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A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
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A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
The Watchman
August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
"the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
The Jews beat the Arabs.
Out of the concentration camps, ghettoes, banks, courtrooms, theaters and factories of Europe the Chosen People had assembled and had won their first great military victory since Judas Maccabeus* beat the Syrian Nicanor at Adasa 2,109 years ago.
Their success has been hidden from the world by U.N. maneuvering and by a confusing war of a hundred skirmishes with real battles. Although, in years to come, fighting might break out again & again, its probable pattern was "fixed: the Jews were too tough, too smart and too vigorous for the divided and debilitated Arab world to conquer.
As the U.N. truce settled on Palestine last week it seemed probable that the new state of Israel, already recognized by 15 nations, would seek and get U.N. membership at next fall's meeting in Paris. It was time to stop pondering the settled question of whether there would be a Jewish state, time, to start asking what kind of nation Israel was.
The world—every corner of it—knew Jews, but the Israelis were not the Jews most of the world knew. Two millenniums of sorrow and insecurity in a hostile world had put their stamp on the character of this people. In Israel, a few years of struggle to build a state, a few months at the center of the world stage, a few weeks of battle had superimposed another, bolder stamp. That the Israelis' Dry had come just after the worst of thousand persecutions, that it had been by those who survived the slaughter of 6,000,000, made the newly minted Jewish character gleam brighter.
Political Bends. The new Israelis walked with a confident swagger along beach front at Tel Aviv. They talked confidently—indeed, stridently—of a state of ten million, not necessarily confined to the present boundaries of Israel. It was a bad joke, and also a sober observation, that the idea of Drang nach Osten lived in the new nation of Hitler's victims. As they looked around them at a disorganized and unproductive Arab world, Israelis showed some of the reactions of the prewar Germans looking around a disorganized and unproductive Europe.
Jewish traditions of peace and democracy run deep, but the Israelis had been transferred so quickly from the depths of Europe to the heights of superiority in the Middle East that they could not escape the political equivalent of deep-sea divers' bends. The new blood of nationalism ran fast and hot in Israel; sometimes it seemed to be gushing out on the ground. Pleading for more understanding and tolerance of Israel, one sympathetic observer warned: "This could become an ugly little Spartan state."
Israel's present leaders are determined that their nation will not take that path. Foremost and most determined among them is David Ben-Gurion, Premier and Defense Minister, labor leader and philosopher, hardheaded, unsociable and abrupt politician, a prophet who carries a gun.
Mystical Ends. Ben-Gurion lives on a typical Tel Aviv boulevard, in a two-story stucco house, distinguished from its neighbors only by the soldiers with Sten guns at the entrance. In his library about a third of the books are on military history and tactics; next in number are books about Greek philosophy and Buddha, his current study. (Zionists all over the world scout up rare Buddhist books for Ben-Gurion.)
In a ground floor study, its windows bricked up against air raids, Ben-Gurion recently sat and answered a reporter's questions with terse frankness.
"Can you conquer the Arabs?"
"Against the Arabs we are one against 40."
"Won't Israel grow?"
"There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million."
"Can that many be accommodated within the U.N. partition boundaries of Israel?"
"I doubt it."
Then Ben-Gurion dropped his matter-of-fact manner. The labor politician was replaced by the prophet. A dreamer's stare veiled his blue eyes. The room was small but his voice throbbed loudly, as if speaking to multitudes against the winds on Mount Carmel.
"We would not have taken on this war merely for the purpose of enjoying this tiny state. There have been only two great peoples: the Greeks and the Jews. Perhaps the Greeks were even greater than the Jews, but now I can see no sign of that old greatness in the modern Greeks. Maybe, when the present process is finished we too will degenerate, but I see no sign of degeneration at present."
His voice took on a deeper tone:
"Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much. We had a message to give the world, but we were overwhelmed, and the message was cut off in the middle. In time there will be millions of us—becoming stronger and stronger—and we will complete the message."
"What is the message?" the reporter asked.
"Our policy must be the unity of the human race. The world is divided into two blocs. We consider that the United Nations' ideal is a Jewish ideal."
At that point, Ben-Gurion descended from Mount Carmel. "Perhaps," he said apologetically, "this may sound rather chauvinistic."
Helpful Push. In less exalted moods, Ben-Gurion goes quietly and industriously about his work of running Israel. His work day of twelve hours is broken by a frugal lunch at a small hotel with other government workers. Colleagues call him by his surname or, occasionally, E.G. During the fighting he slept at a boarding house near his office. Nowadays, he goes home to his wife, a nurse from Minsk whom he met and married in Brooklyn. Ben-Gurion has no close personal friends, but he is widely respected for his ability and his unassuming simplicity. Last week, on a road near Tel Aviv, a truck ground to a stop and the driver signaled for help. Ben-Gurion and a young aide happened to be in a car behind. The 63-year-old Premier of Israel got out and helped push the truck while his young companion stood guard with a rifle to keep down possible Arab snipers.
His son Amos, who was a major in the British Army, later a Haganah fighter, recently married a British Christian. Ben-Gurion did not hold her faith against her; he gathered up an armload of Jewish histories and Zionist tracts, mailed them to her so that she would understand her adopted country.
The Going Up. Few people understand Israel as well as David Ben-Gurion. His life tells the story of Israel's development. He was born, the fourth of eleven children, in 1884, at Plonsk, Poland, then part of Russia. As he grew up, all Russia was stirring. Jews especially felt the tension of gathering storms. Zionism, the dream of the great Theodor Herzl, captured young David's imagination. So did Socialism. He decided to go to Palestine, where other Jews had preceded him. They belonged to the First Aliyah (literally, a going up, a wave); most of them were "gentlemen farmers" who hired Arabs to till their land and to guard their property. But Arab guards proved unreliable. The men of the First Aliyah hired some of the immigrants of the Second Aliyah, including David, to replace them. Ben-Gurion came to Palestine at a turning point in Zionist history. Such "practical" Zionists as British Chemist Chaim Weizmann† (who later won British promises to support a Jewish National Home in Palestine) had persuaded Zionists to speed up the development of Palestine without waiting for a political title to the country.
Handing Over. Ben-Gurion took three steps of the utmost practical and symbolic importance to Zionism: 1) he organized his fellow watchmen into a defense force, the germ of Haganah, the army that beat the Arabs this year; 2) realizing that forces outside Palestine would be decisive, he went to Turkey, which then held the country, to study law; 3) he then came to the U.S. to help organize the Pioneer Movement, which was based on the sound notion that if Jews were ever to get a solid footing in Palestine, they would have to work the land themselves.
