Please click confirm to resume now. Sponsored Offers. Most Popular News. Most Popular Opinion. Most Popular Videos. The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate and Israel's early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the "new historians," paints a much more definitive picture of the historical record.
These documents reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported. Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival.
This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the U. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the U. The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal footing "throughout all sectors of the country's public life. In a famous article, Jabotinsky voiced his readiness "to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone.
Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were to enjoy the same legal standing, and "in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa. If this was the position of the more "militant" faction of the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster Arab-Jewish coexistence.
In January , Chaim Weizmann, then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a peace-and-cooperation agreement with the Hashemite emir Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, , Zionist spokesmen held hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels.
These included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal's elder brother and founder of the emirate of Transjordan later the kingdom of Jordan , incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud founder of Saudi Arabia and Palestinian Arab elites of all hues.
As late as Sept. On the face of it, Ben-Gurion's hope rested on reasonable grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after World War I had revived Palestine's hitherto static condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states. The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to improve Arab cultivation.
In the two decades between the world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive groves quadrupled. No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a third.
That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to Mandate Palestine's socioeconomic well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in a report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel:.
Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to their own devices, they would most probably have been content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of civil society or liberal democracy.
In the modern world, moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among the better educated and more moneyed classes of society. In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by their alleged betters for the crime of "selling Palestine" to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching themselves with impunity.
The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is either placed under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all the Jews in the country," facilitated the transfer of 7, acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives, all respected political and religious figures, went a step further by selling actual plots of land.
So did numerous members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem.
It was the mufti's concern with solidifying his political position that largely underlay the carnage in which Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded -- just as it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution.
In fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs, that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a foretaste of the exodus.
Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back against their inciters, often in collaboration with the British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish underground defense organization.
Still others sought shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. The core of the problem we face is fear itself: what Franklin D. Can anyone honestly say that this is what our government has been doing? To be sure, the caravan trekking from Central America to the U. Some may have criminal records. A few may be members of the drug gangs from which so many families are fleeing. But the insinuation—from the president and vice president of the United States, speaking in the Oval Office—that this caravan includes terrorists from the Middle East is not grounded in any facts yet presented to the American people.
Sending troops to the border, implying that we face the equivalent of an armed invasion, is equally unwarranted. The treatment of refugees is governed not only by domestic law but also by international agreements to which the U. Within this legal framework, individuals who present themselves at our borders are entitled to apply for refugee status. They are not, however, entitled to receive it. Nor may they cite reasons outside of the legal definition of refugee status as justification for entry.
Government officials are equally bound by the rule of law. The manipulation of fear to bypass the law violates the letter and spirit of our democracy. The refusal of the people of the "old covenant" to accept the new came to be defined as a threat to the very legitimacy of Christianity, and one that required a mobilized response.
Branding the Jews "Christ killers" and "sons of devils," the church launched a systematic campaign to denigrate Christianity's parent religion and its adherents.
Accusations of desecrating the host, ritual murder and poisoning wells would be added over the centuries, creating an ever larger powder keg of hatred.
With the growing power of the church and the global spread of Christianity, these potentially explosive sentiments were carried to the far corners of the world, bringing anti-Semitism to places where no Jewish foot had ever trod. According to some Christian thinkers, persecution of the powerless Jews was justified as a kind of divine payback for the Jewish rejection of Jesus.
This heavenly stamp of approval would be invoked many times through the centuries, especially by those who had tried and failed to convince the Jews to acknowledge the superior truth of Christianity. The most famous case may be that of Martin Luther: At first extremely friendly toward Jews--as a young man he had complained about their mistreatment by the Church--Luther turned into one of their bitterest enemies as soon as he realized that his efforts to woo them to his new form of Christianity would never bear fruit.
Nor was this pattern unique to the Christian religion. Mohammed, too, had hoped to attract the Jewish communities of Arabia, and to this end he initially incorporated elements of Judaism into his new faith directing prayer toward Jerusalem, fasting on Yom Kippur and the like. When, however, the Jews refused to accept his code of law, Mohammed wheeled upon them with a vengeance, cursing them in words strikingly reminiscent of the early Church fathers: "Humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them, and they were visited with the wrath of Allah.
That was because they disbelieved in Allah's revelation and slew the prophets wrongfully. In these cases, too, we might ask whether the perception of Jewish rejectionism was accurate. Of course the Jews did not drain the blood of children, poison wells, attempt to mutilate the body of Christ, or commit any of the other wild crimes of which the church accused them. Moreover, since many teachings of Christianity and Islam stemmed directly from Jewish ones, Jews could hardly be said to have denied them.
But if rejecting the Christian or Islamic world meant rejecting the Christian or Islamic creed, then Jews who clung to their own separate faith and way of life were, certainly, rejectionist.
This brings us to an apparent point of difference between premodern and modern anti-Semitism. For many Jews over the course of two millennia, there was, in theory at least, a way out of institutionalized discrimination and persecution: the Greco-Roman, Christian and Muslim worlds were only too happy to embrace converts to their way of life.
