You thought you had seen it all, right? Muhammad al Harrani, the cancer victim who supposedly died waiting for a permit to enter Israel, has been 'miraculously' resurrected.
Muhammad al-Harrani, a father of six from Gaza diagnosed with cancer who reportedly died while waiting for a permit to enter Israel, miraculously "came back to life." This was not the result of a miracle, but rather, just part of the tactics used by al-Harrani's family in a bid to secure a permit for him.
Al-Harrani is currently awaiting an entry permit into Israel, so that he can undergo head surgery at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment. At the end of April he was summoned to a questioning session at the Erez Crossing as part of the permit process, but the session was postponed by a week.
On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, al-Harrani's story was published. His family reported to the "Physicians for Human Rights" organization that he died. "The sick man could not withstand the wait for the permit," claimed Ran Yaron, Director of the Occupied Territories Department who blamed the Shin Bet for adopting cruel policies against cancer patients.
However, the next day, the organization discovered that al-Harrani was still alive. Members of group estimated that his brother, who reported the death, "killed" him so he does not report to the questioning session.
"This is a rare case where a family member knowingly provided false information to the organization," Physicians for Human Rights said. "Usually, the organization receives information from the families and from the hospitals, but in this case the information was received from the family and was not confirmed by the hospital."
Meanwhile, the Shin Bet sent the organization an angry response: "We view these harsh accusations on your part with great severity; not even a minimal inquiry into the facts was conducted." The Shin Bet noted that due to the suspicion of his involvement in terror activities, al-Harrani was indeed called in for a security check, and it was indeed postponed by a week.
Some questions arise: If the hospital did not confirm the death, why did PHR make the announcement? And why, if the man was found to be alive the next day, did PHR wait until now to announce the truth?
Of course, the damage to Israel is already done. The "dead" Palestinian made headlines around the world. The resurrected Palestinian Arab won't get 2 column inches on page 5 of the Independent. Dead Palestinians are news. Live ones are not.
1 KINGS 17:17 And it came to pass after these things, that the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, fell sick; and his sickness was so sore, that there was no breath left in him.
1 KINGS 17:18 And she said unto Elijah, What have I to do with thee, O thou man of God? art thou come unto me to call my sin to remembrance, and to slay my son?
1 KINGS 17:19 And he said unto her, Give me thy son. And he took him out of her bosom, and carried him up into a loft, where he abode, and laid him upon his own bed.
1 KINGS 17:20 And he cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, hast thou also brought evil upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?
1 KINGS 17:21 And he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried unto the LORD, and said, O LORD my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again.
1 KINGS 17:22 And the LORD heard the voice of Elijah; and the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived.
But the real miracle today, is that outrageous lies are manufactures continually, but the media keep falling for them.
NEW DELHI - Tata Advanced Systems, the defense arm of Indian industrial house the Tata Group, has agreed to cooperatively develop and manufacture advanced defense products in India, including missiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare systems and aerospace products with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI).
Itzhak Nissan, IAI president and chief executive, and Tata Group Chairman Ratan N. Tata signed the agreement in Tel Aviv, according to a May 13 statement.
India's UAV needs are met by a variety of UAVs from IAI. The Indian defense forces have a market of more than 200 UAVs. IAI is also involved in India's advanced cruise missile project and air defense projects.
Sources in the Tata Group said the two companies have plans to cooperate in the development of military satellites. The sources said cooperation between the two could reach revenues of $10 billion.
Sources in the Tata Group added that the IAI-Tata tie-up could convert India into a major defense hub in this part of the world.
This business model could be the start of a tran-asian defense giant that will make Israel partly independent of United States military supplies, provide a market for Israeli defense products and cement a business partnership between Israel and India, a country with huge economic potential waiting to take off. I have dreamed of this idea for quite a few years. It is good to see someone had the same idea.
Israel gives India battle tested advanced defense systems and expert knowledge. India gives Israel a huge skilled work force and industrial plant, as well as a large market. A match made in heaven? Let's hope it isn't spoiled by politics or US defense export regulations.
(IsraelNN.com) Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abe Foxman said Tuesday afternoon that mainstream media are turning against Israel. One of the guests at the three-day Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, he told Voice of Israel government radio, "Painting Israel as the cause of the nakba [catastrophe] has taken root in the mainstream."
Foxman pointed out that both The New York Times and the Washington Post published front-page articles on Israel's Independence Day that focused on Arab suffering as well as Jewish celebrations instead of describing the miracle of the re-establishment of the Jewish state.
He added that American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when asked why American President George W. Bush is visiting Israel to help celebrate Israel's existence, stated that the American government is dealing with the consequence of the re-establishment of the State of Israel.
(IsraelNN.com) Israel has no cause to celebrate because Arabs "are groaning" under the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad charged Tuesday in a speech to legislators and foreign envoys. He accused Jewish "settlers" of "crimes" and termed the Jewish presence a siege.
Fayyad, who is heavily supported by the Bush administration that helped put him in power, was unusually harsh in his criticism of Israel. He made the remarks in a speech marking the "nakba," Arabic for "catastrophe," the word used by Arabs to term Israel's Independence Day.
By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, May 12, 2008, at 12:26 PM ET
It's somehow absurd and trivial to use the word Israel and the expression 60th birthday in the same sentence or the same breath. (What is this, some candle-bedecked ceremony in Miami?) The questions before us are somewhat more antique, and also a little more pressingly and urgently modern, than that. Has Zionism made Jews more safe or less safe? Has it cured the age-old problem of anti-Semitism or not? Is it part of the tikkun olamthe mandate for the healing and repair of the human worldor is it another rent and tear in the fabric?
Jewish people are on all sides of this argument, as always. There are Hasidic rabbis who declare the Jewish state to be a blasphemy, but only because there can be no such state until the arrival of the Messiah (who may yet tarry). There are Jewish leftists who feel shame that a settler state was erected on the ruins of so many Palestinian villages. There are also Jews who collaborate with extreme-conservative Christians in an effort to bring on the day of Armageddon, when all these other questions will necessarily become moot. And, of course, there are Jews who simply continue to live in, or to support from a distance, a nerve-racked and high-tech little state that absorbs a lot of violence and cruelty and that has also shown itself very capable of inflicting the same.
I find that no other question so much reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his aphorism about the necessity of living with flat-out contradiction. Do I sometimes wish that Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann had never persuaded either the Jews or the gentiles to create a quasi-utopian farmer-and-worker state at the eastern end of the Mediterranean? Yes. Do I wish that the Israeli air force could find and destroy all the arsenals of Hezbollah and Hamas and Islamic Jihad? Yes. Do I think it ridiculous that Viennese and Russian and German scholars and doctors should have vibrated to the mad rhythms of ancient so-called prophecies rather than helping to secularize and reform their own societies? Definitely. Do I feel horror and disgust at the thought that a whole new generation of Arab Palestinians is being born into the dispossession and/or occupation already suffered by their grandparents and even great-grandparents? Absolutely, I do.
