Israel, which receives $3.8 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid, has the distinction of being the only country in the world that regularly prosecutes between 500 - 700 children each year in military courts that lack fundamental fair trial rights and protections. Children in detention report physical and verbal abuse from the moment of their arrest, and coercion and threats during interrogations. Under Israeli military law, Palestinian children have no right to a lawyer during interrogation.
For this reason, in April 2019, Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced H.R. 2407, the "Promoting Human Rights for Palestinian Children Living Under Israeli Military Occupation Act," a bill prohibiting U.S. taxpayer funding for the military detention and abuse of children by any country, including Israel. The legislation grows out of the No Way to Treat a Child campaign, a joint project of Defense for Children International-Palestine and the American Friends Service Committee. They believe the U.S. and Canadian governments must take concrete steps by holding Israeli authorities accountable for their violations of Palestinian children’s rights.
So far H.R. 2407 has garnered 23 cosponsors but not Antonio Delgado (D-NY), who represents District 19. Is there any reason not to support this legislation, which aligns U.S. foreign policy with international human rights law? Please join Jewish Voice for Peace-Hudson Valley and the Middle East Crisis Response by asking Delgado to endorse H.R. 2407.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March/April 2020, pp. 17-19
Special Report
By Gregory DeSylva
ON DEC. 6, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution advocating the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Surprisingly, Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), her Muslim colleague Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the two other members of their “Squad” opposed the resolution. Tlaib explained, “This resolution…endorses an unrealistic, unattainable solution, one that Israel has made impossible.”
Tlaib’s statement may well have mystified her House colleagues. Why is the two-state solution unrealistic and unattainable, and how is Israel to blame for that? Most U.S. politicians are unaware that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are under the yoke of apartheid and that a Palestinian state is impossible as long as that is the case. The fact that the majority of U.S. representatives evidently want to return to something like the Oslo “peace process” for two states indicates they don’t understand how Oslo failed and how it created apartheid. Especially in light of President Donald Trump’s new “peace plan,” it is timely to evaluate the Oslo process to understand why it would be a mistake to return to anything like it at this time.
A PALESTINIAN STATE—OR SOMETHING LESS?
The Oslo “peace process” began with the Sept. 13, 1993 Oslo I agreement, followed by the Sept. 28, 1995 Oslo II agreement. Israel’s desire to end the First Intifada, which had erupted in December 1987, was the impetus for these secret negotiations in which the PLO headed by Yasser Arafat represented the Palestinians. The Palestinians’ condition for peace was sovereignty over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as defined by the 1949 armistice “green line,” and East Jerusalem for a capital. Israeli settlements undermined these requirements and negotiators also demanded the resolution of the refugee issue. These territories constituted only 22 percent of Palestine. The Palestinians considered this a huge compromise conceding to Israel the 78 percent from which it had ethnically cleansed them in 1948. A viable state required contiguity, so an undivided West Bank with a secure land link to Gaza was essential.
Israel dominated the Oslo process. Israeli scholar and politician Yossi Beilin was a principal architect of the Accords. Perhaps Oslo’s greatest flaw was its failure to acknowledge Palestinian rights to a state. Arafat put that right—and Palestine’s equal status with Israel—at risk in a Sept. 9, 1993 exchange of letters with Israeli Prime Minster Yitzhak Rabin. Momentously, he acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. In exchange, Rabin merely acknowledged the PLO’s right to represent the Palestinians. Moreover, in 1992 Rabin had advised the Palestinians, “We are offering you the fairest and most viable proposal from our point of view today—autonomy, self-government.” The autonomy proposals envisioned local self-rule, not sovereignty. In 1994 Rabin declared, “We do not accept the Palestinian goal of an independent Palestinian state between Israel and Jordan. We believe in a separate Palestinian entity short of a state.” Regarding Jerusalem, he wrote in his memoirs, “Jerusalem is and will continue to be united [under Israeli sovereignty] and our eternal capital.”
Despite Rabin’s aims, the Oslo Accords could have acknowledged Palestinian rights to a state. Failure to do so opened up the possibility of something less than a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Yet the Palestinian residents of the territories—many of them victims of ethnic cleansing by Israel during the 1948 and 1967 wars—had strong rights, backed by international law, to statehood in this remnant of Palestine. Oslo did indicate that Israel would withdraw from parts of the West Bank, which were to be transferred to the Palestinians, but precise areas and timing were left ambiguous. The proposals could be construed to mean that parts of the territories—even large parts—might go to Israel. Whether the remainder would be sufficient for a viable state was purely hypothetical. Such ambiguity was Oslo’s second great flaw, making for misunderstandings, unrealized expectations, loss of faith in the process and violence.