One of the most dramatic and significant elements in Israel's story was the "declassing" of immigrants, the transformation of professional men and tradesmen into farmers and factory workers. Ben-Gurion's hand was in that extraordinary development.
He went back to Palestine as a corporal with Allenby's army in 1917 and then, under the British Mandate, organized the Labor party and the Histadrut (General Federation of Jewish Labor), over both of which he still exerts a dominant influence. Looking back, Ben-Gurion recently said: "We did not hesitate to hand over to the labor community the cherished institutions and treasured economic enterprises that were begun by small select groups inspired by a pioneering zeal—by the few men of the Second Aliyah."
"Sneh on Their Boots." The Histadrut, to which the men of the Second Aliyah turned over Zionism's economic heart, is unique among labor unions as Israel is unique among states. The Zionist socialists, having no nation, could not pursue a program of nationalizing industry. Instead, they turned over more & more functions to the Histadrut until it became a state within a state, a vast trust as well as a labor union. The Histadrut is one of Israel's biggest banks and the main local life insurance company. Histadrut controls 96% of all transportation. (It costs between $1,800 and $5,400 to join the bus drivers' union.) Nearly half of Israel's Jews belong to the Histadrut, which controls directly or indirectly 20% of the country's economy.
Most of the farming is collectivized, because socialist Zionists wanted to work the land as intensively as possible, with Jewish labor. The collectives have another advantage: many are stockaded forts, built to protect pioneer settlers from Arab attacks.
The peculiar socialism of the Histadrut and the collective farms does not lead Israel toward Communist sympathies. Quite the contrary. Ben-Gurion's Labor party, which dominates the present coalition government, is consciously but cautiously antiCommunist. To its left stands the United Workers party; in the left wing of this group is a sinister opportunist named Moshe Sneh, who plays the Kremlin's game. As one Israeli punned: "If the Russians ever come to Israel, it will be with Sneh [Yiddish for snow] on their boots."
On Ben-Gurion's right lurks the Irgun, which calls him a dictator because he wants to prevent Irgun from operating a private army. The Irgunists are intense nationalists and "revisionists," which in practical present terms means they are gangsters and expansionists, itching to carry the fight into Arab territory.
"Blow Your Nose." The new nation is further divided by the differing nationalities and social backgrounds of its citizens. Each aliyah had its own characteristics and dreams for the new state. The men of the Second Aliyah are still on top in the government, but in the army and among the people, the sabras (literally: cacti), the native-born, are coming to the fore. Palestinian climate has played a, strange trick on the sabras. They run to the big-boned, blue-eyed, blond athlete type associated with anti-Semitic persecutions.
In other lands the German Jews tend to look upon themselves as the aristocrats of Jewry (although they give precedence to the Sephardic families from Spain and Portugal). In Palestine the recent German aliyah is looked down upon and made the butt of the same kind of joke that German Jews in the U.S. used to hurl at their Russian brethren.
Israel calls the German Jew a yecki (roughly: squarehead), laughs at his naiveté. Many of the yecki are physicians (of that great, devoted band of German-Jewish doctors) and they have a hard time adjusting to the land. Many try chicken farming, going about it in that highly scientific Teuton way which makes the Polish and Russian Israelis guffaw. They say that when one yecki found a sick chicken he sent all the way to India for a serum, inoculated every one of his flock. They tell of a yecki with an old dry cow who asked a Polish Jew to sell it for him. The Pole found a Russian Jew to whom he said: "This is a fine young cow; she gives six liters of milk every day." The yecki, standing by, said: "Well, well, that I didn't know; I'd like to buy her back." To new arrivals the Eastern Jews say: "Did you come here from conviction—or from Germany?"
The people of each aliyah may speak their own language for the first two years, after that are expected to switch to Hebrew.* A dead language, a language of scholarship and liturgy for centuries, Hebrew has been revived and made the official language of Israel. In earlier days, some of the old folks were shocked to hear Hebrew used in everyday speech. When a mother scolded, "Little Ittomar, blow your nose," in the tongue of the prophets, oldsters winced.
"Buses Will Run." Hebrew will help hold the new nation together. The world outside Israel (including many U.S. Zionists) expected the main cement of the new state to be the Jewish religion, preserved through centuries of vicissitudes. In Israel this seems to have lost its validity. When the Promised Land was the unpaid balance of a divine I.O.U., when they lived among more or less hostile Gentiles, religion was a far more vital force than it is today in Israel. The Jew is supposed to wear a hat; in Tel Aviv, young men risk sunstroke to go hatless. Waiters at the Armon Hotel in Tel Aviv have no qualms about offering guests bacon. Throughout the country dietary laws are widely breached.
The constitution to be written next fall will make a point of separating church and state. Ben-Gurion and other leaders rarely turn up at synagogues. Jews are not supposed to travel in vehicles on the Sabbath but they do today in Israel. Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok, a brisk, urbane statesman, did not even wait for a reporter to ask him about it. Said Shertok: "And if you're going to ask whether the trains and buses are going to run on the Sabbath, I can tell you right now—they are."
The old Jews of Europe had to wear long curls; many young Israelis of Tel Aviv favor crew cuts in the American—or Prussian—style. Israeli girls, who run to the buxom bucolic type, stride the streets in slacks or shorts. Many have gone into the CHEN, Israeli version of the WAC. The young people turn their backs on sentimental, nostalgic, masochistic traditional Jewish art. Such plays as the great Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk, draw an almost unanimous "it stinks" from the sabras. Their strong, bronzed young hands have no tendency to rend their open-necked sport shirts in grief.
Victims of History. If not religion, what will hold Israel together? Today fear of the Arabs performs for the Israelis the same unifying function that Gentile persecution and discrimination performed during the Dispersion. The Arabs, as Ben-Gurion noted, are 40 to one Israeli. But the Jewish superiority over the Arabs is not just a figment of Israeli imagination; it is a fact. Israel has probably the highest percentage of skilled labor and executive experience of any people in the world; by comparison, the Arabs are near the bottom of the scale.
The Western world tends to think of the Arab as a falcon-eyed warrior on a white horse. That Arab is still around, but he is far less numerous than the disease-ridden wretches who lie in the hot streets, too weak, sick and purposeless to roll over into the shade.
The Arabs, no less than the Jews, are victims of history. Four centuries of Turkish rule hurt them at least as badly as a decade of Naziism hurt the Jews. Now, in their morning of independence, the Arabs have suffered defeat at the hands of a small, despised people. It rankles.
