The truth

‘On Monday 12 October, Prime Minister Netanyahu opened the Knesset’s winter session by blasting the Goldstone Report that accuses Israel of committing war crimes and vowing that he would never allow Israelis be tried for them. But that was not his main message. It was an appeal, delivered I thought with a measure of desperation, to the “Palestinian leadership”, presumably the leadership of “President” Abbas and his Fatah cronies, leaders who are regarded by very many if not most Palestinians as American-and-Israeli stooges at best and traitors at worst. Netanyahu again called on this leadership to agree to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, saying this was, and remains, the key to peace. And he went on and on and on about it. “For 62 years the Palestinians have been saying ‘No’ to the Jewish state. I am once again calling upon our Palestinian neighbours – say ‘Yes’ to the Jewish state. Without recognition of the Israel as the state of the Jews we shall not be able to attain peace… Such recognition is a step which requires courage and the Palestinian leadership should tell its people the truth – that without this recognition there can be no peace… There is no alternative to Palestinian leaders showing courage by recognising the Jewish state. This has been and remains the true key to peace.”
As Ha’aretz noted in its report, Netanyahu’s demand for Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state is for him “a way on ensuring recognition of Israel’s right to exist as opposed to merely recognising Israel” (my emphasis). This, as Ha’aretz added, is the recognition which Netanyahu and many other Israelis see as the real core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the name of pragmatism, willingness to “merely to recognise” Israel – meaning to accept and live in peace with an Israel inside its pre-June ‘67 borders – has long been the formal Palestinian and all-Arab position. Why does it stop short of recognising Israel’s “right to exist”, and why, really, does it matter so much to Zionism that Palestinians recognise this right?

The answer is in the following. According to history as written by the winner, Zionism, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This is propaganda nonsense.

* In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.
* Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal – meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy, unless approved by the Security Council.
* The truth is that the General Assembly’s partition proposal never went to the Security Council for consideration. Why not? Because the U.S. knew that, if approved, it could only be implemented by force given the extent of Arab and other Muslim opposition to it; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.
* So the partition plan was vitiated (became invalid) and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine – after Britain had made a mess of it and walked away, effectively surrendering to Zionist terrorism – was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the U.S. was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel unilaterally declared itself to be in existence – actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which came into being mainly as a consequence of pre-planned ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist UNLESS … Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not and cannot take from the Palestinians by force. No wonder Prime Minister Netanyahu is more than a little concerned on this account.’
Israel’s leaders have always known the truth summarised above. It’s time for the rest of the world to know it.’

(Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews: The False Messiah (Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews). He blogs on www.alanhart.net)

The monarchs are getting restless…

In a telltale sign of how serious the repercussions of the Gaza massacre – and the complicity of the ‘moderate’ Arab regimes in it – are becoming, read this plea annex threat written by prince Turki al-Faisal (high up in the Saudi royal family and former head of the Saudi intelligence services) in the Financial Times: ‘Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran wrote a letter to King Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over “this obvious atrocity and killing of your own children” in Gaza. The communiqué is significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom’s primacy from one of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire region, both Shia and Sunni. Further, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s call for Saudi Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel would, if pursued, create unprecedented chaos and bloodshed in the region. So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls, but every day this restraint becomes more difficult to maintain. When Israel deliberately kills Palestinians, appropriates their lands, destroys their homes, uproots their farms and imposes an inhuman blockade on them; and as the world laments once again the suffering of the Palestinians, people of conscience from every corner of the world are clamouring for action. Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel. Today, every Saudi is a Gazan, and we remember well the words of our late King Faisal: “I hope you will forgive my outpouring of emotions, but when I think that our Holy Mosque in Jerusalem is being invaded and desecrated, I ask God that if I am unable to undertake Holy Jihad, then I should not live a moment more.”
Let us all pray that Mr Obama possesses the foresight, fairness, and resolve to rein in the murderous Israeli regime and open a new chapter in this most intractable of conflicts.‘

Arab hero

Muntazer az-Zaidi has achieved more for the Arab world by simply throwing his shoes at Bush than all the Arafats, Abbases, Malikis, Abdullahs and Mubaraks combined. He’s enlisted more worldwide sympathy and understanding for the Arabs than all the Muqtada as-Sadrs, al-Zawahiris and al-Sistanis combined. And let nobody tell you he’s an islamist or a even a religious shia. He’s a leftist secular Iraqi. What am I saying, he’s a full-blooded anarchist. I salute him and so should you.

