Part Six.
Divisions between different Jewish groups have always existed. The Ashkenazi (nazi???) Jews (from Northern Europe) dislike the Sephardic Jews (from the Orient and the Mediterranean) but they especially hate the Yemeni Jews (brought into Palestine
The term “Ashkenazi” actually comes from the Hebrew word for ‘Germany ’ reflecting the fact that many Ashkenazi Jews settled in Germany and along the Rhine Valley Eastern Europe .
In Sydney we have the Jews who are sick of the ‘survivor Jews’; the Jews from Europe hate the ‘suburban’ South African Jews and they all hate the Russian Jews who arrived most recently. This is normal in the Jewish community. Argument is normal – the old Jewish joke goes ‘If you have two Jews you will have three sides of an argument. My daughters reject their Jewish heritage because of Israel
The majority of Zionist officials who held power from the 1920’s through to the 1970’s came from Eastern Europe and are thought to be descendant from the Khazar people who converted to Judaism. The Khazars originated in the Caucasus, not in Palestine
The Khazars were a potent military force in Eastern Europe till about the middle of the 11th century, their last power base being the Crimean peninsula. In the 7th and 8th centuries, they defeated the Eastern Caliphate in several key battles, thus halting the spread of Islam north of the Caucasus mountain range, much the same as what the Carolingian rulers did to the Western Caliphate at the Pyrenees . (Ironically, these Jewish converts made Eastern Europe safe for Christianity.) The Khazars gained control over major waterways such as the Caspian Sea, the Volga River , and the Dnieper River Kiev by the Dnieper , Sarkel by the Don, Samandar by the Caspian) to guard against enemy invaders.
The king of the Khazars learned the Torah with the assistance of the Jewish preacher Isaac Sangari, whose existence has recently been verified (by the discovery of poems authored by Sangari in the Firkovitch collection of manuscripts). In the 9th century, the Khazarian kings and nobles officially converted to Judaism. Surrounded by the Islamic Eastern Caliphate of Persia and the Christian Byzantine Empire, the Khazars may have chosen Judaism as their state religion to avoid being religiously (and hence politically) dominated by either empire, so that they could avoid being labelled as heathens while at the same time remaining independent of their powerful neighbours. By the start of the 10th century, Judaism gained a stronghold among the common Khazar people, and the Hebrew script came into use in Khazaria. However, most of the soldiers in the Khazar army were Muslims, and the non-Khazar ethnic groups within the Khazar Empire (such as the Slavs, Bulgars, and Goths) did not adopt Judaism but rather remained pagans, Muslims, and Christians.
Shlomo Sands in[i] his book The Invention of the Jewish Nation has a chapter titled ‘Realms of Silence’. He quotes the well-known Jewish author Arthur Koestler, a Zionist pioneer in his youth. Koestler [ii] ;
writing about the Khazar wrote… ‘genetically they are more closely related to the Hun, Uiger and Madyar tribes than to the seed of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.’ Shlomo comments ‘Koestler was not certain, in the 1970’s whether the non- Ashkenazi Jews were descendants of the Judeans, and if the Khazar conversion was an exception in Jewish history. At the end of his book Koestler covers himself by saying “[iii]
‘Israel
Shlomo continues;
… In the 1970’s Israel was caught up in the momentum of territorial expansion, and without the Old Testament in its hand and the ‘exile of the Jewish’ in its memory, it would have no justification for annexing Arab Jerusalem and establishing settlements in the West bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan heights and even the Sinai Peninsula. …. the Zionist was entirely caught up in the mythology of an eternal ‘ethnic’ time.[iv]
From the end of WWI the Zionist leadership concentrated on mobilising its community towards one clear goal - the construction of an infrastructure for a Jewish State in Palestine
Ilan Pappe, who in 2004 taught both Israeli and Palestinian students in Haifa
‘The Zionist leaders had a holistic approach to their role, which permeated every sphere of their communal life with force and determination, just as it (Zionism) invaded every neglected or empty space in the land it could reach.’[vi]
The Zionists greatest success was in extracting the Zionist community from the British colonial state in significant spheres of life. One of the earliest examples of this was education.