The questions of principle and the matters of brute realism have a tendency (especially for one who does not think that heaven plays any part in the game) to converge. Without God on your side, what the hell are you doing in the greater Jerusalem area in the first place? Israel may not be the rogue state that so many people say it isincluding so many people who will excuse the crimes of Syria and Iranbut what if it runs the much worse risk of being a failed state? Here I must stop asking questions and simply and honestly answer one. In many visits to the so-called Holy Land, I have never quite been able to imagine that a Jewish state in Palestine will still be in existence a hundred years from now. A state for Jews, possibly. But a Jewish state
Israeli propaganda for a long time obscured this crucial distinction. If all that was wanted was a belt of Jewish territory on the coast and plains, such as that which was occupied by the yishuv in pre-state days, the international community could easily have agreed to place it within the defense perimeter of "the West" or the United Nations or, later, NATO. Aha, say the Zionists, the bad old days are gone when we were so naive as to rely on gentiles to defend us. Very well. But also mark the sequel. Israel is now incredibly dependent upon non-Jews for its own defense and, moreover, rules over millions of other non-Jews who loathe and detest it from the bottom of their hearts. How long do you think the first set of non-Jews will go on defending Israel from the second lot and from their very wealthy and numerous kinsmen? In other words, Zionism has only replaced and repositioned the question of anti-Semitism. For me, the Israeli family is not the alternative to the diaspora. It is part of the diaspora. To speak roughly, there are three groups of 6 million Jews. The first 6 million live in what the Zionist movement used to call Palestine. The second 6 million live in the United States. The third 6 million are distributed mainly among Russia, France, Britain, and Argentina. Only the first group lives daily in range of missiles that can be (and are) launched by people who hate Jews. Well, irony is supposed to be a Jewish specialty.
That last point, however, brings me to my own closing observation. It is a moral idiot who thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews. The history of civilization demonstrates something rather different: Judaeophobia is an unfailing prognosis of barbarism and collapse, and the states and movements that promulgate it are doomed to suicide as well as homicide, as was demonstrated by Catholic Spain as well as Nazi Germany. Today's Iranian "Islamic republic" is a nightmare for its own citizens as well as a pestilential nuisance and menace to its neighbors. And the most depressing and wretched spectacle of the past decade, for all those who care about democracy and secularism, has been the degeneration of Palestinian Arab nationalism into the theocratic and thanatocratic hell of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, where the Web site of Gaza's ruling faction blazons an endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This obscenity is not to be explained away by glib terms like despair or occupation, as other religious fools like Jimmy Carterwho managed to meet the Hamas gangsters without mentioning their racist manifestowould have you believe. (Is Muslim-on-Muslim massacre in Darfur or Iraq or Pakistan or Lebanon to be justified by conditions in Gaza?) Instead, this crux forces non-Zionists like me to ask whether, in spite of everything, Israel should be defended as if it were a part of the democratic West. This is a question to which Israelis themselves have not yet returned a completely convincing answer, and if they truly desire a 60th, let alone a 70th, birthday celebration, they had better lose no time in coming up with one.
In 5 Myths on Who's Really 'Pro-Israel' , J-Street's Ben-Ami makes a case for a dovish "pro-Israel" stand, citing "myths" about being pro-Israel. Not everything he writes is wrong, but he creates a few myths of his own:
Hamas won the most recent Palestinian national elections in a landslide. Do we seriously think that it can be erased from the political landscape simply by assassinations and sanctions?
Hamas did not win in a landslide, since they did not win the popular vote. Hamas is in power in Gaza by virtue of a coup. No, we do not seriously think Hamas can be erased just by assassinations and sanctions. Like Nazism, elimination of Hamasism requires more decisive action. But it is a myth to think we can "negotiate" "peace" with Hamas, just as it was a myth to think one could negotiate peace with Hitler.
Some more myths about being pro-Israel:
Myth: Just because Jews do something, it is pro-Israel
Ben-Ami tells us that not all Jews choose political candidates because those candidates are pro-Israel:
This urban legend has somehow become a tenet of American Politics 101, which is why politicians work so hard to earn the pro-Israel label in the first place. But it's a self-serving fable, cultivated by a tiny minority of politically conservative American Jews who actually are single-issue voters. Most Jewish voters make their political choices the way other Americans do: based on their views on the full spectrum of domestic and foreign policy issues.
The logic escapes me. What are you trying to tell us? If most American Jews are not pro-Israel, does that legitimize their stands as being "pro-Israel" just because they are Jews? Is J-Street a "Jewish" lobby or an Israel lobby? Those are two different things. If Ben-Ami is pro-Israel, then why is he insisting on telling US politicians that they don't have to worry about the Jewish vote on Israel, since Jews "make their choices the way other Americans do?" The observation is true in part. One job of a group that is "pro-Israel" is precisely to marshall Jewish support for Israel, which is not automatic. Apparently, Ben-Ami disqualified himself and J-Street from that role, as he insisting on telling American politicians that Jews don't support Israel, a stand that he thinks is somehow pro-Israel.
Myth: Negotiating ("Engaging") with terrorists and genocidal despots can bring peace.
Ben-Ami insists on negotiations with Hamas and Iran:
Precisely because Hamas and Iran represent the most worrisome strategic challenges to Israel, responsible friends of Israel who'd like to see it live in security for its next 60 years should be engaging with them to search for alternatives to war
He needs to study the case of Chamberlain and Hitler.
Myth: A pro-Israel group can focus exclusively on pressuring Israel to make concessions.
A group that has no support program for Isaeli policies, and focuses only on persuading the US government to pressure Israel into making concessions cannot be considered a pro-Israel lobby for obvious reasons.
Myth:Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah are good for Israel.
Hardly. Must we cozy up to a corrupt group of people who insist, in Arabic, that their ultimate goal is the destruction of Israel? Abbas may be a negotiating partner or a peace partner and a lesser evil than Hamas, but we should not have illusions about Abbas and Fatah. Our relations with Fatah and Abbas should be correct. We don't need to be punishing Palestinians, but we need to defend ourselves and we don't need to be helping them undermine Israeli positions.
Myth: Undermining Abbas by negotiating with Hamas can advance peace
J-Street wants to negotiate with Hamas while at the same time supporting a peace process. J-Street should remember that Abbas and Fatah are the only peace partners for all their faults. Negotiating with Hamas and legitimizing Hamas will ruin the standing of Fatah and is suicide for the peace process. If you make a deal with Hamas, Abbas goes away and you have no partner.
