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History's Revenge
Jewsweek ^ | November 21, 2001 | Avi Davis

Posted on 11/21/2001 12:43:40 AM PST by BenF

Amid Israeli reports of a new anthrax scare and Osama Bin Laden’s videotaped confession, a small news item appeared in the Israeli press last week that should have made history. In a little noticed sidebar, Teddy Katz, a doctoral candidate at Haifa University was found guilty in a Tel Aviv District Court of making false accusations against the Alexandroni Brigade, a Palmach platoon from the 1948 War of Independence.

The salient facts are these: On May 22, 1948, the Alexandroni Brigade under the command of Bentz Pridan, was ordered by the Haganah High Command to take the Arab village of Tantura, a vital link in the coastal supply route. The elders of the village wished to negotiate a truce but the younger men in the Arab town insisted on a fight. Bitter house to house combat followed, leaving 14 Israeli soldiers and 70 Arab villagers dead. The Arab wounded were evacuated and treated in Israeli hospitals.

But Katz had deep suspicions about the official history. His analysis of events, drawn from first hand and supposedly unimpeachable sources, uncovered the slaughter of 200 defenseless Arabs in one of the worst depredations of the war. So confident was he of his thesis that he gave extensive interviews to the press and his story was syndicated by Reuters.

The Brigade’s survivors, enfuriated by Katz's assertion that they had perpetrated a cold-blooded civilian massacre, filed suit to challenge his history. Theyclaimed that Katz had made up the entire story, and that the brigade had conducted its military operations lawfully, appropriately and honorably.

The Court agreed with the plaintiffs and found that not only had Katz fabricated the story, but that much of the Arab testimony he produced contradicted his claims. Cassettes of his interviews were handed to the prosecution who found that in response to questions about the massacre, his interview inquiries had been so leading as to descend into parody. The court demanded an apology from Katz to the Brigade’s survivors.

This extraordinary case -- one of the first in Israeli history in which an academic thesis was challenged in a court of law -- is significant for another reason: it dealt a staggering blow to the cause of post-Zionism in whose name Katz and his mentor Dr. Ilan Pappe are significant stakeholders.

For those in the Israeli academic and artistic elites, post-Zionism has, in less than a decade, transformed itself from an academic catchword into a sweeping social movement. Obeying Oscar Wilde’s admonition that the "an author’s duty to history is to rewrite it" the post-Zionist historians, led by such luminaries as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Avi Shlaim have attempted to re-interpret Israel’s founding as driven by an aggressive, expansionist Zionist ideology. With such a reading, Israel is not only saddled with the blame for the deliberate dispossession and plunder of the indigenous Arab population, but bears responsibility for the Arab refugee crisis that resulted from the 1948 War of Independence.

There is little doubt that those historians who have adopted post-Zionism as an article of faith are not only dismissive of the moral foundations of the state but of Jewish nationalism itself. Pappe has been quoted as declaring Jews as nothing more than a religion with no logical need for a state of their own. Shlaim, in his book The Iron Wall, lacerates Israel’s founding fathers by describing them as ruthless, power-mad tyrants more intransigent than the Arabs. Under this relentless assault of self-loathing and self -recrimination one can almost hear the moral foundations of the state beginning to creak.

Unsurprisingly, a social movement designed to address the wrongs of the past needed clothing and the Oslo peace process was a suit made to order. For these academics the word " peace" was just semantic camouflage for justice and restitution. The price -- the detachment of the territories, half of Jerusalem and a Palestinian state, seemed small.

Yet Yasser Arafat’s perfidy at Camp David in July 2000 and the subsequent explosion of Palestinian violence two months later, roiled the Oslo vessel with gale-force intensity. Unprepared for the drama of Palestinian hatred and violence that followed, many in the post-Zionist claque recanted. Others, clinging to the wreckage, just hoped they could ride out the storm .