The Zionist educational unit founded in 1914 was an essential tool in creating a new reality. [vii] The most surprising act by the British colonial government was to appoint several Zionists to the general directory of education, which was responsible only for the Palestinian, i.e. government, schools.[viii]
Unfortunately the Palestinians leaders, it seems, were ready to leave the social and economic life of Palestine
The Palestinian leaders, semi-feudal in the countryside and authoritarian in the cities, were unable to transcend the narrow world of the politics of notables. In a situation where political elites fought each other vehemently, this narrowmindedness was tantamount to paralysis and stagnation.[ix]
Palestinians were dispossessed in many ways including the Zionists fully exploiting the (mostly Ottoman) ownership laws to take over lands that had been cultivated by the same families for centuries without ownership. Another common method was to purchase land from absentee landlords and then evict the tenants.
Jacqueline Rose quotes Hannah Arendt as having predicted with uncanny prescience the future of the new nation after its victory in the coming (1948) war.
‘The ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defence to a degree that would submerge all other interests and activities. The growth of a Jewish culture would cease to be the concern of the whole people; social experiments would have to be discarded as impractical luxuries; political thought would centre around military strategy; economic development would be determined exclusively by the need of war.’ [x]
In November 1947 a proposal was put forward in the United Nations proposing a partition of Palestine
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/israel_hist_1973.jpg show the suggested partition - but maybe more interestingly are the ‘pre biblical’ maps, which seem to give a detailed geographical location for the periods 930 BC to 142 BC. I guess they were drawn up and placed into the dead sea scrolls or something – there is no reference to where they come from. That they exist as a record in an institution such as the Texas
The world’s two biggest powers; both holders of veto power; the British and US Governments were Israel
Palestinian military strategy was undermined by a secret agreement between the Jordanians and the Zionists that the Jordanians would fudge their army’s support so that it would be ineffective. The armies of Egypt , Syria , and Lebanon
The ethnic cleansing began in March 1948,[xi] two months before the State of Israel was declared. Extreme violence was used including the murder of whole Arab village populations (eg Dir Yassin April 1948). In some villages only males between 13 and 50 years old were slaughtered. These murders were mostly accompanied by the total destruction of the villages. In preparing for the possibility of not winning total victory the Zionists had studied the geographical importance of each village and lists of villages designated for obliteration were handed out to army commanders. About half of the 1000 Palestinian villages, established for centuries, were so destroyed.
70,000 of the large landholders in Palestine
The British Government, which abandoned its legal and moral responsibility for the Mandate, fled home by the middle of May 1948 after the ceasefire. Pro- Zionist British officers gave one of the Zionist gangs, the Hagana, control of essential services and military bases while pro-Palestinian British officers were unable to contact the Palestinians. Bank accounts in Britain holding money accumulated over 30 years from Palestine
In 1947 Jews possessed only 6% of the land, had a population that was just 30% of the total Palestinian population - with the vast majority of that 30% having been in Palestine
In 1948, 750,000 Palestinian people were dispossessed of their land, farms, houses and businesses and forced into exile by the Zionists. This of course radically changed the numbers as this 750,000 represented ‘90% of those living in what had been designated to be the Jewish State’[xiv]. This vile, desperate situation of the Palestinian exiles festers to this day.
