of limited quiet during a long war against it with no end in sight...The conflict is neither rational nor logical: rather than benefit those who attack Israel, it works against their own interests as well as Israel’s. Israel’s enemies have never won an armed conflict against Israel and know that they cannot ever win such a conflict, yet they continue their aggression.”     

    Acknowledging reality, Egypt and Jordan memorably bucked that trend – and have recently been joined by a handful of others via the Abraham Accords – but this conciliatory approach has been more than offset by an Islamist Iran and its extremist proxies who ceaselessly strive to exploit weaknesses in Israel’s protective armour. Not wishing to be outflanked by these jihadist actors, even the “moderate” Palestinian leadership has resolutely eschewed genuine peace-making. 

    King Tiglath-Pileser III couldn’t have known what he was starting all those aeons ago, or that his attempt to liquidate the Jewish state would be emulated down the generations by other Middle Eastern leaders from Haj Amin al-Husseini, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad and Yasser Arafat in the 20^th century to Mahmoud Abbas, Ismail Haniya, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei in the 21st. 

    That’s why this problem seems insoluble, though in reality the solution is, and always has been, at hand. We patiently await the arrival of more Middle Eastern statesmen in the mould of President Sadat and King Hussein – starting with a Palestinian leader willing to reciprocate repeated Israeli offers to negotiate a just peace. Until that happens, the war against the Jews looks likely to enter its fourth millennium.

1. Gordis D. Israel. A Concise History of a Nation Reborn. New York, Harper Collins, 2016, p36.

2. Shapira A. Israel: A History. London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2014.

3. United Nations Charter, Chapter VII Article 51. https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

4. Friends of Israel Initiative 2017. Why The Allen Plan Is Detrimental to Israel’s Future Security.  http://www.friendsofisraelinitiative.org/contents/uploads/papers/pdf/Why%20the%20Allen%20Plan%20is%20Detrimental%20for%20Israel’s%20Future%20Security%204.0%20(2).pdf

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 25

 

Israel doesn’t exist because of the Holocaust – the Holocaust occurred because Israel didn’t exist

 

President Barack Obama [1], addressing an Egyptian audience, said this in 2009:  

“The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.” 

        At first sight, that looks an uncontroversial statement. Yet Obama provoked widespread Jewish criticism because of its underlying implication (intended or not) that the world gifted Israel to the Jews as a guilt-offering for the Holocaust. Distinguished musician Daniel Barenboim went further, drawing a direct line between Nazism and the modern plight of the Palestinians: “Without the Holocaust there never would have been a partition of Palestine, there would have been no al-Nakba, 1967 war, and occupation.” [2] This echoes his friend, Edward Said, who asserted that the Palestinians were “the victims of the victims” [3] – a phrase that rolls nicely off the tongue but bears a tenuous link, at best, to reality. 

        Similar pronouncements have been made by many commentators and politicians including US Democratic congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. This line of thinking leads ultimately to the grotesque antisemitic conspiracy theory – most notoriously expressed by former London mayor Ken Livingstone – that the Zionist movement and the Nazis were (and remain) ideological bedfellows. 

        The allegedly causal connection between the European Jewish calamity and the creation of Israel is not merely false; in reality, according to Israeli scholar Eviatar Friesel [4], the Holocaust seriously damaged the prospects for Jewish statehood:

“There was a point of contact and influence between the Holocaust and the creation of the Jewish state. It was, however, exactly the reverse of what is commonly assumed: the destruction of European Jewry almost rendered the birth of Israel impossible…Zionism was essentially a product of European Jewry, especially East European Jewry. Ironically, that sector of the Jewish people was almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust.”

        There was, of course, a relationship between the Holocaust and Israel’s rebirth but conflating chronology with causality is misleading. Some sympathy for the Jewish plight may have been generated in diplomatic circles by the haunting images that emerged from the death camps at their liberation in 1945. But the sequence of events linking the Holocaust to Israel was the inverse of the narrative apparently favoured by Obama, Barenboim and Said. To understand it, we have to rewind history to the early years of the 20^th century. 

