The Palestinian “liberation” movement has always relied on the idea that the founding of the state of Israel was an unparalleled disaster for the Arab world designed by a colonialist West. This historical aspersion has served to justify the numerous violent campaigns carried out against Israel for the past 55 years by groups such as the PLO. Well, like many of the myths that have fueled anti-Semitic hatred in the Arab world, the idea of colonialist Israel is simply false, as revealed in Arutz Sheva:
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war plays a key part in the Arab National Liberation tale. The Israeli victory in that war is presented as the defining event, the "nakba" or catastrophe. In order to claim that the PLO and Fatah are fighting for National Liberation in 2005, their promoters argue that British imperialism, using Jewish proxies, crushed Palestinian Liberation in 1948. The corollary: if the Jews will just grant Arabs the National Liberation they were denied in '48, Arab leaders will deliver on peace with Israel.Of course, if this story is false, if in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and if it was the Arab leaders and not the Jews who were agents of imperial Britain, then it certainly suggests that their proteges are not fighting for National Liberation today.
The lies that form the basis for today’s Arab nationalism are exposed in a series of British government memorandums, published in the Nation magazine and paraphrased here:
Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the common perception that the creation of Israel was a project of Western colonialism. The Nation shows that during the half year prior to the all-out Arab invasion on May 15, when Britain was responsible for security in its Palestine Mandate territory, it incited, micro-managed and did public relations work for a campaign of Arab troop infiltration and terror.The intelligence documents cited below show that before the Arab invasion, British intelligence knew that the Arabs terrorizing the future Israel were being led in part by Nazi advisers. These included Bosnian Muslims from the infamous Handzar Division of the Waffen SS. According to a French intelligence document published by The Nation seven months later, the British sent thousands of Nazi prisoners of war, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack. This was after the Arab invasion.
Consistent with British tolerance for and apparent employment of Nazi war criminals against new-born Israel, the Nation memorandum shows that the British adopted a propaganda line reminiscent of the Nazis' "Jewish-Bolshevik plot" motif. The British accused Jewish Holocaust survivors trying to get to Palestine of being Soviet Communist infiltrators. A 1948 article in the London Times shows that Arab leaders were saying the same thing:
Blockbuster historical research, a must read.
This is a truly brilliant article. But I have serious doubts about it going any further than the 'extreme right-wing' Arutz Sheva.
Historical information doesn't seem to matter for today's "Champions of Human Rights"
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dolphin, CAGE co-founder.
http://www.acage.org
The British, as Mandatory authority, had made several commitments to the Mandates Commissioin of the League of Nations. Two of the most important were to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and to "encourage close Jewish settlement on the land." The "land" in question turned out to be a lot less than the Mandates Commission itself had contemplated or than the Zioniest delegation had believed it was to be awarded. In an attempt to offer Abdullah, the Hashemite prince and older brother of Feisal, who had just been given (by the British) the throne of Iraq (after all, once those Hashemites were booted out of Mecca and Medina by the Al-Saud, they needed some kind of consolation prize), something other than Syria, which he seemed to covet, they simply gave him all of Easten Palestine, and closed that area to Jewish immigration -- the very immigration that they had commited themselves to facilitating. The Mandates Commission was furious at this act. But it felt it could do nothing. In fact, the British record as mandatory authority was terrible, though there were a few people -- Colonel Meinertzhagen who was Allenby's intelligence offcer and who saw that British officials not only colluded with, but encouraged the 1920 pogrom in Jerusalem, in which the British prevented Jewish self-defense forces under Jabotinsky from protecting or rescuing their co-religionists; there was Wyndham Deedes back in London, and in the 1930s, there was Orde Wingate, who insisted on training Jewish forces to defend themselves against the marauding Arabs who attacked Jewish villages and individuals. Both Meinertzhagen, in the 1920s, and Orde Wingate, in the 1930s, were pressured into leaving Mandatory Palestine. The first went on to write about the birds of Arabia and, in 1956, to publish his important Diary; the second went to Ethiopia to help against Mussolini and later to Burma, to conduct guerrilla war against the Japanese in the capaign that was under the overall command of General Slim, and died, with American airmen, in a plane crash.
Some British behaved badly. The truning away of ships carrying refugees after the war (the travails of the Exodus were only one small part of it) continued the turning away of ships that had left, laden with desperate Jews, various European ports in the 1930s and even during the early days of the war -- German ports, or the Rumanian ports (e.g. Costanta) that remained open throughout the war. The Struma, of course, sank in the Black Sea, with all aboard (it may have been its unseaworthiness, it may have been a Soviet torpedo) long before it could make it to Palestine, where undoubtedly it would have been turned back.
Even after everything became known to everyone, after the camps were opened, after the Nuremberg Trials, in the Attlee government the most relevant officials were distinctly unsympathetic. R. H. S. Crossman, who was in the government at the time, later wrote of how officials in the British government "had tried to destroy Israel." Ernest Bevin warned darkly of what would happen, for example, if those pesky and demanding Jews tried to "jump to the head of the queue" of those in D.P. (Displaced Persons) camps, in their desire to leave Europe for Palestine. That he was so lacking in sympathy then, or in his other pronouncements, show what one must conclude was the usual pathological condition of antisemitism for which there are clear and distinct markers, and dead giveaways in speech and attitude.
Before May 15, 1948, the British were supplying and training the military forces of Egypt, Jordan (the famous Arab Legion under Glubb Pasha), Iraq. The training, and the arming, continued despite the fact that a total arms embargo was supposedly declared by England and all the other countries in Europe, "evenhandedly" to both sides. Some few weapons were smuggled into Israel by sympatizers; a handful of planes came from Czechoslovakia, and later in the war pilots in Israel's service (two non-Jewish Englishmen, in fact, were among those pilots) used those planes to good effect.
