Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 21 

 

Zionism is a necessity not a choice for Jews

 

In 1909, Henry Ford notoriously offered consumers a stark choice: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black." 

 

That’s a version of the 17^th century Hobson’s Choice – take it or leave it – and it pretty much sums up the range of options available to Jews at the end of the 19th century. After trying all the other paths to emancipation apparently on offer – integration, assimilation, the Enlightenment – only Zionism remained. Some Jews, particularly in Europe, felt that it was worth one last throw of the dice and held out hope that they would finally be accepted as equals by the non-Jewish communities that surrounded them. They were tragically mistaken.  

Zionism is not primarily an ideology or a political philosophy but first and foremost a Jewish survival mechanism. The notion that Jews “chose” Zionism from a menu of potential alternatives is false. Other gates to freedom had all been slammed shut. For the Jews confined to the Czarist Pale of Settlement and other ghettoes throughout eastern Europe, the turning point was the assassination in 1881 of Alexander the Second for which the Russian Jews – all Jews – were blamed (though the killer wasn’t a Jew). 

 

The pogroms that followed reached such unprecedented heights of murderous intensity that they propelled the Jews of the Czarist empire in three radical directions – into flight (to other parts of Europe and the USA), into the ranks of the communist and anarchist revolutionaries, and towards Zionism. In 1882, Leon Pinsker [1], a middle-aged Russian-Jewish physician, had the prescience to grasp that only this last offered a realistic long-term hope of Jewish survival:

“We must reconcile ourselves, once and for all, to the idea that the other nations, by nature of their eternal, natural antagonism, will forever reject us. We may not shut our eyes to this natural force, which works like every other elemental force; we must take it into account… We must use all means which human intellect and human experience have devised, in order that the sacred work of national regeneration may not be left to blind chance.”

 

Fourteen years later, a young and highly assimilated Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl [2], reached the same conclusion:

“If only we could be left in peace. But I think we shall not be left in peace….Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves.”

 

While eastern Europe was an important culture medium for Zionist thinkers and activists, there’s a common misconception that the growing Zionist impulse was an exclusively European phenomenon. In the Jewish communities of the Middle East, some of whose roots in their host countries stretched back millennia, a similar yearning for a return to the Land of Israel had been nurtured over the generations. For these Jews, a political awakening occurred in the late 19^th century in tandem with their European co-religionists. Since their expulsion from their ancestral homelands by the Babylonian and Roman invaders, they had sought to appease the demands of their new Muslim rulers in a ceaseless quest to achieve fuller integration into wider society. Their efforts proved futile. 

 

Consigned to second-class citizenship under the Dhimmitude system, the Jews of the Arab world experienced periodic upsurges of antisemitism that became increasingly oppressive, prompting the Aliyah (immigration to the Land of Israel) of hundreds of Yemenite Jews the late 19^th century. In 1941, a savage pogrom incited by Nazi sympathisers, including the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was unleashed in Baghdad, where Jews constituted around one third of the population. Well over a hundred Jews were killed and thousands injured. Homes and businesses were looted, and further violence threatened. 

 

The Baghdad Farhud (“violent dispossession”) was far from unique. But for the Jews of Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world, it was a seminal moment, a confirmation of their suspicion that their presence in the region was precarious – tolerated at best and terminal at worst. That gloomy insight thrust the Middle Eastern and European Jews together to make common cause – the attempted revival of sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. For both, lethal antisemitism was a driver of their attraction to Zionism as the only means of creating a safe and welcoming long-term haven.

 

Don’t believe the propagandists who insist that the establishment of Israel in 1948 caused the destructive, bigotry-infected dynamic of Arab antiZionism – it didn’t. Israel’s declaration of independence merely reinvigorated a pre-existing hatred. Blaming the subsequent mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries on this single event is not evidence based. As British journalist Lyn Julius [3] writes:

“The root cause of the post-1948 exodus of over 850,000 Jews from the Middle East and North Africa was pan-Arab racism, itself influenced by Nazism. Before the first Arab-Israeli war broke out, saturation Nazi propaganda on an illiterate and gullible population had already destroyed any prospect of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs.”

 

Over the past 140 years, first the Yishuv (the pre-state Jewish community) and then Israel have provided refuge to countless Jews fleeing discrimination, persecution and murder. The precise number is impossible to calculate but it runs to the hundreds of thousands – and ultimately many millions if you include their descendants. That remarkable record more than vindicates the Zionist vision. 

 

But this isn’t just a matter of history. Today we are witnessing a frightening global upsurge in antisemitism that too often costs lives. It’s a disturbing fact that antisemitic individuals, groups and countries are not merely antipathetic to Jews; they want to bring about their complete annihilation. For that reason alone, the existence of Israel, the haven of last resort for all Jews, is non-negotiable. 

 

As Israeli legal scholar Amnon Rubinstein [4] reflected in 2002, Zionism remains the nationalism of no choice for the Jewish people:

“The truth of the matter is that from the extinguished crater – from the apparent volcano of antisemitism – a stream of searing lava occasionally erupts…Just as the Jews of Russia in 1881 and the Jews of Iraq in 1941 felt they had no choice, now too, there is ultimately no gate to salvation open other than the Zionist gate.”