The three books written by Jewish authors (Ilan Pappe’s A history of Modern Palestine, 2004, Jacqueline Roses’ The Question is Zion, 2005 and the recent book by Shlomo Sand The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009) are essential reading for a fuller understanding of this subject but it is to a book written by a Palestinian that I will now turn to, to close this brief, clumsy attempt to share some of the story of the theft of Palestine from its people in the process of the creating a Jewish State - The Question of Palestine by Edward W. Said[xv]
Page 69 (condensed extract)
…. although it coincided with an era of the most virulent Western anti-Semitism,
Zionism also coincided with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was as part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl………
Zionism never spoke of itself as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as a Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient. To those Palestinian victims that Zionism sought to displace, the fact that the Zionists had been victims of European anti-Semitism, cannot have helped their understanding of Israel’s continued oppression of Palestinians. Palestinians could see quite clearly that, once victims themselves, Occidental Jews in Israel had become oppressors …. (the fact that) no sizable segment of the Israeli population has as yet been able to confront the terrible social and political injustice done to the native, is an indication of how deeply ingrained are the (by now) anomalous imperialist perspectives basic to Zionism. The fact that no Palestinian has as yet been able to reconcile himself to Zionism suggests the extent to which, for the Palestinian, Zionism has appeared to be an uncompromisingly exclusionary, discriminatory, colonialist praxis (accepted practise).
Page 72 One needs to repeat that what in Zionism served the no doubt justified ends of Jewish tradition, saving the Jews as a people from homelessness and anti-Semitism and restoring them to nationhood, also collaborated with those aspects of the dominant Western Culture (in which Zionism institutionally lived) making it possible for Europeans to view non-Europeans as inferior, marginal, and irrelevant.
(Something to think about when Israel celebrates the sixty-second anniversary of its‘creation day’ this May eh)
Stephen O’Rourke
Bibliography:
Bethmann, Erich W., Decisive Years in Palestine, 1918-1948, American Friends of the Middle East, New York1957
Davies, Norman, A History of Europe, Pimlico, London, 1997
Elston, D.R., No Alternative-Israel Observed, Hutchinson, London, 1960
Kimmerling, Baruch, Zionism and Territory, University of California, Berkeley, 1983
Mendes-Flohr, Paul & Reinharz, Jehuda (compilers and Editors), The Jew in the Modern World – A Documentary History. (2nd ed.), Oxford University Press, New York, 1995
Pappe, Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004
Parkinson, C.Northcote, East and West, John Murray, London, 1963
Rabinowicz, Oskar, K., Fifty Years of Zionism, Robert Anscombe & Co, London, 1950
Said, Edward W., The Question of Palestine, Vintage Books, New York, 1980
Said, Edward W., Orientalism-Western concepts of the Orient, Penguin Books, London.1978
Sands, Shlomo, The Invention of the Jewish People, (Translated Yael Lotan) Verso, London, 2008
Segev, T., One Palestine, Complete – Jews and Arabs under the Mandate, (translated from Hebrew by Hain Watzman), Metropolitan Books, London, 1999
Shafir, Gershon, Land, Labor and The Origins of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, University of California Press, Los Angeles, 1996
Shapira, Anita, Land and Power- The Zionist Resort to Force, 1881-1948, Stanford University Press, Stanford C.A., 1992
Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine, Vintage, New York, 1979
Simons, Chaim, International Proposals to Transfer Arabs from Palestine 1895-1947,
Ktav, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1988
Spiro, Rabbi Ken, http://www.aish.com/jl/h/48960501.hhtml
Stein, Kenneth W., Quotes from-The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, University of North Caroline, 1984, http://pnews.org/art/4art/Landquestion.shtml pages 1-10
Stein, Leonard, The Balfour Declaration, Vallentine-Mitchell, London, 1961
Sternhell, Zeev, The Founding Myths of Israel, translated by David Maisel, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1998 (Electronic book version)
[i] Sands, Shlomo, The Invention of the Jewish People, (Translated Yael Lotan) Verso, London
[ii] Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth tribe, Hutchinson, London
[iii] ibid, pp 223
[iv] Shlomo Sands, Ibid, pp239
[v] Pappe, Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
[vi] Ibid pp88
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid pp89
[ix] Ibid, pp87
[x] Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Question is Zion Princeton University Press, London
[xi] Pappe, Ilan, A History of Modern Palestine , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
[xii] Ibid, pp 130
[xiii] Ibid, pp 135
[xiv] Ibid, pp 139
[xv] Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine , Vintage, New York
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