Non-recognition and ambiguity didn’t eliminate all possibility of a Palestinian state. There were still issues essential to statehood in which the Palestinians had strong grounding in international law. These included Israeli settlements and military locations, borders, Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and foreign relations. The settlements and military locations and troops in the territories contravene international law prohibiting colonization of territories occupied by war and requiring timely termination of military occupations. The borders would define the location, extent and contiguity of the state. According to international law they would be the same as those of the territories, which also would clarify the Jerusalem issue. The right of refugees to return or to be compensated also is well established in international law, as is the right of a sovereign state to conduct its own foreign relations. These “permanent status” issues, emphatically, should have been at the top of the agenda. Instead, Oslo postponed the deadline for resolving those issues until May 4, 1999.
Putting off difficult issues normally means they will be taken up later in a particular negotiation. Deferring them five years after an agreement per Oslo was highly unorthodox, and no progress was made during that period. Rather, these issues became increasingly intractable with each passing day as Israel created more settlements and other “facts on the ground.” This was not the first nor the last time vital Palestinian interests were swept under the rug. They were the sticking point in the 1978 Camp David negotiations, in which Palestinian rights to a state also were unacknowledged and the key issues were put off five years. Nothing was accomplished during that period either, allowing Israel to achieve peace with Egypt without negotiating—let alone reaching an agreement—with the Palestinians. Postponement and other aspects of the Oslo Accords evidently were modeled upon the 1978 Camp David Accords.
In sum, by not demanding explicit statehood recognition and by going along with ambiguous schemes, the PLO was signaling—perhaps unwittingly—that it would accept something less than a state. By acceding to the long postponement of the permanent status issues, the Palestinians were virtually guaranteeing that that would be their only option.
SEPARATION AND DOMINATION: APARTHEID
With Palestinian dreams in deep freeze, Israel waited until the final days of the Oslo II negotiations to foist upon the PLO the notorious A-B-C scheme splitting up the West Bank.
Superficially, this might seem like the basis for a state to start small and expand to re-unite the territory. In the context of non-recognition, ambiguity, postponement and withdrawal failures, it’s hard not to suspect that this scheme was intended to become permanent. Area A consists of Palestinian cities, theoretically to have autonomy, local self-rule and internal security. Area B encompasses Palestinian villages and nearby lands, to be under Palestinian local rule and supposedly joint Palestinian-Israeli security control. In fact, Israeli security dominates Area B. This arrangement enables Israel to suppress dissent in B and invade A at will, despite A’s nominal internal security. C is under full Israeli control and contains all the settlements and most of the water and other essential natural resources lacking in A and B. C also completely surrounds and transects A and B, cutting them into many non-contiguous fragments incapable of constituting a viable state. All of this gave Israel dominating control of the population of A and B and the movement of people, goods and services into and out of those areas.
A and B form three rough non-contiguous blocks: Nablus to the north, Hebron to the south and Ramallah in between. The Second Intifada prompted Israel to impose severe restrictions on Palestinian movement between these blocks and between fragments thereof. It did so by installing numerous checkpoints requiring permits to pass, as well as hundreds of roadblocks and other obstacles along roads connecting the blocks and their fragments. By 2006, 528 checkpoints and obstacles and Jewish-only roads were disrupting Palestinian lives and damaging their economy. Israel also started building a high wall to physically separate West Bank Palestinians from Israeli Jews and from some of the illegal settlements.
The A-B-C scheme allowed Israel to tightly control A and B and the Palestinian residents of C in the name of security. It was a blueprint for apartheid, a prototype for separation and domination disturbingly reminiscent of the “autonomous” bantustans engulfed by the dominating matrix of white South Africa. Its intent clearly was not to create a bona-fide contiguous state for the Palestinians but to isolate and control them. They didn’t fail to recognize A and B as bantustans to which they could be restricted as Israel settled C and annexed the West Bank. Arafat reportedly shouted that they were like “the cantons of South Africa!” (Gaza became a bantustan in 2005 when Israel removed its settlements and enclosed it in a separation barrier.)