 

By 2021, this is the key lesson most Jews have learned from their long and anguished history: full self-determination was and remains their only cast-iron guarantee of physical, cultural and religious survival.

 

Because antisemitic antiZionism was the underlying cause of the conflict between Israel and her neighbours, it is unlikely to end until Arab and Muslim leaders lay to rest their societies’ anti-Jewish demons. Continuing Arab (and Iranian) antiZionism just reinforces the conviction of Israeli Jews, and indeed most of the global Jewish world, that the Zionist path, embodied in the Jewish state of Israel, is the only one available to them. 

 

To all those antiZionists and “critics of Israel” who never tire of reproaching Jews for their strong support for Israel’s right to exist in peace and security, I have this message – get over it. Israel, the world’s sole Jewish state, is going nowhere. Learn the lessons of the repeated failures of the military and terrorist assaults against the country you despise above all others. You are on the wrong side of history. Your demonstrations, condemnations and boycotts will never succeed in their eliminationist goals.  

 

How can I be so confident in this prediction? For the single, easily verifiable reason that Israel is regarded by the overwhelming majority of Jews, both in Israel and elsewhere, as an existential necessity rather than a choice. 

 

1.         Pinsker L. Auto-emancipation (originally published 1882). New York, Maccabaean  Publishing Company, 1906
2.          Herzl T. The Jewish State (originally published 1896). London. Penguin Books, 2010
3.       .  Julius L. Uprooted. London, Vallentine Mitchell, 2018
4.          Rubinstein A. Only the Zionist gate remains open. Haaretz, 14 March 2002

 

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 20 

The “Israel-Palestine Conflict” is a propagandistic construct that obstructs peace

 

 

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.

The world’s greatest philosophers disagree on many things but on one subject they are united – words matter.

 

Language can influence our perception of the world. The “Israel-Palestine conflict” is a classic example of a wilfully world-limiting, blinkered vision of reality. For it is a matter of historical fact there is no Israel-Palestine conflict. If that statement startles you, look at the evidence.  

 

In the early years of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century, there were sporadic Arab attacks (mostly criminal rather than political in nature) on the returning Jewish immigrants as well as on the longstanding (mainly religious) Jewish residents of Eretz Israel (“Palestine”). But the large-scale conflict was ignited in 1920 by Haj Amin al Husseini, self-appointed leader of the Arabs of the emergent Mandatory Palestine, Arab nationalist and unabashed, Hitler-adoring antisemite. This obnoxious character, revered today by the PLO elite as a great Palestinian patriot, exploited his appointment by the British to the influential position of Grand Mufti of Jerusalem to incite anti-Jewish violence. [1] 

 

Wasn’t Husseini merely trying to secure self-determination for the Palestinian Arabs? On the contrary, he was a pan-Arabist who saw Greater Syria, including Palestine, as the launchpad for a resurgent Arab nation. A Palestinian (Arab) state (in addition to the one that was rustled up by the British east of the Jordan in 1922) could have been created at least twice on Husseini’s watch (and many times subsequently) but that was far from most Arab minds. The main motivation for violence against the Jews arose from a far darker source. 

 

The Arab world didn’t confront first Zionism and then Israel to support the Palestinians but to vent hostility to Jews. Antisemitism has long played a central role in the “pro-Palestinian” movement. The leaders of the two most prominent Palestinian political/terrorist organisations today, the Iranian-backed militias Hamas and Hezbollah, are explicitly antisemitic, just as their predecessors were, all the way back to the Mufti and the Nazi-admiring Muslim Brotherhood in the 1920s.

 

Throughout the British Mandate period right up until the UN partition resolution of 1947, Husseini and his friends did all in their power to frustrate the will of the League of Nations to enable the re-establishment of the Jewish national home. Jewish self-determination was pitched against Arab determination to stop it at any price, even at the cost of forfeiting a Palestinian Arab state in western Palestine. 

 

In May 1948, after several months of civil war, David Ben Gurion declared Israel’s independence. The next day, five Arab armies attacked and attempted to snuff out the single flickering candle of Jewish hope in the wake of the collective trauma of the Shoah. Zionism’s adversaries were not just Palestinians but the entire Arab world. Israel won that war, thus saving the Jewish people from a further catastrophe within three years of the liberation of Auschwitz. But her enemies’ annihilationist fervour hadn’t dimmed. 

 

Although both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank were now firmly in Arab hands, there was no demand for a Palestinian state. The reason? Because the prime aspiration of all Israel’s neighbours was to snuff out the hated “Zionist entity” as rapidly as possible. The status of the Palestinian Arabs was of little interest to Israel’s foes until they realised that they could weaponise the Palestinian refugees – that the Arab war of extermination against the Jews had caused – against Israel. 

