The Forgotten Refugees (2005)

The Forgotten Refugees (2005)
Directed by Michael Grynszpan
Produced by The David Project and IsraTV
49 minutes, English

While Palestinians may get the most press, they are not the only refugee population in Israel. Between 1947 and the present day, more than one million Jews were driven out of their homes in the Muslim world. These Jews, many of whom had to leave with only what they could carry, had lived in the Arab world for thousands of years before they were violently forced to leave. Instead of choosing to stay in refugee camps for 50 years, these Jews worked swiftly to integrate themselves into the societies of Israel and the United States, and thus their stories have been largely lost. However, two recent films have begun to try to tell the story of the persecuction, suffering, and ultimate destruction of these Jewish communities. These films add some much-needed perspective to the Arab-Israeli conflict by pointing out that the Palestinian Arabs are not the only refugee population in that part of the Middle East.

“The Forgotten Refugees” is an exceptional documentary film that addresses one of the least recognized refugee groups of the 20th century: the nearly one million Jews from Arab countries and Iran who were either forcibly expelled from their homes or otherwise compelled to leave. Commissioned by the David Project for Jewish Leadership in Boston, “The Forgotten Refugees” is the centerpiece of a campaign by that organization to educate the world about the destruction of thousands of vibrant Middle Eastern Jewish communities.

The film starts by giving a brief history of the settlement of Jews in what are now Arab lands. Jews first left the land of Israel in the sixth century B.C.E., after the destruction of Solomon’s Temple. Most of these Jews settled in Babylonia, which is present day Iraq. This was more than one thousand years before Islam was even founded. At the end of the Babylonian exile, many Jews chose to stay in Babylonia, and they would remain there for 2,500 years.

Jews generally prospered in Arab lands in the early years, and after the rise of Christianity, Jews fared significantly better in the Arab world than in Christendom. However, that is not to say that Jews were given equality. On the contrary, Jews along with Christians were granted the status of dhimmi, or protected peoples of the Book. Dhimmis were allowed to practice their religions without being killed, but they had to pay a tax and were subject to a number of humbling prohibitions, including the wearing of distinctive clothing (the first yellow star badges).

This semi-comfortable coexistence persisted until the 20th century, when the collapse of European colonialism begot a fervent Arab nationalism. Arab nationalist leaders found Jews useful as scapegoats to help galvanize their population. “The Forgotten Refugees” includes testimony from dozens of Jews who lived through these dark days in Arab lands. These Jews, who almost all moved to Israel, describe incensed mobs chanting “death to Jews” and rampaging through the streets of Cairo and Tripoli murdering innocent Jews.

In one segment, two Israelis, formerly Egyptians, explain how laws were passed that decreed all Jews to be enemies of the state and forced them to emigrate. This surge of violence coupled with the passage of Nuremburg-like laws in many Muslim countries resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews leaving the homes their families had inhabited for thousands of years. The testimony of these survivors puts a personal, human face on the mass migration of these Jewish populations.

Fortunately, after 1948, these Jews were able to move to Israel. The film goes on to recount the story of the ma’abarot, the Israeli resettlement camps of the late 1940s and early 1950s that housed primarily Mizrachi Jewish populations. The refugees had all of their property and assets seized by the Muslim governments they had fled, and had to start their lives afresh in the camps in the south of Israel. Footage of these camps is coupled with a brief look at Moshe Katsav, the president of Israel, who lived in one of the camps as a young boy. It is an inspirational segue and a testament to the perseverance of these brave people who had everything taken away from them.

“The Forgotten Refugees” is an excellent film that seeks not to indoctrinate but only to educate. The interviews with many Mizrachi, or north African, Jews make clear that the question of identity and allegiance is still a troubling one for many of them. The viewer can see that these people are pained by the scorn directed at them by their longtime Muslim neighbors. Understandably, these Jews continue to feel a deep connection to their traditional Arabic food, music, and language.

The contemporary footage of crumbling synagogues and empty Jewish quarters throughout the Arab world is a sad record of the complete eradication of once vibrant communities and the separation of these Jews not only from their land and possessions but also in many ways from their own identities. “The Forgotten Refugees” should be required viewing for any would-be experts on the Arab-Israeli conflict who preach about the plight of refugees in the land of Israel.

Guardian’s False Apartheid Charges—Part II

The aim of Chris McGreal’s two-day feature in the British Guardian newspaper is to convince readers that Israel “bears a disturbing resemblance” to apartheid South Africa. This accusation, which is a staple of the most virulent anti-Israel propaganda, has been widely debunked by veterans of the anti-apartheid movement and others. (See CAMERA’s initial Alert on the McGreal series for more on this subject.)

This article addresses the errors and distortions in part two of McGreal’s feature, the Feb. 7 article entitled “Brothers in arms–Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria.” (Part one of the segment is addressed here.)

The main thrust of his article–repeated again and again–is that South Africa’s Jewish community was complicit in apartheid; that Israel stood out in its cooperation with Pretoria; and that Zionism and Israeli society are inherently racist. Using techniques more in line with political advocacy campaigning than with professional journalism, McGreal carefully avoids mention of counterclaims and facts that might contradict his assertions.

South African Jews

It’s important to first note that McGreal’s attack on South African Jewry is completely irrelevant to the question the journalist purports to answer in the article (namely, whether Israel is similar to apartheid South Africa). What does the behavior of a small Jewish community thousands of miles away from Israel tell us about Israeli policy? Nothing, unless one were promoting the racist idea that the Jewish people–whether in Africa twenty years ago or in Israel today–have an inherent taste for apartheid.

In any case, the picture McGreal paints of the Jewish community is incomplete and fallacious, and unfairly and misleadingly singles out the South African Jewish community as supporters and beneficiaries of the apartheid regime.

The article begins with an anecdote about a Jewish Holocaust survivor, Vera Reitzer, who joined the apartheid Nationalist party after moving to South Africa. Only after devoting three paragraphs to Reitzer and her apparently racist views does McGreal admit, albeit equivocally, that she is uncharacteristic of the wider South African Jewish community:

Reitzer was unusual among Jewish South Africans in her open enthusiasm for apartheid and for her membership of the NP. But she was an accepted member of the Jewish community in Johannesburg … while Jews who fought the system were frequently ostracised by their own community.

McGreal’s decision to open his article with four paragraphs about Reitzer, despite the fact that she does not represent her community, is typical of his attempts in the piece to defame the Jews of South Africa. Throughout the article, the writer implicitly accuses the Jewish community of South Africa of supporting apartheid because “for years the bulk of South Africa’s Jews not only failed to challenge the apartheid system but benefitted and thrived under its protection,” because “many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it,” and so on. The Jewish Board of Deputies in South Africa is criticized as well for their “declared policy [of] “˜neutrality.'”

It’s not exactly clear why McGreal finds it fitting to single out for opprobrium one group–the Jews–from the wider white Christian population of South Africa. (Of course, many of these white Christians unmentioned by McGreal traced their roots to Great Britain.)

Commenting on a similarly unwarranted focus on Jewish involvement in the slave trade, Pier Larson, an African history scholar and Assistant Professor in Johns Hopkins University’s Department of History, wrote that

[w]e must question why there is such interest in Jews and the slave trade. Never once in my classroom has anyone asked, for example, if Norwegians or Danes or, for that matter, Christians, participated in the slave trade. Even asking the question implies some special relationship of Jews to enslavement. [But] the vast majority of individuals involved in and benefitting from the slave trade were either Africans or Christian Europeans.

In fact, Jews stood out as firm opponents of apartheid. When Nelson Mandela said in an Oct. 18, 1999 speech that “I owe a debt of honor to the Jews,” he may have been thinking about Helen Suzman, the Jewish anti-apartheid activist and parliamentarian. Or he may have been thinking of the Rivonia Trial in which he was a defendant–not because of Percy Yutar, the Jewish prosecutor whom McGreal made sure to name in his article, but because of the Jewish members of the defense team (Arthur Chaskalson and Joel Joffe) and Mandela’s Jewish co-defendants (Dennis Goldberg, Lionel “Rusty” Bernstein, Bob Hepple, James Kantor), none of whom are mentioned by McGreal. There are any number of other prominent Jewish anti-apartheid activists to whom Mandela could have been referring–according to some estimates, Jews made up fifty percent of all white activists arrested for their opposition to apartheid, despite representing only 2 percent of the white South African population.

