Letter: Response to opinion was a personal attack

The response to my letter about supporting Israel, opposing divestment, but with honest pain over Israel’s history, was a personal attack. Seva Brodsky “smells a rat.” I am “just another fabricator.” What I say are “crafty fabrications,” and “shameless propaganda,” falsifications,” and “lies.” I am part of “Adler, Ron Francis & Co.,” though I have never heard of Francis until now.

I even was against divestment also (which he omits to mention), and I attack nobody.

The Journal’s choice for a title for Brodsky’s letter that captures its essence: Feeling uneasy about letter-writer.” The personalization is telling. I am surprised the Journal published it in current form.

I recognize that truth and facts can be ambiguous. This is the human condition. But since things are so ambiguous, and especially here, there is especially no need for personal attacks.

Space precludes saying much, but suffice that Brodsky does not challenge the central fact: In 1900, Palestine had already been more than 90 percent Palestinian for many centuries, and yet within five short decades, 75 percent of the Palestinians were displaced from 80 percent of their land.”

Brodsky implies the Romans invented the name “Palestine,” which is to admit it is a very ancient name, and he also admits even the Jews there in the 1920s called themselves Palestinians-- so they called themselves by the ancient Roman name. They did so presumably because it was customary back then, and hence was reasonable, (the legal name of he Jerusalem Post is still “The Palestine Post” ), and in the same way the early Arabs took up and adapted the customary name of Al Quds.

Though it is unclear how the Romans could have originated calling the area Palestine, the first great Greek historian and “father of history,” Herodotus, mentions it in ancient Greek times, many centuries before Roman times, for example that “part of Syria, and all the region extending from hence to Egypt, is known by the name of Palestine.” (Herodotus, 7.89, Tr. George Rawlinson, Modern Library, 1942) )

Notwithstanding all this, Brodsky’s recourse to “names” seems anyway irrelevant.

Roses are roses, uprooted roses are uprooted roses, and uprooted people are uprooted people, under any name or category under which they may fall-- or assigned by others who (may) wish them harm.  

“In 1922, most of British Mandate Palestine was given to Hashemite family from Arabia, with Abdullah imported and enthroned as King of Transjordan by the British. The very same League of Nations (U.N.’s precursor) that endorsed re-establishing Jewish homeland in Palestine, created Transjordan.”

First, there is a key difference between, on the one hand, multiple shifts of the rulers or borders which overlay indigenous people, such that the indigenous people stay put uninterrupted in their own stable homes and communities throughout all the moving and shaking transacted over their heads, and they often don’t even notice -- which usually happens -- and, fundamentally different, going where one doesn’t live but they do, and displacing them out their homes and communities.

Second, Brodsky is wrong that the British took most of British Mandatory Palestine out of the British Mandate.   Daniel Pipes notes that Jordan “was part of the Palestine Mandate for a mere eight months, from July 1920 to March 1921 [but that] the League of Nations formally bestowed the mandatory responsibility on Great Britain only [much later] in July 1922.” (“Is Jordan Palestine?”, by Daniel Pipes and Adam Garfinkle (“Commentary”), Oct. 1988).

Third, the Palestine Mandate was a betrayal of League of Nations Mandate purposes. League Mandates were established in Article 22, which begins:

“To those colonies and territories which ... have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves ... [t]here should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization .... The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations ... as Mandatories.”

Even apart from the “white man’s burden” paternalism, why wasn’t it the people of Palestine of 1922, who were 85-90 percent Palestinians, whose “well-being and development” were exactly what was “entrusted” to the British until the Palestinians could “stand by themselves”?

How was the League’s inclusion of Balfour into the Palestine Mandate not a basic betrayal of the League’s purposes norms and values, its raison d’etre for the Mandates, and (not least) the Palestinians?

Brodsky says great Jewish opponents of partition and ethnic cleansing, such as Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, and Erich Fromm “never claimed to be historians,” showing Brodsky’s anachronistic error in thinking they needed to be: this wasn’t “history” but contemporary for them , just as we may oppose the Iraq War as critics of our times-- and certainly not as historians of the past. So when Einstein, Buber, or Fromm speak, they are also relevant not as historians of their pasts, but as great voices of moral examination of their own times.

Brodsky calls renowned Israel historians Benny Morris and Tom Segev “historian”s in disparaging and insulting quotation marks, putting the egg on his face as they are among Israel’s most preeminent historians, who have raised Israeli history from cheerleading stanzas to scholarly history, with conclusions confirmed by most objective professional historians. 

Brodsky says Benny Morris changed his historical views. This is false. Instead Morris became conservative, and now believes early Zionists didn’t execute enough ethnic cleansing but should have gone to the Jordan River.

Recent popular expressions of his views are found in the LA Times (Jan. 24, 2004, B11), significantly called “In ‘48, Israel did what it had to do,” where he describes and supports the cleansing, and Ari Shavit’s interview of him in Israel’s influential daily paper, “Ha’aretz” (Fri., January 9, 2004).

In Ha’aretz, when Morris tells Shavit the Israelis “perpetrated ethnic cleansing,” Shavit responds, “The term ‘to cleanse’ is terrible.”  Morris’s reply is: “I know it doesn’t sound nice but that’s the term they used at the time. I adopted it from all the 1948 documents in which I am immersed.”

This brings us to David Ben-Gurion. Here Brodsky gets his “gotcha.” I accidentally misquoted Ben-Gurion-- either from where it was phrased wrong, or a confusion in my notes. Does it matter? Of course not.

“(Shavit:) ‘Are you saying that Ben-Gurion was personally responsible for a deliberate and systematic policy of mass expulsion?’