Yet only in peace between Jews and Arabs is there much hope for either. If the Israelis are forced into many years of war they may indeed become "an ugly little Spartan state." Their wiser leaders know this. Such men as Ben-Gurion see the Israel of tomorrow as an industrial, trading and organizing nation leading the whole Middle East to new levels of productivity.
But how can the Jews now come to terms with the Arab world whose insecure leaders do not dare cross up the people they have inflamed against Israel? The Jews' hopes of a deal are pinned on Abdullah of Transjordan, whose British paid and trained Arab Legion bolsters up his position as Arab spokesman and leaves him free to compromise. Ironically, it is the British subsidy to Abdullah (against which the Zionists rail) that offers the best chance of attaining the understanding with the Arabs essential to Israel's future peace and commerce.
Need for a Talent. If the Israel issue plunges the Arab world into further chaos and thus gives the Russians a chance to gain influence with the Arab mobs, World War III becomes much nearer. Ben-Gurion, for one, has little hope that Israel would survive such a war. "We would be crushed," he says simply.
Israelis who do not understand the danger of too much success are impatient at British and U.S. concern for Arab friendship. They shout "Oil!" as if nothing but profits were involved. The same oil, which the Arabs can shut off, is an essential part of the world's hope of recovery; without that recovery, the dream of Israel as a prosperous trading nation cannot come true. The same oil is an essential part of the defense of the West. Without that defense Israel, a democratic state, is lost.
So the Israeli political position is a highly delicate one. They may resist Abdullah—but must be sure not to crush him. They may beg the U.S. for help—but must be sure that help does not hopelessly alienate the Arabs. They may snarl at the British, but must remember that the British want essentially what Israel has to have—stability in the Middle East.
In their long and brilliant history the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it.
The Watchman
August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
"the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
The Jews beat the Arabs.
Out of the concentration camps, ghettoes, banks, courtrooms, theaters and factories of Europe the Chosen People had assembled and had won their first great military victory since Judas Maccabeus* beat the Syrian Nicanor at Adasa 2,109 years ago.
Their success has been hidden from the world by U.N. maneuvering and by a confusing war of a hundred skirmishes with real battles. Although, in years to come, fighting might break out again & again, its probable pattern was "fixed: the Jews were too tough, too smart and too vigorous for the divided and debilitated Arab world to conquer.
As the U.N. truce settled on Palestine last week it seemed probable that the new state of Israel, already recognized by 15 nations, would seek and get U.N. membership at next fall's meeting in Paris. It was time to stop pondering the settled question of whether there would be a Jewish state, time, to start asking what kind of nation Israel was.
The world—every corner of it—knew Jews, but the Israelis were not the Jews most of the world knew. Two millenniums of sorrow and insecurity in a hostile world had put their stamp on the character of this people. In Israel, a few years of struggle to build a state, a few months at the center of the world stage, a few weeks of battle had superimposed another, bolder stamp. That the Israelis' Dry had come just after the worst of thousand persecutions, that it had been by those who survived the slaughter of 6,000,000, made the newly minted Jewish character gleam brighter.
Political Bends. The new Israelis walked with a confident swagger along beach front at Tel Aviv. They talked confidently—indeed, stridently—of a state of ten million, not necessarily confined to the present boundaries of Israel. It was a bad joke, and also a sober observation, that the idea of Drang nach Osten lived in the new nation of Hitler's victims. As they looked around them at a disorganized and unproductive Arab world, Israelis showed some of the reactions of the prewar Germans looking around a disorganized and unproductive Europe.
Jewish traditions of peace and democracy run deep, but the Israelis had been transferred so quickly from the depths of Europe to the heights of superiority in the Middle East that they could not escape the political equivalent of deep-sea divers' bends. The new blood of nationalism ran fast and hot in Israel; sometimes it seemed to be gushing out on the ground. Pleading for more understanding and tolerance of Israel, one sympathetic observer warned: "This could become an ugly little Spartan state."
Israel's present leaders are determined that their nation will not take that path. Foremost and most determined among them is David Ben-Gurion, Premier and Defense Minister, labor leader and philosopher, hardheaded, unsociable and abrupt politician, a prophet who carries a gun.
Mystical Ends. Ben-Gurion lives on a typical Tel Aviv boulevard, in a two-story stucco house, distinguished from its neighbors only by the soldiers with Sten guns at the entrance. In his library about a third of the books are on military history and tactics; next in number are books about Greek philosophy and Buddha, his current study. (Zionists all over the world scout up rare Buddhist books for Ben-Gurion.)
In a ground floor study, its windows bricked up against air raids, Ben-Gurion recently sat and answered a reporter's questions with terse frankness.
"Can you conquer the Arabs?"
"Against the Arabs we are one against 40."
"Won't Israel grow?"
"There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million."
"Can that many be accommodated within the U.N. partition boundaries of Israel?"
"I doubt it."
Then Ben-Gurion dropped his matter-of-fact manner. The labor politician was replaced by the prophet. A dreamer's stare veiled his blue eyes. The room was small but his voice throbbed loudly, as if speaking to multitudes against the winds on Mount Carmel.
"We would not have taken on this war merely for the purpose of enjoying this tiny state. There have been only two great peoples: the Greeks and the Jews. Perhaps the Greeks were even greater than the Jews, but now I can see no sign of that old greatness in the modern Greeks. Maybe, when the present process is finished we too will degenerate, but I see no sign of degeneration at present."
His voice took on a deeper tone:
"Suffering makes a people greater, and we have suffered much. We had a message to give the world, but we were overwhelmed, and the message was cut off in the middle. In time there will be millions of us—becoming stronger and stronger—and we will complete the message."
"What is the message?" the reporter asked.
"Our policy must be the unity of the human race. The world is divided into two blocs. We consider that the United Nations' ideal is a Jewish ideal."
At that point, Ben-Gurion descended from Mount Carmel. "Perhaps," he said apologetically, "this may sound rather chauvinistic."
Helpful Push. In less exalted moods, Ben-Gurion goes quietly and industriously about his work of running Israel. His work day of twelve hours is broken by a frugal lunch at a small hotel with other government workers. Colleagues call him by his surname or, occasionally, E.G. During the fighting he slept at a boarding house near his office. Nowadays, he goes home to his wife, a nurse from Minsk whom he met and married in Brooklyn. Ben-Gurion has no close personal friends, but he is widely respected for his ability and his unassuming simplicity. Last week, on a road near Tel Aviv, a truck ground to a stop and the driver signaled for help. Ben-Gurion and a young aide happened to be in a car behind. The 63-year-old Premier of Israel got out and helped push the truck while his young companion stood guard with a rifle to keep down possible Arab snipers.