But wasn’t C supposed to be transferred to A and B in stages, putting the West Bank Humpty-Dumpty back together? Postponement of the settlements issue made this impossible. As long as they remained and continued to expand, most of C could not be transferred. Though Oslo II prohibited actions changing the status of the territories during permanent status negotiations, it erred by not explicitly banning settlement expansion. Israel took full advantage. Between the signing of Oslo II and the 1999 deadline for those negotiations, the number of West Bank settlers increased 9.2 percent per year. Withdrawal delays and ceaseless settlement expansion led to Palestinian loss of confidence in the process and anti-Israel violence, causing more delays. Consequently, only limited areas of C have been transferred to A and B.
By 2013, Area A, initially 3 percent of the West Bank, grew to 18 percent; Area B, initially 24 percent, declined to 22 percent. Area C, initially 73 percent, declined to 60 percent. The map above shows combined areas A and B today: scattered bantustans totaling 8.8 percent of pre-1947 Palestine. Palestinian residents of C—many of them refugees and even refugees twice over—are under pressure to migrate to A and B or emigrate due to the lack of housing. Building is not an option because Israel virtually always denies them permits and demolishes houses they build without permits.
Israel justifies all of this on the basis of security. But the sole cause of Palestinian violence is resistance to Israel’s settler colonization of Palestine. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of black violence, “It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.” Just so, Palestinian violence is born of the greater, original crimes of the Zionist society. Israel can no more justify its apartheid crimes by Palestinian violence than South Africa could justify its apartheid crimes by African National Congress (ANC) violence.
JUSTICE DELAYED/JUSTICE DENIED: CAMP DAVID 2000 AND BEYOND
Each delay of the permanent status issues—especially the settlements—drove another nail into the two-state coffin. Nevertheless, President Bill Clinton convened another Camp David Summit in 2000 to try again. Since Oslo II (1995), the number of West Bank settlers had increased 48 percent. Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a half-baked proposal that still did not acknowledge Palestinian statehood and under which many West Bank settlements were to be annexed. It rejected the green line border and gave Israel a 99-year lease on the Jordan Valley; most of East Jerusalem was to be under Israeli sovereignty with no Palestinian capital; and the world would bear most of the responsibility for the refugees. In Gaza, Israeli settlements and border control would have remained. None of this was in writing and there was no map. Leery now of ambiguous schemes, Arafat walked out and was blamed for the failure—never mind Israel’s proposed settlement annexations and rejection of other Palestinian permanent status positions. Once again those were left in limbo as Israel gained more time to establish facts on the ground.
The January 2001 Taba negotiations were a hasty attempt to salvage the 2000 Summit before Ariel Sharon’s probable election as prime minister. Considerable progress was made, but differences on settlement annexations and compensating land swaps, as well as Jerusalem and refugee restitutions, could not be resolved in time. Once again, the permanent status issues stymied negotiations and were kicked further down the road.
Israel didn’t make all the proposals. The stipulations of the 2002 Arab League Peace Initiative were virtually identical to Palestinian demands, for which it offered Israel peace with all Arab League states. Israel rejected this proposal on Jerusalem and refugees.
George W. Bush’s 2003 “Roadmap” further postponed the permanent status issues until the end of 2005—by which time the number of settlers had increased 84 percent over 1995—and also ended up in the peace plan graveyard.
Israeli policy thawed briefly when Ehud Olmert became prime minister in 2006. In late 2008, with the number of West Bank settlers up 109 percent, he made a proposal similar to the 2001 Taba concept. But differences persisted over settlement land swaps, Jerusalem and refugees, and the deal could not be done before rejectionist Binyamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2009.
UNHOLY APARTHEID IN THE HOLY LAND
Twenty-seven years of the “peace process” haven’t come close to a two-state solution. Rather, it has resulted in apartheid in the territories. Assuming the House of Representatives is sincere about two states, that outcome indeed is unrealistic—even fanciful—under current circumstances. It also is not a little hypocritical, given its approval of more than $75 billion in aid to Israel from the beginning of the “peace process” in 1993 to 2017 and $3.8 billion per year in military aid thereafter—which has helped to establish and maintain this apartheid.
