Main Feature
Morally Assessing the Jewish Claims
Sophie Shulman, Victoria
Volume 28 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: September 19, 2014
INTRODUCTION
This article, which introduces a section on Palestine – Israel conflict, is excerpted from a much longer response to an article in the Spring 2014 issue of ICN titled “The Palestinian Perspective on Zionism and the State of Israel” by Mazin Al Nahawi, a Palestinian refugee from Syria now residing in Victoria.
How to morally assess the Jewish claims for homeland. Let us first look at the global history of claims on the land: as the ethernal ethics does not exist, we have to admit that if the entire humanity historically persists in doing something, it ought to be considered necessary enough to be rated morally acceptable.
INTRODUCTION
This article, which introduces a section on Palestine – Israel conflict, is excerpted from a much longer response to an article in the Spring 2014 issue of ICN titled “The Palestinian Perspective on Zionism and the State of Israel” by Mazin Al Nahawi, a Palestinian refugee from Syria now residing in Victoria.
How to morally assess the Jewish claims for homeland. Let us first look at the global history of claims on the land: as the ethernal ethics does not exist, we have to admit that if the entire humanity historically persists in doing something, it ought to be considered necessary enough to be rated morally acceptable.
Mass migrations, land appropriation and re-population have always been a global common practice. Spanish conquistadors, white people, who came to America, to Australia in search of riches or religious freedom, they grabbed the Natives’ land, because ‘as Christians they had that right’ – we still (and will) possess that land. Well, one may say, it was 400 years ago! Let’s look at our days.
Imperialistic colonization of Africa by the Arabs has been an ongoing endless aggression (invasion and occupation) for 15 centuries. Semi-nomadic Arab herders have by sword expropriated fertile lands of the the indigenous agrarian Blacks (mass-killing them or – at best – driving into deserts) non-stop since the eighth century up to our time. “The biggest grab of land in the Middle East is not in Palestine or Lebanon; it is the Arab conquest of North Africa… from the indigenous people who live there” (New Republic, December 3, 2009).
The Arab Apartheid reports, “...Elders of the Zaghawa people of Sudan complained that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign. Sudanese Arabs are widely referred to as practicing apartheid against Sudan’s non-Arab citizens” (Wikipedia).
In southern Sudan 400,000 indigenous inhabitants were murdered only in the last six years (some 180 killings per day). Simon Deng, a former slave, claims (with many others) that they are “…the victims of Arab/Islamic apartheid” (Durban Watch Conference, NY, New Republic, September 22, 2011). “…Tens of thousands of black Africans in the country’s southern region, most of them Christians or Animists, have been abducted and sold into slavery by Arab militias backed by the Islamist regime in Khartoum.” (Boston Globe, November 30, 2008).
Read this: “The third of the Arab community living outside Africa should move in [African] continent… which is the only space we have,” Muammar Gadhafi of Libya claimed in his speech at the Arab League, 2001. “It is a call for the final phase of the 15 centuries old Arab lebensraum war on Africans – a war to Islamize and conquer all of Africa, from Cairo to the Cape and from Senegal to Somalia, and to then enslave all the conquered Africans” (New Black Magazine, September 23, 2009).
Where is the world outcry? Is it not glaring injustice, not double standard that only tiny Israel is the victim of well-orchestrated anti-land-sharing campaign? Please, compare the scale of the “land grab” in Palestine versus in African continent.
Do compare “the lebensraum” for Arabs with the total lack of it for ever-hunted Jews… That was why the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 approved on November 29, 1947 (with 33 votes in favor, 13 against, 10 abstentions and one absent) of the partition of the British-ruled Palestine Mandate into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
Had the Arabs accepted it… But they never had (unlike Jews) and from inception Israel has been relentlessly attacked (aiming at extinction) by its multiple neighbors’ military alliances; no wonder, tiny Israel, lacking oil, accommodating hordes of refugees, turning desert into garden (by the European ex-URBANITES!), building modern country from scratch within one generation – has had no choice but militarize to defend itself. And emphatically: none of its achievements justifies Israel’s very real imperfections or cancels the criticism some of it's policies deserve.
Let me say this up front: no, neither the ongoing Arab colonization of Africa nor the economic achievements make Israel look infallible; no, in principle, two wrongs never make one right. But nor double standard, injustice of being singled out, ever makes right either: you can’t, say, punish someone who ruined a book, while ignoring another who tried to burn the British Library – and call it justice.
Other grand migrations of our times involved Europe and Asia. In the 1923, some 400,000 Muslims were forced to relocate from Greece to Turkey and three times as many Orthodox Greeks – from Turkey to Greece; it is still being felt as an open wound in peoples' memory. During WWII 1.4 million people were relocated between Poland and Ukraine.
Afterward, 12 million ethnic Germans were evicted from Eastern Europe. More recently, about a million persons were exchanged between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Seven million migrated in the Balkans within the last two decades. Over seven million Muslims left India for Pakistan after the partition (1947), and over seven million Hindus went from Pakistan to India, let alone half a million that were murdered. Historically, Tibet has been on and off China’s control. The policy had been to encourage hundreds of thousands Chinese to permanently resettle in Tibet to provide justification for China to grab Tibet; this re-population policy worked. Same policy (decades of expelling the Tatars and repopulating by the Russians of the Crimea peninsula) worked for Putin in 2014.
So, painful land-sharing (migrations, mass relocation) is the trivial global historical occurrence of real life at our time (as ever before). Discern, please, the enormous psychological differences between the reasons behind other migrations as compared to the post-WWII move of Jews.
While Jews, as a people, literally run for their life, none other move, listed above, was imperative for their sheer physical survival: neither Chinese, seeking Tibet, or Russians, craving for the balmy Crimean climate, nor the Turks, Greeks, Germans, Poles, Hindu, Muslims, looking for religious unification, migrated driven by mortal threats of total eradication (as if they were cockroaches, not humans). In total, over 50 millions are being officially recognized as ‘refugees’ in the world today, the highest number since WWII. From the point of view of the World Refugee Organization, tiny Israel turned out to be a world benefactor, because it managed to accommodate more refugees than it created. Palestinians are the only known group (out of 50 millions) that continues to demand the status of refugees with the right of return, rather than re-settling in the vast Arab lands, – why?
Because, tragically, radical religious and nationalistic oil-rich authorities pursue their own interests using sectarian violence as a tool at the expense of both, Israelis and Palestinians as their pawns. Here is one example: to fuel Israeli/Palestinian mutual hostility the Arab League in 1959 passed the Resolution #1457: “The Arab countries will not grant citizenship to applicants of Palestinian origin in order to prevent their assimilation into the host countries.” So much for their ‘brotherhood’. The Arabs want Palestinians to rot as refugees in generations, to keep this toxic potion boiling at hand.
Eric Hoffer, a prominent social (non-Jewish) philosopher, wrote: “The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it. Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese – and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis… Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world” (LA Times, May 26, 1968).
Sophie Shulman, Victoria