Oops…drunk salafists?

Naharnet has completely changed its version of this morning’s shootout in Bab al-Tabbaneh: turns out the incident started with three men in a car ignoring a checkpoint and subsequently being shot at by the soldiers. One of the men was wounded. A little later a crowd of neighbourhood inhabitants came and attacked the checkpoint. It is in this firefight that two men were killed and 8 others wounded, including 3 soldiers… The crowd also blocked the Tripoli-Akkar highway with burning tires (a longstanding Lebanese custom) and, for some unfathomable reason, set fire to the car which the men were driving – which, Incidentally, was not a white Mitsubishi van but a Renault 18. Its colour was not mentioned in the article. It is unclear whether the drunk men were salafists…

Beirut to Beijing (and beyond)

A friend of mine is currently traveling overland to China from Beirut via Syria, Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. She has been writing a prolific blog diary that is both amusing and insightful, shedding some light not only on the countries and cultures she traverses, but also on the tribulations, surprises and dilemmas facing a self-defined ‘vegetarian deconstructionist with liberal-humanist tendencies’ confronted with Central Asian life and culture. She’s about to leave Kazakhstan and enter China at the moment. Check it out here: ‘I concluded that the dynamic of the celebration was very different from the way that we have large-scale parties in Europe. There, festivities are an industry: one rents a space, one hires caterers, waiters, photographers, entertainers… Whereas in Sentap, I think that the only person who might have been receiving a fee was the singer. Everybody else was just assuming their part of the responsibility that accompanies the festivity. These were the ethics of community that have been largely lost in the way we celebrate in urban centres around the world, where solidarity is replaced with convenience. I think that in the first major shindig I have in my life, I will take inspiration from that village party in the mountains of Uzbekistan instead of bowing to the weight of my own social conventions; not as an appropriation of some romanticised exotic, rural purity, but as a reclaiming of a set of communal values that, in many places, I feel have been forgotten.’
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Debunking the myths of zionism

‘Sixty years after its foundation, Israel refuses to accept that it should exist for the sake of its citizens. For almost a quarter of the population, who are not regarded as Jews, this is not their state legally. At the same time, Israel presents itself as the homeland of Jews throughout the world, even if these are no longer persecuted refugees, but the full and equal citizens of other countries.’

Schlomo Sand, professor of history at Tel Aviv university and author of Comment le people juif fut inventé (Fayard, Paris, 2008) is writing in Le Monde Diplomatique: ‘Israel deliberately forgets its history’
‘(…)Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest.
Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea.
But if there was no exile after 70 AD, where did all the Jews who have populated the Mediterranean since antiquity come from? The smokescreen of national historiography hides an astonishing reality. From the Maccabean revolt of the mid-2nd century BC to the Bar Kokhba revolt of the 2nd century AD, Judaism was the most actively proselytising religion. The Judeo-Hellenic Hasmoneans forcibly converted the Idumeans of southern Judea and the Itureans of Galilee and incorporated them into the people of Israel. Judaism spread across the Middle East and round the Mediterranean. The 1st century AD saw the emergence in modern Kurdistan of the Jewish kingdom of Adiabene, just one of many that converted.
The writings of Flavius Josephus are not the only evidence of the proselytising zeal of the Jews. Horace, Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus were among the Roman writers who feared it. The Mishnah and the Talmud (authorised conversion, even if the wise men of the Talmudic tradition expressed reservations in the face of the mounting pressure from Christianity.
Although the early 4th century triumph of Christianity did not mark the end of Jewish expansion, it relegated Jewish proselytism to the margins of the Christian cultural world. During the 5th century, in modern Yemen, a vigorous Jewish kingdom emerged in Himyar, whose descendants preserved their faith through the Islamic conquest and down to the present day. Arab chronicles tell of the existence, during the 7th century, of Judaised Berber tribes; and at the end of the century the legendary Jewish queen Dihya contested the Arab advance into northwest Africa. Jewish Berbers participated in the conquest of the Iberian peninsula and helped establish the unique symbiosis between Jews and Muslims that characterised Hispano-Arabic culture.
The most significant mass conversion occurred in the 8th century, in the massive Khazar kingdom between the Black and Caspian seas. The expansion of Judaism from the Caucasus into modern Ukraine created a multiplicity of communities, many of which retreated from the 13th century Mongol invasions into eastern Europe. There, with Jews from the Slavic lands to the south and from what is now modern Germany, they formed the basis of Yiddish culture.’