        The UN partition resolution of 1947 was the end-point of a torturous historical process initiated towards the end of the First World War when US President Wilson touted the principle of self-determination of all peoples, including the Jews. Every November, around the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised British support for a Jewish national home, antiZionists demand an apology from the UK government. That hasn’t been granted, and rightly so, but the highlighting of British culpability for an avoidable catastrophe is inadvertently appropriate since an apology is indeed merited – to the Jewish people. That Declaration, and its international endorsement, should have been the salvation of the Jews but wasn’t. As a result of Britain’s perfidy, trapped European Jewry had nowhere to find refuge from the Nazi predator. Countless innocent lives might have been saved had the doors of Mandatory Palestine remained open to Jewish immigration rather than slammed shut during those years of persecution and mass murder. (Unlike the Jews, to whom self-determination had been promised but not delivered, the Arabs were granted several sovereign states almost immediately following the Declaration starting with Churchill’s carving out of Transjordan from most of Mandatory Palestine). 

        This was the tragedy of the Palestine Mandate; its near-total repudiation, via a succession of British white papers in response to Arab violence, not only violated the expressed wishes of the League of Nations, but deprived millions of Jews of the opportunity to escape from the Third Reich’s killing fields. In The Revolt, Menachem Begin [5] asserted that Britain was complicit in the Holocaust by reneging on the Mandate: 

“An entire nation – six million men, women and children, sank into an abyss, in a planned campaign of annihilation which lasted five whole years, because the Germans decided to destroy it, and the British – and others – decided not to rescue it.”

        Former Israeli ambassador to the UK Mark Regev [6] supports Begin’s view:

“Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem from 1921, president of the Supreme Muslim Council from 1922 and president of the Arab Higher Committee from 1936, was the pivotal figure in the Palestinian national movement and his views were no secret…Husseini, along with fellow Arab Palestinian nationalists, conducted a successful campaign to pressure the British to keep the gates of Mandatory Palestine all but closed to European Jews fleeing the Nazis, and in so doing, sealed their fate… Husseini knew of the ‘Final Solution’ and supported the genocide.” 

        The trashing of the Mandate remains a troubling issue to this day. The acknowledgement of Zionism by the major powers after the Great War was, after all, a humanitarian response to antisemitism. But the failure to implement the Balfour Declaration, given its incorporation into international law via the San Remo conference and subsequent treaties, represents a profound moral failure on the part of the international community that inexplicably declined to enforce its own decisions or to call the recalcitrant Mandatory government to account. 

        The prime responsibility for the obscenity of the Final Solution lies with the German nation, who have sought to atone. Others too must shoulder a degree of blame but few have shown signs of doing so. No Arab leader has yet had the courage to admit the disastrous impact, on both Jews and Arabs, of Husseini’s collaboration with Hitler and his Nazification of Arab antiZionism. 

        As for the UK, what can one say? Even self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” British governments have remained silent on the UK’s shameful Mandate record and continue to support the institutionally antisemitic UNRWA as well as the Holocaust-denying, violence-inciting Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. As if that were an insufficient rubbing of salt in Jewish wounds, the UK works with the EU in seeking to revive the near-moribund nuclear deal that was designed to appease Islamo-fascist Iran. Is it any wonder that British Jews remain sceptical of public UK denunciations of antisemitism while government ministers indulge in recurrent, ritualistic and hypocritical condemnation of Israel in the UN? Constant references to “occupation of Palestinian land” and “illegal settlements,” invariably delivered in insufferably sanctimonious tones, cut no ice when far more egregious examples of such policies are pursued by Russia, China, Turkey, India and Morocco. Only tiny, democratic Israel, that for decades has striven to achieve equitable peace treaties with her neighbours, including the Palestinians, is singled out for opprobrium. With friends like these…

        Then there is the contemporary international community. The modern heirs of Hitler are aided and abetted by their apologists in the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, the UN, prominent NGOs, and an army of academics, journalists and politicians. All are determined to pursue their hate-filled war against the Jewish people, hiding behind a transparent facade of “criticism of Israel.” They would, if granted their wish, reduce Jews once more to a position of impotent vulnerability to the annihilationist aspirations of their enemies. 

        There can be no equivocation on this point and no room for post-modernist relativism – either you are opposed to genocide and in favour of peaceful coexistence or you are not. Which side are you on? That’s the question that today’s architects of “even-handed” policy-making in the UK Foreign Office, the US State Department, the EU and the UN must answer satisfactorily. 