Furthermore, in 1980, the same Board of Deputies criticized by McGreal as “neutral” passed a resolution calling on the Jewish community “to cooperate in securing the immediate amelioration and ultimate removal of all unjust discriminatory laws and practices based on race, creed, or colour.” Five years later, according to a July 13, 1985 Associated Press article (which, ironically, is entitled “South Africa’s Jews take strong stand against apartheid”), the Board of Deputies asserted that it “records its support and commitment to justice, equal opportunity and removal of all provisions in the laws of South Africa which discriminate on grounds of color and race, and rejects apartheid.” Later that year in Johannesburg, 500 Jews attended the first meeting of the new anti-apartheid group Jews for Social Justice.

And in a recent interview, leading anti-apartheid politician Helen Suzman explained that the support she received from Jewish voters was key to her electoral success:

My own electorate, which I represented for 36 years as an anti-apartheid politician, had a considerable number of Jewish voters supporting me throughout my career. This was one of the reasons why I was the only Progressive Party candidate reelected in 1961 after we left the United Party in order to form a more forceful anti-apartheid opposition. (Tara Levy, YNETnews, 1/9/05)

While it is fair to mention the Board of Deputy’s years of neutrality and the Jewish community’s hesitancy to risk backlash by confronting the government, any serious journalistic examination of the Jewish community under apartheid cannot ignore the Board’s eventual anti-apartheid stand, or the many Jews who struggled for racial equality in South Africa.

In Nelson Mandela’s memoir, Long Walk to Freedom, the famed anti-apartheid activist wrote that he “found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics ….” McGreal’s disingenuous focus on Vera Reitzer and Percy Yutar, and his selective and fragmentary look at Jewish organizations, appears intended to convince Guardian‘s readers of the opposite.

Israel’s links to South Africa

A-bomb technology

Under the heading “A-bomb technology was Israel’s “˜gift’ to Pretoria,” McGreal claims the Jewish state “provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa’s development of its nuclear bombs.”

Instead of substantiating his allegation with facts, the journalist relies only on a few vague remarks by former Israeli foreign ministry official Alon Liel about a “completely secret” program, the knowledge of which “was extremely limited to a small number of people….”

There was no need for McGreal to rely so heavily on this anecdote about a “secret” program; much has been said and written publicly about South Africa’s nuclear developement. The Guardian article avoids discussing such information, and with good reason: the facts discredit McGreal’s claim of Israel’s “central” role.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists provides a detailed history of South Africa’s nuclear programs. South Africa’s nuclear program was launched in 1949 and up until 1975 supported by France, the United States and Germany. France supplied reactors. The US supplied a research reactor in 1965 (SAFARI-1) and weapons grade Uranium until 1975. Germany provided technical training at the Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe and transferred critical enrichment technology to South Africa.

Although there has been much speculation over Israeli-South African collusion on developing a nuclear weapon, David Albright, who wrote an extensive article on South Africa’s atomic bomb development, concluded that “available evidence argues against significant cooperation” with Israel. He concludes that ARMSCOR, the South African corporation that took over the bomb project in the late 1970s, “is unlikely to have used Israeli assistance in developing its nuclear devices.” (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 1994)

While evidence of European involvement in South Africa’s enrichment programs has been exposed, significant international links–Israeli or otherwise–to South Africa’s nuclear weapons program have not. F.W. de Klerk, former President of South Africa, admitted that South Africa had nuclear weapons, but asserted that South Africa never cooperated with others on its weapons program.

South African Arms

McGreal not only accuses Israel of building South Africa’s nuclear program, but also of creating the country’s arms industry in general. Israel “created the South African arms industry. After 1976, there was a love affair between the security establishments of the two countries and their armies,” he quotes Alon Liel saying. Again, McGreal relies on an empty declaration, without providing any actual evidence documenting Israel’s contribution to South Africa’s arms industry.

Although Israel and South Africa did cooperate in some areas of defense, McGreal’s focus on this connection grossly distorts the larger picture and conveniently ignores the primary suppliers for South Africa’s military.

The following is a sampling of the detailed list of arms supplies to South Africa provided by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI):

UK		14 Westland Wasp helicopters supplied in 1973 and 1974
France		38 Mirage fighter aircraft supplied in 1974 and 1975
Jordan		717 Tigercat missiles suppplied in 1974
Italy		80 military aircraft supplied in 1974
UK		41 Centurian tanks supplied in 1974
France		48 AS-12 air to surface missiles supplied in 1975
France		2 submarines supplied in 1975
France		2040 air to surface missiles supplied between 1976-1983
Italy		96 Impala counter insurgency equipment supplied between 1976-1983
Spain		60 centurion tanks supplied in 1979

SIPRI’s yearbook describes Israel’s major contributions during that time period as limited to a dozen patrol boats.

The SIPRI Yearbook for 1985 reports that France, West Germany and UK were the only countries listed as supplying SA with military equipment in 1984. Between 1963 and 1975 the largest suppliers of arms to South Africa was in order: France, UK, USA, West Germany.

Similar assessments have been provided by UNESCO and other sources.

While McGreal disregards the massive lethal weaponry supplied by European and Middle Eastern states (like Jordan) that was used to suppress resistance groups, he nonetheless deems it important to mention a kibbutz having sold anti-riot vehicles to South Africa.

It is far beyond the scope of this piece to delve into the complex web of companies and international subsidiaries that formed the South African arms industry, but it is clear that the majority of companies involved had European (especially British) and American connections.

SIPRI’s Signe Landgren wrote extensively in his study Embargo Disimplemented: South Africa’s Military Industry about the manner in which South Africa skirted the arms embargo imposed on it. (See also Susan Willett, “Open Arms for the Prodigal Son?: The Future of South Africa’s Arms Trade Policies,” African Defence Review, 1994.) While noting that there was some Israeli involvement in designing certain weapons, Landgren writes that “the aircraft industry evolved with French and British aid although structured around US and Italian designs … the nuclear industry was based on technology transfer from the United States, France and Germany; military vehicles were based on upgraded British and French models and; electronics and communications technologies were developed with the help of British and US companies based in South Africa.”

This hardly suggests that Israel was the primary or even the dominant supplier of military designs and technology to South Africa.

But ultimately, military supplies represent only part of the picture of support for the Apartheid regime. In his narrow focus on Israel and South Africa’s Jewish community, McGreal completely ignores the extensive trade, in particular the oil supplied by Arab gulf states, without which the South African regime could not have survived.

The International Monetary Fund published statistics on trade with South Africa which show Israel’s trade was minuscule in comparison to European nations and Arab oil exporting states.

Direction of Trade Statistics, IMF Yearbook, October 1984: Trade with South Africa 1982-1984

Exports to	$ million
USA	1,551
Japan	1,390
UK	1,219
Black Africa	772
West Germany	703
France	353
Israel	142

Imports from	$ million
Arab oil exporting countries	2,500
USA	2,207
West Germany	2,003
Japan	1,765
UK	1,697
France	544
Black Africa	315
Israel	69

Similarly, foreign investment was a major source of support to the regime. According to one source, Arab countries accounted for one third of the foreign investment in South Africa, totaling over 9 billion dollars. (Middle East Review, Summer 1985)

Portrayal of Israel, Israelis and Zionism as Racist

McGreal repeatedly attacks the Jewish State and its Jewish citizens as racist practitioners of apartheid. He quotes Ronnie Kasrils, an Jewish anti-apartheid activist serving as Minister of Intelligence for South Africa. In an attack on the very concept of Jewish self-determination in their homeland, Kasrils asserts that “Israelis claim that they are the chosen people, the elect of God, and find a biblical justification for their racism and Zionist exclusivity,” adding that “[t]his is just like the Afrikaners of apartheid South Africa.”

McGreal himself also shows contempt for Zionism, suggesting that the idea of Jewish self-determination was cynically usurped from the anti-apartheid struggle (by those same Jews whom the author paints as complicit in apartheid):

Nowadays, the language of the anti-apartheid struggle has found favour with the Jewish establishment as a means of defending Israel. South Africa’s chief rabbi, Warren Goldstein, has called Zionism the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” and invoked the terminology of Pretoria’s policies to uplift “previously disadvantaged” black people. “Israel is an affirmative-action state set up to protect Jews from genocide. We are previously disadvantaged and we can’t rely on the goodwill of the world,” he said

Of course, describing Zionism as the “national liberation movement of the Jewish people” is not merely a current fashion as described by one rabbi. It is the accepted definition of the word (see, for example, American Heritage and Miriam-Webster dictionaries), and is concept that long predates apartheid.