His son Amos, who was a major in the British Army, later a Haganah fighter, recently married a British Christian. Ben-Gurion did not hold her faith against her; he gathered up an armload of Jewish histories and Zionist tracts, mailed them to her so that she would understand her adopted country.
The Going Up. Few people understand Israel as well as David Ben-Gurion. His life tells the story of Israel's development. He was born, the fourth of eleven children, in 1884, at Plonsk, Poland, then part of Russia. As he grew up, all Russia was stirring. Jews especially felt the tension of gathering storms. Zionism, the dream of the great Theodor Herzl, captured young David's imagination. So did Socialism. He decided to go to Palestine, where other Jews had preceded him. They belonged to the First Aliyah (literally, a going up, a wave); most of them were "gentlemen farmers" who hired Arabs to till their land and to guard their property. But Arab guards proved unreliable. The men of the First Aliyah hired some of the immigrants of the Second Aliyah, including David, to replace them. Ben-Gurion came to Palestine at a turning point in Zionist history. Such "practical" Zionists as British Chemist Chaim Weizmann† (who later won British promises to support a Jewish National Home in Palestine) had persuaded Zionists to speed up the development of Palestine without waiting for a political title to the country.
Handing Over. Ben-Gurion took three steps of the utmost practical and symbolic importance to Zionism: 1) he organized his fellow watchmen into a defense force, the germ of Haganah, the army that beat the Arabs this year; 2) realizing that forces outside Palestine would be decisive, he went to Turkey, which then held the country, to study law; 3) he then came to the U.S. to help organize the Pioneer Movement, which was based on the sound notion that if Jews were ever to get a solid footing in Palestine, they would have to work the land themselves.
One of the most dramatic and significant elements in Israel's story was the "declassing" of immigrants, the transformation of professional men and tradesmen into farmers and factory workers. Ben-Gurion's hand was in that extraordinary development.
He went back to Palestine as a corporal with Allenby's army in 1917 and then, under the British Mandate, organized the Labor party and the Histadrut (General Federation of Jewish Labor), over both of which he still exerts a dominant influence. Looking back, Ben-Gurion recently said: "We did not hesitate to hand over to the labor community the cherished institutions and treasured economic enterprises that were begun by small select groups inspired by a pioneering zeal—by the few men of the Second Aliyah."
"Sneh on Their Boots." The Histadrut, to which the men of the Second Aliyah turned over Zionism's economic heart, is unique among labor unions as Israel is unique among states. The Zionist socialists, having no nation, could not pursue a program of nationalizing industry. Instead, they turned over more & more functions to the Histadrut until it became a state within a state, a vast trust as well as a labor union. The Histadrut is one of Israel's biggest banks and the main local life insurance company. Histadrut controls 96% of all transportation. (It costs between $1,800 and $5,400 to join the bus drivers' union.) Nearly half of Israel's Jews belong to the Histadrut, which controls directly or indirectly 20% of the country's economy.
Most of the farming is collectivized, because socialist Zionists wanted to work the land as intensively as possible, with Jewish labor. The collectives have another advantage: many are stockaded forts, built to protect pioneer settlers from Arab attacks.
The peculiar socialism of the Histadrut and the collective farms does not lead Israel toward Communist sympathies. Quite the contrary. Ben-Gurion's Labor party, which dominates the present coalition government, is consciously but cautiously antiCommunist. To its left stands the United Workers party; in the left wing of this group is a sinister opportunist named Moshe Sneh, who plays the Kremlin's game. As one Israeli punned: "If the Russians ever come to Israel, it will be with Sneh [Yiddish for snow] on their boots."
On Ben-Gurion's right lurks the Irgun, which calls him a dictator because he wants to prevent Irgun from operating a private army. The Irgunists are intense nationalists and "revisionists," which in practical present terms means they are gangsters and expansionists, itching to carry the fight into Arab territory.
"Blow Your Nose." The new nation is further divided by the differing nationalities and social backgrounds of its citizens. Each aliyah had its own characteristics and dreams for the new state. The men of the Second Aliyah are still on top in the government, but in the army and among the people, the sabras (literally: cacti), the native-born, are coming to the fore. Palestinian climate has played a, strange trick on the sabras. They run to the big-boned, blue-eyed, blond athlete type associated with anti-Semitic persecutions.
In other lands the German Jews tend to look upon themselves as the aristocrats of Jewry (although they give precedence to the Sephardic families from Spain and Portugal). In Palestine the recent German aliyah is looked down upon and made the butt of the same kind of joke that German Jews in the U.S. used to hurl at their Russian brethren.
Israel calls the German Jew a yecki (roughly: squarehead), laughs at his naiveté. Many of the yecki are physicians (of that great, devoted band of German-Jewish doctors) and they have a hard time adjusting to the land. Many try chicken farming, going about it in that highly scientific Teuton way which makes the Polish and Russian Israelis guffaw. They say that when one yecki found a sick chicken he sent all the way to India for a serum, inoculated every one of his flock. They tell of a yecki with an old dry cow who asked a Polish Jew to sell it for him. The Pole found a Russian Jew to whom he said: "This is a fine young cow; she gives six liters of milk every day." The yecki, standing by, said: "Well, well, that I didn't know; I'd like to buy her back." To new arrivals the Eastern Jews say: "Did you come here from conviction—or from Germany?"
The people of each aliyah may speak their own language for the first two years, after that are expected to switch to Hebrew.* A dead language, a language of scholarship and liturgy for centuries, Hebrew has been revived and made the official language of Israel. In earlier days, some of the old folks were shocked to hear Hebrew used in everyday speech. When a mother scolded, "Little Ittomar, blow your nose," in the tongue of the prophets, oldsters winced.
"Buses Will Run." Hebrew will help hold the new nation together. The world outside Israel (including many U.S. Zionists) expected the main cement of the new state to be the Jewish religion, preserved through centuries of vicissitudes. In Israel this seems to have lost its validity. When the Promised Land was the unpaid balance of a divine I.O.U., when they lived among more or less hostile Gentiles, religion was a far more vital force than it is today in Israel. The Jew is supposed to wear a hat; in Tel Aviv, young men risk sunstroke to go hatless. Waiters at the Armon Hotel in Tel Aviv have no qualms about offering guests bacon. Throughout the country dietary laws are widely breached.