        Anything less would be an act of global moral cowardice comparable to the Mandate-era betrayal of the Jewish people who suffered an agonising and avoidable fate as a result of the UK’s shredding of Arthur Balfour’s well-intentioned but ultimately empty promise. 

 

1. Text of Barack Obama speech 2009 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/us/politics/04obama.text.html

2. Barenboim D. Germany Is Repaying Its post-Holocaust Debts to Israel - but not to the Palestinians. Haaretz 8 June 2017

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/germany-not-repaying-post-holocaust-debts-to-palestinians-1.5481259

3. Said, E. “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims. Social Text no 1, Duke University Press, 1979 

https://doi.org/10.2307/466405

4. Friesel E. The Holocaust: Factor in the Birth of Israel? Shoah Resource Centre, The International School for Holocaust Studies [undated]. 

https://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%203575.pdf

5. Begin M. The revolt. New York, Tolmitch E-books (electronic copyright 2013), 1952 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revolt-Menachem-Begin-ebook/dp/B00HXJ5N9E/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&coliid=I3SW5ZALUNF4IZ&colid=37RDG3Y7SJOR5&qid=&sr=

6. Regev M. Jerusalem Post, 11 November 2021. The Palestinians must acknowledge their role in the Holocaust.

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-palestinians-must-acknowledge-their-role-in-the-holocaust-opinion-684753

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 24

 

The first Great Power to declare support for Zionism was France not Britain 

 

If there’s one thing that Zionists and antiZionists agree on it’s this: the Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government on 2nd November 1917, was the great leap forward for the modern Zionism movement. I believe they are both are wrong.

            The Declaration has acquired iconic status in both Zionist history and antiZionist demonology for two reasons: it was the first public expression of Great Power endorsement of the Zionist aspiration to re-establish sovereignty in the historical Jewish homeland; and it was incorporated into international law via the San Remo resolution of 1920 that paved the way for the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine in 1922. But a closer look at the historical record reveals a hidden truth: the Balfour Declaration wasn’t the first expression of Great Power support for Zionism.          

                At the end of World War One, there was widespread international sympathy for Zionism – including, as has recently been revealed, from China’s new post-imperial leadership [1]. The specifically British role in promoting Zionism via the Balfour Declaration was important but should not be overrated. London would not have adopted such a far-reaching policy decision without taking account of the likely response of its allies. How did Lloyd George and Arthur Balfour know that it would be so spectacularly well received? Because Chaim Weizmann, president of the British Zionist Federation, and his gifted colleagues had virtually guaranteed it through their tireless negotiations with senior officials around the word. 

         If the British affirmation of Jewish rights in 1917 proved a turning point for the international community’s attitude to the Jewish people, it wasn't the first enthusiastic endorsement Zionist aims by a powerful state. That accolade goes to one of the least phylosemitic countries - France. For Zionism’s game-changing diplomatic breakthrough antedated the Balfour letter by six months via the articulation, on 3^rd June 1917, of a dramatic new policy by Jules Cambon, head of political section of French foreign ministry, and one of the great diplomats of the time. Here is the key section of Cambon’s letter: 

“It would be a deed of justice and of reparation to assist, by the protection of the Allied Powers, in the renaissance of the Jewish nationality in that Land from which the people of Israel were exiled so many centuries ago. The French government, which entered this present war to defend a people wrongly attacked, and which continues the struggle to assure the victory of right over might, can but feel sympathy for your cause, the triumph of which is bound up with that of the Allies. I am happy to give you herewith such assurance.”

            This French statement of support for Zionism became known as the Cambon Declaration. It was secured with the knowledge and approval of the French prime minister Alexandre Ribot, by a Zionist activist called Nahum Sokolow to whom the letter was addressed. 

            Sokolow is generally regarded as an historical footnote in Israel’s history. This is deeply unjust. He was a brilliant polyglot journalist and author [2] and the first to translate Herzl's iconic novel Altneuland into Hebrew, giving it the title Tel Aviv (literally, "An Ancient Hill of Spring") that in 1909 was adopted for the first modern Hebrew-speaking city. But that was only one of his many achievements. 