But the indiscretions of Teddy Katz have punctured a hole in this vessel that is not easily repaired. By revealing that its historiography is in fact ideology masquerading as serious academic inquiry, post- Zionism now reeks of the intellectual rot that in the 1930s made appeasement so fashionable. Indeed, with a rotting keel, this boat may well be sinking, taking with it the largely fabricated history that its ragged and bewildered crew have attempted to foist on Israel, the Jewish people and to its own discredit, the rest of the academic establishment.


TOPICS: Editorial; Foreign Affairs
KEYWORDS:
One wonders what other "massacres" committed by the Israelis are, in fact, lies.
1 posted on 11/21/2001 12:43:40 AM PST by BenF
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To: twills; zamzoomin; newwahoo; angelo; Sabramerican; American in Israel; Tigen; Yehuda; vrwc54
FYI
2 posted on 11/21/2001 12:44:09 AM PST by BenF
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To: Thinkin' Gal; dennisw; Magician; exodus; cdwright; STD; Goldi-Lox; monkeyshine; DistantVoice
FYI
3 posted on 11/21/2001 12:44:39 AM PST by BenF
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To: veronica; dennisw; Lent; Nachum; jonatron; Israel; NorthernRight; TrueBeliever9; neutrino; d4now
FYI
4 posted on 11/21/2001 12:45:14 AM PST by BenF
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To: BenF
You know there is a saying in Israel, "one jew, helps the second jew, screw the third jew."

(Rough translation)

It's to bad (and historically a problem that seems to repeat itself) that jews are often their own worst enemies.

It's not enough we have just about the whole world against us, we need to up the challenge a little bit and screw ourselves over, just to make it that much tougher.

5 posted on 11/21/2001 12:53:10 AM PST by IcommGen
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To: BenF
Cassettes of his interviews were handed to the prosecution who found that in response to questions about the massacre, his interview inquiries had been so leading as to descend into parody. The court demanded an apology from Katz to the Brigade’s survivors.

If only this would happen here!

6 posted on 11/21/2001 1:01:19 AM PST by 1Peter2:16
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To: BenF
Identity Profile: Secular Critic of Zionism

Before the creation of the State of Israel, secular opposition to Zionism in Western and Central Europe was expressed primarily by left-wing and socialist groups who saw in Zionism a threat to their integration into those societies in which they lived. In these contexts the Zionist claim that Jews were a national group was denied and instead a religious definition preferred. In Eastern Europe the opposition to Zionism emerged from amongst Socialists and Communists who claimed that the essence of contemporary conflicts was neither religious nor national but class based. Zionism was seen as deflecting the masses from class-consciousness and as serving the bourgeois classes. A different view, national at its core, argued that Zionism was a solution for only a minority of the Jewish people since there was little reason to believe that it could solve the plight of the millions of Jews in the Diaspora. This Autonomist solution called for the securing of national minority rights for the Jews within multi-national states where Yiddish would serve as a Jewish national language. These positions lost influence after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State. However, in Palestine, a small movement expressed the commitment to establish a Hebrew-speaking state neutral on matters of religion and ethnicity. A contemporary expression of this position might be the radical post-Zionists who wish to see Israel become a 'state for all its citizens', without special ties to the Jewish Diaspora. A key proponent of this theory, is Ilan Pappe:

"...Such a society will base Israeli identity on local patriotism and not on Jewish solidarity. Civic identity, and not religious or national identity, will be the factor in determining the country's economic and political order of priorities. Such a new view can have its own symbolic expressions, such as a flag and an anthem, and actual expressions, such as school curricula and an official information department. I believe that one can state definitively that the ties with the Diaspora will weaken, but it is possible that they will remain, albeit in an attenuated form. The Jewish majority in Israel will probably maintain contacts with the Jewish Diaspora, but it is possible that the ties will be via voluntary organizations rather than through government departments.