The constitution to be written next fall will make a point of separating church and state. Ben-Gurion and other leaders rarely turn up at synagogues. Jews are not supposed to travel in vehicles on the Sabbath but they do today in Israel. Foreign Minister Moshe Shertok, a brisk, urbane statesman, did not even wait for a reporter to ask him about it. Said Shertok: "And if you're going to ask whether the trains and buses are going to run on the Sabbath, I can tell you right now—they are."
The old Jews of Europe had to wear long curls; many young Israelis of Tel Aviv favor crew cuts in the American—or Prussian—style. Israeli girls, who run to the buxom bucolic type, stride the streets in slacks or shorts. Many have gone into the CHEN, Israeli version of the WAC. The young people turn their backs on sentimental, nostalgic, masochistic traditional Jewish art. Such plays as the great Yiddish drama, The Dybbuk, draw an almost unanimous "it stinks" from the sabras. Their strong, bronzed young hands have no tendency to rend their open-necked sport shirts in grief.
Victims of History. If not religion, what will hold Israel together? Today fear of the Arabs performs for the Israelis the same unifying function that Gentile persecution and discrimination performed during the Dispersion. The Arabs, as Ben-Gurion noted, are 40 to one Israeli. But the Jewish superiority over the Arabs is not just a figment of Israeli imagination; it is a fact. Israel has probably the highest percentage of skilled labor and executive experience of any people in the world; by comparison, the Arabs are near the bottom of the scale.
The Western world tends to think of the Arab as a falcon-eyed warrior on a white horse. That Arab is still around, but he is far less numerous than the disease-ridden wretches who lie in the hot streets, too weak, sick and purposeless to roll over into the shade.
The Arabs, no less than the Jews, are victims of history. Four centuries of Turkish rule hurt them at least as badly as a decade of Naziism hurt the Jews. Now, in their morning of independence, the Arabs have suffered defeat at the hands of a small, despised people. It rankles.
Yet only in peace between Jews and Arabs is there much hope for either. If the Israelis are forced into many years of war they may indeed become "an ugly little Spartan state." Their wiser leaders know this. Such men as Ben-Gurion see the Israel of tomorrow as an industrial, trading and organizing nation leading the whole Middle East to new levels of productivity.
But how can the Jews now come to terms with the Arab world whose insecure leaders do not dare cross up the people they have inflamed against Israel? The Jews' hopes of a deal are pinned on Abdullah of Transjordan, whose British paid and trained Arab Legion bolsters up his position as Arab spokesman and leaves him free to compromise. Ironically, it is the British subsidy to Abdullah (against which the Zionists rail) that offers the best chance of attaining the understanding with the Arabs essential to Israel's future peace and commerce.
Need for a Talent. If the Israel issue plunges the Arab world into further chaos and thus gives the Russians a chance to gain influence with the Arab mobs, World War III becomes much nearer. Ben-Gurion, for one, has little hope that Israel would survive such a war. "We would be crushed," he says simply.
Israelis who do not understand the danger of too much success are impatient at British and U.S. concern for Arab friendship. They shout "Oil!" as if nothing but profits were involved. The same oil, which the Arabs can shut off, is an essential part of the world's hope of recovery; without that recovery, the dream of Israel as a prosperous trading nation cannot come true. The same oil is an essential part of the defense of the West. Without that defense Israel, a democratic state, is lost.
So the Israeli political position is a highly delicate one. They may resist Abdullah—but must be sure not to crush him. They may beg the U.S. for help—but must be sure that help does not hopelessly alienate the Arabs. They may snarl at the British, but must remember that the British want essentially what Israel has to have—stability in the Middle East.
In their long and brilliant history the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it.
thinbl...@gmail.com
Jul 16, 2015, 3:50:30 PM7/16/15
to
On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 3:40:27 AM UTC-4, thinbl...@gmail.com wrote:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.tv/wARVyJ7ElXo/6Cc6zuU1mSEJ
> A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
>
>
>
>
> The Watchman
> August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
> http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
>
>
>
> "the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
Israel Requests 50% Increase in U.S. Military Aid, Up to $4.5B
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/16/headlines#7164
Israel continues to express opposition to the deal, arguing that a stronger Iran will threaten the region's stability. The New York Times reports that Israel has been requesting between $4.2 billion to $4.5 billion of military aid from the United States each year for the next 10 years in talks that began prior to the Iran nuclear deal's passage. Israel currently receives $3 billion a year in U.S. military aid.
https://twitter.com/LatuffCartoons/status/621706155270778880
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.tv/wARVyJ7ElXo/6Cc6zuU1mSEJ
> A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
>
>
>
>
> The Watchman
> August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
> http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
>
>
>
> "the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/7/16/headlines#7164
Israel continues to express opposition to the deal, arguing that a stronger Iran will threaten the region's stability. The New York Times reports that Israel has been requesting between $4.2 billion to $4.5 billion of military aid from the United States each year for the next 10 years in talks that began prior to the Iran nuclear deal's passage. Israel currently receives $3 billion a year in U.S. military aid.
https://twitter.com/LatuffCartoons/status/621706155270778880
thinbl...@gmail.com
Feb 23, 2017, 12:15:34 PM2/23/17
to
On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 3:40:27 AM UTC-4, thinbl...@gmail.com wrote:
by Lara Friedman 02/20/2017
http://lobelog.com/israeli-occupation-is-poisoning-americas-democracy/
As Americans come out in huge numbers to challenge the illiberal policies of President Donald J. Trump, they should be mindful of developments in and emanating from another increasingly illiberal democracy: Israel.
In power in Israel for nearly a decade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have focused their energies on one goal above all others: expanding settlements and securing permanent Israeli control over territory occupied by Israel in 1967. In pursuing this “Greater Israel” agenda, Netanyahu has governed according to a political ethos that has much in common with that of Trump, starting with the belief that political might makes right; that laws, courts, and public institutions exist solely to serve those in power; that the media and activists are the enemy; that hasbara (Hebrew for “propaganda,” often akin to “alt-facts”) trumps facts; and that democratic norms like “rule of law” and “checks-and-balances” are for suckers.
Americans should pay attention to Israel not merely for the many lessons it offers about how illiberalism can take hold in a free society. They should pay attention because the same “Greater Israel” agenda that has eroded Israeli society is today poisoning America’s democracy.
Specifically, recent years have witnessed surging attacks against opponents of Israeli policies. In Israel, these attacks have included demonization by government officials, public hate campaigns led by purpose-built groups, and a raft of legislation aimed at undermining peace and civil society organizations. Legislation has also actively sought to quash activism and legitimize settlements, including defining activism against settlements as an attack against Israel itself.
In parallel, recent years have witnessed an ongoing campaign in the U.S. to pass laws serving many of the same goals, supported – in the name of being “pro-Israel” and fighting anti-Semitism – by forces from across the political and ideological spectrums.