 

When Egypt’s President Nasser provoked the war of June 1967, yet another Jewish Nakba loomed. On this occasion, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq and even Pakistan joined the attempt to eliminate the Jewish state. Further wars and terrorist campaigns ensued, most involving non-Palestinian actors. As Israeli journalist Matti Friedman [2] explains: Palestinians have made up a small number of the combatants facing the country…Israeli soldiers faced Egyptians, Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Iraqis. Today Israel’s most potent enemy is the Shiite theocracy in Iran, which is more than 1,000 miles away and isn’t Palestinian (or Arab). The gravest threat to Israel at close range is Hezbollah on our northern border, an army of Lebanese Shiites founded and funded by the Iranians…A threat of a lesser order is posed by Hamas, which is Palestinian but was founded as the local incarnation of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, affiliated with the regional wave of Sunni radicalism, kept afloat with Qatari cash and backed by Iran. 

 

There are several seriously damaging consequences, beyond historical inaccuracy, of subsuming this complex and multifaceted array of threats to Israel under the wholly inadequate “Israel-Palestine” rubric.

 

First, it casts Israel as the oppressor and the Palestinians as the victims. In this framing, Israelis are more numerous, stronger and wealthier than the Palestinians – that is its primary purpose. The strategy works: Palestinians garner global sympathy and political support (as well as generous funding), while Israelis are cast as heartless villains deserving nothing but moral condemnation and pariah status. 

 

Second, it implants the notion in the minds of the uninformed that Palestine is a real geopolitical entity. In reality, "Palestine" is a fictional version of disputed territory, one that promotes the Palestinian Authority’s bogus claim to have achieved sovereignty while simultaneously (and illogically) accusing Israel of illegitimately occupying the self-same Palestinian land. (Fact-check: despite repeated Israeli offers to establish a state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza in the context of a peace treaty, such an entity does not exist and pretending that it does will not make it happen sooner. Equally specious is the UN-brokered phrase Occupied Palestinian Territories that is tossed around as though neither the 1993-5 Oslo Accords nor the 2005 Israeli withdrawal from Gaza happened). 

 

Third, it can be exploited to project a negative image of domestic Israeli society. Renowned English children’s author Michael Morpurgo [3] spoke recently on BBC radio of his visit to an Israeli school “in a village where Palestinians and Israeli children grow up together” [sic], a confused demographic taxonomy in which the Israel-Palestine paradigm is parachuted into Israel itself in a manner that implies an ethnically defined normative division (apartheid anyone?) between Israelis (aka Jews) and Palestinians (aka Arabs). (For the record, Michael, fewer than 1 in 1o Israeli Arabs self-identify as Palestinians [4]). 

 

Fourth, and perhaps most seriously, it leads to the discredited analysis that all roads to peace in the Middle East run through Ramallah, thereby granting the Palestinians a veto over Israeli attempts to improve relations with her neighbours (the Kerry doctrine) [5]. Only be “solving” the Israel-Palestine conflict (through concessions squeezed out of Israel as the stronger party), posits this theory, can a wider peace be achieved. The absurdity of this assumption has been spectacularly exposed by the signing of the Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab states in 2020. 

 

Am I asserting that there is no conflict whatsoever between Israelis and Palestinians? Of course not, that would be ludicrous. It exists, is real and lethal for both sides. Like most myths, it contains a kernel of truth but it has been amplified far beyond the bounds of veracity. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute represents just one corner of a much wider and more dangerous argument between Israel and several of her Middle Eastern neighbours. To see the full picture, a much wider-angle lens is needed. 

 

The phrase “Israel-Palestine conflict” is not merely a flawed or inadequate descriptor of a century-old dispute but a propagandistic construct that portrays the Goliath Israel intent on crushing underfoot the Palestinian David. This is a deliberate inversion of the facts intended as a trap for the unwary; all who are genuinely interested in helping to promote peace should resolutely decline to fall into it. 

 

Wittgenstein was right, words matter. Language dictates thought. Politicised language causes misunderstanding, and that is a recipe far more rather than less violence. 

 

Lord Buddha said: Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace. What is that one word? It’s unclear but here’s a wild guess that might just fit the bill in the context of the Middle East. It’s short, sweet and powerful.

 

Truth.     

 

 

1. Karsh E. Palestine Betrayed. Yale University Press, London, 2010.

2. Friedman M.  There is no Israel-Palestine conflict. New York Times, 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/israeli-palestinian-conflict-matti-friedman.html

3. Michael Morpurgo. A Point of View. BBC Radio 4, 2021. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000t77x

4. Slepkov N, Fuchs C, Rosner S. 2020 Pluralism Index. Jerusalem, Jewish People Policy Institute, 2020.

5. Ryvchin A. Collapse of the Kerry Doctrine and End of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Newsweek 2 November 2020.

https://www.newsweek.com/collapse-kerry-doctrine-end-arab-israeli-conflict-opinion-1543790

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 19 

Israel is the most pro-Palestinian country in the world

Remember this little ditty?

In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

I learned it as a schoolboy. It prefaced breathless classroom accounts of the great explorer’s exciting exploits in discovering America. The date of his departure from Spain was accurate but the rest of the narrative was either false or missing (especially with regard to his brutality towards the indigenous inhabitants). But I believed what I was told. I was a child after all. 

Many of today’s children believe things that aren’t true. They grow into adults who cling, limpet-like, to those untruths throughout their lives. One of the most egregious myths that every schoolchild “knows” is that the state of Israel is and always has been irredeemably anti-Palestinian. It appears, after all, to be “common sense.”

