Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was
Used to Create Israel, by Alison Weir
I continue with this final installment in my review of this
book.
Kidnapped
Zionist cadres infiltrated
displaced person’s camps that had been set up to house refugees displaced
during WWII. These infiltrators tried
secretly to funnel people to Palestine.
When it turned out that most didn’t want to go to Palestine, they worked
to convince them – sometimes by force.
This “force” took interesting forms: “confiscations of food
rations, dismissal from work, expulsion from the camps, taking away legal
protection and visa rights…”
The story of the ship that had later become known as Exodus is interesting. In July 1947 it set sail with 4,500 survivors
from German camps for Palestine; British officials in Palestine refused this
illegal entry. As documented by Baruch
Kimmerling, an Israeli professor and author of nine books on the founding of
Zionism:
While many people have heard that
British authorities refused to allow their illegal immigration into Palestine
and forced the boat to be returned to Germany, few know that the French
government had agreed to host the refugees.
Baruch
Kimmerling offers a reason for a slight detour:
Baruch Kimmerling (16 October 1939
– 20 May 2007) was an Israeli scholar and professor of sociology at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Upon his death in 2007, The Times described him as
"the first academic to use scholarship to reexamine the founding tenets of
Zionism and the Israeli State". Though a sociologist by training,
Kimmerling was associated with the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars
who question the official narrative of Israel's creation.
And the “New Historians”:
The New Historians are a loosely
defined group of Israeli historians who have challenged traditional versions of
Israeli history, including Israel's role in the Palestinian Exodus in 1948 and
Arab willingness to discuss peace.
Their scholarship is based on Israeli government papers made
public thirty years after the founding.
Avi Shlaim described the New Historians'
differences from what he termed the "official history" in the
following terms. According to Shlaim:
·
The official version said that Britain tried to
prevent the establishment of a Jewish state; the New Historians claimed that it
tried to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state
·
The official version said that the Palestinians
fled their homes of their own free will; the New Historians said that the refugees
were chased out or expelled
·
The official version said that the balance of
power was in favour of the Arabs; the New Historians said that Israel had the
advantage both in manpower and in arms
·
The official version said that the Arabs had a
coordinated plan to destroy Israel; the New Historians said that the Arabs were
divided
·
The official version said that Arab
intransigence prevented peace; the New Historians said that Israel is primarily
to blame for the "dead end".
They take criticism from all sides: traditional Israeli
historians who say that they fabricate Zionist misdeeds and Arab or
Arab-friendly historians who say they whitewash Zionist crimes. In other words, these guys might be on to
something.
Returning to Weir: David Ben-Gurion wanted drama such as
that of the passengers of Exodus –
this would aid in gaining sympathy for the Zionist cause. He rejected this solution offered by the
French; the refugees spent seven months more on the ship.
For the coming war with the native Palestinians, forced
conscription of incoming Jewish refugees (many of whom came involuntarily in
the first place) was necessary as only 0.3% of this population voluntarily
joined the military. Consider: a
non-nation-state forced compulsory military service on a population that had
never even lived on the land for which they were required to fight!
Refugees
Israel’s so-called “War of Independence” created 750,000
Palestinian refugees. As a show of
goodwill, if you can call it this, Israel donated 500 cases of oranges to the
relief effort – this in exchange for property (stolen, confiscated, whatever) valued
at the time at $480 million – or over $5 billion today.
Numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were
either destroyed or emptied of their Christian owners. Citing Anders Strindberg:
In one of the most spectacular
attacks on a Christian target, on May 17, 1948, the Armenian Orthodox
Patriarchate was shelled with about 100 mortar rounds – launched by Zionist
forces from the already occupied monastery of the Benedictine Fathers on Mount
Zion.
Truman, whose caving in to Zionist pressure was instrumental
in creating this disaster, now tried to convince Israel to allow the refugees
to return. Israel refused this
request. The State Department threatened
to withhold $49 million of Export-Import Bank funds if Israel did not allow at
least 200,000 refugees to return. The
Israeli Ambassador contacted the White House – and Truman disassociated himself
from this request.
Conclusion
This ends my review of the book, but not my review of the
subject. I will follow-up shortly with a
perspective on this history by looking through the lens of property rights,
immigration and homesteading.
Another Zionist attack was the blowing up of the French passenger ship Patria in Haifa harbor which killed over 200 people on 25 November 1940
ReplyDeleteThe Germans had allowed 3,600 Jews to leave Europe in cooperation with the Zionists. The 3 ships used went to Haifa where the British interned them and decided not to let the passengers into Palestine. Instead they were going to be sent to the French island of Mauritius. Being in the Indian Ocean it would have put the refugees out of reach of the Germans.
However the Zionists did not want them to leave so planted a bomb on the ship which sank it in less then 16 minutes.
The Zionist of course blamed everyone else for the attack, the French, British, Palestinians, Germans and Italians. So they got the British to relent and allow most of the Jewish survivors to stay in Palestine.
It was not until 1957 that the Zionists admitted that they had set the bomb.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patria_disaster