September 2nd is my 49th wedding anniversary. I should be posting a wedding picture and red roses or something like them. I will instead be visiting my husband in the hospital, where he is doing exceptionally well after a heart operation. I am also posting these thoughts about the Presbyterian Israel/Palestine Mission Network which seems to not understand that I also belong to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and they are misrepresenting me and thousands of other PCUSA members.
IPMN has now posted a letter to the Editor of the New York Times. The Times article is “In Israel, Settling for Less” by Gadi Taub. It is about the difference between religious Zionism and secular Zionism. The latter kind of Zionism was the earlier version of Zionism, but that is not my concern. My concern is with Walter T. Davis’ letter to the editor, in which he not only perpetrates some untruths but he does it in my name because he signs his letter as Chair of the Education Committee of the IPMN.
If the Israel/Palestine Mission Network was not a Presbyterian organization I would not care. It would be their business. But it is my business now, and the business of all Presbyterians who care. And there are several items we should care about.
First is this statement in the letter. “From the beginning, political Zionism carried seeds of its own destruction. Religious Zionism merely calls attention to the tragic flaw in both ideologies: the conviction that Jews and non-Jews can never live together in peace.”
This is a denunciation of all Zionism. That is anti-Semitic and outrageous. The Presbyterian Church has never denounced (Jewish) Zionism and certainly not secular Zionism. It was such Zionism that gave birth to the State of Israel and gave the Jewish people a safe homeland after the Nazi's atrocities.
Second is this statement: Israel’s leaders have demonstrated this conviction by ongoing policies of "transfer.” As Ben Gurion put it in 1937, "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." This statement attributed to Ben Gurion is a fabrication.
For a clarification see this e-mail by Benny Morris the Jewish Historian that many one-sided historians and church people such as Davis like to quote. Morris is responding to an article written by Johann Hari he writes:
"Hari quotes David Ben-Gurion as saying in 1937: ‘I support compulsory transfer ... The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.’ The first part of the quote (‘I support compulsory transfer’) is genuine; the rest (‘The Arabs will have to go ... such as a war’) is an invention, pure and simple, either by Hari or by whomever he is quoting (Ilan Pappe?) It is true that Ben-Gurion in 1937-38 supported the transfer of the Arabs out of the area of the Jewish state-to-be – which was precisely the recommendation of the British Royal (Peel) Commission from July 1937, which investigated the Palestine problem. The commission concluded that the only fair settlement was by way of partition, with the Jews receiving less than 20 per cent of Palestine, but that, for it to be viable, the 20 per cent should be cleared of potentially hostile, disloyal Arabs. (Britain, incidentally, at the end of World War II supported the expulsion to Germany of the German Sudeten minority, which had helped Hitler destroy and occupy Czechoslovakia – for precisely the same reasons.) The Arabs, then and later, rejected the principle of partition as well as the specific Peel proposals.
Neither Ben-Gurion nor the Zionist movement ‘planned’ the displacement of the 700,000-odd Arabs who moved or were removed from their homes in 1948. There was no such plan or blanket policy. Transfer was never adopted by the Zionist movement as part of its platform; on the contrary, the movement always accepted that the Jewish state that arose would contain a sizeable Arab minority." 1.
What right does Davis or the IPMN have to include all of us in their one-sided views. His connection to the IPMN should not have been noted in his letter. And why don’t we have two organizations dealing with the Middle East so that all of us might be represented? I know of a very good organization that would be fair to all sides. Presbyterians for Middle East Peace.
1. While on this site go to their information page about the Roma. What is happening in France is awful, to say the least. See Reflections on Roma
4 comments:
You may be correct about that particular quote. But transfer was a policy of the Israeli state. Several of the parties that support the current government and some Israelis continue to support it. Look for Israeli proposals for land swaps which include as many of Israel's Arab citizens as possible.
A few quotes made by Ben-Gurion from "Righteous Victims" by Benny Morris
"The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples. . . We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is MORE than a state, government and sovereignty----this is national consolidation in a free homeland." (Righteous Victims, p. 142). 1937
"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims, p. 144)
"In my heart, there was joy mixed with sadness: joy that the nations at last acknowledged that we are a nation with a state, and sadness that we lost half of the country, Judea and Samaria, and , in addition, that we [would] have [in our state] 400,000 [Palestinian] Arabs." (Righteous Victims, p. 190) 1948
John,
Your last quote is by Yosef Nahmani who was “a Tiberias city councilor and head of the JNF office there. Ben Gurion on that night, of the UN vote, as Morris writes, recalled “I could not dance, I could not sing that night. I looked at them so happy dancing, and I could only think that they were all going to war.”
Looking up the other quotes, I got too interested in the text and started reading instead of writing, (I am trained as a historian and that is one of my loves) and so with only two pages left of the autobiography of Bonhoeffer I am reading, I will read that book next.
But I think the important thing here is Morris’s word’s, “Neither Ben-Gurion nor the Zionist movement ‘planned’ the displacement of the 700,000-odd Arabs who moved or were removed from their homes in 1948. There was no such plan or blanket policy. Transfer was never adopted by the Zionist movement as part of its platform; on the contrary, the movement always accepted that the Jewish state that arose would contain a sizeable Arab minority.”
There was so much animosity on both sides, and such a longing by the Jewish people to no longer be mistreated by a host country that for Davies to write what he wrote is outrageous. Zionism does not bare the seeds of racism in it. Shame on him.
There were some planned displacements particularly near the end of the pre independence war. They may not have been planned by the highest leadership but the commanders of the troops sure were involved.
Viola, you know I agree with you about most of this. But as a historian I am sure you also know that what really happened is rarely an either or. Jews doctors and nurses on their way to the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem were killed. People in the Jewish quarter were killed and chased out of Jerusalem. The Jewish quarter was, after all, in East Jerusalem. Who ever remembers that? The Stern gang massacred a village of people. And both Jews and Palestinians were put on the road by the opposing armies in Israel/Palestine.
War always gets ugly. Take a look at prisons in both the North and the South in the Civil War. Conditions were horrible and planned. Actually more planned in the North in Chicago and Binghamton, NY than in the South. The North had lots of food for themselves but not for the prisoners. And yet must of what we hear about today is Andersonville.
In the South prisoners and people in the towns around the prisoners were going hungry. And of course the people in the South fed their own children, themselves and the guards (and clothed them too) more than they fed the prisoners.
Both sides in the Civil War (and in Israel/Palestine) were fighting a holy war. And in holy wars you do terrible things. Taking pot shots at Palestinians from your illegal settlement on the hill is a terrible thing. So is blowing up yourself along with a bunch of Jewish children and then having your own children say you did a holy thing.
Yes Bob,
I think I wrote about the two sides and both of their atrocities when I was writing about "Steadfast Hope."
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