Myth: The United States had a leading role in peace diplomacy in the Middle East
Ben-Ami tells us:
The best gift that Israel's friends here could give this gallant, embattled democracy on its milestone birthday would be returning the United States to its leading role in active diplomacy to end the conflicts in the Middle East -- and help a secure, thriving Israel find a permanent, accepted home among the community of nations.
The US has no leading role to return to. The Israeli-Egyptian peace was the product of an initiative by Anwar Sadat and Israeli reciprocation. After the Israelis and Egyptians prepared the ground, the Americans were brought in and were somewhat reluctant. The peace with Jordan was a Jordanian and Israeli initiative. The United States was asked to give pro-forma blessing and money, and to get a photo-op. The negotiations with Palestinians that led to the Oslo DOP were an Israeli and Palestinian initiative. America has played a role, but never a leading role. It could never accomplish anything that the sides did not already want. When the Oslo process fell apart and the Palestinians began attacking Israel, America demonstrated that it is worthless as a guarantor of peace because it did not do anything to stop the terror. Worse, it prevented Israel from doing anything. If America wants to have a "leading role" in peace, it has to be ready to demonstrate that it will stand behind the solutions it has brokered. In this respect, America has a "perfect" record and so does the UN - they have always imposed solutions, and then Israel paid the price for the "solutions." This has been true since the partition plan and the internationalization of Jerusalem, right up to and including the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and participation of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. Both of the last were done at the behest of the Americans (Israel wanted to remove only some of the settlements) and resulted in the mess that exists today. Practically speaking, there can be no peace as long as Hamas rules Gaza. Is J-Street going to get the US to root out Hamas?
Myth: All Zionists who oppose J-Street and negotiations with Hamas, Iran and Hezbollah are neocon troglodytes who think John Hagee is wonderful
Ben Ami wrote:
Are Israel and American Jewry really so desperate that we must cozy up to people whose messianic dreams entail having us all killed or converted to Christianity? Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel, and his ilk believe that Israel dare not cede any territory in the quest for peace, claiming that the Bible promised all of the holy land to the Jews.
A minor point - Hagee does not, as a matter of fact, believe in conversion of the Jews, so Ben-Ami created another myth right there. Don't confuse him with the facts. Not everyone agrees with Hagee's presence at an AIPAC meeting, which was not appropriate, but Hagee is not Ahmadinejad or Hamas. Are Jewish progressives really so desperate that we must cozy up to Hamas? Or are Zionists so secure that they can reject the hand of friendship from anyone? If mighty America can accept reactionary Saudi Arabia as an ally, how can the tiny Zionist movement reject the friendship of John Hagee and Christian Zionists? Are they really worse than Salafi Muslim fanatics? We do not have to agree with everything Hagee says about Catholics, territories and theology, but we can politely accept his support and work with him on the issues that are important to us. Can we say the same about Hamas or Iran?
Beware of Americans bearing gifts. About "deliverables:"
There is no burning sense in Washington, the official said, that something has to "be delivered" on this visit, but rather that the "deliverable" is the visit itself, Bush's second here since the beginning of the year.
But there is a sense that Israel has to "deliver" concessions to the Palestinians, right? Maybe the US "deliverables" should be policy changes rather than better bombs.
US officials on Monday downplayed Israeli expectations that US President George W. Bush, during his three-day visit here beginning Wednesday, will bring with him "parting gifts" to shore up Israel's qualitative military and strategic advantage before he leaves office.
According to the officials, there are ongoing intense discussions between Israel and the US on a host of both military and diplomatic issues, but that it is improbable Bush would feel the need to "tie up all the lose ends" on this trip, especially since this visit is not a working visit, but primarily a ceremonial one.
The speculation that Bush would give Israel a grocery cart full of state-of-the-art weaponry or technology is coming from those eager to receive the goods, not from those on the giving end, the source said.
The source pointed out that with the exception of a meeting with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday, Bush's visit will be mostly state affairs, protocol and ceremonial.
"This visit is not chock-full of meetings," the official said. "It is not heavy on substance. It is a couple of speeches and a collective high-five."
There is no burning sense in Washington, the official said, that something has to "be delivered" on this visit, but rather that the "deliverable" is the visit itself, Bush's second here since the beginning of the year.
Despite US denials, Israeli diplomatic officials continued to say they expected Bush to announce the sale to Israel of a package of military hardware that would upgrade Israel's qualitative strategic advantage.
Top Israeli defense delegations have traveled to the US in recent months for talks in the White House and the Pentagon regarding a number of Israeli requests for advanced military platforms.
One request has centered on the F-22 - a stealth bomber currently operational in the US - which came up during recent talks in Washington. Israel has asked to be allowed to acquire the jet - currently under congressional sales ban - in face of Iranian attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon. The F-22 can avoid radar detection and is the today the world's most advanced fighter jet.
In addition to discussing the F-22, the defense officials also spoke with their US counterparts about receiving two new and advanced models of the JDAM smart bomb in order to retain Israel's qualitative edge over Saudi Arabia, which is supposed to receive the standard smart-bomb kit.
Israel is also in talks with the Pentagon over the possibility of connecting to a US worldwide early-warning ballistic missile system. Israel has connected to the radar system in the past - during the First Gulf War in 1991 and ahead of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Meanwhile, in a strong hint to Iran, OC IAF Maj.-Gen. Elazar Shkedy told reporters Monday that "nothing is impossible. The IAF provides outstanding solutions for different issues including challenges that are far away."
"The IAF is outstanding and ready for any missions the state will give it," said Shkedy, who on Tuesday will finish up four years in his position and be replaced by Maj.-Gen. Ido Nehushtan.
Shkedy said he was "deeply disturbed" by the rhetoric in Iran. "I see how they are developing different capabilities with airplanes, cruise missiles and on the ground and I think we need to take what they say very seriously," he said.
Imagine your reaction if you were told by someone that they "recognised Australia's right to exist". I suspect they would be introduced to a range of expletives with which they were not familiar.
"I recognize Israel's right to exist" has become the condescending equivalent of "some of my best friends..."
Imagine your reaction if you were told by someone that they "recognised Australia's right to exist". I suspect they would be introduced to a range of expletives with which they were not familiar. Now you know how Israelis feel as they celebrate their nation's 60th birthday. That's 59 more than most predicted.
In the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, debate raged as to how to resolve the claims of Arabs and Jews to the British mandated territory of Palestine. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations accepted the recommendation of its Special Committee on Palestine, by 33 votes to 13, to divide the territory into two states, one Arab, one Jewish.
Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, made it clear that it was far from what he wanted, but on behalf of the Jewish people he accepted. This was that moment in history where the problem could have been solved. Had the Arab nations agreed, the bitterness and acrimony of the previous 70 years would have ended and tens of thousands of lives would not have been lost during the ensuing 60 years. Instead the Arabs set out to strangle Israel at its birth.