The Arab effort was a classic Jihad. There was no mention then, in any statement by any Arab, of the "Palestinian people." The "Palestinian people" had not yet been invented -- there was no need to, or so it seemed. That came later, after the 1967 war. Statements such as those by Azzam Pasha showed clearly the intent to destroy "the Jews" -- for the unheard-of crime, the sin against Shari'a, Islam, and the natural order, of establishing a state controlled by non-Muslims on land once controlled by Muslims.
I guess the anti-Westernism of The Nation trumps its anti-Zionism. Does anyone think The Nation would have bothered to publish this article had it been damning only of the Arabs and not also of the evil British Empire?
This is not new information.
I have just pulled my battered copy (1975) of Golda Meir's autobiography My Life (what else) off the shelf to re-read her experiences of this period. It stuck in my mind particularly because of her comments about the British soldiers, one of whom in the Indian Army was eventually to be my history teacher and who had vivid memories of the tragedies of many of the displaced persons.
Chapter 7 The Struggle Against the British disturbed me a lot when I first read it. As it perplexed Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann who were there.
At the beginning of Chapter 8 - We have our State she wrote
"I don't know (nor does it matter any more whether Bevin was a little insane, or just anti-semitic or both. What I do know is that he insisted on pitting the strength of the British Empire against the will of the Jews to live and that by doing so he not only brought great suffering to people who had already suffered enormously, but also forced upon thousands of british soldiers and sailors a role that must have filled them with horror. (it did indeed)....I looked at these nice young English boys and was filled with pity for them."
She spoke well of Richard Crossman, calling him a good friend.
And Dr Pepper has a point.
Atlee's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin (not to be confused with Nye Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service), as far as I understand and remember reading, said he thought that the Old Testament was the most evil book ever written, and had a strong dislike for Jews. I'll try and find out where I got that information from.
Many people traverse the great divide from Left to Right in their lifetimes. David Horowitz, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager and even myself to name just a few. It's not uncommon.
Saddam lionized Hitler and "Iran" is the way of saying "Aryan" in Persian. Iran wanted to be among the master race, because the Quran says they are. They wanted to be identified with the Nazis even in the 1930's, and many Muslims still see Hitler as some kind of hero. Sick.
Elephant
It's bloodly public school Lawrence of Arabia syndrome again.
Flowing burnoose (what exactly is a burnoose anyway?)= sexy.
Tallis and kipot = not.
I think the quotation you are thinking of is said to come from Christopher Mayhew's diary for May 1948 (before I was born). It may be in his book A War of Words: a Cold War Witness Christopher Mayhew IB Tauris, London, 1998,
I still do know why the British apponted Al Husseini as grand Mufti of Jerusalem against the the advice even of other muslim clerics.
One wonders if they tried then to destroy what they had promised to create under the mandate.
One also wanders what would have ensued had Al Husseini not been given the appointment to the history of Israel.
----" Saddam lionized Hitler and "Iran" is the way of saying "Aryan" in Persian. Iran wanted to be among the master race, because the Quran says they are. They wanted to be identified with the Nazis even in the 1930's, and many Muslims still see Hitler as some kind of hero. Sick." -- from above.
If there was ever to be a comment that would justify the shutdown of the comments section, this would be it. From the depths of ignorance, Behmond has pulled out something for a "race". Alas, leftists with their heads buried in the sand or even those a little reluctant might simply hit the X button on the top right corner of their windows after reading that one (if they haven't done so already). Qur'an might well be supremacist when it comes to the "ummah", but as has been repeated countless times, the "ummah" is not a race, it is simply a community of believers. Dont EVER use "race" when talking about the ideology that is Islam. It is the biggest mark of ignorance you can sport as a badge on your blazer.
Yes, the Aryan connection exists but not for any 20th century reasons, Iran was Iran even before the Islamic Revolution. India and Persia had shared millennia of interactions and hence the "Aryan" bond. Please dispell the Nazi notion of "Aryan". It is simply a Sanskrit term for "noble, cultured" etc. Doesnt refer to a RACE.
Granny:
Indeed it is. I suspect it's an extention of the "noble savage" thing that some Europeans (Scots and Germans) have. A simple Arab, clad in a burnoose, wandering the desert with camels definitely strikes a much more romantic figure than Israelis converting the desert into lush, fertile land. And then, I suppose, it's that we Jews, damn it, are so given to being independent, instead of subservient to a hierarchy of sheiks and princes. We just don't know our place. As Ben Gurion famously told John Kennedy, if Kennedy thought it was tough being president of a nation of 200 million, imagine being president of a nation of 2 million presidents.
Someone asked about Ernest Bevan above. I know Joan Peters referenced Bevan's preference for Arabs over Jews in her book, "From Time Immemorial:.
Chevalier,
The Balfour Declaration of November 2nd 1917 promised to establish a Jewish homeland whose territory was to include what is now Jordan.
However in the White Paper of 1921, Israel was to lose the land east of the Jordan river, hence granting her only about a quarter of the area previously promised.
I suspect that the Balfour Declaration was done during Britain's darkest moments of WW1, in that Russia was out of the war, u-boats were threatening our food supply, and the battle of Passchendaele was almost over, producing very little gains for an enormous loss of life. I suspect that this was done to try and increase support and assistance from America. With the war over in 1918, such support was not nearly so important, so Britian could afford to break its promises.