According to Einstein (allegedly): Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

In this case, the truth is the opposite of common sense: Israel is and always has been the most pro-Palestinian country in the world. This may appear a literally nonsensical statement, so let’s review the evidence.

I propose three indicators that, taken together, most reasonable people would agree reflect a genuinely a pro-Palestinian position: a consistent commitment to workable Palestinian self-determination, a profound concern for Palestinian welfare, and the taking of significant risks to achieve a peaceful resolution of the conflict. 

First, self-determination: realising this universal principle for both Israelis and Palestinians need not be a zero-sum game [1]. Only Israel has taken concrete steps on this path towards, in today’s jargon, Two States for Two Peoples (2S2P). 

The Zionist push for self-determination for the Arabs of Palestine began in 1919 with the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement. Both Jews and Arabs were outraged by the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement that had been struck between Britain and France in 1916 to divide up between them the spoils of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. Although the Balfour Declaration the following year boosted Zionist hopes of Jewish statehood, Weizmann understood that the Arabs were equally deserving of sovereignty and strained every sinew to generate a mutually supportive united Jewish-Arab front in the face of Great Power perfidy. Faisal initially agreed but inexplicably got cold feet before his signature had dried and the agreement collapsed.

That didn’t deter Weizmann, who accepted (reluctantly) the lopping off of 78% of the Jewish National Home (Mandatory Palestine) to create an Arab state, Transjordan, in 1922. A further partition of the remainder of Palestine, as proposed by the Peel Commission in 1937, would have reduced the Jewish state to an even tinier rump but the Zionist leadership acquiesced in the interests of 2S2P. Ten years later, they accepted the UN partition plan that deprived the Jewish people of Zion (Jerusalem) and their historical heartlands of Judea and Samaria (annexed by Jordan and renamed the West Bank). So it continued to the present day – attempt after attempt to apply the magic 2S2P formula was frustrated by violent Arab rejectionism.  

Second, what about Israel’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of the Palestinians? It is impossible to do justice to the enormous energy and resources that Israel has expended to this end. 

At the conclusion of the War of Independence of 1947-49 (that had been launched by local Arab militias), Israel passed a Basic Law guaranteeing full and equal rights for all Arabs who remained in the country. She then offered to accept 100,000 Arab refugees unconditionally to kickstart peace negotiations despite having to absorb huge numbers of Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from Arab countries. (Though that offer was rejected, Israel nevertheless subsequently permitted thousands of Palestinians to return via the family reunification programme).  

After the defensive Six Day War of 1967, Israel engineered massive improvements in Palestinian health, education, housing and employment in the West Bank and Gaza [2,3] right up until the vast majority of the residents of those territories became the responsibility of the newly created Palestinian Authority in 1994. In the recurrent wars triggered by the Hamas rulers of Gaza from 2008 onwards, the IDF made unprecedented efforts, validated be external military experts [4], to avoid Palestinian civilian casualties while defending Israelis against rocket attacks, tunnelling and other terrorist incursions. Israel has also provided near-daily humanitarian aid to Gazans even during periods of intense fighting. 

Third, Israel's risk-taking to accommodate Palestinian aspirations has been mind-boggling. Here’s a sample of her territorial concessions: in 1978 at Camp David, Menachem (“not an inch”) Begin agreed to withdraw not only from all of Sinai but also from the West Bank to permit a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy that would undoubtedly have led to statehood had Arafat deigned to join the party. Following the 1993-95 Oslo Accords with the PLO (that refused to amend its charter calling for Israel’s destruction), Israel withdrew from large swathes of the West Bank while simultaneously agreeing to the arming the PA security forces. That was followed five years later not by negotiations, as promised by all sides, but by the terrorist war that Arafat unleashed against Israeli civilians in response to further ultra-generous Israeli land-for-peace offers. 

In 2005, the hawkish Ariel Sharon ordered a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to try to stimulate progress towards peace; instead, it led to an upsurge of attacks against Israelis. Undeterred, Israeli PM Olmert stunned his people with his 2008 offer to Mahmoud Abbas of close to 100% (including land swops) of the West Bank.  

As for the other side, what have “moderate” Palestinian leaders done to resolve the conflict? The PA incites violence and incentivises terrorism through its Pay-To-Slay policy, orchestrates a stream of one-sided condemnations of Israel at the UN, opposes “normalisation” with Israel in any circumstances (including a global coronavirus pandemic), brainwashes Palestinian children into hating Jews, glorifies Jihadist violence [5] and refuses to negotiate an end to the conflict. Most damagingly, it maintains the fiction of a Two State Solution (note - not 2S2P) that requires implementation of the Right of Return, a mantra with no basis in international law, for the millions of descendants of the Palestinian refugees. Since Israel has no intention of committing national suicide, this insane demand guarantees ongoing conflict and perpetuates the absence of a Palestinian state [6]. 

Instead of being challenged on their delusional and self-defeating intransigence, Abbas and his colleagues are cheered to the rafters by the Arab League, UN, EU, NGOs, academics, clerics and journalists. How can a posture that leads up a political cul-de-sac be interpreted as “pro-Palestinian”?