            Sokolow’s talents were recognised by Weizmann, who charged him with the task of drumming up support around the world for the aims of the Zionist movement. Sokolow’s foremost target was not the British government, despite its importance as the world’s most formidable colonial power, but their eternal rivals, the French. Historian Martin Kramer [3] has argued persuasively that the Balfour Declaration would not have been issued had not the US, France, Italy, the Vatican and other countries signalled their support. 

            France was an unlikely sponsor of Zionism. The upper echelons of French society had been ambivalent about Jews for centuries. In 1789, when the Jews of Metz asked for protection against the threat of anti-Jewish mob violence (of which there had been outbursts in Alsace), Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, a liberal nobleman from Paris, asserted that, while the Jews suffered oppression, the state could not recognise their collective rights since "there cannot be a nation within a nation…The Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals." This principle was incorporated into Napoleonic law.

            The role of the Dreyfus Affair in persuading Herzl of the need for restored Jewish sovereignty is well documented if somewhat mythologised. What is not at issue is the shameful degree to which deep-seated antisemitism has long infected French politics, the army, the arts and academia. Both the colonisation and decolonisation of North Africa worsened the plight of Jews in that region. Few today realise that many Jews were sent to concentration camps during World War Two by the Vichy administration’s Nazi policies in its North African colonies as well as in mainland France. 

            So why did France support Zionism in the early twentieth century? Perhaps they saw it as a vehicle for implementing the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement; if they did, they were wrong. More likely, they were moved by the persuasive powers of the Zionist leadership, and Sokolow in particular, combined with an awareness of the growing impact of President Wilson’s assertion of self-determination as a universal human right as the war was drawing to a close. Another critical factor may have been Sokolow’s coup, just weeks before his meeting with Cambon, in persuading Pope Benedict XV to reverse the Catholic church’s previous antipathy to Zionism (that was predicated on the belief that the Jewish people’s dispersion was punishment for their refusal to recognise Jesus as the Messiah). The return of the Jews to Palestine, opined the pontiff (according to Sokolow), was “providential: God has willed it.”            

            French support for Israel remained solid from 1948 until the early 1960s (even to the point of establishing a joint nuclear cooperation programme), driven in part by France’s fear that pan-Arabism might derail its operations in Algeria. But relations deteriorated sharply in 1967 when Israel had the temerity, in French eyes, to inflict a humiliating defeat on the Arab forces ranged against her. Following de Gaulle’s volte-face, France has been lukewarm about the Jewish state and has often acquiesced or even cooperated in UN-sponsored attacks on Israel.

            Are there any signs, however minimal, of change in contemporary French attitudes towards either their Jewish citizens or Israel? Perhaps. There are glimmers of hope – France formally endorsed the IHRA [4] definition of antisemitism in December 2019 and shortly thereafter Paris became the first capital city to adopt it. And President Macron pulled French participation in the 2021 UN review of the openly antisemitic Durban “anti-racism” process launched in 2001. On the other hand, French support for engagement with the genocidal Iranian regime is more in line with traditional French insensitivity to Jewish concerns. Modern French antisemitism is notoriously aggressive, and for its political elites an obsessive “criticism of Israel” is a convenient (if transparent) cloak behind which it is disguised. 

            For antiZionists, steeped in a fake history of Zionism-as-colonialism, the revelation of the French role in the restoration of Jewish sovereignty will merely reinforce their prejudices – after all, one Great Power was much like another. But they miss the point. The geopolitical zeitgeist that shifted the tectonic plates of the post-World War One order was not colonialism but its polar opposite – self-determination for all peoples. Moreover, in the Jewish case the hard graft was performed by the Jews themselves. The Jewish national home wasn’t a gift granted to Jews by imperialists; Zionist aims were achieved by the blood, sweat and tears of Jewish endeavour in their homeland, Eretz Israel, combined with a sustained global charm offensive conducted by Weizmann, Sokolow and other Zionist leaders whose eloquent advocacy proved irresistible because it was based on truth and justice. Widespread international approval followed their efforts, not the other way round. 