Apartheid in the Palestinian territories is a clear and present evil that cannot be whitewashed by Israel apologists. It’s a legitimate target for the kind of grassroots action that helped bring down South African apartheid. Assembling a bona-fide state from the shattered, dominated fragments Oslo created is highly improbable. Apartheid must be disassembled before that can be a real possibility. Adequate physical, legal and political space must be cleared before a Palestinian state can take root. All the apartheid laws, regulations, institutions and infrastructure first must be swept away, beginning with the official condemnation and outlawing of Zionist apartheid itself.
So, politicians and citizens: put aside two states for now. Help bring down this apartheid if you can. But get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand.
Gregory DeSylva is a board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and has written and produced six videos related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
The Israeli Lobby is the hidden enemy of progressive reform, both in England and in United States. Jeremy Corbin and the Labour Party championed the rights of English working people against the Conservative Party and its all powerful corporate interests. Charges of antisemitism against Corbin dominated much of the last campaign, leading to the election of a Trump clone, Boris Johnson.
In the US, Sanders, Warren, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have all been smeared by the same label. We have yet to see if Israel Lobby money can destroy America's hopes for economic reform.
Johnson, Trump, and Netanyahu represent the new wave of fascist thought, all predicated on the call for ethnic and racial "purity" in troubled economic times. Their ascension to power, in fact, comes from the neoliberal drift of the last several decades that has brought victory to the billionaire class over the vast majority of workers.
Racism is the weapon of choice for demagogues seeking power. All three leaders offer a constant refrain of racist comments to keep their base inflamed. Johnson speaks hatefully of all immigrants, characterizing them as parasites. Trump thinks it is fair game to attack Mexicans, Arabs, women, gays, or any other vulnerable group he can demonize. Netanyahu simply urges his Jewish citizens to ever tighten their noose around the necks of the Palestinians.
Political power built on racism brings an end to democracy, a terrible price to pay for leaders who would replace the common good with hate.
Jews from Arab Countries vs. Palestinian Refugees: A Wash?
Gregory DeSylva
An Iraqi woman walks past an abandoned house in what was a Jewish neighborhood in the Iraqi city of Hilla, south of Baghdad, on August 12, 2015. Between 1948 and 1951 nearly all of Iraq's 2,500-year-old Jewish community fled amid a region-wide outbreak of nationalist ¬violence. Prior to the exodus that followed the creation of Israel in 1948, Jews made up around a third of Baghdad's population and played a major role in the political, economic and cultural life of the country. (PHOTO CREDIT HAIDAR HAMDANI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2019, pp. 42-45
Special Report
By Gregory DeSylva
ISRAEL IS LOUDLY PROCLAIMING a false equivalency between Palestinian expulsions and the expulsion of Jews from Arab countries across the Middle East and North Africa.
While not taking responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Israeli officials nonetheless argue that even more Jewish refugees were expelled or forced to flee from Arab countries, especially following the 1948 war. According to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs—an Israeli research institution—“Between 1920 and 1970, 900,000 Jews were expelled from Arab and other Muslim countries…600,000 settled in the new state of Israel.”
Another advocacy group, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries, promotes their “cause” to governments and at the U.N. It claims as its most significant accomplishment the 2008 House of Representatives resolution calling on U.S. officials to refer to the “plight of the Arab Jewish refugees” whenever Palestinian refugees are mentioned.
The implication is that since the Arab countries expelled their Jews and have not compensated them for their property, therefore Israel has no obligation to allow the Palestinian refugees to return or to compensate them for their losses. The argument claims that Arab Jewish losses of land and property exceed Palestinian losses.
Based on a 1951 report by the U.N. Conciliation Commission for Palestine, British land expert John M. Berncastle estimated Palestinian losses at $4.4 billion versus Arab Jewish losses of $6.7 billion, in 2012 dollars. As of 2019 the ante has been upped dramatically: Israel is demanding $250 billion from seven Arab countries and Iran, with the Palestinians demanding $100 billion.
These analyses are predicated upon comparison of what happened to the Arab Jews and what happened to the Palestinians, but the analogy is false. What happened to the two groups was not comparable. Rather, these two events are related, constituting the two phases of the Zionist’s scheme to “…expel Arabs and take their places,” as Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion capsulized it in an Oct. 5, 1937 letter to his son Amos.
Ben-Gurion strove to expel Palestinian Arabs from their homes and properties in the Holy Land and replace them with Jews from everywhere—including Arab countries. The Zionists carried out the expulsion phase under “Plan Dalet” (or Plan D) whereby they ethnically cleansed 750,000 Palestinians from that part of the Holy Land that would become Israel in 1948. According to the International Criminal Court, ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. The replacement phase manifested as the immigration to Israel of Jews from Arab countries and elsewhere to fill the vacancies so created.