This campaign is focused, in the first instance, on convincing Congress and individual U.S. states to pass laws ostensibly aimed at stopping the Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS). In reality, these laws seek to exploit concerns about BDS – a movement that has generated a great deal of noise but has had little tangible impact on Israel – in order to legitimize settlements and stifle opposition to Israeli policies. The campaign, in fact, took off only after the November 2015 European Union notice, which called for EU states to differentiate between Israel and settlements. The results speak for themselves: in 2016, at least 14 states adopted faux-anti-BDS/pro-settlements legislation; so far in 2017, new bills have been introduced in at least 12 U.S. states.
Clearly, it is the right of Americans to oppose boycotts of Israel and even boycotts of settlements. However, turning such opposition into law clearly violates the Constitutionally-protected right to free speech, which the Supreme Court ruled long ago includes boycotts. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – an organization today enjoying a surge in support for its work challenging Trump – emphatically takes this view, as does The Center for Constitutional Rights, the National Coalition Against Censorship and experts writing in the Harvard Law Review.
Nonetheless, this campaign has continued and in late 2016, it expanded in a new direction, with the introduction of legislation seeking to codify a specific definition of “anti-Semitism” to be applied to activism on U.S. campuses. Entitled “the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act,” this new effort made its debut in bipartisan bills introduced in Congress at the end of the 2016 session, backed by a constellation of Jewish groups, including the ADL. Coming ironically at a time of surging anti-Semitism in the U.S. linked to the emboldening of the “alt-Right,” an editorial in the Los Angeles Times highlighted that, rather than actually targeting anti-Semitism,
“This legislation is really about something else entirely: Israel. What it does is to endorse an expansive definition of anti-Semitism that was adopted by the State Department in 2010 as a benchmark for diplomats. The problem with the definition is that it unfairly conflates anti-Israel speech with anti-Semitic speech, in a way that, if enforced, would violate the free speech rights of students and professors.”
The Act is expected to be re-introduced soon in the new Congress, and has already been introduced this year in Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee. In the meantime, the ACLU has once again weighed in, stating that this legislation “opens the door to considering anti-Israel political statements and activities as possible grounds for civil rights investigations.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has said it “would likely violate the First Amendment by prohibiting protected expression.”
Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the definition of “anti-Semitism” used as the basis for the legislation, emphatically agrees. Formerly the Director of the American Jewish Committee’s program on anti-Semitism and extremism, Stern has repeatedly and vociferously denounced what he sees as the misuse of his work, including in a 2015 op-ed in the LA Jewish Journal and a December 2016 letter sent to members of Congress informing them that using his definition of anti-Semitism in this manner “is both unconstitutional and unwise.”
Stern was even more emphatic in a December 2016 op-ed in the New York Times, in which he stated that, “The definition was intended for data collectors writing reports about anti-Semitism in Europe. It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.” Looking at the implications of the proposed anti-Semitism legislation, Stern went on to warn:
“What’s next? Should Congress define what speech is Islamophobic? Anti-Palestinian? Racist? Anti-white? How about defining ‘anti-United States’ speech? We could dust off the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
Stern’s concerns are neither hyperbolic nor entirely hypothetical. The campaign to legislate support for settlements scored its first big win in 2016, when Congress defined “boycott of Israel” to include boycotts of settlements, in a law governing U.S. trade negotiations. That definition has since become a legal point of reference in subsequent legislation. The same would likely happen to Stern’s definition of “anti-Semitism”: once adopted in any law, it would likely become a touchstone in subsequent legislation designed to quash free speech in other contexts.
The rise of Trump has been a wake-up call to Americans about the need to stand up and defend democratic rights and values. It remains to be seen if it will likewise alert them to the dangers of allowing the “Greater Israel” agenda to hijack U.S. law and undermine the Constitution. If not, many Americans who today are vociferously opposing Trump’s illiberal policies may awaken soon to find that their support for Israel and concerns about anti-Semitism have been abused, and that they have allowed themselves to become the cat’s paw in a broader assault on American democracy.
Republished, with permission, from Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/israeli-occupation-is-poisoning-americas-democracy_us_58ab25a0e4b026a89a7a2e65
thinbl...@gmail.com
Mar 22, 2017, 1:58:33 PM3/22/17
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On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 3:40:27 AM UTC-4, thinbl...@gmail.com wrote:
Mehdi Hasan March 22 2017
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/22/top-israelis-have-warned-of-apartheid-so-why-the-outrage-at-a-un-report/
IN HIS MEMOIR, the Israeli journalist Hirsh Goodman described how he returned home from the Six Day War in June 1967 to hear the country’s founding father and first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, speak on the radio. “Israel, he said, better rid itself of the territories and their Arab population as soon as possible,” recalled Goodman. “If it did not Israel would soon become an apartheid state.”
Goodman was born and raised in apartheid-era South Africa. “That phrase, ‘Israel will become an apartheid state,’ resonated with me,” Goodman wrote. “In a flash I understood what he was saying.”
In a flash. Yet fifty years later, despite an entrenched and ongoing occupation, Israel’s defenders angrily reject any invocation of the A-word. Leading U.S. politicians who have dared utter it in relation to Israel, such as John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, have been forced to apologize and backtrack. Last week, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA) became the first U.N. agency to publish an official report documenting how “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole,” and this provoked — as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has noted — a huge furor which led to the U.N. secretariat removing the report from its website and the Jordanian head of the UNESCWA, Rima Khalef, quitting in protest.
Good riddance, say supporters of the Jewish state. To mention the grotesque crime of apartheid in the same sentence as the democratic state of Israel, they claim, is “slander”, a “smear”, a “despicable” and “blatant lie”, a shameful act of “Israel-bashing” and a “new form of anti-Semitism.”
So what, I wonder, does that make Ben Gurion? Dishonest or despicable? How about Yitzhak Rabin, who told a TV journalist in 1976 during the first of his two terms as Israel’s prime minister, “I don’t think it’s possible to contain over the long term, if we don’t want to get to apartheid, a million and a half [more] Arabs inside a Jewish state”? Was he also engaged in a smear campaign against the nation he led?
In recent years, two more former Israeli premiers, Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, have echoed their illustrious predecessors’ warnings. Olmert has predicted that “if the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then the State of Israel is finished” while Barak has declared that “if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”
Are they Israel bashers, too?