From November 1947 until the British withdrawal on May 14, 1948, savage fighting broke out between the Haganah and Arab irregulars. On May 15, the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, with the help of Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya, attacked Israel. The Israel Defence Forces, drawn from a Jewish population of 650,000 and equipped with light arms, with no navy or air force, defended itself against an Arab population in excess of 100 million. To the world's surprise, Israel survived. Somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 Arabs became refugees.
Terrible things happen in war, and the Middle East conflict has been no exception. Arab propagandists who allege that Deir Yassin, in 1948, was a massacre of Arabs by Jews, conveniently ignore endless massacres of Jews by Arabs, including Hebron, Kfar Etzion, Hadassah Hospital and Safed, to name but a few.
Nor do they tell us of the likely fate of 650,000 Jews if the Arabs had won.
The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war as a guest of Hitler and visited Auschwitz with Himmler, was so impressed he planned a similar death camp for Palestine. "Our fundamental condition for co-operating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine," he said.
Fast forward to 1967 when the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, moved tens of thousands of troops into the Sinai, ordered the United Nations forces out and blocked the Straits of Tiran, thus denying Israel access to the Indian Ocean. "We intend to open a general assault against Israel. This will be total war. Our basic aim will be to destroy Israel," he said.
Hafez al-Assad, then Syria's defence minister and later president, made his views clear while massing his troops on the Golan Heights. "I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation." No equivocation there.
The most admirable trait of Arab leaders is their honesty. Every one of note, including the Palestine Liberation Organisation's Yasser Arafat, Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah and the present Hamas leadership, have made it clear they would destroy Israel.
Then there's the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the tireless pursuer of nuclear weapons, who made his intentions clear when he announced that "Israel should be wiped off the map", although he claimed he had been quoted out of context.
We Jews have traditionally been slow learners, but we have learnt that when people say they want to kill us, it's best to believe them.
The terrible tragedy of the last 60 years is that no one need have died, and that the infusion of some of the brightest from around the world has created an expanding, thriving, pulsating Israeli economy and culture that could have been shared by the Arab world, instead of them wallowing in the squalor and misery experienced by all but the oil-rich states. As an Israeli diplomat, Abba Eban, once said: "The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
Barry Cohen was a federal Labor MP from 1969 until 1990.
Our friend and colleague in Lebanon Elie Fawaz writes in to remind us that The War for Lebanon has not even begun yet in earnest and Hezbollah's "victory" in Beirut is not all it seems:
"So, we know that Hezbollah's well-trained fighters are in control of most of west Beirut. The decision taken by Walid Jumblat and Saad al-Hariri not to fight back in Beirut, but rather hand most of their positions to the army ended any illusion regarding the sanctity of the "resistance" that it would never turn its weapons inward, for now its hands are dripping with the blood of innocent Lebanese. But it's different in the Chouf where Jumblatt's forces bloodied Hezbollah.
"The Chouf is calm now after fighting over the weekend in which forces belonging to Talal Arslan, part of the Hezbollah-led opposition, jumped sides and joined alongside Jumblatt's men. As the Progressive Socialist Party website reports: 'The free people of the Shouf roll back an attack by the Iranian militias causing severe casualties in lives and equipment.'
"Hence, Jumblatt sounded more assertive last night on LBC news because he knows he got the upper-hand in the Chouf battles (Reuters is reporting at least 14 Hezbollah gunmen killed. Meanwhile, the PSP website is claiming 32 Hezbollah fighters killed and 250 wounded.). He was willing to hand his offices over to the army to deflect some of the tension and because he wants to avoid a civil war."
In short, what happened in West Beirut was a given. According to a report from the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese paper Al-Akhbar, this coup had been planned well in advance and its mastermind was the recently assassinated Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh. The government may in fact have forced Nasrallah to show his hand at a time of its choosing, not his. Hezbollah's walkover in Beirut came as a surprise to no one; nor did the performance of the army, except perhaps the Bush administration which must now reconsider the amount of money it has spent on equipment and training for the Lebanese Armed Forces.
As for the pro-government fighters in Beirut, contrary to most press accounts, there are no Sunni "militias" in the capital. Rather, it is mostly defensive armament, private citizens with small arms defending their families, homes and property. So it is hardly any surprise that Hezbollah managed to overrun Sunni neighborhoods easily. But that is merely one small part of Lebanon, and while the attention of the foreign press has focused on fighting in one sector of the capital, events throughout the rest of the country suggest that Hezbollah's "rout" is illusory. Tony Badran, drawing on various Lebanese accounts and his own reporting, offers this account:
"After taking over West Beirut, Hezbollah tried to move to the Shouf, where there are two Shiite towns, Kayfoun and Qmatiyye. Hezbollah is trying to link them up to the Dahieh through the Karameh road, which links Dahieh to Choueifat-Aramoun-Doha-Deir Qoubel-Aytat-Kayfoun and Qmatiye, so that it can make encroachments, maintain access routes and not allow the Druze to surround the two Shiite towns.
"That was the plan, but Hezbollah got a severe beating in the Shouf. They were not able to penetrate anything, relying instead for the first time in the current fighting on artillery/mortar fire. To no avail. Yesterday alone we heard that seven Hezbollah fighters who tried to infiltrate got killed.
"Hence, Hezbollah burned its Druze ally, Talal Arslan. Whatever tiny following Arslan had before this, it's safe to say it has been seriously damaged. Witness for instance the fate of Syria's little Druze creation, the pitbull Wi'am Wahhab, who, it is rumored, has taken his followers (which on a good day may actually reach about 100) and left the Shouf altogether.
"Meanwhile in Northern Lebanon, the pro-opposition Alawites are being slammed by Sunnis in the Baal Mohsen area. Similarly, Sunnis in the Akkar area in the north attacked and torched offices of the SSNP, Baath party, Hezbollah and Aoun, killing a good number of SSNPs. As with Arslan, we see a parallel development, former PM Omar Karami, a Sunni who is at the same time trying to support Hezbollah while shoring up his Sunni bona fides. So he lamented the "deep wound" that has occurred between Sunnis and Shia, and told Hezbollah that if this becomes a sectarian fight, then we have two choices: to either stay home, or fight with our sect.
"So far we've had the luxury of not seeing this sad charade play out in the Christian areas. Sleiman Frangieh has been inconspicuously quiet these last few days. Michel Aoun, on the other hand, can't help himself. So, while there are rumors that he might be urging Hezbollah in to East Beirut, others are watching to see if Nasrallah will attempt to do with the tiny Shiite communities in Nab'a, Metn, and Keserwan/Jbeil, what they did with Qmatiyye and Kayfoun.