If there are any lingering doubts about McGreal’s views on the existence of a Jewish state, the journalist disposes of them when he describes the two-state solution as akin to apartheid: “[O]ver the past decade [Israelis] have come to support the creation of a Palestinian state as a means of ridding themselves of responsibility from the bulk of Arabs. Separation. Apartheid.”

To convince his readers that Israeli Jews are especially racist, the author employs outright falsehoods along with selectively highlighting atypical, extreme individuals.

For example, he focuses on the late Israeli Member of Knesset Rehavam Ze’evi, whose political party has advocated the transfer of Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and then grossly exaggerates the extent of public support for this view. McGreal claims that 70 Knesset members backed a bill to memorialize the assassinated lawmaker and “perpetuate his ideas.” But the law memorializing Ze’evi, passed by 43 MKs (not 70, as McGreal writes), and the initators of the bill explicitly assured voters that it did not perpetuate the idea of “transfer”(Nina Gilbert, Jerusalem Post, 7/12/05). The journalist also claims that “there was a time when large numbers of Israelis agreed with Ze’evi,” despite the fact that Ze’evi’s party, Moledet, never managed on its own to win more than 3 seats in the 120-seat Knesset.

When McGreal finally allows one paragraph to relay Alon Liel’s argument that “[t]he existential problems of Israel were real,” and that the country’s policies were “not … built on racism” but were mainly “security-oriented,” the journalist turns over the following three paragraphs to Author Goldreich, a critic who chides Liel and claims Israel’s Six Day War was merely a land grab rather than a war for survival:

“It’s a gross distortion. I’m surprised at Liel. In 1967, in the six day war, in this climate of euphoria – by intent, not by will of God or accident – the Israeli government occupied the territories of the West Bank and Gaza with a captive Palestinian population obviously in order to extend the area of Israel and to push the borders more distant from where they were,” [Goldreich] says.

Goldreich then claims Israel ignored his pleas to negotiate with the Palestinians because “the government wanted territory more than it wanted security.” Both Goldreich and McGreal–the Guardian‘s Middle East “expert”–appear to have forgotten that the Arab leadership made clear shortly after the war that negotiation was not an option. “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it,” the infamous Khartoum Resolutions declared, even though Israel had offered to return most of the land it conquered.

Selective Representatives of South African Jewry

It is instructive to look at whom McGreal relies upon to support his comparison of Israel to Apartheid South Africa. He includes ample quotes from Kasrils, who headed a petition campaign describing “Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and the suppression of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination” as the cause of the conflict. Finding a Jew to deliver the harshest denunciations of Israel is a typical tactic of anti-Zionist polemicists.

But McGreal excludes or misrepresents the views of prominent anti-apartheid activists and others whose message is not consonant with his polemic.

For example, although the article makes sure to mention Kasrils’ anti-Israel petition, it ignores completely the letter signed by several prominent South African anti-Apartheid activists, including Bob Hepple and Joel Joffe, stating that

we reject this parallel [between Israel and apartheid]. Israel may adopt policies with which we disagree, but the institutions of social democratic Israel do not bear comparison with the authoritarian and racist structures of apartheid South Africa. To equate this with Israel distorts the historical record.

(The letter was published in McGreal’s own newspaper, the Guardian, in May 2005.)

And Alon Liel, whose criticisms of Israel were freely quoted by McGreal, had also argued a few years earlier that the comparison of Israel to apartheid is specious. McGreal apparently found this viewpoint inconvenient to his advocacy; like other opinions and facts which discredit his apartheid comparison, it was left unmentioned.

The second installment of McGreal’s apartheid feature, like the first, departs from the journalistic principles encoded in both the UK Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice and the Guardian‘s own Editorial Code. According to these guidelines, both of which the Guardian purports to follow, McGreals errors and omissions require prompt and prominent corrections. Check back to see if the newspaper complies with its standards.

Guardian Defames Israel with False Apartheid Charges

A recent series of articles in the Guardian by Chris McGreal charges that similar to the old South Africa, Israel is an apartheid state that engages in racist and discriminatory behavior against its Arab citizens. According to the paper, “after four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from Johannesburg before that, the Guardian‘s award-winning Middle East correspondent Chris McGreal is exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive comparison.”

Explosive the comparison certainly is, especially because a CAMERA investigation reveals that Mr. McGreal’s arguments are uniformly based either on materially false assertions, or on assertions wrenched grotesquely out of context.

Like the original series of articles, our analysis and investigation will be published in multiple parts. This first installment deals with the first articles of the series, published on Feb. 6, 2006. And, since the investigation is ongoing, further updates will be posted as new information becomes available.

It is appropriate to begin with perhaps Mr. McGreal’s most damning allegation – that most of the land in Israel is reserved for Jews only:

Israeli governments reserved 93% of the land – often expropriated from Arabs without compensation – for Jews through state ownership, the Jewish National Fund and the Israeli Lands Authority. In colonial and then apartheid South Africa, 87% of the land was reserved for whites.

This charge is utterly false. Before going into details concerning the actual land laws and practice in Israel, perhaps it’s better to start with a simple counterexample: the city of Upper Nazareth. Upper Nazareth, a relatively new community (founded in 1957), is built on the slopes above the ancient city of Nazareth, has always had a Jewish majority, and was built entirely on “state land.” Today, it has a population (look for Nazerat Illit in the following link) that is more than 20% non- Jewish, at least half of whom are Israeli Arabs, who, like their Israeli Jewish neighbors, lease their land from the Israel Land Administration (ILA).

The 93% claim is therefore obviously false, and it is a pity that in his “four years reporting from Jerusalem” Mr. McGreal never managed to notice this. Because the “93% of the land” claim is so common – it appears on thousands of anti-Israel websites and probably hundreds of such books – CAMERA produced a detailed refutation, available in slightly different versions here and here. The salient facts are these:

In 1960 under Basic Law: Israel Lands, JNF-owned land and government-owned land were together defined as “Israel lands,” and the principle was laid down that such land would be leased rather than sold. The JNF retained ownership of its land, but administrative responsibility for the JNF land, and also for government-owned land, passed to a newly created agency called the Israel Land Administration or ILA. (Encyclopaedia Judaica, V 10, p. 77)

Today, of the total land in Israel, 79.5% is owned by the government, 14% is privately owned by the JNF, and the rest, around 6.5%, is evenly divided between private Arab and Jewish owners. Thus, the ILA administers 93.5% of the land in Israel (Government Press Office, Israel, 22 May 1997).

Jewish and Arab Access to Government-Owned Land in Israel

Statements that Israel refuses to sell state-owned land to Israeli Arabs are extremely misleading, since, as stated above, such land is not sold to Israeli Jews either, but is instead leased out by the ILA and is equally available to all citizens of Israel.

The availability of state-owned land to Israeli Arabs is true not just in theory, but also in practice. For example, about half of the land farmed by Israeli-Arabs is leased from the ILA. (Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel, Westview Press, p. 66, 1990)

Moreover, sometimes Israeli Arabs receive more favorable terms from the ILA than do Israeli Jews. Thus, for example, in new Jewish communities near Beersheva the ILA charged $24,000 for a capital lease on a quarter of an acre, while at the same time Bedouin families in the nearby community of Rahat paid only $150 for the same amount of land. (Israel’s Dilemma, Shapolsky Publications, p. 97, 1989)

In another case a Jewish citizen applied to the ILA to lease land in a new Bedouin community under the same favorable, highly subsidized terms available to the Bedouins.

When the ILA refused to lease him land in the community under any circumstances, he sued. In Avitan v. Israel Land Administration (HC 528/88) the High Court ruled that ILA discrimination against the Jewish citizen Avitan was justified as affirmative action for Bedouin citizens. (Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel, p. 81)

In addition, it is important to note the following from the Legal Status book cited above, regarding specifically the access by non-Jewish citizens of Israel to the 80 percent of the land that is state owned (ie “state land”), and the restrictions on access by non-Jews to the roughly 13 percent of the land that is privately owned by the JNF:

The legal arrangements described above, which prevent leasing of land to non-Jews, apply only to JNF lands. Under the principle of equality that binds all public authorities the ILA may not refuse to lease other Israel lands, i.e., lands belonging to the state or the Development Authority, to Arabs. In practice such lands are indeed leased to Arabs, mainly for urban use, but they are also sometimes leased to Arabs for agricultural use too … (Legal Status, p. 66)

As noted elsewhere in the book, the JNF restictions are often evaded by the government in practice, meaning that non-Jews do in fact have access to much JNF-owned land. Finally, it should be noted that the book’s author, Prof. David Kretzmer, is hardly an apologist for Israel – he was one of the founders of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, more or less equivalent to the ACLU in the United States. While one might not necessarily agree with some of Prof. Kretzmer’s conclusions, his technical treatment of civil rights law and practice in Israel seems quite reliable, unlike Mr. McGreal, who might have benefitted from reading the book or speaking with its author.

