Letters/Discussion Forums
Edelstein’s criticism of Israel is not really for Palestinian benefit
In her letter in last week’s Jewish Report, Merlynn Edelstein cites the 1948 War in Israel where both sides – Israel and a host of Arab nations – suffered casualties. In war terrible things happen, populations get displaced and even wiped out, something we Jews know only too well.
Allan Wolman
In reality she focuses on Palestinian suffering only; reading Edelstein’s letter, it seems Israelis have not suffered – they’re simply dishing it out!
Reading JVFP’s take on history, the uninformed would believe that Jews descended on Palestine, dispossessed those hapless people of their land, possessions and dignity and colonised that country. Rather economical with historical fact, rather economical with Israeli suffering and rather generous in their condemnation of the Zionist enterprise.
Palestine after the Great War became a British mandated territory and the Palestinians living in what is Israel today were Jews, (there were of course Arabs who remained Arabs until 1967 when they became “Palestinians”).
The Middle East was then divided up by the Great Powers into a number of Arab states and one Jewish state. No doubt the writer wouldn’t question the legitimacy of Jordan, Iraq or Syria; it seems, however, that she questions Israel’s legitimacy.
Respected historians like the late Sir Martin Gilbert of Oxford University documented the historical events of those tumultuous years. However, Edelstein chooses to quote her “revisionist historian” Ilan Pappe who also supports the notion of ethnic cleansing in a territory where the population continues to expand with life expectancy at its highest in the Middle East.
Criticism of Israel as of many other countries, is indeed warranted, but JVFP’s criticism is neither comparative, contextual nor constructive.
If Israel’s human rights record was to be compared to those countries guilty of real human rights abuses, every Arab state would probably feature on top, together with those perpetrators of genocide in Syria and parts of Africa. Israel would feature way down the scale and even below some European countries!
I urge Edelstein, so concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, to read an article published in The Star (April 4, 2016) by Victoria Brittain, highlighting the plight of Palestinians in Lebanon for the past 60 years. Why do JVFP and its aligned groups choose to ignore the plight of the people it purports to champion? Methinks it’s not really about the Palestinians!
Rosebank, Johannesburg
nat cheiman
April 6, 2016 at 9:31 am
‘I would ask Edelstein, how she feels about the holocaust.
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Allan Kolski Horwitz
April 12, 2016 at 10:32 am
‘The point is that all gratuitous human suffering is to be condemned. The Jewish Holocaust ranks as one of the most horrific crimes against humanity but it was not the only genocide practised in history. Edelstein’s observation (which is borne out by many Israelis who lived through the 1948 war is that there were mass expulsions of Palestinians from tens of villages and from towns like Lydda (Lod) and Ramle. Israeli soldiers who were involved in these illegal and immoral actions (the removal of civilians from their homes and land) have written extensively about this. As Jews we must admit to these crimes and either permit the refugees to return or pay them as their families mutually agreed reparations. That is the bottom line in terms of international law and we , as a people, dare not be arrogant and put ourselves above international law as enshrined in countless internationally recognised treaties and agreements. Denial of this fact is going to and is already costing the Jewish people dearly never mind the cost to the Palestinians.
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nat cheiman
April 13, 2016 at 5:46 pm
‘The torah ranks above international law.
\nThe custodian of International law is the United Nations who are; Anti Semitic; Anti Israel; Pro Arab/ Muslim/ Palestinian.
\nAllan, at what part of history do you begin with your assertion that that Israels actions were immoral and illegal?
\nMy point of reference is contained in the Books of Moses.
\nHuman suffering is to be condemned as you rightly assert. How about the suffering of the Jews throughout history? The holocaust is but one such facet. The Grand Mufti of Palestine was a buddy of Hitler. He was responsible for Bulgarian Jews being sent to death camps in 1943, instead of to Palestine.
\nThere were 400,000 Jews murdered at the instance of the Mufti who was a \”Musligerman\”.
\nIt beggars belief that you would even have the temerity to suggest that Israel/ Jews should have any compassion [Removed due to concerns over incitement and racism -ED].
\nQuite frankly, the Palestinians under Fatah/ hamas/ and others such as Hezbollah, do not agree with you either, because they have a settled determination to wipe Israel off the map and kill all Jews. In France Jews were killed. In Belgium Jews were killed and in Turkey as well.
\nThe sooner we all understand that the Judea and Sumaria is Israels land for the Jews.
\nAt the moment the UN doesn’t understand nor wishes to. Nor Europe either.
\nI say again. The Israelis need to do what it takes to attain this objective and disregard internationally recognised treaties. Who will care for Israel? Nobody, so why should those Palestinians be shown any sort of courtesy?