"And so, the Party of God has achieved the 'great victory' of conquering a few Beiruti streets, terminating the credibility of the army, hastening the prospect of its disintegration, and damaging beyond repair for the foreseeable future, the Shiites' ties to the Lebanese social fabric."
Hezbollah and its allies have won one small battle in a war that has just begun.
Shmuel Rosner raises an issue that has been nibbling away at my mind for a while, but he may be missing the main point. What is important is how a group or person acts, not their announcement that they are "pro-Israel" or other announced principles, and what they do in balance.
If the J Street lobby focuses almost exclusively on peace negotiations and is exclusively critical of Israel and doesn't stand up in defense of Israel at all, it is not "pro-Israel." The same is true of Brit Tzedek and other groups.
For US political candidates the criteria are different. Nobody should expect them to be lobbyists for Israel. Barack Obama's stands against Iran and defense of Israel certainly put him in the pro-Israel camp. We haven't seen similar activities or announcements from the "pro-Israel" J Street lobby. But the question in deciding among political candidates is "who has the best policy for the Middle East?"
Ami Isseroff
What Does It Mean To Be "Pro-Israel"?The election, and the creation of a new dovish Jewish lobby group, brings the question to the fore. By Shmuel Rosner Posted Wednesday, May 7, 2008, at 1:23 PM ET
William Daroff is vice president for public policy and director of the Washington office at United Jewish Communities, an organization representing America's Jewish federations. In other words, he's a lobbyist. Daroff is also one of the country's better-connected Jewish operatives. In recent months, he has been called upon to moderate dozens of panels aimed at Jewish activists and professionals, dealing with the hot topic of the day: the 2008 election and the Jewish community.
This election has reignited an old debate: Which party is better for Israelthe Republicans or the Democrats? Assuming that Jewish voters care about this question, the parties have to make their case if they want Jewish voters to support them.
Jewish representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties are invited to most of the panels Daroff moderates. After a long string of forums, Daroff has noticed that the two parties' line of argument is markedly different.
The Democratic representative will often say: Both parties are good for Israel; it's a bipartisan issue; let's move on to discuss health care or the mortgage crisis.
The Republican will respond: Not so fast. Democrats are trying to avoid the issue because they recognize their weakness and know that Republican support for the Jewish state is much stronger than theirs.
It's a cyclical debate with no end and little meaning until you define what it means to be pro-Israel. Historically, Israel has relied on support from both sides of the aisle, and it would clearly be better off if that situation continues. But at the root of the Republican claim is a niggling kernel of truth: Democratic voters do not side with Israel at the same rate and with the same enthusiasm as Republican voters do. At least if you accept the definitions most pollsters use to define a pro-Israel position.
Take, for example, a recent Gallup poll about Americans' most- and least-favored nations. Israel, fairly popular with Americans, is "viewed more favorably by Republicans than by Democrats," the survey reports. Eighty-four percent of Republicans rank it favorably, compared with only 64 percent of Democrats. This is hardly a new phenomenon: Back in 2006, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found that Republicans favored alignment with Israel over neutrality in the Israeli-Arab conflict 64 percent to 29 percent. By contrast, only 39 percent of Democrats supported alignment with Israel, while 54 percent favored neutrality.
But is favoring "neutrality" less pro-Israel than favoring alignment with Israel? Does sympathizing with the terrible fate of the Palestinians make someone less supportive of Israel?
This question isn't of concern to only the political parties. A new organization, J Street, presents a similar challenge to those trying to define the meaning of being a pro-Israel American. J Street is a dovish new Jewish-American lobby groupself-tagged "pro-Israel"that will push the United States to become more involved in its declared "No. 1 priority," achieving piece between Israel and the Palestinians.
Many of the people active in this group don't just believe that the U.S. government should be more active, but also that "active" means pressuring the Israeli government toward compromises. "Like a scout forcefully helping an old lady across the street?" I asked one of its leaders. "Perhaps," he replied. "Before she's hit by a truck." In the eyes of J Street members, this desire to save Israel from itself is what makes the project "pro-Israel." If pressuring the Israeli government was not traditionally considered a "pro-Israel" position, they argue, it is mainly because those traditional definitions were skewed.
"For too long, the only voices politicians and policy makers have heard on American policy toward Israel and the Middle East have been from the far right," complains the group's Web site. In recent years, said Alan Solomonta leading supporter of the group and a Jewish supporter of Barack Obama's"neocons, right-of-center Jewish leaders, and Christian evangelicals" were the people tasked with delineating the "pro-Israel" position. Obama himself expressed a similar sentiment a couple of weeks ago: "I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel, and that can't be the measure of our friendship with Israel."
The situation was tilted in one directionso the new group is trying to tip it the other way.
Obama does not like the "pro-Likud" approach, but he wants the benefit of being seen as a pro-Israel candidate. All American politicians do (except, perhaps, Patrick Buchanan). "In political life in America today, everyone says they're a friend of Israel," wrote Aaron David Miller, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, in his new book The Much Too Promised Land. And it's true: If you lower the bar enough, everybody is a friend; everybody is "pro-Israel" as long as they don't actively agitate for Israel's demise.
Jimmy Carter, one of the most vocal critics of Israeli policies and of the "Israel lobby" in America, said two weeks ago that all he wants is "to bring peace to Israel. The security of Israel is paramount." Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimerauthors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, a book highly critical of Israelalso say that Israel has a moral and legal right to exist. Are they "pro-Israel" because they do not say that they want it to be destroyed?
J Streetwhose leaders are also very critical of Israel's policiesis more specific. It states that "U.S. support for Israel as a Jewish and democratic state is an historic and legitimate commitment" and that "maintaining Israel's qualitative military edge" is necessary. Is that the right policy for Israel? That's another debate. But the policy J Street advocates is clearly so different in nature from the traditional positions of "pro-Israel" advocacy groups that having it under the same roof becomes strange. It leaves the wondering citizen with a somewhat redundant definition of the "pro-Israel" camp
And that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Defining someone as "pro-Israel"or, for that matter, pro-anything or anti-anythingis a way for people to simplify complicated questions when searching for a political party, a candidate, or an organization they would like to support. The problem is that along the way the term has been used so oftento describe so many conflicting positionsthat it has become practically meaningless, more confusing than clarifying.
So maybe now, for Israel's 60th birthday, there's one last position that the "pro-Israel" camp can agree on: It is time to dump the term. Those Democrats might be right when they tell William Daroff: "We are all pro-Israel." But Republicans are also right when they insist: "We should still talk about the specifics." Without specifics, being "pro-Israel" is almost like being pro-great-weather or pro-tasty-food.