And what have “pro-Palestinian” governments and activists around the world actually done to alleviate the plight of the Palestinians? Here’s a sample of their contribution: goading the Arabs into an unnecessary war against Israel in 1947-49 that caused the Naqba [7]; hijacking UNRWA to weaponise the refugees as a permanent incubator of Jew-hating terrorists; turning a blind eye to the denial of civil rights for Palestinians living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere; expelling hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from Kuwait after the Gulf War in 1991; ignoring Assad’s murder of around 4,000 Palestinians during the Syrian civil war; enabling the fanatical Iranian mullahs to pour billions of dollars into the coffers of the genocidal twins, Hamas and Hezbollah; and promoting the antisemitic BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) movement in a futile addendum to the failed military and terrorists campaigns. In what parallel universe can any of that be viewed as “pro-Palestinian”? 

An objective reading of the evidence points to one unavoidable conclusion: only Israel has consistently promoted the real interests of the Palestinians. Her leaders have not merely consented on multiple occasions to the proposed establishment of a Palestinian state but have initiated, time and again, constructive, risk-laden and often domestically unpopular measures to achieve Palestinian self-determination, to improve the daily lives of Palestinians, and to promote peace. 

The corollary is equally clear: most so-called “pro-Palestinians” have done absolutely nothing to meet the needs of the Palestinians – and have instead exploited them, wittingly or otherwise, as a front for anti-Israelism and antisemitism. The Palestinian leadership, along with their so-called friends in the Arab League and the international community, have repeatedly betrayed the Palestinians by espousing violent rejectionism and trumpeting a fictional and unattainable Right of Return.

“Common sense” insists that Israel is, always was, and always will be anti-Palestinian. That calumny has become so ubiquitous that it is rarely discussed and never disputed. It’s one of those prejudices about Israel that have become axiomatic. It will take a genius of Einsteinian stature to remove it. 

Meanwhile, those of us who know the truth will just have to keep repeating it until the world listens. 

1       Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 4 Israel does not (and never has) opposed freedom for the Palestinians

https://isra-prof.blogspot.com/2019/07/astounding-facts-most-people-dont-know.html

2      Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel: 6 The impact of Israel on the health of Palestinian Arabs has been overwhelmingly positive https://isra-prof.blogspot.com/2019/09/astounding-facts-most-people-dont-know.html

3     Stone D. Has Israel damaged Palestinian health? London, Fathom, 2014 https://fathomjournal.org/has-israel-damaged-palestinian-health/

4      High Level Military Group. An assessment of the 2014 Gaza conflict. Friends of Israel Initiative, 2015  http://www.high-level-military-group.org/pdf/hlmg-assessment-2014-gaza-conflict.pdf

5       IMPACT-se (Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education). The 2020-21 Palestinian School Curriculum https://www.impact-se.org/reports/palestinian-territories/palestinian-authority/

6      Schwartz A, Wilf E.  The War of Return - How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace. New York, All Points Books, 2020

7       Karsh E. Palestine Betrayed. London, Yale University Press, 2011  

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 18 

The map of Israel today is in large part attributable to a microbe 

In 2014, Israeli archaeologists discovered a 5,000-year-old monument, large enough to appear in satellite images, near the northern town of Tsfat [1]. The purpose of the structure remains a mystery though its contours may have been intended to depict a crescent moon. It could hardly have been more prophetic because it was a pretty accurate representation of the shape of Israel, in both its ancient and (especially) modern configurations.

Have you ever wondered why contemporary Israel is the shape it is? Its cartographic outline is effectively a crescent with the concave side facing east. That’s because most of the population, with the exception of Jerusalem, is concentrated in the coastal plain. Further inland, the historical Jewish heartlands of Judea and Samaria (known to the rest of the world as the West Bank) contain relatively few Israelis despite the endless negative publicity showered on the post-1967 Jewish settlers, 80 per cent of whom live in fairly close proximity to the old green (ceasefire) line. 

This curious demographic pattern didn’t happen by chance or solely because of political events such as the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank in 1948 or the Oslo Accords of 1993 that gave the Palestinians self-rule in large swathes of that same territory which, they insisted, would always remain judenrein. The explanation lies in biology or, more precisely, entomology. 

As a result of two millennia of foreign conquest, massacres and expulsions, those Jews who stubbornly clung to their homes in Eretz Israel, or somehow succeeded in returning in subsequent centuries, were mainly religious and clustered in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tsfat and Tiberias. For the secular pioneers of the late 19th and early 20^th centuries, these locations held few attractions and in any case their first priority on arrival was to purchase land to establish agricultural settlements. The question was – where was suitable land for sale? 

Unfortunately for those immigrants, the answer was virtually nowhere. The “land flowing with milk and honey” had languished under four centuries of appalling neglect by the Ottoman Empire. Mark Twain [2], visiting Palestine in 1867, wrote: “A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We never saw a human being on the whole route.” Cook’s [3], the foremost travel guide of the day, confirmed this account a few years later: “Above all other countries in the world…it is now a land of ruins. In Judea it is hardly an exaggeration to say that …for miles and miles there is no appearance of present life or habitation.”