EXPULSION: THE PALESTINIAN NARRATIVE
Zionism arose in the late 1890s with the aim of making the entire Holy Land a Jewish nation, and trouble has shaken the region ever since. Its intentions were particularly arrogant given that Palestine was part of the Muslim Ottoman Empire and was 81 percent Muslim vs. 8 percent Jewish and 11 percent Christian, all living in relative peace there.
The Zionist nation was to be a “Jewish democracy”—an idea as self-contradictory as “white democracy” or “Christian democracy.” In theory, Jews had to be politically dominant to make it a “safe haven” for the world’s Jews, who had endured much oppression. Thus, Jews had to become a large majority where they long had been a small minority. But they were not expected to become 100 percent of the population. The new country would be Jewish (large majority, politically dominant) yet appear to be a genuine democracy fully enfranchising its minorities. To achieve these goals, the proportion of Jews to Muslims and Christians had to change radically.
From 1892-1947, the Zionists removed Arabs mainly by buying land from “notable” Arab owners of large estates farmed by Arab tenants. These tenants originally had owned much of this land but had entrusted it to the “notables” to avoid conscription into the Ottoman military. After buying the property, the Zionists evicted the tenants and replaced them with Russian and European Jews, more than 550,000 of whom flooded the Holy Land in six waves. So, by 1947 Jews had increased to 32 percent of the population vs. 60 percent Muslim Arabs and 7 percent Christians—still far from a dominant Jewish majority.
With few exceptions, Arab Jews thus were not expelled or ethnically cleansed.
That year, the U.N. partitioned the Holy Land: 56 percent went to the Zionist state, 42 percent for an Arab state and 2 percent for internationally controlled Jerusalem. On March 10, 1948, Zionist political and military leaders, including Ben-Gurion, met in Tel Aviv and formally adopted Plan Dalet, a blueprint for the forcible ethnic cleansing of Arabs to make way for a repopulation with Jews. They drove out 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from the 78 percent of the Holy Land that the new state of Israel would control after the 1948 war. This transformation left 86 percent Jews and only 14 percent Arabs.
The Palestinian exiles were bona-fide refugees, having fled partly out of fear of war, but primarily due to at least 31 massacres of Palestinians. Like most war refugees, they did not want to leave home and strove to return when the war was over. But Israel barred them with lethal force from doing so, declared their property abandoned, and made it state property. This confiscated property was then made available to Jewish immigrants—including Arab Jews. Counting descendants of the 1948 and 1967 refugees, there now are about five million Palestinian refugees, about 1.5 million of whom subsist in wretched camps in the West Bank, Gaza and surrounding Arab countries.
REPLACEMENT: THE ARAB JEWISH NARRATIVE
In 1945 about a million Jews inhabited the Arab states. They were often considered second-class citizens, but so were other non-Muslims. And while they occasionally experienced more or less harsh oppression, most did not want to leave their homelands. But since the late 19th century Zionism had been increasingly destabilizing not only the Holy Land, but Arab lands as well.
To replace the Palestinians expelled under Plan Dalet, the Zionists first imported Holocaust survivors and other European Jews, followed by some 600,000 Arab Jews. In contrast to Israel’s attitude toward the Palestinians, most Arab governments strongly opposed the departure of their Jews because they might migrate to Israel and thereby benefit the Zionist scheme. The Jews also constituted valuable human resources. Thus, rather than expelling their Jews, Iraq and Syria long prohibited them from leaving.
Iraq only lifted its prohibition in 1950 under American and British pressure, which got so intense that Iraq’s leader relented and even pushed some out. In 1956 Egypt expelled 25,000 of its Jews. Morocco barred its Jews from leaving from 1956-1961 but permitted their emigration the next three years. Lebanon, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Bahrain all permitted their Jews to leave and did not expel them. Under U.S. pressure, Syria finally let its Jews emigrate in 1991—tellingly, under the condition that they would not go to Israel.