For many years, Benny Morris's work was seen as blaming Israel for the 1948 flight of the Palestinian refugees. Excerpts from his books were quoted selectively by Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and others to "prove" his point. Morris did not object or take issue with this view until a few years ago. His actual work in fact, was always careful to just avoid pointing the finger of blame unequivocally, and on each page of his various books, you can find conclusions that appear to contradict other conclusions. He also quoted Ben Gurion and others out of context and selectively, as if to prove the point that Israeli leaders were contemplating transfer, and he gave undue weight to the opinions of Joseph Weitz, a transfer advocate, which were not accepted policies.
'I haven't revealed any smoking gun," says Benny Morris, sitting in a Jerusalem café.
That muffled drumbeat on the eve of publication of his latest book - a history of the War of Independence - may be reassuring to Israelis still shaken by the smoking gun he laid on the table with his first book. That tome, on the Palestinian refugees, revealed that many of those who fled in 1948 were deliberately uprooted by Israel.
Morris's new book, called 1948, reshapes half a century's published research on the first Arab-Israeli war, vitalizes it with his own extensive archival forays and weaves a tale so gripping that even an informed reader feels he is learning about the country's early history for the first time. (Disclosure: This writer worked at the desk next to Morris's in the newsroom of The Jerusalem Post when the world was younger.)
Morris's book on the refugees, which brought him international renown when published two decades ago, made him a hero to the political Left, which saw him boldly acknowledging the plight inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel. It made him anathema to the political Right, which saw him gratuitously granting comfort and political ammunition to the country's enemies. In subsequent interviews, Morris made it clear that both sides had him wrong: The tragedy which overtook the Palestinians was something that merited an honest historical account, he argued, but not an apology. The Arabs had started the war with the intention of driving out or annihilating the Jews. Furthermore, he says, if a large, demonstrably hostile and fast-growing Arab minority had subsequently remained in place, a Jewish state would not have taken root.
Despite the new book's title, the story it tells begins in 1881 with the onset of modern Jewish settlement in Palestine; the chapters devoted to the pre-1948 years are among Morris's most absorbing. A sense of déjà vu that the book sometimes evokes comes from recognition that the underlying state of play a century ago and 60 years ago is often still the state of play today.
The 1948 war was a conflict between two national movements, but something else underlay the passions, says Morris. "It was also a jihad. 'To wipe out the infidel' - that's what drove the masses in the squares of Cairo and Baghdad to demand war and that's what drove the Arab leadership in making war. I don't know how much they were thinking about the Palestinians."
The Jews were divided into contentious political camps but it was rare for them to employ violence against each other and they proved able to achieve broad unity on major issues in orderly fashion. However, differences within the Palestinian camp - between militants led by the Husseini family and the more moderate faction led by the Nashashibis - were bloody and debilitating to the Palestinian cause, a theme echoed in the current Hamas-Fatah face-off. Lack of common purpose was in abundant evidence. The Nashashibis as well as the Husseinis publicly condemned the influx of Jews but both secretly sold land to them and hundreds of Arabs collaborated with the Zionist intelligence agencies.
MORRIS DIVIDES the war into two segments. The "civil war" between Jewish Palestinians and Arab Palestinians, the latter supported by volunteers from Arab countries, lasted from December 1947 to May 1948. The militias had initial successes in cutting roads to Jewish settlements and imposing a siege on Jerusalem, but when the Hagana went over to the offensive in April it was able to decisively crush them.
The major test came when 20,000 troops from the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian and Iraqi armies crossed into Palestine following Israel's declaration of independence on May 14. (The Lebanese army did not cross the border but provided some artillery support. Israeli troops did later cross into Lebanon.) On paper, the Hagana outnumbered the invading Arab forces, but half the 30,000-person Jewish army, says Morris, was made up of rear-echelon troops, while the Arab contingents were all combat units. No less important, the Jews had no artillery when the war began and virtually no tanks, while the Arab forces had both.
"At this stage, when the Jews didn't have heavy equipment, motivation was a critical factor. They really did stop tanks with Molotov cocktails at Deganya and elsewhere, and at Kibbutz Nirim 60 members and a few Palmahnikim really did fight off 600 Egyptians."
Although the dispatch of the four armies to the Palestinian arena was seemingly a high point of Arab unity, that soon proved illusory. There was no effective joint command and each army had its own agenda. The clearest was that of Jordan's Arab Legion. King Abdullah intended initially to seize only territories assigned to the Arabs by the UN partition resolution. He changed his plan so as to include Jerusalem - designated by the UN as an international enclave - when the Jews began attacks on the Old City and he feared the loss of the Muslim holy places, says Morris. But he never attacked areas assigned by the partition plan to the Jews.
"The Jordanians came into the war to take the West Bank. The other armies were out to destroy Israel if they could but, if not, then to take as much land as they could and also to prevent the Jordanians from taking too much."
The Egyptians, driving up the coast toward Tel Aviv, sent a column northeast through Hebron to Jerusalem not to support the Jordanians but, says Morris, in an effort to prevent the southern part of what became the West Bank from falling into Jordanian hands. Israeli attacks forced the Egyptians back.
The Jordanians blocked the road to Jerusalem at Latrun not with the intention of cutting off and capturing the Jewish half of Jerusalem as the Israelis believed, but to prevent the passage of Israeli reinforcements that might enable the Jews in Jerusalem to capture the Arab half of the city. Although Jordanian armored cars were stopped, with Molotov cocktails, when the Legion attempted to capture Notre Dame monastery on the seam between the two halves of the city, it had no intention of risking a plunge into the built-up Jewish neighborhoods. One of the first things the Jordanians did, says Morris, was to disarm the Palestinian militias and incorporate the West Bank into Jordan in defiance of the UN resolution and of the Palestinian elite who wanted a Palestinian state.
As the war continued, with intermittent truces, both sides grew in strength. By the end of the year, the Hagana had 110,000 men under arms, while the Arab forces numbered 60,000-80,000. By this time only the Egyptian army was engaged in active combat.
The UN partition resolution had allocated 6,000 square miles to the Jewish state. By war's end, an additional 2,000 square miles had been won in the field.
WHEN THE WAR had started, 630,000 Palestinian Jews had faced twice as many Palestinian Arabs. The latter held a greater part of the country and were assured the intervention of the Arab armies on their side when the British left. How, then, did the Jews prevail?
"They were far better organized for war," says Morris. "There was command and control, logistics, intelligence. Kibbutzim had trenches, barbed-wire fences and perimeter lighting. Much of this was done during the civil war before the real attack came."
Also, he says, the Jews were fighting with their backs to the wall. "They were fighting with their families alongside them and the Holocaust at their back, only three years earlier."
The Arabs were also fighting for hearth and home but knew that if defeated they would find refuge at no great distance.
At the end of May the first fighter planes arrived from Czechoslovakia. There would be 20 serviceable aircraft at war's end. The bulk of the pilots and ground crew were foreign, with probably more than half the pilots Christian. A number of non-Muslims served with the Arab forces, including a few SS veterans.