Israel's insistence on its role as the State of the Jewish people cannot be reconciled with the guarantee of equality for all its citizens, and I would like to raise doubts that the majority of Israel's citizens accept such a formulation, i.e., that they want Israel to be the state of the Jewish people while at the same time offering equality to all its citizens. Most citizens support a state which offers civic, political and economic preference to the Jews. Whoever wants to make democratic ideals preeminent will find himself in direct and indirect confrontation with the national values. Therefore, it is the view of the writer that the State of Israel must become the state of all its citizens, at the expense of the loss of the Jewish national character of the state, even if the majority of its citizens continues to define itself as of Jewish nationality. In such a case, not only will the Law of Return be annulled, but also the Basic Laws of the 1950s, which grant ownership to the land to the Jewish National Fund and discriminate against the civic rights of the Palestinians of the State of Israel. It is possible that there will remain a special tie, even at the legislative level, with Jews in countries of distress, i.e., a legal basis for special actions by the new State of Israel in the event that this Jewish community or another is in danger of being destroyed or wiped out. This view will be acceptable, in the view of this writer, to the majority of Palestinian citizens of the State of Israel, if it is the product of an Arab-Jewish agreement and not the imposition of the view of the majority upon the minority... "
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Ilan Pappe, "At the Crossroads", in Gesher, (Israel, the Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1996), 29-30. Used by permission of the Institute of the World Jewish Congress, Israel.

More...

7 posted on 11/21/2001 7:18:53 AM PST by NorthernRight
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To: BenF
After Half-Century, Historians Debate Israel's Birth

By DAN PERRY Associated Press Writer

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- For the Jewish refugees and pioneers who built Israel on the ashes of the Holocaust, theirs was a straightforward tale of justice, heroism and redemption.

But a half-century later, a maturing nation is reassessing its violent birth, with historians angrily debating a long-suppressed question with broad implications: Was Israel born in sin?

For Ilan Pappe, among the most outspoken of Israel's "new historians,'' the answer is a resounding yes.

"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab,'' the Haifa University scholar said in an interview with The Associated Press. " We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time!''

The "new historians'' claim that in many cases their predecessors dishonestly perpetuated national myths, especially surrounding the 1948-49 war that established Israel and created the Palestinian refugee problem.

Among the claims made by the revisionists:

--The Jews' victory over several invading Arab armies in the 1948-49 war was not the miracle they like to believe. The stronger side won.

--The Arabs who fled Israel (estimates range up to 700,000) were not just responding to Arab leaders' calls to clear out of the way so Arab armies could massacre the Jews. Many, if not most, were driven out.

--After the war, the Arabs were not the rejectionist side. Israel's leaders hid from their people a series of peace overtures because they were unwilling to compromise.

In Israel, history and the present day mix constantly. Some fear the revisionists' dismantling of Israel's heroic self-image could weaken its resolve as it prepares to negotiate final borders with the Palestinians, and it has sparked an angry backlash.

For instance, Ephraim Karsh, who teaches war studies at London's Kings College, denounced the revisionism as distortion peddled by cynics.

"The motives of Israel's founders were pure,'' he insisted. "They wanted a Jewish state for the Jewish people.''

The expulsions issue was long muddled by confusion surrounding the war, a vague assumption that Arab versions of events were false, as indeed, they often were over the years, and regulations sealing documents relating to state security for 30 years.

The first salvo from the ``new historians'' came in the late 1980s, when Benny Morris, now a professor at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, detailed the expulsions of the Arabs in a series of articles and a book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.''

"They (the Arabs) left for a variety of reasons, the most prominent of which was Israeli attacks and fear of Israeli attacks imminent, not imagined attacks,'' Morris said in an interview.

Morris could not say exactly how many were directly driven out. In Lod and Ramle, about 60,000 were actually forced out by Israeli troops, while in Haifa, Jaffa and Safed, Arabs fled on or near the dates of Jewish attacks, he said.

And while Zionist leaders may not have planned the expulsions, Morris said, they toyed with the idea while struggling with a basic quandary: "They had to establish a Jewish state in a country where there was a majority of Arabs. Any way you divided the country there would be a large ... potential fifth column.''