The returning Jews (olim) were thus faced with a barren, impoverished landscape. The climate was so oppressively hot and dry that even the most agriculturally skilled idealists became rapidly demoralised. The prospect of rebuilding their homeland in such circumstances was beyond daunting. Much of the existing arable land was being farmed by Arab fellahin – tenant farmers whom the young Zionists (contrary to hostile propagandists’ claims) were anxious to avoid displacing. The rest was patently uninhabitable, either because it comprised desert or swamps. But this was the nature of the land that the absentee Arab owners were willing to sell. They regarded most of this real estate as intrinsically worthless from a commercial perspective. They may have been antiZionist politically but they jumped at the chance to sell their unviable acreage to the Jews at grossly inflated prices. And the Jews, having no choice, paid up. 

The end result was that first two waves of Jewish immigrants (1881-1914) headed into the predominantly empty but disease-ridden territory along the Mediterranean coast, across the Jezreel Valley and up to the northern interior in the terrain surrounding the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee). They generally gave a wide berth to the sun-baked, arid Negev desert as well as the more fertile inland acreage of Judea and Samaria which was already fairly densely inhabited by an increasingly resentful Arab population, and in any case wasn’t for sale. 

Nevertheless, the olim, most of whom were fleeing poverty and pogroms in eastern Europe, continued to arrive though many left within a few years after encountering what seemed impossibly challenging conditions in their inhospitable homeland. The Turkish rulers of Palestine were unsupportive of the Jewish newcomers and did all they could, up to and including forced expulsions, to obstruct their efforts. 

With the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, everything changed. That cataclysmic event paved the way for the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and the realisation of President Wilson’s vision of self-determination for all peoples – including Jews and Arabs. But two formidable obstacles had to be overcome first: the vast Ottoman army that controlled the entire region, and a troublesome biting insect, the anopheles mosquito – host of the deadly Plasmodium malaria parasite. 

To ensure a British-led victory against Germany and her allies, General Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force had to drive the Turkish army out of this strategically vital corner of the Levant, starting in the Negev desert and then moving northwards to Jerusalem and beyond. Militarily, the Turks were no match for the British but Allenby and his troops found themselves in one of the most malaria-infested regions in the world. Unless the disease was checked, the British army would disintegrate as an effective fighting machine. 

Allenby delayed the advance on the enemy, instead charging the entomologist Major EE Austen with the task of protecting his army from malaria. Building on earlier discoveries of Manson and Ross and using the fairly crude methods of mosquito control available to him, mainly drainage and clearance of vegetation, Austen successfully held the disease at bay for six months after which Allenby launched his decisive cavalry attack against the Turks. The timing of this offensive was critical. The Turks capitulated a matter of days before huge numbers of their British adversaries succumbed to the infection, just as Allenby had anticipated. 

Dunkel and Alexander [4] explain that “failure to contain malaria would have, in all probability, resulted in failure to defeat the Turkish army… Extensive boundary areas of the Middle East were thereafter changed to reflect the division of the former Ottoman Empire.” These post-war boundaries were a consequence of Allenby’s military victory that, in turn, had been enabled by entomologist Austen’s contribution.

To recap: the havoc wrought by malaria had powerfully influenced two key developments in Zionist history: first, the precise location of the land purchased by the early Jewish immigrants, and second, the defeat of the Turkish enemy in World War One that terminated the Ottoman Empire. Their combined effect was to facilitate the revival of an internationally endorsed Jewish national home in Palestine, as first signalled by the Balfour Declaration in 1917, and to mould the basic geographical contours of the new State of Israel around thirty years later.

This analysis is supported by three key sources evidence. First, the 1921 Annual Report of the British Mandate’s Department of Health [5] recorded that “Malaria stands out as by far the most important disease in Palestine. For centuries it has decimated the population ... an effective bar to the development and settlement of large tracts of fertile lands ...” Second, the Palestine Royal (Peel) Commission [6] in 1937 commented: “The expenditure [on anti- malaria work] ... by the Jews is due to the rapid pace of their colonization and to the fact that they purchased a large amount of land where malaria had been rife for centuries.” Third, the Armistice Lines of 1949 followed a similar shape and pattern to that of the 1947 UN Partition Plan, that had in turn reflected the (still) malarious areas of Palestine that had been almost the only land available to the Jews to purchase.

The impact of malaria also partially explains why, in 1937 and 1947, the Yishuv leadership accepted (reluctantly) the idea of a Jewish state shorn of those areas comprising their historical heartland. This was a painful concession for the Zionist leadership but their decision was eased by the demographic reality of Judea and Samaria being sparsely populated by Jews, for the reasons described, even after decades of Jewish immigration.

It would be remiss to fail to give an honourable mention to Dr Israel Kligler, an American public health scientist and idealistic Zionist who, after settling in Palestine, began in 1921 what was to become the first example anywhere in the world of a successful national malaria-elimination campaign. Using similar methods to Austen's, Kligler’s ambition was to eliminate the disease entirely to make the country habitable. He forged a highly productive partnership with Gideon Mer, another immigrant doctor (whose laboratory, now a museum, may be visited in the old quarter of Rosh Pina). The project, involving close Arab-Jewish co-operation, proved outstandingly successful. The World Health Organization eventually declared Israel the first malaria-free Asian country in the 1960s. 

