This morning I received the following from one of my Internet scouts: "This is a MUST READ - I don't know anything about the author of this article , but it seems he must have been reading some revisionist literature."
See? The author's name is Brian Sewell.
Were I a Jew whose parents had reached Israel when it was still a promised land in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War, I have no doubt that I would defend my stripling country with the same strenuous fervour as the Likud Party, the Israeli army and police now do, the Old Testament my romantic justification.
Had I been born a Palestinian, my parents deprived of hereditary land, driven back into the Gaza strip that was once the territory of ancient Philistines, cut off from the Holy Places of Islam, denied education, medicine, hope, I have equally no doubt that I would be as frustrated and enraged at my virtual imprisonment in the Third World as any young man in Gaza now, and that I too would be out on the streets with stones in hand, perhaps even driven to lynch if the opportunity occurs.
It is all very well for us, by which I mean the Americans, the Norwegians (who now can recall the Oslo agreement?), the European Union and the United Nations, as well as the British - to prate of talk to both these parties, as though in protracted discussion they can be so ground down to exhaustion that they will agree to sleep in the same bed. Their talking leaders might, briefly.
There was evidence of this in the body language of Arafat and Barak when President Clinton had them locked away for day-after-day discussion in a "peace process" in America - but in truth it was a process less of peace than of fraudulent self-deception that could never be sustained after their return to their respective real worlds in Gaza and Jerusalem.
Even if, for a while, they could have maintained the fiction for themselves, the grudging suspicion that each had come back from Munich, as it were, clutching a worthless piece of paper, that each had betrayed his cause, would eventually have eroded any agreement they had seemed to reach, the erosion hastened by supporters who had not suffered the exhaustion of talk, talk among the lavish comforts of America, but been at home amid the Sturm und Drang, perhaps even deliberately worsening the situation.
At best, the Israelis are prepared to tolerate a toothless Palestine, a Palestine that offers no military or economic threat, a Palestine that will always be, cap-in-hand and underclass, a client state, its claims to the sacred sites of Jerusalem, a holy city of Islam, denied.
At worst, we should not doubt that there are Israelis who, setting aside the lessons of the Holocaust, see ethnic cleansing as the one permanent answer, another Bosnia, another Kosovo, three million worthless peasants of Islam wiped out, the suppurating boil lanced once and for all, the integrity of the Holy Land from Dan to Beersheba and beyond secured in such a way that no new Assyrian, Egyptian, Roman or Christian - and certainly no Philistine - would ever seek to breach it.
Were this last course to be pursued, its apologists would argue that America, largely unwillingly perhaps, would contrive to support Israel - as it has in every diplomatic crunch - because neither Democrat nor Republican can afford to alienate the domestic Jewish vote, and with America as ally, Israel is safe. And perhaps she is; her leaders could behave as badly as the war criminals of Yugoslavia and the Arab states on Israel's borders would yet again do nothing, would yet again leave the Palestinians to fight alone, unaided and virtually unarmed.
The Director of Excavations for the Palestine Exploration Fund who wrote in 1911 that in Palestine "the Arab will remain master at the end, as he was in the beginning", was in grave error.
Was the Arab there in the beginning? Was the Jew? Did Palestine ever have borders until we, the British, traced lines in the sand after the First World War, claiming a mandate there to protect our routes to India and the oil wells of Iraq?
Whatever Palestine was in our imaginations a century and more ago when we were covertly establishing ourselves through antiquarian, archaeological and Biblical enquiry, when we hoped that by making it a Church of England Bishopric it would become a converted Christian Holy Land, it was not a Jewish homeland but part of the Ottoman Empire, occupied by far more Arabs than Jews and a stronghold of Islam.
Palestine was not a Jewish homeland but part of the Ottoman Empire, occupied by far more Arabs than Jews.
In early Biblical times, it lay on the trade routes of ancient Egypt, Persia, the Hittites, with whom Abraham did business, and the civilisations of the Tigris and Euphrates; under such international pressures, could it ever have been as exclusively Jewish as the Bible implies?
The New Testament gives the impression of an entirely Jewish satrapy, but when the Crusades began a millennium later, they were fought against Arabs and Islam, with hardly a Jew in evidence. Under the Turks, Palestine was remarkable for long centuries of peace, and might well still be so had it not been for the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
By the Balfour Declaration Britain was committed to the notion of an ancestral home for the Jews in Palestine. It was an utterly cynical propaganda ploy to bring into alliance with the British in the First World War the mythical great force (in terms of wealth and political influence) of International Jewry. It took the form of a letter from Lord Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Zionist; it offered no secure guarantees to the existing population; it was used as our reason for demanding the postwar Mandate; and it was the cause of bitter argument until, in a welter of violence from Jewish terrorists, we abandoned the territory to the United Nations in 1948.
If we are now appalled by the Palestinian lynching of Jewish soldiers, we should not forget that in July 1947, Jewish terrorists abducted two British sergeants, hanged them and booby-trapped their bodies. We should not forget the atrocity of 91 deaths when the so-called National Military Organisation dynamited offices of the Mandate in the King David Hotel in 1946. We have much to remember of Irgun and the Israel Freedom Fighters.
"Without the Balfour Declaration we would not have had the Mandate; without the Mandate we would not have had the British administration; without the British administration ... the Jewish presence in Palestine would not have developed into a threat to our existence ... and our political rights."
These were the words of a Palestinian diplomat 25 years ago and they are a just indictment still; I have borrowed them from Ploughing Sand, Naomi Shepherd's remarkable book on British rule in Palestine (John Murray, 1999) - essential reading, as reviewers used to say.
To the onlooker, it seems that, while the rest of us must constantly be reminded of the Holocaust, build museums and memorials to it, carry guilt for it from generation to generation and flagellate our consciences, the Israeli Jews can behave as unacceptably to native Palestinians as other nations have to minorities in their midst. If ever there were an instrument of International Jewry, it is the exploitation of the Holocaust to neuter opposition from the reasonable man.
If America stopped believing that what happens in Israel influences the domestic politics of the United States, Israelis might feel compelled to confront the need that all western nations face - the need, by force of circumstances, to become a multicultural society. And the rest of us must stop believing as a sentimental article of faith the distorted history promoted by the Bible.
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Thought for the Day:
"The Nova program struck me as a not-too-subtle attempt to save what is left of the Holocaust myth, using the Irving trial as a hook for guilt-mongering with wartime film footage."
(One of many, many letters received by the Zundelsite expressing the same sentiment about the "David Irving Trial Special")
Back to Table of Contents of the Nov. 2000 ZGrams