After a British commission recommended a partition of Palestine and population exchanges in 1937, David Ben-Gurion and others who led Israel before statehood made numerous statements in support of transferring the Arab population out of Israel, Morris said. "There is never one quote that they oppose transfer.''

Pappe has tried to prove that Israel's War of Independence was not what it seemed for Israelis reared on the idea that a small, ragtag army of Jewish refugees miraculously prevailed over powerful Arab invaders.

"The Arab armies - primarily from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan - totaled just over 20,000* men, he said. The core of the Arab nations' fighting forces remained behind, in part to ensure the internal stability of their own fledgling regimes.

The nascent Israel Defense Force - mostly based on the pre-state Hagana militia - soon outnumbered the Arabs and the Jewish soldiers were far more motivated. The Arabs also were crippled by dependence on British military supplies, which were withheld," Pappe said.

Crucially, Israel had a quiet agreement with Transjordan that its Arab Legion, the strongest of the invading armies, would take over only the West Bank, which the U.N. partition plan had intended as the center of a Palestinian Arab state, Pappe said.

Even so, the Arab Legion handily won a few battles, including the capture of East Jerusalem and the Etzion bloc of Jewish settlements near Bethlehem.

There are also new claims that in the months after the war, Arab leaders sent peace feelers that Ben-Gurion rejected and kept from the Israeli public because he would not part with his gains in the war compared to the skimpier U.N. partition plan. The Arabs never publicized the offers, fearing their own public opinion, Pappe said.

Morris said these events were glossed over by Zionist historians, who "propagated a wholly rosy view of Israeli thinking and actions and a wholly negative view of Arab thinking and actions.''

The conclusion is that "Israelis are normal,'' Morris said. "They look after their own interests, they're not very generous and like most people they distort the truth and after revolutions tend to write official histories.''

While some of the facts are in dispute, the essence of the historians' debate appears to be mostly about emphasis and interpretation.

"Old historian'' Anita Shapira of Tel Aviv University, for example, said it was unfair to focus solely on the number of soldiers in the field and ignore the Arab armies "`potential to overwhelm Israel numerically.'' Asked about expulsions of Arabs, she said, "There was no plan to expel, because it seemed cruel, and they really felt that they couldn't do it for moral reasons.''

"But no one was sorry when the flight began,'' she conceded.

The debate has degenerated into name-calling in recent months in a feud between Morris and Karsh, who wrote a book called ``Fabricating Israeli History: The New Historians.''

Karsh told the AP that Morris "would be in jail'' if he applied his academic standards to his tax returns.

"Karsh is a liar,'' snapped Morris.

The anger that accompanies the debate appears to be fueled by an evident political split.

Karsh, Shapira and most other ``old historians'' are Zionists. Pappe and many of his colleagues declare themselves ``post-Zionists'' who believe Israel should drop the ``Jewish state'' mantle.

The post-Zionists would cancel the Law of Return, which allows anyone with a Jewish grandparent to immigrate and receive automatic citizenship. They also want to change "Hatikva,'' the anthem that speaks of Jews' longing for their land and ignores the Arab minority that accounts for almost a fifth of the population.

At the heart of the debate is a challenge to the fundamental idea justifying the Jews' return to Israel over the past 100 years - that they deserve a state because they are a "people.''

"Jews are nothing more than a religion. To have a `Jewish state' is like having a Catholic state' in France,'' said Pappe.

*The total Number of the Jewish soldiers was 65,000 fighter. (in 1948).


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More...

8 posted on 11/21/2001 7:21:55 AM PST by NorthernRight
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To: BenF
Anyway.....there's lot's more. I have several articles, all dealing with Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and many other revisionists. If desired I can post them. There are about three or four more, some quite long.
9 posted on 11/21/2001 7:26:12 AM PST by NorthernRight
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