Similarly distorted was Mr. McGreal’s treatment of building and demography in Jerusalem. He claims, for example, that:

At the heart of Israel’s strategy is the policy adopted three decades ago of “maintaining the demographic balance” in Jerusalem. In 1972, the number of Jews in the west of the city outnumbered the Arabs in the east by nearly three to one. The government decreed that that equation should not be allowed to change, at least not in favour of the Arabs.

But had Mr. McGreal simply looked at the population figures published every year, he would have seen that the “demographic balance” has not been maintained and has indeed changed in “favour of the Arabs.” According to the Statistical Abstract of Israel 2006,  Jews comprised 73.4 percent of Jerusalem’s population in 1972 but only 64.9 percent in 2004. (The Palestinian statistical abstract claims that the Israeli figures understate Arab population growth, so that would further undermine Mr. McGreal’s case.)

The bottom line is that all claims about “Israel maintaining the demographic balance” by “preventing Palestinian growth” are contradicted by the most basic demographic figures – in Jerusalem the Palestinian population has grown far faster than the Jewish population. In other words, if anyone is changing the demographic balance in Jerusalem it is the Palestinians.

Let us now turn to Mr. McGreal’s claims that Muslims and Christians are barred from living in the so-called Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City:

Israeli law also restricts where non-Jews may live. “Muslims and Christians are barred from buying in the Jewish quarter of the old city on the grounds of “historic patterns of life of each community having its own quarter’,” says Seidemann, in a phrase eerily reminiscent of apartheid’s philosophy. “But that didn’t prevent the Israeli government from aggressively pursuing activities to place Jews within the Muslim quarter. The attitude is: what’s mine is exclusively mine, but what’s yours is mixed if we happen to target it.”

This is arrant nonsense. Non-Jews can and do live in the Jewish Quarter, and in substantial numbers, while relatively few Jews live in the Muslim Quarter. According to the most recent figures available online (from the 1995 Census of Population and Housing) at least 480 Muslims lived in the Jewish Quarter, making up 22.5% of the quarter’s population. In contrast, Jews made up just 1.68% of the Muslim Quarter’s population. Even in absolute terms, the 480 Muslims living in the Jewish Quarter outnumbered the 380 Jews living in the much larger Muslim Quarter. (The Jerusalem Statistical Yearbook gives the total population of the quarters, along with their numerical designation – the Jewish Quarter is Sub-quarter 63 of Jerusalem, the Muslim Quarter Sub-quarter 64. The Census of Population and Housing then gives the religious breakdown of the population by sub-quarter and even by the more detailed measure of statistical area; the relevant figures are on and near line 1639 of this spreadsheet.)

Thus, the reality is exactly the opposite of what Mr. McGreal charges – it is evidently far easier for a Muslim to live in the Jewish Quarter than it is for a Jew to live in the Muslim Quarter. And Danny Seidemann, the “expert” quoted by Mr. McGreal on this matter, is apparently less than reliable.

McGreal also falsely charged – once again relying on Seidemann – that Jerusalem’s Arab residents were:

… denied permission to build new homes or expand existing ones, [so] many Palestinians build anyway and risk a demolition order. Israel’s former prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, routinely defends the demolitions by arguing that any civilised society enforces planning regulations. But Israel is the only western society to deny construction permits to people on the grounds of race. Until 1992, so did South Africa.

In fact, contrary to McGreal’s claims, Arabs in Jerusalem actually receive building permits at the same rate as Ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city (the two communities are demographically quite similar – in total population, family size and income). Indeed, in Jerusalem, Arabs have actually built new housing units at a faster rate than have Jews. As the chief Palestinian demography expert, Khalil Tufakji, admitted in a CNN interview, “We can build inside Jerusalem, legal, illegal — rebuild a house, whatever, we can do. Maybe we lose ten houses, but in the end we build 40 more houses in East Jerusalem.” (Sept. 19, 1998)

Tufakji’s statement that Arabs have no problem building in Jerusalem is confirmed in a comprehensive report by Israel Kimhi, Arab Building in Jerusalem: 1967 – 1997, published by CAMERA. (Kimhi, of the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, was formerly the municipality’s chief city planner).

An even more detailed report by Justus Weiner, Illegal Construction in Jerusalem, was recently published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Among the facts documented by Weiner is that the Jerusalem municipality:

has authorized more than 36,000 permits for new housing units in the Arab sector, more than enough to meet the needs of Arab residents through legal construction until 2020;

and that

Both Arabs and Jews typically wait 4-6 weeks for permit approval, enjoy a similar rate of application approvals, and pay an identical fee ($3,600) for water and sewage hook-ups on the same size living unit.

Thus, McGreal’s claim that Israel denies construction permits to Jerusalem’s Arabs is utterly false.

In order to support his charge that Israel is a racist, apartheid society McGreal also falsely attributed to Israeli leaders extreme anti-Arab positions. For example, he charged the veteran Israeli politician Uzi Landau with supporting the expulsion of Palestinians:

In 2001, Sharon appointed Uzi Landau as his security minister, a position from which he openly advocated that Palestinians should be forced to move to Jordan because they were in the way of Israeli expansion in the West Bank. “For many of us, it’s as though they (the Palestinians) are encroaching on our very right to be there (in the occupied territories),” he said.

First of all, the quoted statement has nothing to do with forcing Palestinians to move to Jordan. If indeed Uzi Landau had openly advocated such a thing, why can’t McGreal come up with a direct quotation to prove it? Just to be sure, on Feb. 27 I called Mr. Landau and asked him about this. He vehemently denied that he has ever advocated, openly or otherwise, that Palestinians be forced to move to Jordan. In addition, both Jewish and Palestinian journalists verified that they had never known Mr. Landau to express or hold such views. Therefore, unless Mr. McGreal can provide proof that Mr. Landau has endorsed such forced relocation, it seems that both he and the Guardian are guilty of libel.

In addition, there are serious questions about the manner in which McGreal used the above statement by Mr. Landau, since McGreal had earlier used exactly the same statement in an entirely different context. The prior usage was in a 27 October 2004 article covering the departure of Mr. Landau from the Israeli cabinet following his vote against disengagement:

Nearly half of Likud’s MPs, led by Mr Landau, voted against the disengagement process last night. “Unilateral withdrawal is simply signalling to the Palestinians that terrorism rewards and that Israel is in an ongoing retreat.

“This is not going to reduce terrorism, it is going to boost it,” he said.

“We see all these territories
as our homeland. For many of us it’s as though they are encroaching on our very right to be there, but also it casts a shadow on our ability to really defend ourselves.

“There are many, many Arabs who hate our guts and want our destruction. We don’t want to see an additional terrorist state on our border.”

It is hard to see what this statement has to do with Palestinians supposedly being “in the way of Israeli expansion in the West Bank.” Mr. Landau is clearly referring to Israelis who voted in favor of disengagement as encroaching on the rights of fellow Israelis to live in the territories. By changing the context of Landau’s statement, Mr. McGreal seems to have directly violated the Guardian’s Editorial Code, which requires that “Direct quotations should not be changed to alter their context or meaning.”

Mr. McGreal also falsely claimed that Prime Minister Sharon essentially agreed with expelling Palestinians:

Sharon rarely objected to the expression of such views, and when he did it was not because they were racist or immoral. The prime minister told Likud party members who pressed him to expel Palestinians that he could not do so because the “international situation wouldn’t be conducive”.

In fact, contrary to McGreal’s claims, Sharon, in his autobiography, strongly supported Jewish-Arab coexistence:

It had always been one of my convictions that Jews and Arabs could live together. Even as a child it never occurred to me that Jews might someday be living in Israel without Arabs, or separated from Arabs. On the contrary, for me it had always seemed perfectly normal for the two people to live and work side by side. That is the nature of life here and it always will be.