            All who support universal human rights, including Jewish rights, should never forget Jules Cambon and the crucial role he played, as the colonial era began to draw to an end, in translating empty virtue signalling about the need for self-determination into a practical reality. Equally, the time is long overdue to honour properly the memory of Weizmann’s near-forgotten colleague, Nahum Sokolow, and to recognise his pivotal role in the struggle of the Jewish people against discrimination, oppression and imperialism. 

 1. Rothbart Z. Lost Letter on Zionism from ‘Father of the Chinese Nation’ Surfaces. The Librarians, 10.02.2021

https://blog.nli.org.il/en/sun-yat-sen/?utm_source=facebook_englishpage&utm_medium=organicpage&fbclid=IwAR3vACqHO-lSzsCzmMUpnNQTO3mxEUlzuc29q7TfGADCM77BApoKi0l3z7A

 

2. Nahum Sokolow (1859-1936) 

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nahum-sokolow

 

3. Kramer M. The forgotten truth about the Balfour Declaration. Mosaic Magazine, June 2017

https://mosaicmagazine.com/essay/israel-zionism/2017/06/the-forgotten-truth-about-the-balfour-declaration/ 

4. International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. About the IHRA non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism

https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 23

 

The first Jews to return home were not Europeans but Middle Easterners 

 

In 1985, my pre-teen daughter and I attended a concert in Beer Sheva given by the Israeli chanteuse extraordinaire Ofra Haza [1]. Her music straddled West and East, Jewish and Arab, modern and traditional and was phenomenally popular in Israel, throughout the Middle East and even in the West. Her unique talent was snuffed out prematurely – she died at the age of 42 – but her contribution to Israeli and world music lives on. 

            The singer’s brief life was significant for another reason: her family had immigrated to Israel from Yemen and lived in the dilapidated Hatikvah district of Tel Aviv. The singer’s astonishing rise to recognition from humble beginnings epitomises the changing fortunes of many olim (immigrants) of Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, Central Asian or North African) origin in the Jewish state. As readers of this blog will be aware, the accusation that modern Israel is a European colonialist entity is not supported by evidence, including the demographic data: over 60% of Israel’s Jewish population today are Mizrachim who arrived in the country as a result of Arab hostility to the newly re-established Jewish state in 1948. Moreover, a minority of Mizrachi Jews had either never left their homeland, surviving massacres and expulsions perpetrated by a succession of foreign invaders over two millennia, or had returned prior to the twentieth century. The significant role of the Mizrachim in general, and Yemenite Jews in particular, in the history of the Zionist movement is woefully underappreciated. 

            In the monotheistic religious traditions, Aliyah (Jewish immigration to Israel) stretches back to the biblical era. Abraham set out for Canaan with his family around four millennia ago. Moses and Joshua led the Israelites to the Promised Land after the Exodus from Egypt. Later and more historically verifiable aliyot included the return of Jews to Jerusalem from Babylon under the Cyrus Declaration (539 BCE) and the steady trickle of Jews re-entering Judea during Herod’s rule in the Second Temple era. In the 10th century, the leaders of the Karaite Jews, mostly living under Persian rule, urged their followers to settle in Eretz Yisrael. The Karaite olim established a community in Jerusalem, on the western slope of the Kidron Valley. All of these olim were of Asian rather than European origin. 

            The number of Jews migrating to the land of Israel rose significantly between the 13th and 19th centuries, mainly due to a general decline in the status of Jews across Europe and an increase in religious persecution. In the modern Zionist era, the so-called First Aliyah was prompted by Russian pogroms in 1882 following the assassination of the Czar. It was largely unsuccessful as a Zionist enterprise with more than half of the immigrants leaving in the face of poverty, disease and violence, though it helped spread awareness of Zionism throughout the Jewish world. But these European olim were not the first to arrive in the 1880s – that accolade goes Yemenite Jews, the oldest known diaspora community. 

            In 1882, approximately seven months before most of the Eastern European Jews reached their homeland, several hundred immigrants from Yemen, perhaps inspired by false rumours of European olim being granted free land by Baron Rothschild, established a Yemenite quarter in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem (from where they were later ethnically cleansed during the Arab Revolt of 1937). Although the Ottoman authorities quickly banned Yemenite Jews from emigrating, many continued to do so clandestinely. Additional waves of Yemenite immigrants arrived Eretz Israel in the early 1890s and 1900s and succeeded in establishing homes in various locations including the Kerem Hateimanim (Yemenite Quarter) near Jaffa in the early 1900s. One-tenth of the Jewish population of Yemen – an extraordinary proportion in comparison with other diasporas – had made aliyah by 1914 and comprised about six percent of the Jewish population of Eretz Israel [ 2]. Of these, 3,000 lived in Jerusalem, another 1,100 in agricultural settlements (moshavot), and 900 in Jaffa.