Morris: ‘From April 1948, Ben-Gurion is projecting a message of transfer. There is no explicit order of his in writing, there is no orderly comprehensive policy, but there is an atmosphere of [population] transfer. The transfer idea is in the air. The entire leadership understands that this is the idea. The officer corps understands what is required of them. Under Ben-Gurion, a consensus of transfer is created.”

Morris: ‘Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.’” (The Ha’aretz Interview, Jan. 9, 2004)

A recently scholarly expression of his views is in the 2nd ed. of his landmark history, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004, Cambridge Univ. Press), and is replete with documentation that “transfer” was inbuilt into Zionism, and basic to Ben-Gurion, though his views vary depending on time and circumstance, and he is often ambivalent.

Morris asks: “How was the Zionist movement to turn Palestine into a ‘Jewish’ state if the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants were Arabs? ..... The obvious, logical solution lay in Arab emigration or ‘transfer’. Such a transfer could be carried out by force,i.e., expulsion, or it could be engineered voluntarily.... The logic of a transfer solution to the ‘Arab problem’ remained ineluctable; without some sort of massive displacement of Arabs from the area of the Jewish state-to-be, there would be no viable ‘Jewish’ state.” (p. 40-41)

And Ben-Gurion? “‘The compulsory transfer of the Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples...” (p. 47)

“Ben-Gurion confided to his diary. ‘We are being given the opportunity that we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is more than a state, government, and sovereignty-- this is a national consolidation in an independent homeland .... We must grab hold of this conclusion as we grabbed hold of the Balfour Declarartion, even more than that-- as we grabbed hold of Zionism itself .... (p. 47; also Righteous Victims, p. 142) In his book “Righteous Victims”: Complete transfer without compulsion -- and ruthless compulsion at that – is hardly imaginable.” (p. 169).

“With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement]... I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it. (p. 144).

Morris sums up: “My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that merged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion.... But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism,-- because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish” state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population...” (p. 60, “Refugee Problem Revisited)

Certainly there’s the danger of “quotation-mining,” and certainly what Ben-Gurion and other Zionists’ thought changed over time, was in response to specific historical circumstances, and, at least for Ben-Gurion, had ambivalences. He would have preferred the transfers to be voluntary. But he and the rest were pro-transfer, because, as Ben-Gurion says, it was “inbuilt into Zionism,” because of the “ineluctable” ultimate problem of how else to build a Jewish state in a land where most of the people were Arabs.

I say this, supporting Israel -- and am confused and suffer with it.

But apparently because of this Brodsky says that he “smells a rat,” and that I am “just another fabricator,” and that what I say are “crafty fabrications,” and “shameless propaganda, “falsifications,” and “lies.”

He says “Adler, Francis and co.,” but I had never heard of Francis until now.

And “follow the call of his blood rather than that of the truth.” What does that even mean?

I support Israel (and Palestinians) and wrote to oppose divestment. (Which again Brodsky omits to mention.) I oppose it because of the horror of the Holocaust and millennia of persecution and pogroms against the Jews in Europe, that they were chased out of Europe-- and even the rest of the Middle East-- into Palestine, and Israel justifiably feels tiny, beleaguered, threatened, and severally attacked. Israel was not “rewarded” for withdrawing from Gaza except with missiles. Scandalous. Israel is now there, and so has every right to exist, not to be attacked, and not to be singled out for boycott.

I admit to confusion and agony in how to support and love Israel, because of the historical record, but I still support and love Israel.

I criticize its bashers, oppose boycotts against Israel, support Israel’s security fence to protect innocents from bombs on buses and at bus stops, coffee shops, nightspots, and weddings, support Israel’s right to have   responded in Lebanon, and support time-consuming checkpoints to prevent   terrorism, including Gazan checkpoints, which seem no different from our -- time-consuming -- airport checkpoints. And again Israel has been poorly rewarded for withdrawing from Gaza.

I wish Brodsky was right on history. I wish Efraim Karsh was right. I wish Benny Morris was right that Zionist Jewish leaders had no choice. I realize it is humanly understandable to avoid pain by denying or ignoring unpleasant history, and I want to almost as much as Brodsky seems to want to.

One thing I do is oppose divestment against Israel, and to support Israelis” security and measures to sustain it.

But also criticize Israeli settlers. For example the Palestinians are not supposed to have minded moving only 30 miles east, such a short distance, but in 2005 Israeli settlers were so up in arms with Ariel Sharon and the Israeli government about moving 30 miles to the west and north, which is the same allegedly short distance.   If the modern settlers don’t want to go the short distance, why would the indigenous Palestinians have wanted to?

And though I’m happy Brodsky has apparently found an easy answer for himself, I just haven’t been able to about the morality issues surrounding Palestinian displacement.

And I can’t believe many or most knowledgeable liberals are not beset with the same problem, even if some have humanly understandable difficulties in admitting it.

Both Israeli and Palestinian extremists need to understand there can be no maximal absolute justice. As Madeleine L’Engle, in “Glimpses of Grace,” says:

Madeleine L’Engle says in “Glimpses of Grace,” that “Cursing is a boomerang. If I will evil towards someone else, that evil becomes visible in me. It is an extreme way of being forensic, toward myself, as well as toward whoever outrages me. To avoid contaminating myself and everybody around me, I must work through the anger and the hurt feelings and the demands for absolute justice to a desire for healing.”

I love Israel and the Jewish people of Israel, and I wish both Israelis and Palestinians, and many of us, could learn from L’Engle’s simple truth.

God bless Israelis, Palestinians, and cool heads and compassionate hearts among us all.