Meanwhile, several high-profile Israelis have suggested that apartheid is not a future risk but a present reality, including former education minister Shulamit Aloni (“Israel practises its own, quite violent, form of apartheid with the native Palestinian population”), former environment minister Yossi Sarid (“what acts like apartheid, is run like apartheid and harasses like apartheid, is not a duck — it is apartheid”) and former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair (“we established an apartheid regime in the occupied territories”).
Others have gone even further, recognizing that Israel is in complete control between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and extending the apartheid analogy from the occupied West Bank and Gaza to inside the Green Line, to what’s considered Israel proper. Former Foreign Ministry chief Alon Liel, who also served as ambassador to South Africa, has said that “until a Palestinian state is created, we are actually one state. This joint state…is an apartheid state.”
Are we expected to dismiss all of these former Israeli officials as Israel-haters?
And what shall we do with the testimonies of prominent South Africans who defeated apartheid at home — only to be horrified by what they then witnessed in the occupied territories? “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land,” wrote the Nobel Peace Price-winning bishop Desmond Tutu in 2002. “It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa.” A range of senior officials from the African National Congress have backed Tutu’s comparison, including former South African president Kgalema Motlanthe (“the current situation… is worse than conditions were for blacks under the apartheid regime”), current speaker of the South African parliament Baleka Mbete (“far worse than apartheid”) and former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils (“the Israeli measures, the brutality, make apartheid look like a picnic”).
Are we expected to believe that all of these veterans of the South African anti-apartheid struggle have lost their minds? Are we supposed to denounce them as anti-Semites?
Then there is international law. What is often left unsaid in much of the debate over Israel and the A-word is that one can legitimately debate whether, or to what extent, modern Israel resembles apartheid-era South Africa. In the occupied West Bank, with its “separate and unequal” road networks, water systems and housing policies, and where Israeli settlers are bound by Israeli civil law while Palestinians are judged according to Israeli military law, it seems an open and shut case. Inside the Green Line, where Palestinian citizens of Israel have the right to vote and stand for parliament and where Arabic is an official language it is, admittedly, less clear-cut. However, human rights groups like Adalah point to more than 50 different laws or bills in Israel that privilege Jews over Arabs or discriminate in favor of Jews in areas such as housing, education and family reunification.
A car drives on a new segment of a highway separating Palestinian and Israeli traffic near the West Bank city of Ramallah, 12 August 2007. Once finished, the highway will connect north of the West Bank to its south, bypassing Jerusalem. The highway will be used by both Palestinians and Israelis, but on two different lanes separated by a wall of concrete.
Yet under international law, apartheid is a specific crime with specific definitions, independent of the South African experience. The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid widened the definition of apartheid to “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa” and applied it to “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group,” including the denial of free movement and the expropriation of land.
Four years after the collapse of the Afrikaner regime in South Africa, the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), defined apartheid as “inhumane acts…committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”
From a strictly legal perspective, therefore, whether or not Israel is identical to, or even resembles, apartheid-era South Africa is, frankly, irrelevant. The only issue that matters is whether Israel is in violation of international law. In 2009, a team of academics and lawyers commissioned by South Africa’s statutory research agency concluded that Israel maintains “a system of domination by Jews over Palestinians” and “this system constitutes a breach of the prohibition of apartheid.” In 2013, another study co-authored by international law professor and former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Territories, John Dugard, found “Israeli practices in the occupied territory are… in breach of the legal prohibition of apartheid.”
Back in 1967, Goodman understood in a flash what Ben Gurion was trying to say. Today, defenders of the Jewish state refuse to understand the warnings of former Israeli prime ministers, the condemnations of South African anti-apartheid activists, and the clear strictures of international law. For Palestinians, however, this is far from an academic issue or a mere debating point. For fifty years they have been the victims of discrimination, segregation and oppression. How much more do they have to endure?
thinbl...@gmail.com
Dec 22, 2018, 6:47:05 PM12/22/18
to
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.arts.tv/wARVyJ7ElXo/6Cc6zuU1mSEJ
> A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
>
>
>
>
> The Watchman
> August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
> http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
>
>
>
> "the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
Adam Raz Dec 21, 2018
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-secret-letter-detailing-israel-s-plan-to-expel-arabs-1.6766389
Six months after the War of Independence ended, David Ben-Gurion sought to expel more than 10,000 Arabs from the north, for unspecified 'security reasons.' Why was a long-declassified letter describing that plan recently hidden again from public view?
> A Flashback In TIME: An Ugly Little Spartan State
>
>
>
>
> The Watchman
> August 16, 1948 | Vol. LII No. 7
> http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601480816,00.html
>
>
>
> "the Jews have displayed great genius for religion, ethics, husbandry, commerce, literature, music and art. The one skill they have never shown as a people is a talent for politics. That is the talent they need now. Perhaps the Israeli has it."
> "Won't Israel grow?"
> "There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million."
> "Can that many be accommodated within the U.N. partition boundaries of Israel?"
> "I doubt it."
The Secret Letter Detailing Israel's Plan to Expel Arabs, 'Without Unnecessary Brutality'
> "There are eleven million Jews in the world. I don't say that all of them will come here, but I expect several million, and with natural increase I can quite imagine a Jewish state of ten million."
> "Can that many be accommodated within the U.N. partition boundaries of Israel?"
> "I doubt it."
Adam Raz Dec 21, 2018
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-secret-letter-detailing-israel-s-plan-to-expel-arabs-1.6766389
Six months after the War of Independence ended, David Ben-Gurion sought to expel more than 10,000 Arabs from the north, for unspecified 'security reasons.' Why was a long-declassified letter describing that plan recently hidden again from public view?
thinbl...@gmail.com
Dec 22, 2018, 6:56:04 PM12/22/18
to
The document reproduced here is important for three reasons. First, because of its content; second, because it's been classified; and third, because of the connection between the first reason and the second reason, which offers a lesson about the reciprocal relations between releasing historical documentation from archives and the recognition of history.
The document is a “secret” letter dated December 4, 1949, half a year after the official conclusion of the War of Independence (following the signing of the armistice agreement with Syria). Its author was Walter Eytan, the first director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, and its addressee was Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, who was in New York at the time.
Eytan is reporting to his boss on a plan “to expel the Arab residents of a large number of places” in Galilee and elsewhere in the north of the country. He lists the villages: Fasuta, Tarshiha, Jish (where most of the uprooted inhabitants of the village of Biram had gone the year before), Hurfeish, Rihana, Majdal and Zakariya. Eytan noted that the plan called for the expulsion of more than 10,000 Arabs, most of them Christians, though some were Druze (Hurfeish) or Circassians (Rihana). The expulsion was to be carried out for “security reasons.” The deportees’ destination was not specified.