… though Israel is a Jewish nation, it is, of course, not only a Jewish nation… I begin with the basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together. I have repeated that at every opportunity, not for journalists and not for popular consumption, but because I have never believed differently or thought differently, from my childhood on. I am not afraid of Arabs. I feel I can live with them. I believe I understand their problems. I know that we are both inhabitants of this land, and although the state is Jewish, that does not mean that Arabs should not be full citizens in every sense of the word. (Warrior, p343, 542-3)

In addition, Mr. McGreal’s claims about Sharon seem remarkably similar to those made in Al-Ahram by Khaled Amayreh, an open Hamas supporter and “journalist” who works out of Hebron. But even Mr. Amayreh was more cautious than McGreal in using this alleged Sharon statement. Amayreh phrased it this way:

… when members of his Likud Party approached him with the idea, Sharon reportedly told them that “the international situation wouldn’t be conducive to expelling the Palestinians”

By using the word “reportedly” Amayreh is indicating that he didn’t actually have any source for the alleged statement. Why then did Mr. McGreal treat this as if it were a genuine quotation? Once again Mr. McGreal seems to have directly violated the Guardian’s Editorial Code on quotations.

Mr. McGreal also deceived readers by claiming that an “influential Likud MP Uzi Cohen” supported expelling Palestinians from Israel:

An influential Likud MP, Uzi Cohen, said Israel and its western allies should demand that a part of Jordan be carved off as a Palestinian state and that Arabs in the occupied territories should be given 20 years to “leave voluntarily”. “In case they don’t leave, plans would have to be drawn up to expel them by force,” Cohen told Israel radio. “Many people support the idea but few are willing to speak about it publicly.”

But, in fact, there is no Knesset member, influential or not, named Uzi Cohen. Indeed, there has never been in Israel’s history an MK named Uzi Cohen, demonstrating once again Mr. McGreal’s reckless urge to damn Israel, no matter what the facts.

Finally, Mr. McGreal’s assertions about Israeli Arab political parties were also false:

Arab Israelis have the vote, although they were prevented from forming their own political parties until the 1980s.

In fact, Israeli Arabs were never prevented from forming their own political parties, and they did so long before the 1980’s. As Professor Jacob Landau wrote in his book The Arab Minority in Israel, 1967 – 1991, Political Aspects :

… although no legal ban existed on the formation of Arab political parties and political groupings, it took a while until a second generation of Israeli citizens became aware of the significance of political organization and activity.

In accord with this, in the 1977 elections, for example, the Arab-dominated Democratic Front for Peace and Equality won five Knesset seats, one more than they won in the 1973 elections. In addition, a number of smaller Arab parties ran unsuccessfully. Among these were the Arab Reform Movement, which received 5695 votes (about 9000 votes short of winning a Knesset seat) and Coexistence with Justice, which received over 1000 votes.

According to the Guardian website “it is the policy of the Guardian to correct significant errors as soon as possible.” The Guardian also claims to follow the UK Press Complaints Commission Code of Conduct, which requires that newspapers “should take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material, including pictures,” and that “whenever it is recognized that a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement or distorted report has been published, it should be corrected promptly and with due prominence.”

Will the Guardian live up to these high-minded words by presenting forthright corrections of their reporter’s defamatory falsehoods, and will these corrections be prominently displayed both in its printed pages and on its website? Or will it follow defamation with denial and coverup? We shall soon see.

CAMERA Prompts Corrected AFP Article

An AFP article today incorrectly stated that in September Israel completely cut off the Palestinian territories (“Israelis kill armed Palestinian in Gaza Strip”). CAMERA communicated with editors, and the erroneous information was removed in an updated version of the story later in the day. The two versions of the article follow:

Error (AFP, 2/8/06): Closed since September 24 under the complete cutting off of the Palestinian territories by Israel, it [the Karni crossing] was reopened on Sunday.

Correction (Updated story, 2/8/06): The crossing had been closed since mid-January after a security alert but it was reopened on Sunday.

AFP is to be commended for promptly correcting the record. Corrections on wire stories the day they appear on the wire are especially valuable and reflect a proactive achievement, because the following day newspapers around the world will print the correct information and not propagate the misinformation.

Guardian portrays Israel as an Apartheid State

Chris McGreal

In an all-out assault on Israel’s legitimacy, the Guardian newspaper has published a lengthy two-day “Special Report” on February 6 and 7 by reporter Chris McGreal, promoting the false and defamatory allegation that Israel is an apartheid and colonial state.

The Palestinians have elected Hamas (whose charter openly calls for the obliteration of the Jewish state and includes the most vicious slanders against the Jewish people) to the majority of seats in their legislature. The Palestinian leadership continues to demand the land they claim for a state be Judenrein. The Iranian president presses for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” while aggressively seeking nuclear weapons. With all of this, the Guardian finds it more urgent to “assess” the notion that Israel is an apartheid state.

The article also goes beyond de-legitimizing Israel, singling out South African Jews as supporters and beneficiaries of the apartheid regime. McGreal even makes a point of noting that prominent Jews involved in the anti-apartheid movement were secular or unaffiliated Jews.

McGreal follows the familiar pattern of Israel’s detractors, portraying security measures, such as the security fence and border checkpoints, as a means for Israel to intentionally humiliate Palestinians rather than as a way to stop terrorists and save lives. When he does include opposing opinions, they are used as a pretext for the next attack on Israel or the South African Jewish community, rather than to provide a balanced perspective.

The comparison of Israel to apartheid South Africa is specious. Israel is a diverse and pluralistic society. 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab Christians and Muslims, and they have full rights, including voting, serving in the government, attending universities, freedom of speech and religion.While Israel, like America, is not a perfect society, and discrimination does exist, Israeli Arabs have by far the most rights of any Arabs in the Middle East. And like in America, discrimination in Israel is lessening as the years go by. Israeli schoolbooks teach respect for different ethnic and religious cultures and promote coexistence. Increasingly, Jewish and Arab Israelis go to camp together (e.g. http://www.shemesh.org ), attend university together, work and socialize together. If McGreal wants to focus on a genuine source of discord and ongoing violence, his attention might be better spent examining the rejectionist and anti-Semitic indoctrination that permeates Palestinian society.

Anti-Israel activists claim that Israel is an apartheid state because Palestinian Arabs don’t have the same rights as Israelis. This is akin to saying that the United States is an apartheid state because Mexican citizens don’t have the same rights as American citizens and aren’t allowed to automatically live and work in America. Palestinian Arabs who live in the West Bank and Gaza are citizens of the Palestinian Authority. They are not citizens of Israel and therefore they do not enjoy the same rights and privileges. This would seem to be an obvious point, but many people do not grasp the difference between an Arab citizen of Israel and a Palestinian Arab who is a citizen of the Palestinian Authority.

Benjamin Pogrund, a South African-born Jew who was active in the anti-apartheid movement and now lives in Israel, notes:

Apartheid is dead in South Africa but the word is alive in the world, especially as an epithet of abuse for Israel. Israel is accused by some of being ‘the new apartheid’ state. If true, it would be a grave charge, justifying international condemnation and sanctions. But it isn’t true. Anyone who knows what apartheid was, and who knows Israel today, is aware of that. Use of the apartheid label is at best ignorant and naí¯ve and at worst cynical and manipulative. …

“Apartheid” is used in this case and elsewhere because it comes easily to hand: it is a lazy label for the complexities of the Middle East conflict. It is also used because, if it can be made to stick, then Israel can be made to appear to be as vile as was apartheid South Africa and seeking its destruction can be presented to the world as an equally moral cause. (from the December 2005 issue of Focus, published by The Helen Suzman Foundation)

For further detailed talking points to refute the apartheid accusation, read the entire article by Pogrund. (Note, however, that Pogrund is entirely wrong in claiming that with regard to land “most of Israel [is] reserved for Jews.” For refutation of that tenacious canard see CAMERA’s Land Backgrounder and this article in Middle East Quarterly.)

For more information regarding the false linking of Israel to apartheid South Africa, see CAMERA and ADL on the topic.

To read CAMERA’s in-depth rebuttals of McGreal’s two articles, click here and here.

Ignoring Hamas Hate-Indoctrination

A familiar quality of unreality pervades much of the news and commentary about the ascendance of Hamas in recent Palestinian elections.