So next time you contemplate the map of Israel, think of Allenby, Austen, Kligler, Mer and their tiny foe, the single-cell Plasmodium parasite hosted by the female anopheles mosquito. All five played crucial roles in the bringing to fruition political Zionism’s vision of a reborn Jewish sovereign state after millennia of homelessness. It’s an extraordinary story, and one that has been overlooked in the midst of today’s overheated and often ill-informed political rhetoric. But without an appreciation of this microorganism’s profound significance, our understanding of the modern Middle East would remain woefully incomplete.         

Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Anton Alexander who drew my attention to this important yet underappreciated history. 

1.     https://www.timesofisrael.com/enigmatic-ancient-crescent-in-galilee-pegged-as-massive-moon-shrine/

2.     Twain M. The Innocents Abroad. Hartford, American Publishing Company, 1867

3.     Handbook for Palestine and Syria. London, Thomas Cook & Son, 1876

4.     Dunkel FV, Alexander A. Three stepping stones leading to malaria elimination, changing world maps on the way.  Malaria World Journal 2020, 11:4 https://malariaworld.org/sites/default/files/mwjournal/article/MWJ2020_11_4.pdf

5.     Palestine Department of Health. Annual Report of the Department of Health for the year 1921. Jerusalem, New Jerusalem Press, 1921

6.     Report of the Palestine Royal Commission. London, HM Stationery Office Cmd. 5479, 1937

 Astounding Facts Most People Don’t Know About Israel 17 

 

Israel is the only country that regularly attracts psychotic criticism

 

When I was a naive young medical student, I was sent to interview a patient on a psychiatric ward. I couldn’t find anything wrong with him. At the debriefing session, I was staggered to learn that he was a paranoid schizophrenic: he believed he was the resurrected Jesus and that they were trying to kill him. I had missed a diagnostic symptom known in the trade as a circumscribed delusion. 

My diagnosis of much of the egregious criticism that is heaped daily on Israel is not that the critics are misguided, misinformed or prejudiced, nor that they are swept up in a form of groupthink that merges at times into mass hysteria – though all of that is true up to a point. I believe that some, at least, suffer from a circumscribed delusion, and that their skewed perception of that tiny Middle Eastern democracy is so detached from the real world that it amounts to a mass psychosis.

A psychosis is a mental disturbance characterised by cognitive and/or emotional loss of contact with reality. This is an apt descriptor of the delusional suite of malevolent accusations launched against Israel on a daily basis. 

Cary Nelson [1] has documented several high-profile sufferers of this psychopathology among US academics. Judith Butler, a philosophy professor at the University of California, is a woman with a politicidal vision for Israel. Her ardent desire is for Jews to relinquish their hard-won state and return to a position of an ineradicable alterity – pretentious language for the restoration of the homeless “wandering Jew” (a phrase of medieval origin implying punishment for the supposed crime of killing Christ) or the “rootless cosmopolitan” of Soviet propagandists’ imagination.  

Butler’s unconscionable opinions are moderate compared to those of Jasbir Puar [2], professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey, who takes anti-Israel rhetoric to a higher level. As well as accusing Israel of apartheid and pinkwashing (the trumpeting of gay rights as a means of distracting attention from the state's criminality), she writes: “Through debilitating practices of maiming and stunting, Palestinians are further literalised and lateralised as surface, as bodies without souls, as sheer biology, thus rendered nonhuman.” Faced with the IDF’s efforts to minimise civilian fatalities, she opines that, for Israelis, “the Palestinians are not even human enough for death.” 

Then there is the late Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago [3] who updated and amplified the old blood libel: “What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz,” a view enthusiastically supported by Israeli writer Yitzchak Laor [4]: “Gas chambers are not the only way to destroy a nation, it is enough to develop high rates of infant mortality.”

To describe such fulminations as irrational would be an understatement. And yet these voices have found welcoming platforms throughout the world to disseminate their crackpot theories and many occupy senior positions at prestigious universities. The UK hosts several: Ilan Pappé, of the University of Exeter, is one of those “historians” who lacks interest in historical veracity (“who knows what the facts are?”); another is his Oxford University colleague, Professor Avi Shlaim (“the job of the historian is to judge”). Many of these so-called experts, who cavalierly ignore evidence to promote their narrative of a brutal, bigoted and illegitimate Israel, receive lavish praise from peers and have become global celebrities.

Human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Oxfam have never been slow to criticise Israel but they turned poisonous in 2001 after the NGO Durban “antiracism” conference that was effectively an anti-Israel hatefest that spawned the BDS (boycotts, divestments, sanctions) movement. Many BDS supporters proclaim their devotion to universal human rights yet appear to have no problem with founder Omar Barghouti’s call to “euthanise” Israel. Demanding the destruction of a state and condemning most of its inhabitants to homelessness is both ethically despicable and patently unworkable. It is also a recipe for large-scale bloodletting as most Israelis, having nowhere else to go, would resist. 