With few exceptions, Arab Jews thus were not expelled or ethnically cleansed. Rather, more often they were prohibited from leaving. Most Arab Jews did not want to leave, even when faced with growing violence. As the Jewish Virtual Library explains, “After the Arabs rejected the United Nations decision to partition Palestine to create a Jewish state, however, the Jews of the Arab lands became targets of their own governments’ anti-Zionist fervor.” These anti-Zionist sentiments spread to ordinary Arabs disturbed by Israel’s maltreatment of Palestinians and, it seems likely, by the prospect of Islam losing its standing in the Holy Land.
Even before 1947, Arab Jews had been targets of anti-Zionist sentiment in Arab countries. According to Israeli historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, the “Palestine problem” had affected Iraqi society since the late 1920s. The 1936-1939 Arab Revolt against Jewish land purchases and growing Jewish immigration in Palestine precipitated stormy anti-Zionist demonstrations and bomb-throwing against Jewish institutions in Iraq. In the “Farhud” of June 1941, Iraqi Arab nationalists tragically killed 150-180 Iraqi Jews because they supported British rule of Iraq, under which they had thrived. Antagonism to Zionism may also have contributed to this massacre: according to Meir-Glitzenstein, “In the first half of the 1940s, the Iraqi people were incited against Zionism by propaganda in the [Iraqi] press.”
The proposition that attacks on Arab Jews during this period stemmed from anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism is supported by the correlation of the dates of these attacks with Zionist historical milestones. The 1945 anniversary of the Nov. 2, 1917 Balfour Declaration granting British support to Zionism precipitated attacks on Jews in several Arab countries. On Nov. 2 and 3, anti-Zionist militants killed five Jews and injured hundreds in Egypt. From November 5–7, 140 Jews were killed in riots in Tripolitania (today’s Libya). On Nov. 6, 14 Jews were killed during riots in Lebanon.
The Nov. 29, 1947 partition of Palestine marked another major Zionist milestone with ominous implications for Arab Jews. The previous day, the Iraqi foreign minister warned the U.N. General Assembly, “Partition imposed against the will of the majority of the people [of Palestine] will jeopardize peace and harmony in the Middle East. Not only the uprising of the Arabs of Palestine is to be expected, but the masses in the Arab world cannot be restrained. The Arab-Jewish relationship in the Arab world will greatly deteriorate.” Three days later, Arab attacks on Jews and Arab-Jewish clashes in Aden, Yemen left 82 Jews and 38 Arabs dead. On Dec. 5, one Jew was killed and much Jewish property was destroyed in Bahrain. Later that month, attacks in Syria killed an estimated 75 Jews.
Rasel Kazes (r), 85, arrives in Istanbul, Turkey with her daughter, Silvia on May 23, 2019. Kazes, a Sephardic Jew, left Turkey at the age of 16 and migrated to Argentina with her husband. (PHOTO BY ISA TERLI/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES)
The May 14, 1948 establishment of Israel was Zionism’s ultimate milestone. On June 7 and 8, attacks in Morocco killed 43 Jews and injured 150. The attackers were angered over young Zionist Jews trying to go fight for Israel in the war that broke out on May 15. A few days later, 13 or 14 Jews and four Arabs were killed in Tripolitania in clashes between young Zionists going to fight for Israel and anti-Zionist Arabs going to fight for Egypt. That summer, bombings left 70 Jews dead and 200 wounded in Cairo. Measures against Arab Jews were not limited to inter-ethnic violence: Iraq made Zionism a capital crime and put several onerous restrictions on its Jews.
The Suez War of Oct. 29 to Nov. 7, 1956—a failed Israeli attempt to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, barring Israel from using it—marked a rare Zionist setback, as the U.N. and the United States forced the invaders to withdraw. Yet the Suez Crisis had anti-Zionist repercussions for Egyptian Jews: soon after Israel invaded, Egypt expelled 25,000 and forced them to sign away their property.
Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War was another major Zionist milestone. Soon Libyan Jews were again targeted, with 18 killed and many injured. In Qamishli, Syria, 57 Jews were killed in a pogrom. In Egypt, Jewish men between the ages of 17 and 60 were deported or jailed and tortured, more Jewish property was confiscated, and most remaining Egyptian Jews left for Israel. Iraq expropriated Jewish property, froze Jewish bank accounts, fired Jews from public posts, prohibited them from using the phone, kept them under constant surveillance, held many under house arrest, restricted them to the cities, cancelled Jewish trading permits, and closed many Jewish businesses. In Bahrain, riots induced its remaining 500-600 Jews to emigrate.