Note is endlessly made of the fact that Hamas, with its clinics and other welfare operations, is less “corrupt” than the old-guard Fatah chieftains, providing needed services the Palestinian Authority neglected. And many news stories duly report that the radical Islamic organization specializes in suicide bombing and rejects Israel’s existence.

But as to why Palestinians en masse are comfortable choosing a leadership engaged in the defamation and murder of innocent Jews – including children, teenagers and the elderly – very little is said.

Harold Evans, writing in London’s Times several years ago, observed: “Everyone talking about Palestine or terrorism is talking in a vacuum, for nothing can be understood without proper appreciation of the way minds have been poisoned.” (“Anti-Semitic Lies and Hate Threaten Us All” June 28, 2002)

He had it exactly right. Without addressing the mind-poisoning, there can be no clear understanding of events. Yet, as throughout the Oslo years of journalistic indifference to Palestinian Authority indoctrination of its people in hatred and rejection of Israel, so too current reporting gives scant attention to the calamitous effects of inculcated Jew-hatred in shaping events related to Hamas and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Islamist group has long made clear the importance of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel indoctrination, which occurs intensively throughout its network of charities, schools, mosques, clinics and summer camps. The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center cites a typical leaflet found in the office of a Hamas “charity committee” in Tulkarm entitled “Jewish hatred of the human race.” In it, Jews are described as enemies of Islam and its values and murderers of the prophets. The Hamas Charter itself is anti-Semitic, citing, for instance, the “Nazism” of Jews and blaming them for the world wars as well as the French and communist revolutions.

From earliest childhood, lurid messages demonize Zionists and Jews as evil and extol the joys of martyrdom attained in killing them. Hamas is in the forefront of Palestinian groups exploiting the Internet to disseminate propaganda, with approximately 20 sites in seven languages. A children’s on-line magazine called “Al-Fateh”(www.al-fateh.net) – meaning the conqueror – juxtaposes child-like cartoons and stories with shocking images of violence. Issue number 38 of Al-Fateh, includes a photograph of the decapitated head of a female suicide bomber. The caption reads “Zaynab Abu Salem who carried out the suicide bombing attack. Her head was severed from her pure body and her headscarf remained to decorate her face. Your place is in heaven in the upper sky, Zaynab … sister [raised to the status of heroic] men.” Abu Salem had killed two Israeli border policemen and wounded 17.

Menashe Komemi, 19, who helped support a family in which a disabled father was unemployed, and Mamoya Tahio, 20, an immigrant from Ethiopia, lost their lives trying to protect those around them against the female terrorist.

Terrorism specialist Matthew Levitt writes of a Hamas “incitement machine” in the Winter 2004 Middle East Quarterly, describing, for instance, a kindergarten graduation run by a Hamas charitable association. The event “featured 1600 preschool age children wearing uniforms and carrying pretend rifles. A five-year-old girl reenacted attacks on Israelis by dipping her hands in red paint, mimicking the bloodied hands Palestinians proudly displayed after the lynching of two Israelis in Ramallah.”

He describes an Islamic school in which “11-year-old Palestinian student Ahmed states, “˜I will make my body a bomb that will blast the flesh of Zionists, the sons of pigs and monkeys …I will tear their bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.'” His classmates shout in response, “God is great” and his teacher adds “May the virgins give you pleasure.”

The depth of hatred instilled from a young age is such that mothers push their own sons to suicide-murder. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has translated an interview with Umm Nidal Farhat, a woman whose three sons, raised on incessant hatred, joined Hamas, one of them killing five Israelis before being shot, the others engaging in other anti-Israel actions and killed by Israel. Her own remorseless expression of hatred is chilling – and she was just elected by her fellow Palestinians to the Palestinian legislature. Farhat declares in the interview that even women and “old people” are occupiers and “all means are legitimate” against them.

She says: “I am proud and honored to be a terrorist for the sake of Allah.”

Why, one wonders, do so many reporters consistently neglect the mind-poisoning that profoundly affects Palestinian views and actions? Why do American journalists, whose own society promotes acute awareness of the power of stereotypes and insensitive language to damage others, seem impervious to the grotesque demonizing of Jews and Israelis and the deadly toll that hatred continues to take?

Fisk Warps the Facts

Robert Fisk

Controversial journalist Robert Fisk, who covers the Middle East for the British Independent and whose syndicated columns also appear in the U.S. press, is author of the new book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

In a New York Times review of the book, Times deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner stated that Fisk is “least informed about Israel,” pursues his agenda “nearly to the exclusion of the pursuit of straight journalism” and allows his points to be “warped by his perspective.” It is no wonder, Bronner added, that Osama bin Laden recommended Fisk’s reporting as “neutral.”

An excerpt from Fisk’s book, published on the Independent online edition on Jan. 6, 2006 under the headline “Ariel Sharon…,” provides example after example of why the British journalist’s work is seen as “warped.”

The preface to the piece begins: “Israel’s Prime Minister was a ruthless military commander responsible for one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century, argues Robert Fisk.” This dubious contention is reinforced in the article by a series of unfounded and distorted allegations. 

Distortion of Kahan Commission Report

In the third paragraph of the excerpt, Fisk misleads readers about the Kahan commission, the body that investigated the 1982 massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militiamen at Sabra and Shatila. He criticizes Israeli diplomats who say that “the commission held Sharon only indirectly responsible for the massacre.” According to Fisk, “It was untrue. The last page of the official Israeli report held Sharon ‘personally responsible.’”

Fisk’s insinuation that “personal responsiblity” precludes “indirect responsibility” is wrong. The opening summary of the Kahan report leaves no room for argument: “No Israeli was directly responsible for the events which occurred in the camps.” The body of the report, too, repeatedly makes clear Sharon and the Israeli army were not directly responsible:

The Direct Responsibility
… Our conclusion is … that the direct responsibility for the perpetration of the acts of slaughter rests on the Phalangist forces. …

The Indirect Responsibility
To sum up this chapter, we assert that the atrocities in the refugee camps were perpetrated by members of the Phalangists, and that absolutely no direct responsibility devolves upon Israel or upon those who acted in its behalf. At the same time, it is clear from what we have said above that the decision on the entry of the Phalangists into the refugee camps was taken without consideration of the danger – which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to foresee as probable – that the Phalangists would commit massacres and pogroms against the inhabitants of the camps, and without an examination of the means for preventing this danger. Similarly, it is clear from the course of events that when the reports began to arrive about the actions of the Phalangists in the camps, no proper heed was taken of these reports, the correct conclusions were not drawn from them, and no energetic and immediate actions were taken to restrain the Phalangists and put a stop to their actions. This both reflects and exhausts Israel’s indirect responsibility for what occurred in the refugee camps.

It is only after the commission unequivocally absolves Israel and “those who acted on its behalf” of direct responsibility that it charges Sharon with “personal responsibility.” That is, the Kahan report charged Sharon with “personal” but “indirect” responsibility. 

Furthermore, as the Kahan report makes clear, the phrase “personal responsibility” is not antithetical to indirect responsibility, but rather is meant in contrast with ministerial responsibility. In parliamentary democracies (such as Israel and the United Kingdom), ministerial responsibility refers to the fact that cabinet ministers are ultimately responsible for the actions of their ministry — even if they are not aware of or involved in the action. In the words of the Kahan report, it is “a minister’s responsibility for the shortcomings and failures of the apparatus he heads and for which he should not be charged with any personal responsibility.” Personal responsibility, on the other hand, indicates that the minister himself had made a mistake. The Kahan report notes that it does “not express an opinion” on ministerial responsibility, and in turn specifies that Sharon’s indirect responsibility was “personal,” as opposed to ministerial; it blames Sharon himself, and not those working under him, for failing to foresee or prevent the massacre.

As  someone raised and educated in the U.K. with a Ph.D. in Political Science, Fisk should certainly understand these distinctions.

“Bestialisation”? Or Rather, Misrepresentation and Hypocrisy

Repeating one of his frequent allegations, Fisk claims in the excerpt that “the Palestinian people continue to be bestialised by the Israeli leadership.” Menachem Begin, he asserts, called Palestinians “two-legged beasts.” Moshe Yaalon “described the Palestinians as a ‘cancerous manifestation,'” Ehud Barak called them “crocodiles,” and Rehavam Zeevi referred to Arafat as a “scorpion.”