\nJordan nor Egypt nor Lebanon or Syria wants the Palestinians. So why on earth should Israel be their home?
\nEdelstein and her groupies are deluded or at best confused.
\nPerhaps one may consider asking her ilk to go on a sabbatical to Gaza so that she can share her views with the scumbag terrorist there.’
nat cheiman
April 13, 2016 at 5:48 pm
‘The torah ranks above international law.
\nThe custodian of International law is the United Nations who are; Anti Semitic; Anti Israel; Pro Arab/ Muslim/ Palestinian.
\nAllan, at what part of history do you begin with your assertion that that Israels actions were immoral and illegal?
\nMy point of reference is contained in the Books of Moses.
\nHuman suffering is to be condemned as you rightly assert. How about the suffering of the Jews throughout history? The holocaust is but one such facet. The Grand Mufti of Palestine was a buddy of Hitler. He was responsible for Bulgarian Jews being sent to death camps in 1943, instead of to Palestine.
\nThere were 400,000 Jews murdered at the instance of the Mufti who was a \”Musligerman\”.
\nIt beggars belief that you would even have the temerity to suggest that Israel/ Jews should have any compassion or tolerance for any [Removed for reasons of incitement and racism -ED].
\nQuite frankly, the Palestinians under Fatah/ hamas/ and others such as Hezbollah, do not agree with you either, because they have a settled determination to wipe Israel off the map and kill all Jews. In France Jews were killed. In Belgium Jews were killed and in Turkey as well.
\nThe sooner we all understand that the Judea and Sumaria is Israels land for the Jews.
\nAt the moment the UN doesn’t understand nor wishes to. Nor Europe either.
\nI say again. The Israelis need to do what it takes to attain this objective and disregard internationally recognised treaties. Who will care for Israel? Nobody, so why should those Palestinians be shown any sort of courtesy?
\nJordan nor Egypt nor Lebanon or Syria wants the Palestinians. So why on earth should Israel be their home?
\nEdelstein and her groupies are deluded or at best confused.
\nPerhaps one may consider asking her ilk to go on a sabbatical to Gaza so that she can share her views with the scumbag terrorist there.’
Gary
April 15, 2016 at 12:12 pm
‘What Edelstein and Horwitz and the other anti-Israel bigots and traitors conveniently ignore is the Arabs atrocities that has been carried out against Jews in the Holy Land for decades if not centuries
\nslam had a long history of hatred and subjugation of the Jews, known as dhimnitude. The Jews in Islamic countries were reduced ton the status of humiliated and subjugated second class citizens, with a variety of laws to ensure this.
\nDhimnis were barred from building any structure higher than a Muslims, could not ride horses but only donkeys without saddles, could not build any new houses of worship or repair existing ones and were forbidden from making any noises that would attract attention to their worship or burial of their dead.
\nThey had to wear distinctive clothes to identify them, Jews had to wear yellow, and the mandatory yellow patch which was forced upon the Jews by the Nazis had it’s origins in Baghdad, and not in Medieval Europe as commonly believed.
\nThe idea of Jews in the Middle East being sovereign in an independent state, and not subjugated to Muslim rule and humiliated under Dhimni status is what was intolerable to the Arabs and the roots of the violent Arab rejection of the state of Israel, and before that of migration of Jews into the Land of Israel. This was anathema to the demand for Arab supremacy and dhimnitude
\n\”Certainly the Palestinian population was accustomed to the many migrants from the far reaches of the Ottoman Empire and especially the extended Middle East who settled in the land. But the local Arab community harbored a special resentment, at one level or another, for all these new Jewish neighbours. They were after all Jews and as such second class citizens beneath the Syrian Muslims, Lebanese Muslims, Egyptian Muslims, and Turks who freely came and went from Palestine\”.
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\nIn his book Jerusalem A Biogrpahy Simon Sebag Montefiore refers to the Islamic persecution of Jews in Jerusalem and the Levant. It is a myth and pro-Islamic propaganda that that the Jews were well treated in this land during Islamic rule. In this period Jews in Jerusalem were prohibited from wearing white on their Sabbath or Muslim headgear or to wear nails in their shoes. Christian lived under similar ordinances. Both had to make way for Muslims in the streets. Oppressive fees were enforced with cruel violence.
\n\”When a stray dog wondered onto the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver a dead dog to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave their carcasses to the nearest infidel\”. The Jews were extorted and robbed and many left the city for this reason.
\n\”The Polish Ashkenazis were broken finally in 1720 forcing imprisonment, banishment and bankruptcy, the synagogue burned down-this became known as the Ruin-the Hurva Synagogue. and remained a wreck for over a century. It was reconstructed in the 19th century but destroyed by the Jordanians in 1967\”.