In the confrontation between the Yishuv and the Palestinians, writes Morris, societal differences were a major factor. "One [society] highly motivated, literate, organized, semi-industrial; the other backward, largely illiterate, disorganized, agricultural." Arab society was also deeply divided along social and religious lines. "For Palestinian men, loyalty lay mainly with family, clan, village and occasionally region. Nationhood remained a vague abstraction."
The basic history of the War of Independence until a few years ago was a book written in the 1950s, The Edge of the Sword by Netanel Lorch, founder of the IDF Historical Division. In the 1990s, official archives began making accessible previously classified material on the war. This was tapped by historians Yoav Gelber and David Tal to publish books in 2000. Official archives were also the principal source for Morris, who does not believe in relying on live testimony from participants or even, if he can help it, memoirs.
"People forget and distort. Collective memory becomes confused with personal memory. And as long as a conflict is ongoing, everybody will tilt [their testimony]. I decided I would do without memoirs unless there was such a big black hole that I had to fill it somehow."
He did not even rely on the memoirs of David Ben-Gurion, the central figure in the story. "He was wholly history-conscious all his life. He doesn't lie but he omits a lot, which of course is lying."
Ben-Gurion, who apparently didn't trust memory either, would compile his diary in real time. One official describes sitting down opposite him and seeing the white-maned head lowered as Ben-Gurion transcribed their ongoing conversation into a notebook. When Ben-Gurion's head rose, the visitor knew the conversation was over. Aware that history would be looking over his shoulder, Ben-Gurion would edit the diary afterward.
"We have the diaries of others who participated in meetings in which expulsion of Arabs was discussed," says Morris. "Ben-Gurion, in describing these same meetings in his diary, would not write 'expulsions.' He would say we discussed renovation of villages or settlement of Jews in villages."
In retrospect, Morris regrets not having interviewed one player who was still alive when he began working on the book - Yitzhak Rabin, who was a senior Palmah commander in 1948. "He was a very honest man."
What Morris does rely on are official documents like operational orders, battle reports, intelligence reports and diplomatic analyses. Cabinet protocols are an important source. In the US, Morris notes, cabinet meetings are not recorded, while in Britain, cabinet minutes are taken but only a terse précis reaches print. This is aimed at giving ministers greater leeway in expressing themselves.
In Israel, a stenographer records the cabinet discussions verbatim and types them up. Ministers are able to amend their words in the printed draft but almost always these changes are limited to matters of style, since the other ministers will see the changes. On extremely sensitive subjects, entire pages are occasionally blanked out. Morris believes that the blanked-out sections from the 1948 protocols include a discussion on the expulsion of Arabs from Lod and Ramle which sat astride the main road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
A major hole for any historian of the Israel-Arab conflict is the absence of access to Arab records from any period. "Their archives are closed," says Morris. "To everybody. We don't even know what's in them."
Although an occasional document might be leaked or sold, Morris says, that is an out-of-context finding, not the product of serious archival research. Because of the presence of British officers in the Arab Legion, some material from Jordan did reach the British public records office, which Morris also researched together with American archives. Indirect access to the Arab side was available through Israeli intelligence reports, POW interrogations and diplomatic reports, including from foreign military and political attaches.
Morris hesitates to use the word "great" when asked to evaluate Ben-Gurion as a leader. "Ben-Gurion devoted all his life to accumulating power - personal power and then for his nation. He was both a gambler and cautious. He was always pushing things but pulled back when he had to."
As prime minister during the war he made critical operational decisions, but he also twice overrode his military advisers and ordered attacks on Latrun which proved costly failures.
One of Ben-Gurion's most important moves was to steer the Zionist movement away from the concept of a Greater Israel to partition. He had been enthusiastic about the recommendation of the British Peel Commission in 1937, whose partition proposal included transfer of Jews and Arabs out of the territory designated for the other group.
"He had resigned himself to the necessity of partitioning Palestine," says Morris. "He may have pushed during the war for expanding the Jewish part, and adding Jerusalem, but he never seriously thought of capturing all the Land of Israel."
Why not? "Maybe because of international circumstances. Maybe because of morality. Maybe he felt that the Palestinians deserved a chunk of Palestine."
1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War By Benny Morris Yale University Press £19.99
'The Palestine problem is still in its infancy. The preface ended with the [end of the] Mandate and Chapter One began [in November 1947]... Do not miss [the 'next installment']!" recommended the British consul general in Jerusalem midway through the 1948 War.
"Chapter One," the first war between Israel and the Arabs, was the culmination of developments and a conflict that had begun in the 1880s, when the first Zionist settlers landed on the shores of the Holy Land, their arrival and burgeoning presence increasingly resented by the local Arab population. Over the following decades, the Arabs continuously inveighed, first with the Ottoman rulers, and then with their British successors, against the Zionist influx and ambitions, and they repeatedly attacked the new settlers, initially in individual acts of banditry and terrorism and then in growingly massive outbreaks, which at first resembled nothing more than European pogroms.
The Zionists saw their enterprise and aspirations as legitimate, indeed, as supremely moral: the Jewish people, oppressed and murdered in Christendom and in the Islamic lands, was bent on saving itself by returning to its ancient land and there reestablishing its self-determination and sovereignty. But the Arab inhabitants, supported by the surrounding, awakening Arab world, decried the influx as an aggressive invasion by colonialist, infidel aliens; it had to be resisted. The culminating assault on the Yishuv in 1947-1949 was a natural result of this posture of antagonism and resistance.
David Ben-Gurion well understood these contradictory perspectives. As he told his colleagues, against the backdrop of the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939: "We must see the situation for what it is. On the security front, we are those attacked and who are on the defensive. But in the political field we are the attackers and the Arabs are those defending themselves. They are living in the country and own the land, the village. We live in the Diaspora and want only to immigrate [to Palestine] and gain possession of [lirkosh] the land from them." Years later, after the establishment of Israel, he expatiated on the Arab perspective in a conversation with the Zionist leader Nahum Goldmann: "I don't understand your optimism... Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?"
To be sure, while mentioning "God," Ben-Gurion - a child of Eastern European social democracy and nationalism who knew no Arabic (though, as prime minister, he found time to study ancient Greek, to read Plato in the original, and Spanish, to read Don Quixote) - had failed fully to appreciate the depth of the Arabs' abhorrence of the Zionist-Jewish presence in Palestine, an abhorrence anchored in centuries of Islamic Judeophobia with deep religious and historical roots. The Jewish rejection of the Prophet Muhammad is embedded in the Qur'an and is etched in the psyche of those brought up on its suras. As the Muslim Brotherhood put it in 1948: "Jews are the historic enemies of Muslims and carry the greatest hatred for the nation of Muhammad."