But Begin didn’t refer to “the Palestinian people” as beasts. Rather, he was describing in a June 8, 1982 speech those who would attack Israeli children:

The children of Israel will happily go to school and joyfully return home, just like the children in Washington, in Moscow, and in Peking, in Paris and in Rome, in Oslo, in Stockholm and in Copenhagen. The fate of… Jewish children has been different from all the children of the world throughout the generations. No more. We will defend our children. If the hand of any two-footed animal is raised against them, that hand will be cut off, and our children will grow up in joy in the homes of their parents.

Similarly, Yaalon also was not referring to “the Palestinian people,” but to terrorism: “Palestinian terrorism is the main threat for Israel because it is spreading like a cancer,” he said on August 25, 2002 (after Palestinian violence claimed 15 Israeli lives already that month).  

What about Palestinian “crocodiles”? Whoever made this reference — and it is far from clear that it was Barak — seemed to be talking about the Palestinian government negotiators who were demanding more control over Jerusalem. According to the AFP news agency, a close aide to Barak was reported to have said: “In a few weeks we will know if the Palestinians want peace and are prepared to look at the compromise proposals on Jerusalem put forward by (US) President Bill Clinton at Camp David or if they are like crocodiles, which the more they eat the hungrier they are.” Israeli Arab Knesset member Ahmed Tibi later accused Barak of being that “close aide,” but this was never confirmed.

As far as Zeevi calling Arafat a “scorpion,” Fisk finally seems to be correct. The late Israeli lawmaker did refer to the man known as the “father of terrorism,” who commanded groups responsible for hundreds of bombings, hijackings, assassinations and other attacks on innocent men, women and children, as a scorpion. Just as Begin referred to terrorists as animals and Yaalon called terrorism a cancer, it is not at all uncommon for people to use animal metaphors in describing violent individuals or organizations.

But then Fisk, despite his repeated criticism of Israelis using animal metaphors, understands very well the use of animal metaphors to describe shady individuals. He himself regularly refers to Saddam Hussein as the “Beast of Baghdad.” He has described Americans accused of abusing prisoners in Iraq or Guantanamo as “animals.” He has compared the Taliban to a “chameleon,” and the American media to a “dog.” Apparently, what is a literary tool for Fisk and others is “bestialisation” when coming from Israelis. 

Distortion of Weisglass Interview

Fisk prevaricates yet again when writing that Sharon’s “spokesman,” Dov Weisglass, said the Israeli pullout from Gaza would “turn any plans for a Palestinian state in the West Bank into ‘formaldehyde’….”

This allegation is based on a widely disseminated, and widely distorted, interview with Weisglass (who was actually Sharon’s advisor, not his spokesman) in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz. While anti-Israel propagandists like Fisk often seize on Weisglass’ words to paint Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza as a nefarious Israeli scheme rather than a positive development for Palestinians, Weisglass never said what Fisk attributed to him. Again, this is a case of Fisk distorting Israeli comments with manipulative paraphrasing.

Rather than turning plans into formaldehyde, Weisglass spoke metaphorically of preserving them with the chemical. The pullout, in Weisglass’ words, would preserve the “road map” peace plan and its principles, as if in formaldehyde, until the Palestinian side was readly to comply with its obligations. (For more on distortions of the Ha’aretz interview, including relevant excerpts of the interview, see here.)

And More

On subject after subject, Fisk misrepresents the truth. He refers to Sharon’s supposed “outspoken criticism of NATO’s war against Serbia” based on an Israeli news report, but hides the fact that Sharon’s spokesman denied the validity of the report, and that Sharon had in fact openly spoken in support of the NATO intervention, saying: “We expect that U.S. and NATO forces will do everything possible to stop the suffering of innocent people” in Kosovo. (And of course, Fisk makes no mention of Israeli aid to Albanian refugees.) He describes Palestinians who rained stones and bottles on Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall merely as “demonstrators.” He mocks the fact that Israelis see those who kill Jewish civilians as “terrorists,” and suggests that the reason “Judaism and Islam are crashing into each other” is because of supposedly vengeful Jewish values stemming from the Old Testament.

“One of the most shocking war crimes”?

Clearly, Fisk’s facts do not withstand scrutiny. But what of his opinion, expressed in the very first sentence of the preface to the excerpt, that the 1982 killings at Sabra and Shatila are “one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century”? The murder of civilians is always shocking, and these two Phalangist massacres are certainly no exception. Still, in the context of the long and brutal Lebanese civil war, these most infamous of massacres were not so exceptional. Correspondingly, in the much longer and much more brutal 20th century, it can hardly be claimed that the tragedy in the refugee camps belongs among the “most shocking war crimes.”

The war in Lebanon was characterized by massacres, counter-massacres, and other wanton killing. Fisk himself obliquely admits that the 1982 massacre might not even be the worst carnage ever inflicted on the Sabra camp, noting in his book Pity the Nation that “about 2000 women and children [were killed] in the shelling of Sabra in 1975 and 1976.” In 1976, according to the same book, “thousands” of Palestinians in the Beirut refugee camp of Tel al-Za’atar, “mostly civilians,” were killed by Lebanese Christian militiamen. Jonathan Randal, a reporter whom Fisk recommends, described in his book Going All the Way the murder in 1976 of “a thousand” residents of Karantina in Beirut. Professor William Harris put the number at 1,500. On “Black Saturday” of December 1975, in the first atrocity of the civil war, “at least 300 Muslims were butchered” along with an equal number of Christians, and the following month, a Palestinian attack on Damour left at least 149 dead, and probably a couple of hundred more (Fisk, Pity the Nation).

The list of 20th century war crimes outside the Lebanese stage further indicates that the Sabra and Shatila massacres, terrible as they were, cannot fairly be characterized as among the “most shocking” war crimes of the century. In the middle decades of the century alone, a deluge of massacres — the mass murder of Jews in Odessa, Ninth Fort, Rumbula, Lvov, Pinsk and Bessarabia during the Holocaust, of Christians in Poland, of Chinese in Nanjing, to name only a few — dwarfed the casualty count at the Lebanese refugee camps. So did the numbers killed during the Armenian genocide, in Rwanda, Bosnia, Hama in Syria, Cambodia, and during “la Mantaza” in El Salvador — again just to name a few.

Fact-Checking Fisk

According to historian Efraim Karsh, who reviewed the book, such errors span the entire volume. But it is not much of a surprise that Fisk shows little regard for facts. He has said that journalistic neutrality is “no longer relevant” to the Middle East and that instead journalists are “morally bound … to show eloquent compassion to the victims.”  And Fisk’s reporting makes all too clear whom he anoints as the “victims” in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Nor is it a surprise that the Independent is willing to publish even Fisk’s most patently false claims. That newspaper’s foreign editor has himself parroted some of Fisk’s specious allegations, including the absurd assertion that the word “settlements” has been replaced by “neighborhoods” in the media.

What is somewhat surprising is that the mainstream American media, committed to objectivity and accuracy, continue to publish the journalist’s deceptive and error-ridden work, seemingly without any fact-checking.

Cartoon Double Standard at the Independent

Contrast comments from The Independent criticizing the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed that are deemed offensive to Islam with the newspaper’s defense of a cartoon it published showing Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian child.

On January 27, 2003, the Independent published a cartoon showing a grotesque caricature of Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian child. With the long history of blood libels, including most notably the first reported blood libel accusation occurring in England, this cartoon evoked some of the most horrific anti-Jewish prejudice.

When confronted with complaints by readers and Jewish community leaders in Britain, the Independent responded by defending the publication of the cartoon.

In a commentary on February 1, 2003 (MEA CULPA: SATIRE, ANTI-SEMITISM AND FRANCESCO GOYA), journalist Guy Keleny said he initially dismissed the cartoon as “an obscure joke.” After some Jewish colleagues raised the issue that the cartoon conjured up the blood libel image, Keleny admitted he could understand why Jews might be upset at the cartoon. Nevertheless, he determined ” the accusation of anti-Semitism is also a favourite weapon of those who wish to suppress debate on the measures Israel takes in the occupied territories.” Apparently what most disturbed Keleny was not the offense to the Jewish community, but rather the possibility that the cartoon might provide the Israeli government “ammunition” to validate its claim that critics in the British press are biased.

Keleny cited a review the previous day from British member of Parliament, Gerald Kaufman, known for his vehement hostility to Israel, but who happens to be Jewish, in supporting publication of the cartoon. He concluded the piece with a comment that ringed with sarcasm,  writing, “Some of those who say this cartoon should never have been published in The Independent seem remarkably keen to publish it as widely as possible themselves.”