Compelling evidence suggests that the attacks and measures against Arab Jews were motivated by anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism. Gudrun Kramer, author of The Jews in Modern Egypt, 1914-1952, concludes that the Egyptian Jews were attacked because of their real or alleged links to Zionism.
Regardless of its motivation, this violence worked counter to Arab interests, inducing the Arab Jews to do what the Zionists wanted them to do: migrate to Israel. As too often has been the case, Arabs harmed their own interests by engaging in violence against civilians.
Despite violence and repression, most Arab Jews still clung to their homelands. To further motivate them to leave, Zionist agents operated in several Arab countries, applying such force as necessary to ensure their exodus. To convince less educated Jews in Iraq and elsewhere to migrate, they portrayed Israel as a paradise.
Higher status Iraqi Jews required more convincing: from 1950-1951, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed three or four Jews and wounded dozens. According to Naeim Giladi, a former member of the Iraqi Zionist underground, they carried out bombings in an effort to force more Jews to leave Iraq. Moroccan Jews also required special “persuasion.” Israeli historian Yigal Bin-Nun has documented Zionist crimes committed to convince Jews to migrate to Israel. Some Libyan Jews believed the Jewish Agency was behind the June 1948 riots, since the riots helped it achieve its goals. Zionist agents also urged Algerian and Tunisian Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Anti-Zionist attacks, persuasion, threats and terror finally broke Iraqi Jews’ ties to their country. When Iraq lifted its prohibition in 1950, they hastened to migrate—especially to Israel. Similar forces were dislodging Jews from the other Arab countries.
Jews who exited Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria had some or virtually all of their property confiscated for the same reason Jews were often prohibited from leaving: to keep that wealth from benefitting Zionism. Tellingly, in 2010 Libya agreed to compensate only its Jewish emigrants who had not migrated to Israel. Confiscated property also compensated these countries to some degree for their loss of human capital. Jews who exited Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Yemen generally did not lose their property because they sold it and circumvented prohibitions against taking cash out of the country by converting it to jewels. Lebanon and Bahrain did not constrain their Jews from leaving or confiscate their property.
Some Jews from countries that prohibited their emigration crossed into Israel illegally. Where they were permitted to leave, the Zionists flew thousands to Israel in operations like “Magic Carpet” from Yemen, and “Ezra and Nehemiah” from Iraq. Upon arrival in Israel, they were placed in temporary “transit camps,” then re-settled in “development towns” on the sites of demolished Palestinian villages. Others were moved into vacant houses of Palestinian refugees. There, Zionism’s “expel and replace” scheme was on full display.
LIABILITY AND COMPENSATION
What happened to the Arab Jews has only superficial resemblance to what happened to the Palestinians. Their narratives are not comparable. These were closely related but distinct events: the expulsion of one group—the Palestinians—and their replacement by another group, the Arab Jews.
The Arab countries had no comparable scheme to expel Jews and replace them with Palestinians. The Palestinians were the victims of the Zionist crime. The Arab Jews were more or less unwitting pawns in that scheme. There is no logical, moral or legal equivalence between their narrative and that of the Palestinians.
Zionist Israel is responsible for restitution to the Palestinians. If the Arab Jews deserve further compensation, then Israel—whose founders engineered their migration and indirectly incited their Arab countrymen against them—should also be responsible for making them whole.
Gregory DeSylva is a board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and has written and produced six videos related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
How do racist leaders come to power? That question is particularly important as our unapologetically racist President Trump readies himself for another run for office.
A look at Trump's international "best friends" reveals some striking similarities. Many of these leaders came to power by unleashing racial and ethnic prejudices against vulnerable populations. In the US, Trump has attacked Mexicans, Muslims, Blacks, and immigrants while supporting white supremacists who want to rid our country of all people of color.
Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Modi in India, and even Johnson in Great Britain have risen to power by stoking similar hatred towards minority groups.
Bolsonaro spews his venom towards indigenous peoples: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”
Netanyahu treats the five million Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the same way. Speaking about Israel's apartheid wall, he said that it was necessary to “defend ourselves against the wild beasts."
Modi, a fervent Hindu Nationalist, has encouraged violence against millions of Muslims. Johnson has a long record of winning elections on hatred, having described Black English subjects as "flag-waving piccaninnies" with "watermelon smiles."