Such thinking characterized the Arab world, where the overwhelming majority of the population were, and remain, believers. In 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt sent out feelers about a negotiated settlement of the Palestine problem, King Ibn Sa'ud of Saudi Arabia responded that he was "prepared to receive anyone of any religion except (repeat except) a Jew." A few weeks earlier, Ibn Sa'ud had explained, in a letter to Roosevelt: "Palestine... has been an Arab country since the dawn of history and... was never inhabited by the Jews for more than a period of time, during which their history in the land was full of murder and cruelty... [There is] religious hostility... between the Muslims and the Jews from the beginning of Islam... which arose from the treacherous conduct of the Jews towards Islam and the Muslims and their prophet." Jews were seen as unclean; indeed, even those who had contact with them were seen as beyond the pale. In late 1947 the Al-Azhar University 'ulema, major authorities in the Islamic world, issued a fatwa that anyone dealing with "the Jews," commercially or economically (such as by "buying their produce"), "is a sinner and criminal... who will be regarded as an apostate to Islam, he will be separated from his spouse. It is prohibited to be in contact with him."
This anti-Semitic mindset was not restricted to Wahhabi chieftains or fundamentalist imams. Samir Rifahi, Jordan's prime minister, in 1947 told visiting newsmen, "The Jews are a people to be feared... Give them another 25 years and they will be all over the Middle East, in our country and Syria and Lebanon, in Iraq and Egypt... They were responsible for starting the two world wars... Yes, I have read and studied, and I know they were behind Hitler at the beginning of his movement."
The 1948 War, to be sure, was a milestone in a contest between two national movements over a piece of territory. But it was also - if only because that is how many if not most Arabs saw it (and see it today) - part of a more general, global struggle between the Islamic East and the West, in which the Land of Israel/Palestine figured, and still figures, as a major battlefront. The Yishuv saw itself, and was universally seen by the Muslim Arab world, as an embodiment and outpost of the European "West." The assault of 1947-1948 was an expression of the Islamic Arabs' rejection of the West and its values as well as a reaction to what it saw as a European colonialist encroachment against sacred Islamic soil. There was no understanding (or tolerance) of Zionism as a national liberation movement of another people. And, aptly, the course of the war reflected the civilizational disparity, in which a Western society, deploying superior organizational and technological skills, overcame a coalition of infinitely larger Islamic Arab societies.
Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs' perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King 'Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of "saving" the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. "In our souls," wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, "Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract nationalist feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples."
The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the "inescapable obligation on every Muslim," declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938. Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forgo the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended "to take over... all the lands of Islam." Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, "the memories of the Battle of Badr... as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din's [Saladin's] liberation of Palestine" from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: "The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: 'O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'"
The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the "street" and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and 'ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women's Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: "The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders... [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the 'holy war' has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred." The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: "No Muslim can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands," reported Kirkbride from Amman. "Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda]... who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject."
Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the 'ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing "the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics,... and leaders of public opinion." It was, ruled the council, "necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands... and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes." The Arab armies had "fought victoriously" (sic) "in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty." The 'ulema condemned King 'Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: "Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers," concluded the 'ulema.
The immediate trigger of the 1948 War was the November 1947 UN partition resolution. The Zionist movement, except for its fringes, accepted the proposal. Most lamented the imperative of giving up the historic heartland of Judaism, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), with East Jerusalem's Old City and Temple Mount at its core; and many were troubled by the inclusion in the prospective Jewish state of a large Arab minority. But the movement, with Ben-Gurion and Weizmann at the helm, said "yes."
The Palestinian Arabs, along with the rest of the Arab world, said a flat "no" - as they had in 1937, when the Peel Commission had earlier proposed a two-state solution. The Arabs refused to accept the establishment of a Jewish state in any part of Palestine. And, consistently with that "no," the Palestinian Arabs, in November-December 1947, and the Arab states in May 1948, launched hostilities to scupper the resolution's implementation. Many Palestinians may have been unenthusiastic about going to war - but to war they went. They may have been badly led and poorly organized; the war may have been haphazardly unleashed; and many able-bodied males may have avoided service. But Palestinian Arab society went to war, and no Palestinian leader publicly raised his voice in protest or dissent.
The Arab war aim, in both stages of the hostilities, was, at a minimum, to abort the emergence of a Jewish state or to destroy it at inception. The Arab states hoped to accomplish this by conquering all or large parts of the territory allotted to the Jews by the United Nations. And some Arab leaders spoke of driving the Jews into the sea and ridding Palestine "of the Zionist plague." The struggle, as the Arabs saw it, was about the fate of Palestine/the Land of Israel, all of it, not over this or that part of the country. But, in public, official Arab spokesmen often said that the aim of the May 1948 invasion was to "save" Palestine or "save the Palestinians," definitions more agreeable to Western ears.
The picture of Arab aims was always more complex than Zionist historiography subsequently made out. The chief cause of this complexity was that fly-in-the-ointment, King 'Abdullah. Jordan's ruler, a pragmatist, was generally skeptical of the Arabs' ability to defeat, let alone destroy, the Yishuv, and fashioned his war aim accordingly: to seize the Arab-populated West Bank, preferably including East Jerusalem. No doubt, had his army been larger and Zionist resistance weaker, he would have headed for Tel Aviv and Haifa; after all, for years he had tried to persuade the Zionist leaders to agree to Jordanian sovereignty over all of Palestine, with the Jews to receive merely a small, autonomous zone (which he called a "republic") within his expanded kingdom. But, come 1948, he understood the balance of forces: the Jews were simply too powerful and too resolute, and their passion for self-determination was not to be denied.
Ordinary Qassam rockets fired until now did not usually have the range to reach Ashqelon. This is either an "improved" version or a Grad (Katyusha) rocket. Hamas can escalate violence confidently, knowing that Israel will not undertake a major attack before President Bush and other dignitaries visit Israel.
Two Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip by Palestinian militants hit Ashkelon on Monday morning. One of the rockets struck an area that contains many schools and kindergartens at 7 A.M., only a few minutes before the area is usually filled with children.
The second rocket fell in the Ashkelon National Park.
One woman was treated for shock and damage was caused to some homes.
On Sunday, Gaza militants fired three rockets at the western Negev, one of which exploded next to a schoolbus carrying children.
Two of the rockets, fired Sunday afternoon, hit populated areas in Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council.
There were no injuries in either of the strikes. The first rocket landed near Sapir College, damaging a local construction site.
The second Qassam struck near a local gas station, causing damage to the school bus. There were no casualties reported, but several people were treated for shock.
On Saturday, an Israeli civilian was killed when a mortar shell exploded as he tended his garden in the community of Kfar Aza. Jimmy Kdoshim, 48, was laid to rest in the cemetery near his home.
At least 21 rockets hit the western Negev over the weekend.