Kaufman, for his part, wrote a piece that began:

The labelling as anti-Semitic of Dave Brown’s cartoon, which depicted the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a naked, child-eating ogre, was entirely spurious – but entirely predictable. Nor is it surprising that the lynch-mob was led by the Israeli embassy in London, once a respected diplomatic mission, but now the instrument of Israel’s worst- ever Foreign Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

He then proceeded to quote an inflammatory passage from Amos Oz:

Our sufferings have granted us immunity papers, as it were, a moral carte blanche. After what all those dirty goyim non-Jews have done to us, none of them is entitled to preach morality to us. We, on the other hand, have carte blanche, because we were victims and have suffered so much. Once a victim, always a victim, and victimhood entitles its owners to a moral exemption.

Cartoonist Dave Brown, who was presented the Cartoon of the Year award for his grotesque cartoon by member of Parliament and government minister Clare Short, “thanked the Israeli embassy in Britain for increasing the cartoon’s publicity by its angry reaction.” (World Net Daily , 11/27/2003)

The Independent has a completely different take on the recent controversy over the depictions of Mohammed. An editorial on Feb 4, 2006 entitled “A more responsible approach to the debate on freedom of speech” asserts

while we `defend Jyllands-Posten’s right to publish, we also question its editorial judgement. It is not a decision we intend to emulate…There is no merit in causing gratuitous offence, as these cartoons undoubtedly do. We believe it is possible to demonstrate our commitment to the principle of free speech in more sensible ways. It is interesting that the entire mainstream British press feels the same way. No national newspaper has printed the cartoons.

The editorial goes on to discuss the importance of cultural sensitivity toward minorities and concludes with the statement, “There is a difference between robust questioning of someone’s belief system and crass insults.”

That is a statement worth pondering as one looks at the Independent’s cartoon of Ariel Sharon, depicted with classic antisemitic facial features biting off the head of a Palestinian child. The Independent’s real message: “There is no merit in causing gratuitous offence” to Muslims, but it is entirely acceptable to do so to Jews.

Ha’aretz’s Hass Scolds Hamas’ Haniyeh

In an interview last week with Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ parliamentary slate, Ha’aretz‘s Amira Hass scolded the Hamas leader for his upbeat assessment regarding the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The exchange follows:

HANIYEH: “We’re very optimistic. The occupation is gone from Gaza, and today they are talking about leaving a large part of the West Bank. These are steps on the way to realizing the Palestinian people’s rights. The situation is better than it was, and that is due to the armed resistance.”

HASS: “Gaza is more cut off from the West Bank than ever; the West Bank is divided into several separate, disconnected units; the settlements are expanding; Israel’s diplomatic position in the world is better than ever. Where’s the improvement?”

HANIYEH: “We’re not powerless. The people want some relief in their lives. We will insist on our people’s rights and the connection between the West Bank and Gaza.”

HASS: “What practical steps will you take to succeed where others failed?”

HANIYEH: “We’ve said that we won’t give in to this situation. We conducted an intifada that lasted five years en route to obtaining our rights.”

HASS: “But the situation worsened.”

HANIYEH: “Not true. And even if it were true, the situation in Israel is also difficult: economically; from the standpoint of the crisis in Likud and [Ariel] Sharon’s departure from it; the lack of security. All this is due to the stamina of the Palestinian people and the costs of the occupation.

HASS: “The Palestinian people is tired of the slogans that Fatah mouthed. It expects more than slogans.”

HANIYEH: “These aren’t slogans. We’re talking about things that happened. Why is the occupation gone from Gaza? Was is not the stamina and the resistance; did these not cause losses to the occupation?”

Hass’ seemingly agitated stance, in which she takes a more extremist view than the Hamas leader, is reminiscent of BBC reporter Claire Bolderson’s badgering of Palestinian human rights campaigner Bassam Eid in 2000, when he blamed Palestinians for shooting at Israelis and urged a cessation of shooting.

(It should be noted that Hass’ interview with Haniyeh appeared as a news item on page one of the English print edition.) According to the Jan. 20 Guardian newspaper, Hamas hired a media consultant to help spin the group’s message and polish their image with Americans and Europeans. Perhaps the consultant was shrewd enough to realize Hamas could be made to seem relatively moderate to Western news consumers if paired with Hass.

WASHINGTON POST-WATCH: Historical Amnesia and More

The Washington Post‘s January 22 lead editorial, “Palestinians’ risky elections,” ignores some important historical truths in its apparent willlingness to accept Hamas.  The editorial concludes that the Bush administration

must hope that Hamas eventually will embrace democracy as the sole means of advancing its agenda, rather than as a mere tool to prevent its own disarmament or any Palestinian concessions to Israel, and that it will feel obliged to moderate its tactics and agenda while serving in government. Whether or not that happens, a Palestinian Authority backed by Hamas may be able to restore a semblance of order to Gaza. In the dismal present circumstances, that would be a step forward.

In other words, if Hamas remains dedicated to Israel’s destruction and to the imposition of an Islamic state over all the land west of the Jordan River, its participation in the Palestinian Authority government would nevertheless be considered a “step forward” so long as it “restore[s] a semblance of order to Gaza”  This was also the argument made for rule by Mussolini and his Italian Fascists – they may have been thugs but they brought order and “made the trains run on time”. More recently, it was an argument for allowing Hezbollah to participate in Lebanese politics. But rather than lead to Hezbollah’s domestication as a political party, its members in parliament help the terrorist group resist compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1583 that calls for, among other things, disarmament of all extra-governmental armed groups in Lebanon.

Another Post theory – that  terrorists can be domesticated by including them in politics – already has failed with the Palestinian Arabs. Dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization (and its largest faction, Fatah) diplomatically was supposed to induce it to soft-pedal terrorism and emphasize governing. After the 1993 Oslo accords and establishment of Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the PLO began doing business also as the Palestinian Authority, and Fatah dominated the PA. Though now portrayed by the news media almost exclusively as a political “party,” Fatah (literally, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine – “Palestine” including Israel) continues anti-Israel attacks through affiliated “armed wings.” These include the Tanzim and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Fatah’s politico-terrorist nature is epitomized by the fact that Marwan Barghouti, its West Bank leader of the “al Aqsa intifada,” topped the movement’s candidate slate in the January 25 Palestinian legislative elections. Barghouti is serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison for involvement in the murders of five people as part of the intifada.

The Post editorial avoids the fact that “the dismal present circumstances” resulted in no small part from Hamas’ actions. Hamas blames Fatah for the failure of the Oslo negotiations with Israel, when these collapsed in part due to Hamas’ own terrorist attacks. Hamas incitement contributed to the radicalization of many Palestinian Arabs. Meanwhile, the organization has attempted to suppress some secular aspects of Palestinian society, and continues anti-Israel terrorism, on its own or with “plausible deniability” through the “Popular Resistance Committees” and cooperation with other terrorist groups.

In addition, “Palestinians’ Risky Elections”:

* Says that “economic activity [in the Gaza Strip] is choked by the continuing violence and Israeli border controls.” The “and” in this sentence is misleading because it suggests these are equivalent causes.  They are not . Israeli border controls, pre- and post-Gaza Strip disengagement, exist  in response to “the continuing violence.”  The editorial asserts that “the Palestinian territories are approaching a state of anarchy.” If so, Israeli border controls are a necessity – especially when that anarchy includes reported infiltration by al Qaeda agents, increased weapons smuggling, and the return of long-exiled Palestinian terrorists (on all of which the editorial is silent);

* Never mentions that participation in Palestinian elections by groups advocating violence and inciting hatred was banned in the Oslo peace process. The provision was written with Hamas in mind, according to Yossi Beilin, one of the authors; and

* Declares that “Hamas’ prospective [electoral] success has less to do with its fundamentalist platform – which it has substantially moderated for the sake of the campaign – than with voters’ disgust with the ruling Fatah movement.” Here’s one of many examples of Hamas’ “substantially moderated” campaign platform, from a January 17 advertisement on PA Television: “We do not recognize the Israeli enemy, nor his right to be our neighbor, nor to stay [on the land], nor his ownership of any inch of land. Therefore, we do not see [Israel] as an ally, not in policy, not in security, not in economy and not in any form of cooperation ….” More likely, Hamas’ electoral success has to do both with voters’ disgust with Fatah’s corruption and inefficiency and the former’s insistence that its “armed resistance” – terrorism – drove Israel out of the Strip and will do likewise in the West Bank and Israel proper.