Technical announcement 4

That’s right, brothers and siters, from now on, and on general demand, I will continue this blog in english, so that my Lebanese and international friends can enjoy my ramblings too. I use the occasion to announce the uploading of a few new sets of pictures onto my flickr site: the set ‘From Israel with love’ documents (a tiny part of) the incredible destruction of the southern shiite suburbs of Dahiyyeh. ‘Nahr al-Bared RIP’ features the pix I took on the one-but-last day of the LAF siege of the Palestinian refugee camp. ‘Mount Lebanon’ contains views on a recent trip through the Maronite part of the Lebanon range, including a shot of the pitiful remnants of the once mighty cedar forests. Let me remind you again that I am not (at all) a professional photographer an use a cheapo little camera. I also take this occasion to link to HARRYZZZ, the blog of Harald Doornbos, Middle East correspondent for the Dutch newspaper group GDP and for NOS television. His site famously features a video of ‘the flying terrorist’ – an explosion during the Nahr al-Bared siege which hurls into the air a Fatah al-Islam gunman (or something looking like a human being at least).

Technische mededeling 3bis – Mailing list

OK, de link in de eerste aankondiging werkte blijkbaar niet, dus hier het emailadres waarop je je kan inschrijven op de mailing list: middeninhetoosten-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Foto’s

Ik ben er eindelijk toe gekomen enkele van mijn foto’s te uploaden (up te loaden, op te laden, whatever). Je kan ze hier bekijken. Ik zal mijn best doen om er regelmatig wat meer bij te plaatsen. Naast de set Beirut views (vnl. het uitzicht vanuit mijn hotelkamer op diverse tijden van de dag) zijn er tot nu toe foto’s geplaatst van het Nasr min Allah-feest van Hizbollah op 14 augustus (set The Divine Victory) en van de expositie over de Juli-oorlog (set In het huis van de spin). Meer volgt later. Verwacht er niet te veel van, ik ben een slechte fotograaf met een simplistische camera, de foto’s zijn bedoeld als persoonlijke herinneringen en niet als professionele documenten of artistieke creaties. Die kan je wél vinden op de sites van Adam Pletts en Ferran Quevedo, waar ik eerder al eens naar gelinkt heb. Ik ga vaak met hen samen op stap (onlangs nog met Adam naar BELUBATT (Belgische en Luxemburgse UNIFIL-troepen in Tibnin) waar ik in een volgende post nog over zal berichten).

Technische mededeling 3 – Mailing list

Ik weet het, ik ben een beetje erratic in het posten van nieuwe berichten, het is kwestie van tijd hebben of niet, en iets (hopelijk) interessants beleefd te hebben of niet, en dan zijn er ook de nog altijd frequenter wordende power cuts in Libanon en de ultra-trage internetverbindingen. Vandaar dat ik een Yahoo! group gecreëerd heb, waarvan iedereen lid kan worden die gemaild wil worden als ik nieuwe posts geschreven heb of iets anders aan de blog toevoeg. Zo ga ik zeer binnenkort een aantal van de vele foto’s die ik hier ondertussen al genomen heb online zetten. ‘t Is een kwestie van in Starbucks te geraken – de enige snelle en betrouwbare internetverbinding in Beiroet (waar ik toegang toe heb) maar pervers genoeg ook de enige non-smoking place – zodat ik iets substantieels kan uploaden… Je kan je inschrijven in de groep met een mailtje naar middeninhetoosten-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.