            Following Israel's independence, the position of Jews in the Yemen – as in all Arab countries – worsened, and riots and massacres erupted against the small community. When the new ruler authorised Jewish emigration, virtually all the country’s remaining Jews (43,000 of 45,000) took advantage of the offer and in 1949-50 were airlifted via Aden to Israel. This was the celebrated Operation Magic Carpet (known originally in Hebrew as Operation Eagles’ Wings). About 1,500 more followed in the next few years. Still more left at the time of the Six Day War in 1967 and in 2016 most of the remnants were rescued from the civil war by the Jewish Agency. 

            Once in Israel, this ancient and highly devout community struggled to integrate into the reborn Jewish state. The Ashkenazi (European Jewish) political establishment seemed clueless about how to absorb them. Ideologically, political Zionism collided with the values of this traditional and socially conservative group. Modern Zionism was a revolutionary movement that found expression in antidiasporic and antireligious attitudes and policies. The intention was to a create a new society and a new Jew. Over time, a growing number of Yemenite Jews accepted the Labour Zionist doctrines while a hard core resisted them, resulting in their exclusion from mainstream Israeli society. The latter may have been a minority within a minority but they joined forces with other traditionally minded Mizrachim, to oppose the ruling secularists. The ensuing clash of cultures generated bitter resentment on both sides of the divide that reverberates – with major political consequences – in Israel to this day. 

            A degree of reconciliation was eventually achieved. Many within the secular Israeli majority began to pose this pointed question – why do we have to abandon the rich cultural and religious traditions of our forebears? In 1977, the establishment of the Centre for Integration of Sephardic and Oriental Jewish Culture represented an official effort by the Israeli government to acknowledge ethnic heritage as a legitimate component of contemporary Israel. Thereafter, a renaissance of Yemenite and broader Mizrachi culture occurred and attracted the attention of hitherto disinterested sectors of the Israeli populace. 

            Have the Yemenite Jews, and Mizrachi Israelis in general, become fully assimilated into the modern state? Yes and no. The disaffection of the Mizrachim with the ruling Labour Party in the state’s first few decades is often credited with the rise of the ostensibly pro-Mizrachi Likud in 1977 (though even today that party’s leadership remains firmly in the hands of Ashkenazim). And the Mizrachi contribution to both Zionist history and contemporary Israel remains grossly undervalued. 

            In a sense, however, the question is misplaced. Assimilation is no longer an overriding national objective and cultural pluralism is now an accepted characteristic of modern Israel. That should not distract attention from the lingering resentment that many Mizrachim continue to harbour despite constituting a demographic majority in the country. 

            A popular Ofra Haza song, Am Yisrael Chai – the people of Israel lives – resonates with Jews and Israelis across cultural, political and sectarian divisions. It unites a people that is simultaneously western and eastern, religious and secular, unified and diverse. While the whole is arguably greater than the sum of the parts, all of the strands that comprise the nation are crucial to the history, culture, strength and resilience of Israel as she enters the next phase of her rapid evolution. The old Israeli “melting pot” concept has arguably outlived its usefulness and is gradually giving way to the more inclusive “tapestry” or even bouillabaisse image [3]. Many Israelis – and foreign well-wishers – believe that the country is all the more tolerant, vibrant and fascinating for it. 

1. Ofra Haza, Yemenite Songs. Sun-Moon Music, 1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_vIydVt7wc 
2. Druyan N. Yemenites In Israel - In Search Of A Cultural Identity. Hebrew Annual Review 1994, 14, 43-54   https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/58798/1/HAR_v14_043.pdf
3. Weill A. Israeli Arts, Culture & Literature: Fifty Years of Culture in Israel - From “Melting Pot” to “Bouillabaisse.”   https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/fifty-years-of-culture-in-israel-from-melting-pot-to-bouillabaisse