Much of the modern discourse about Israel is infected with bizarre delusions and conspiracy theories about the way Zionists dictate US foreign policy, control the media, manipulate global finance, and plot to dominate the world. The IDF, it is alleged, is not a conventional army but an instrument of mass murder and terrorism; Israeli troops shoot Palestinian children for fun or target practice or to harvest internal organs, or because Jews are conditioned – according to award-winning British playwright Caryl Churchill [5] – to regard all non-Jews as unworthy of empathy. In this narrative, Zionism, by its nature irredeemably evil, has always sought the ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide of the Palestinians. 

 

This is not normal criticism of the kind that is directed at other countries. It’s deranged.

 

Social media, in the words of Israeli writer Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll [6], have added a new dimension to the disease: “What we see online is a mass of misinformation…. The result is that masses of people around the world think that Israel feeds on the blood of Palestinian babies just as the Nazis – and Christians before them – believed that we fed on the blood of their babies.” 

 

“When people of sound mind display clear signs of deviation from reality it demands of us to examine the symptom and expose the defect,” wrote Barry Shaw [7] in 2016.

 

The defect is a form of collective insanity. If you think this judgement is harsh, consider the alternative – that the proponents of grotesque fabrications are liars. I suggest that, while some probably are, others may actually believe their own fantasies. In either case, the end result is the demonisation of Israel that, in turn, attracts an unsavoury following of antisemites who are all too willing to join the fray. 

 

Does antisemitism itself lie at the root of the vilification of Israel? The evidence is compelling. Antisemitism is a kind of psychosis that has never disappeared. Post-1945, the expression of Jew-hatred, while no longer acceptable in polite society, had to find an outlet; so it may have mutated not just into antiZionism but into psychotic belief systems about the Jewish state.

 

In one sense, the cause of the disease is less important than its outcome – the normalisation of falsehoods. Ben-Dror Yemini [8] puts the matter starkly: “When these statements are circulated in an atmosphere that is antagonistic to Israel, created as a result of similar lies made by other lecturers and journalists, the lies become truth.” Wider public opinion, shaped by ill-informed or malicious journalistic filtering of extreme ideas into the mass media, inevitably follows suit. That is every bit as dangerous to Jews as previous incarnations of classic antisemitism.

 

The widespread dissemination of a warped view on Israel relentlessly drags moderate opinion towards extremism that increasingly appears acceptable. What should be an unimportant lunatic fringe has wormed its way into mainstream institutions including churches, trade unions, charities and political parties.

 

In 2003, at the height of Arafat’s terrorist campaign against Israelis, a European survey found that 60% of respondents regarded Israel as the greatest threat to world peace [9]. In 2005, Clare Short [10], a UK cabinet minister, asserted that “the oppression of the Palestinian people is the major cause of bitter division and violence in the world.” There we have it – the classic Nazi trope of the Jewish threat to all of humanity has morphed into the scapegoating of Israel as the root of all evil. 

 

An especially damaging consequence of this delusional mindset is a dysfunctional international response to the Middle East. The UN condemns Israel more than any other country thereby contributing nothing to conflict resolution [11]. The UN Human Rights Council appointed the infamous Richard Falk as its special advisor; there he exploited his position to accuse Israel of genocidal intent towards the Palestinians. The same brand of obsessive, baseless attacks on Israel occurs in other branches of the UN such as UNESCO, that erases any Jewish historical connection to Judaism’s holiest sites, the Economic and Social Council, that accuses Israel of being the world’s foremost violator of women’s rights, and the World Health Assembly, that claims Israel systematically denies Palestinians basic healthcare.

 

This process is clearly pathological. Yet most consumers of world news have no idea that the phenomenon even exists. All who genuinely care for human rights have a duty to banish this ignorance and hold the facilitators of the malaise to account. 

 

I often wonder what became of the schizophrenic patient I met in the psychiatric unit all these years ago. Treating psychotic patients is challenging. Dealing with psychotic populations is even harder. That’s not an excuse for inaction as they are capable of inflicting serious harm on themselves and others. We can’t confine them to locked psychiatric wards but we can and must isolate them intellectually and politically to preserve historical accuracy, to counter their antisemitic incitement and, above all, to enhance the prospects of peace. 

 

1.        Nelson, C. Israel Denial. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019

2.       Puar, J. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham, Duke University Press, 2017

3.       Saramago, J. The militant magician. Guardian, 28 December 2002 

4.       Laor, Y. After Jenin. London Review of Books, May 2002

5.        https://royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/seven-jewish-children/

6.       Keats Jaskoll, S. The Whack-A-Mole model of Israel advocacy. Jewish Chronicle, 3 December 2020 

7.       https://israelseen.com/2016/02/07/barry-shaw-how-the-western-media-and-world-leaders-have-israeli-blood-on-their-hands

8.       Yemini, BD. Industry of Lies. New York, ISGA, 2017

9.       https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/nov/03/eu.israel

10.    https://weepingskies.blogspot.com/search?q=clare+short

11.     https://www.newsweek.com/un-palestinian-package-resolutions-only-fans-flames-conflict-opinion-1550821