Eytan writes that David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister, had already approved the transfer of the residents “by force to other places,” but wanted the agreement of Sharett and Eliezer Kaplan, the finance minister, because the cost of the operation would be about a million Israeli pounds (including the resettlement of the uprooted).
Eytan had been briefed on the plan’s details from Zalman Lief, an expert on borders and land, who advised Ben-Gurion on these subjects. Lief noted that the scheme could be implemented “without unnecessary brutality.” Eytan emphasized to Sharett that the foreign minister’s agreement was needed for approval of the plan and added his opinion. “I expressed a sharply negative response for political reasons,” he wrote Sharett. “I thought it was right for you to know about the plan now, even if its fate will not be decided immediately.” During this period, Sharett was often deliberately left in the dark by Ben-Gurion and his colleagues.
The letter written by Walter Eytan to Moshe Sharett. Says "secret " on top.
The expulsion, of course, was not carried out, but in the years that followed a number of attempts were made to transfer tens of thousands of Christian Arabs from Galilee out of the country to Argentina and Brazil (the idea was described as a transfer by agreement, with or without the quotation marks). One of the plans was called “Operation Yohanan” (after Yohanan from Gush Halav – John of Giscala – a leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans, in the first century C.E.), which the Israeli leadership considered briefly in 1952-1953, until it was shelved for lack of feasibility. As we know, the town of Gush Halav (Jish, in Arabic) is still intact. In the years after the war, there was a sharp dispute within the leadership concerning the “emigration” of Arabs from the country. Moshe Dayan, for example, thought that “the country should be homogeneous” and supported the removal of the Arabs by force.
We don’t know why the plan described in the letter wasn’t implemented, though it was probably due mainly to the “political reasons” Eytan mentioned in his letter. After all, the proposal entailed the expulsion of inhabitants many months after the end of the fighting. By the way, within a few years, both the Druze (1956) and the Circassians (1958) would be integrated into the Israel Defense Forces as regular conscripts. (In practice, many of them had volunteered for IDF service already during and after the 1948 war.)
The fact that Ben-Gurion insisted on Sharett’s agreement for implementing the plan reveals something of the relations between the two leaders. The political disagreement between the two top figures in Mapai, the ruling party and forerunner of Labor, went a long way toward determining the future of the two peoples that share the land and the dynamics between Israel and the Arab world.
Whereas Sharett urged that all the Arabs who remained in Israel be officially recognized and granted citizenship, with equal rights, Ben-Gurion was opposed to the idea and urged that the Arabs be viewed as a potential fifth column; anyone who thought otherwise was simply naive, he said. This is why, among other reasons, he opposed revoking control of the military government over the Arab population in 1966, during the period of the Levi Eshkol government. He considered its existence a necessity, contrary to the opinion of Sharett and other senior figures. Sharett probably shared Eytan’s objection to the expulsion plan.
Eytan’s letter was until recently held in a file in the Israel State Archives titled “Minorities – Matters of Organization, Religion, Policy toward Minorities” (File No. 2402/29). For more than 25 years, up until about six months ago, the file had been open for public perusal. The staff of the archives would even send a scan of it via email to anyone who so requested. (In the present case, it was sent to the Akevot Institute for Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Research, whose agenda also includes removing obstacles the state places in the way of researchers who want to uncover historical documentation). But now the letter (together with an eight-page letter written by Bechor-Shalom Sheetrit, Israel’s first and last minister of minorities) has been removed from the file and is no longer accessible.
Contrary to its obligations, the archives does not explain in the file why documents have been removed from it and makes do instead with leaving a blank page on which is written only the word “classified.” Sheetrit’s censored letter mentions the Riftin report, which was the subject of an article by Ofer Aderet in Haaretz earlier this year (“Why is Israel still covering up extrajudicial executions committed by a Jewish militia in ‘48?”). Sheetrit’s letter, headed “Minorities in the State of Israel,” signals its theme. The writer warns, among other points, about “theft and plunder [of Arab property] both by the army and by civilians […] violation of surrender agreements about preserving property [and adds that] the lust for robbery has turned the heads of army personnel.”
Why were two documents suddenly censored after having been available to the public for years? Answers are not forthcoming. A few months ago, I wrote in these pages (“What is Israel hiding about its nuclear program in the ’50s?”) that in a great many cases, the state’s representatives who are in charge of releasing historical documentation (in this case, the chief press and media censor) do not distinguish between documents that may adversely affect state security and foreign policy, and those that may simply embarrass the state.
The fact that, half a year after the end of the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion considered expelling thousands of Arabs from their homes is not very flattering (the more so because they were Christian Arabs, whose welfare would probably carry more weight in world public opinion). However, whereas the study of history is amenable (to a certain degree) to an individual’s choice, the uncovering of historical documentation should not be amenable to political considerations, must not become a privilege in a democracy and must never be susceptible to considerations that are not directly related to security.
The Secret Letter Detailing Israel's Plan to Expel Arabs, 'Without Unnecessary Brutality'
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-the-secret-letter-detailing-israel-s-plan-to-expel-arabs-1.6766389
chromebook test
Jul 12, 2023, 9:28:40 PM7/12/23
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On Friday, April 24, 2015 at 3:40:27 AM UTC-4, thinbl...@gmail.com wrote:
July 11, 2023 THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/opinion/netanyahu-israel-judiciary.html
Whenever people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them that I’m a translator from English to English. I try to take complex subjects and make them understandable, first to myself and then to readers — and that is what I want to do here regarding three interrelated questions: Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?
The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values and the vitally important shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes there just barely alive.
If you want to get just a whiff of the tension between the U.S. and this Israeli cabinet, spearheaded by extremists, consider that hours after Biden mentioned to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria just how “extreme” some of Netanyahu’s cabinet members were, one of the most extreme of them all, the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, told Biden to butt out — that “Israel is no longer another star in the American flag.”
Nice, eh? According to a 2020 Congressional Research Service report, Israel has received the most U.S. foreign assistance of any country in the world since World War II, at $146 billion, not adjusted for inflation. That’s quite an allowance and one that might have merited a little more respect for the U.S. president from Ben-Gvir, who in his youth was convicted of inciting racism against Arabs.
There is a sense of shock today among U.S. diplomats who’ve been dealing with Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and a man of considerable smarts and political talent. They just find it hard to believe that Bibi would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben-Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.
But it is what it is — and it’s ugly.
----------
Our Most Cherished Ally
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDmyIudsAlk
chromebook test
Oct 22, 2023, 11:26:17 AM10/22/23
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