\nIn the 19th century the plight of the Jews under Ottoman rule was made worse. In April 1854 Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune after a visit to Jerusalem \”None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews of Jerusalem, inhabiting the most filthy quarterconstant objects of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins\”.
\nThe bloody 1929 pogroms and massacres of Jews that spread throughout the Land of Israel in 1929 were sparked in September, 1928, by Jews at the Western wall contravening the dhimni laws by erecting benches to sit on at the wall, and partitions to separate men from women. Jews were first massacred in Jerusalem and then the horrific massacres by Arabs of Jews took place of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron.
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\n\”House to house they went bursting into every room looking for hiding Jews. Religious scrolls or books were burned or torn to shreds. The defenceless Jews were variously beheaded, castrated, their breasts and fingers sliced off, and in some cases their eyes plucked from their sockets. Infants and adults, men and women , it mattered not. The carnage went on for hours, with the Arab policemen standing down. Blood ran in streamlets down the narrow stone staircases outisde the buildings.hose by house, room by room the savagery was repeated\”.
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\nThis was followed by the Arab pogroms against Jews of 1936, the Arab-Nazi Alliance and the spread of the Holocaust to Iraq where Jews were massacred horrifically in Baghdad by pro-Nazi Arab mobs. an event which the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has refused to acknowledge, either for reasons of refusing to recongnize the equality of Sephardi Jews to Ashkenazim, or a politically correct determination not to blacken the names of the Arabs or create an association of the Arab radicals with the Nazis.
\nThe book go’s onto to highlight the traditional Islamic Jew-hatred found a willing ally in Nazi Germany, with the instrumental role played by Husseini, who met with Hitler, worked closely with Eichmann, and wrote letters top Axis governments preventing the transportations of thousands of Jewish children from bulgaria and Hungary to safety in the Holy Land, instead diverting them to the death camps at Auschwitz where they were murdered.
\nIraq gained independence in 1932. Nazi infiltration followed within a year. The Christian owned daily al Aram-al-Arabi (The Arab World) published daily extracts from the Arabic edition of Meim Kampf. with it’s venomous anti-Jewish propagnda.
\nIn 1935, as German influence strengthened , a pro-Nazi society, al Muthana was set up in Basra and Mosul lead by a well-known Jew-hater Dr Saib Shawkat, director of the Royal hospital in Baghdad, whose brother Sami Shawkat, a fellow medical doctor, founded the Futuwa youth brigades , which distributed anti-Jewish and anti-British leaflets.
\nHilter’s ambassador to Baghdad Fritz Grobba played the lead role in Iraq in disseminating anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propagnda, his provocations were covered in newspapers of the day from Palestine to Great Britain. He claimed that 85% of commerce in Iraq was in Jewish hands and that Jews were not true Iraqis but a foul species apart. Dozens of Iraqi Jews were killed in attacks by pro-Nazi Iraqis. In a report to Berlin on June 6, 1939, Grobba wired a report to Berline labelled SECRET in which he railed that ‘The Jews are the source of propaganda against the Italians and Germans in Iraq\” Grobba threatened a bloody massacre of Jews in Iraq \”If the Jews continue to make it difficult for Iraq with their deeds, a day will come when the anger of the masses erupt, and the result will be: a massacre of Jews. When an oriental people’s feelings erupt, all restraint disappears: The want to see blood\”
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\nThe idea of Jews in the Middle East being sovereign in an independent state, and not subjugated to Muslim rule and humiliated under Dhimni status is what was intolerable to the Arabs and the roots of the violent Arab rejection of the state of Israel, and before that of migration of Jews into the Land of Israel. This was anathema to the demand for Arab supremacy and dhimnitude
\nFrom 1920 attacks against Jews spread like wildfire in the Land of Israel, instigated by Haj Amin al husseini, the bloodthirsty Jew-hater and’Mufti of Jerusalem’.
\nThe bloody 1929 pogroms and massacres of Jews that spread throughout the Land of Israel in 1929 were sparked in September, 1928, by Jews at the Western wall contravening the dhimni laws by erecting benches to sit on at the wall, and partitions to separate men from women. Jews were first massacred in Jerusalem and then the horrific massacres by Arabs of Jews took place of the ancient Jewish community of Hebron.Further pogroms took place in 1936-1939 during the Nazi German backed Arab RevoltThe idea of Jews in the Middle East being sovereign in an independent state, and not subjugated to Muslim rule and humiliated under Dhimni status is what was intolerable to the Arabs and the roots of the violent Arab rejection of the state of Israel, and before that of migration of Jews into the Land of Israel. This was anathema to the demand for Arab supremacy and dhimnitude
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