The goal of all this populist nationalism is to get rid of the "other," and to restore "greatness" to the dominant ethnic population. Of course a virulent misogyny and homophobia usually accompanies all these "patriotic" efforts.
Openly racist leaders in the 1930s led their willing citizenry to genocide. Today we tolerate such leaders at the world's peril.
One might wonder why the most racist president in our nation's history is supposedly outlawing "antisemitism" on US campuses.
Trump plans to intimidate the nation's colleges and universities into banning any discussion of Palestinian human rights. In effect, he has defined the limits of free speech for all of higher education, as he has defined the meaning of "antisemitism" for all Jewish Americans.
Yet his power base is white supremacist: Christian men, the type who march through the streets chanting "Jews won't replace us." Could anything be as contradictory?
Trump is certainly protecting Israel, the US colony, by obliterating freedom of speech on campuses. The fact that most US Jews do not want their religion or ethnicity defined by an apartheid state in the Middle East means nothing to him.
But white nationalism is more complex. Conservative evangelicals in the US have been advocating for the creation of an Israeli state for over a century. According to their doctrine, Jesus is to reappear when all Jews are returned to the Holy Land. But something else would happen as well; Jews would no longer be part of a Christian America. For white supremacists, an ascendent Israel represents the hope of ethnically cleansing this country of all Jews.
A featured evangelical leader at Trump's recent Hanukkah party, the Rev. John Hagee, once said that the "Holocaust was part of God's plan to return the Jews to Israel." In fact, white supremacists want to send everyone "home," be they Black, Latino, Muslim or Jew.
As a community organization, Middle East Crisis Response has been active in protecting human rights, both here in the Hudson Valley and abroad. We were founded sixteen years ago by Joel Kovel, noted environmentalist and professor at Bard College. His seminal book, "Overcoming Zionism" was dropped by his American publisher and he was forced to retire from the college. Things were different back then. Any mention of Palestinian rights ended a writer's academic career, even if he was Jewish.
Human rights have made some impressive gains since then. Black Lives, Immigrant Defense, LGBTQ and Muslim rights have begun to assert themselves locally. The same is true with Palestinian rights. We now have a Hudson Valley Jewish Voice for Peace (in Westchester, Kingston and Albany), a Palestinian Support Project, and a J Street all acting locally, along with strong organizations at several colleges.
None of these human rights organizations confuse a fair criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Jewish Voice for Peace, while strongly condemning antisemitism, rejects that charge when used to cover up ethnic cleansing and apartheid in Palestine.
Your recent statements branding a Vassar Students for Justice in Palestine action as antisemitic is a good example. You have decided that the chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an antisemitic declaration, a threat to the Jewish community on campus.
Left out of your analysis is the fact that Jewish students are members of SJP and JVP. Are you deciding for Jewish students what is antisemitic? Maybe young Jews don't want you to define what their Jewishness means. That was the message of JVP's National Director of JVP, Rebecca Vilkomerson, when she spoke at Vassar in 2011. She strongly refuted the idea that all Jewish people support Zionism, and stated that many young Jews do not want to have their ethnic identity or religion tied to a racist and apartheid state in the Middle East.
The chant lends itself to simplistic assumptions. According to a story about Vassar in the New York Daily News (Dahl, Ziva. "Vassar’s education on anti-Semitism" 20 Nov. 2019), "This rallying cry, first used by the terrorist group Hamas, calls for the annihilation of Israel. It is as racist as was the 'Jews will not replace us' chant by white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017."
The New York Times had a different and more nuanced take on these words. "David Kimche, who was director general of Israel's foreign ministry in the 1980's, noted: 'The old Zionist nationalists' anthem was a state on the two banks of the River Jordan.' When that became impractical, we talked about 'greater Israel,' from the Jordan to the sea. But people now realize that this, too, is something we won't be able to achieve.' " (Bronner, Ethan. "Why 'Greater Israel' Never Came to Be" 14 Aug. 2005)
It looks like your interpretation of the chant follows the reasoning of the Daily News article, written by an employee of the Haym Salomon Center, a Zionist propaganda organization with a troubling Islamophobic reputation.
We are asking you not to discipline any students for chanting about freedom for Palestinians, whether it be from the Jordan to the sea, or anywhere else. We know there are risks to be faced in siding with human rights for Palestinians. But Vassar is a highly respected college, and should be free from the influences of Zionist donors, tabloid newspapers and rightwing hate groups.
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