In the modern era, this choice often proved illusory. Both assimilated and unassimilated Jews, both religious and secular Jews, were equally victimized by pogroms, persecutions and genocide. In fact, the terrors directed at the assimilated Jews of Western Europe have led some to conclude that far from ending anti-Semitism, assimilation actually contributed to arousing it. What accounts for this? In the premodern world, Jews and Gentiles were largely in agreement as to what defined Jewish rejectionism, and therefore what would constitute a reprieve from it: It was mostly a matter of beliefs and moral concepts, and of the social behavior that flowed from them.
In the modern world, although the question of whether a Jew ate the food or worshiped the God of his neighbors remained relevant, it was less relevant than before. Instead, the modern Jew was seen as being born into a Jewish nation or race whose collective values were deeply embedded in the very fabric of his being.
Assimilation, with or without conversion to the majority faith, might succeed in masking this bedrock taint; it could not expunge it. While such views were not entirely absent in earlier periods, the burden of proof faced by the modern Jew to convince others that he could transcend his "Jewishness" was much greater than the one faced by his forebears.
Despite the increasing secularism and openness of European society, which should have smoothed the prospects of assimilation, many modern Jews would find it more difficult to become real Frenchmen or true Germans than their ancestors would have found it to become Greeks or Romans, Christians or Muslims.
The novelty of modern anti-Semitism is thus not that the Jews were seen as the enemies of mankind. Indeed, Hitler's observation in "Mein Kampf" that "wherever I went, I began to see Jews, and the more I saw, the more sharply they became distinguished in my eyes from the rest of humanity" sounds no different from the one penned by Philostratus 1, years earlier.
No, the novelty of modern anti-Semitism is only that it was far more difficult--and sometimes impossible--for the Jew to stop being an enemy of mankind.
On closer inspection, then, modern anti-Semitism begins to look quite continuous with premodern anti-Semitism, only worse. Modern Jews may not have believed they were rejecting the prevailing order around them, but that did not necessarily mean their enemies agreed with them. When it came to the Jews, indeed, European nationalism of the blood-and-soil variety only added another and even more murderous layer of hatred to the foundation built by age-old religious prejudice.
Just as in the ancient world, the Jews in the modern world remained the other--inveterate rejectionists, no matter how separate, no matter how assimilated. Was there any kernel of factual truth to this charge?
It is demeaning to have to point out that wherever and whenever they were given the chance, most modern Jews strove to become model citizens and showed, if anything, an exemplary talent for acculturation; the idea that by virtue of their birth, race or religion they were implacable enemies of the state or nation was preposterous.
So, too, with other modern libels directed against the Jews, which displayed about as much or as little truth content as ancient ones. The Jews did not and do not control the banks. They did not and do not control the media of communication.
They did not and do not control governments. And they are not plotting to take over anything. What some of them have indeed done, in various places and under specific circumstances, is to demonstrate--with an ardor and tenacity redolent perhaps of their long national experience--an attachment to great causes of one stripe or another, including, at times, the cause of their own people.
Particularly instructive in this regard is the case of Soviet Jewry. What makes the Soviet case instructive is, in no small measure, the fact that the professed purpose of communism was to abolish all nations, peoples and religions--those great engines of exclusion--on the road to the creation of a new world and a new man. As is well known, quite a few Jews, hoping to emancipate humanity and to "normalize" their own condition in the process, hitched their fates to this ideology and to the movements associated with it.
After the Bolshevik revolution, these Jews proved to be among the most devoted servants of the Soviet regime. Once again, however, the perception of ineradicable Jewish otherness proved as lethal as any reality. In the eyes of Stalin and his henchmen, the Jews, starting with the loyal communists among them, were always suspect--"ideological immigrants," in the telling phrase.
But the animosity went beyond Jewish communists. The Soviet regime declared war on the over nationalities and religions under its boot; whole peoples were deported, entire classes destroyed, millions starved to death, and tens of millions killed. Everybody suffered, not only Jews. But, decades later, long after Stalin's repression had given way to Khrushchev's "thaw," only one national language, Hebrew, was still banned in the Soviet Union; only one group, the Jews, was not permitted to establish schools for its children; only in the case of one group, the Jews, did the term "fifth line," referring to the space reserved for nationality on a Soviet citizen's identification papers, become a code for licensed discrimination.
Clearly, then, Jews were suspect in the Soviet Union as were no other group. Try as they might to conform, it turned out that joining the mainstream of humanity through the medium of the great socialist cause in the East was no easier than joining the nation-state in the West.
But that is not the whole story, either. To scant the rest of it is not only to do an injustice to Soviet Jews as historical actors in their own right but to miss something essential about anti-Semitism, which, even as it operates in accordance with its own twisted definitions and its own mad logic, proceeds almost always by reference to some genuine quality in its chosen victims.
As it happens, although Jews were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the early Bolsheviks, the majority of Russian Jews were far from being Bolsheviks, or even Bolshevik sympathizers. More importantly, Jews would also, in time, come to play a disproportionate role in communism's demise.
In the middle of the s, by which time their overall share of the country's population had dwindled dramatically, Soviet Jews made up a significant element in the "democratic opposition. Even more revealing, in the s the Jews were the first to challenge the Soviet regime as a national group, and to do so publicly, en masse, with tens of thousands openly demanding to leave the totalitarian state.
To that degree, then, the claim of Soviet anti-Semites that "Jewish thoughts" and "Jewish values" were in opposition to prevailing norms was not entirely unfounded.
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