Muslims Demand “Right of Return” to Spain.

Muslims Demand “Right of Return” to Spain. By Soeren Kern. Gatestone Institute, February 21, 2014. Also at Real Clear World.

Spain: Sephardic Jews are Welcome Back . . . Maybe. By Soeren Kern. Gatestone Institute, February 12, 2014.

Ukrainian Medic Olesya Zhukovskaya, Who Tweeted After Being Shot, Returns to Twitter to Say “I’m Alive!”

Ukrainian medic Olesya Zhukovskaya, who tweeted after being shot, returns to Twitter to say “I’m alive!” By Adam Taylor. Washington Post, February 21, 2014. Also here.

“I am alive!” - medic injured in Kiev tweets after surviving bullet wound. By Elena Cresci. The Guardian, February 21, 2014.

Olesya Zhukovskaya

Capitalism for the Masses. By David Brooks.

Capitalism for the Masses. By David Brooks. New York Times, February 20, 2014.

“Be Open-Handed Toward Your Brothers”: A Conservative Social-Justice Agenda. By Arthur Brooks. Commentary, February 2014.

Breakfast Before the MOOC. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Breakfast Before the MOOC. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, February 18, 2014.

Friedman:

Beginning March 2, Prof. Hossam Haick, will teach the first ever massive open online course, or MOOC, on nanotechnology in Arabic. What’s more interesting, though, he explained to me the other day over breakfast is some of the curious email he’s received from students registering for his MOOC from all over the Arab world. Their questions include: Are you a real person? Are you really an Arab, or are you an Israeli Jew speaking Arabic, pretending to be an Arab? That’s because Haick is an Israeli Arab from Nazareth and will be teaching this course from his home university, the Technion, Israel’s premier science and technology institute, and the place we were having breakfast was Tel Aviv.

 

His course is entitled Nanotechnology and Nanosensors and is designed for anyone interested in learning about Haick’s specialty: “novel sensing tools that make use of nanotechnology to screen, detect, and monitor various events in either our personal or professional life.” The course includes 10 classes of 3 to 4 short lecture videos — in Arabic and English — and anyone with an Internet connection can tune in and participate for free in the weekly quizzes, forum activities and do a final project.

 

If you had any doubts about the hunger for education in the Middle East today, Haick’s MOOC will dispel them. So far, there are about 4,800 registrations for the Arabic version, including students from Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates and the West Bank. Iranians are signing up for the English version. Because the registration is through the Coursera MOOC website, some registrants initially don’t realize the course is being taught by an Israeli Arab scientist at the Technion, said Haick, and when they do, some professors and students “unregister.” But most others are sticking with it. (MOOC’s have just started to emerge in the Arab world via Coursera, edX, Edraak, Rwaq, SkillAcademy and MenaVersity — some with original content, much still translated.)

 

Asked why he thought the course was attracting so much interest in the neighborhood, Haick said: “Because nanotechnology and nanosensors are perceived as futuristic, and people are curious to understand what the future looks like.” And because nanotechnology “is so cross- and multi-disciplinary. ... It offers a large diversity of research opportunities.”

 

Haick, 38, whose Ph.D. is from the Technion, where his father also graduated, is a science prodigy. He and the Technion already have a start-up together, developing what he calls “an electronic nose” — a sensory array that mimics the way a dog’s nose works to detect what Haick and his team have proved to be unique markers in exhaled breath that reveal different cancers in the body. In between that and teaching chemical engineering, the Technion’s president, Peretz Lavie, suggested that Haick lead the school into the land of MOOCs.

 

Lavie, Haick explained, “thinks there is a high need to bring science beyond the boundaries between countries. He told me there is something called a ‘MOOC.’ I did not know what is a MOOC. He said it is a course that can be given to thousands of people over the Web. And he asked if I can give the first MOOC from the Technion — in Arabic.”

 

The Technion is funding the project, which took nine months to prepare, and Haick is donating the lectures. Some 19 percent of the Technion’s students today are Israeli Arabs, up from 9 percent 12 years ago. Haick says he always tells people, “If the Middle East was like the Technion, we would already have peace. In the pure academy, you feel totally equal with every person. And you are appreciated based on your excellence.” He adds without meaning to boast, “I have young people who tell me from the Arab world: ‘You have become our role model. Please let us know the ingredients of how we become like you.’”

 

I know what some readers are thinking: nice bit of Israeli propaganda, now could you please go back to writing about Israel’s ugly West Bank occupation. No. This story is a useful reminder that Israel is a country, not just a conflict, and, as a country, it’s still a work in progress. It has its lows, like the occupation and economic discrimination against Israeli Arabs, and its highs, like the collaboration between Haick and the Technion, which is providing a tool for those in the Arabic-speaking world eager to grasp the new technologies reshaping the global economy. Those, like members of the B.D.S. — boycott, divestiture, sanctions — movement who treat Israel as if it is only the sum of how it deals with the West Bank and therefore deserves to be delegitimized as a state, would do well to reflect on some of these complexities.

 

For me, though, Haick’s MOOC is also a reminder of what an utter waste of money and human talent has been the Arab-Israeli conflict. Look how eager all these young Arabs and Persians are for the tools and resources to realize their full potential, wherever they can find that learning. Arab dictators so underestimated their people for so long. That’s what fueled the Arab awakening. It makes you weep for the wasted generations and pray this will be the last of them.

Putin Is Russia’s Reagan. By Andranik Migranyan.

Putin Is Russia’s Reagan. By Andranik Migranyan. The National Interest, February 21, 2014.

Is It Time for Ukraine to Split Up? By Brian Whitmore.

Is It Time for Ukraine to Split Up? By Brian Whitmore. The Atlantic, February 20, 2014.

Wikimedia Commons.

Is Russia’s Destiny Autocratic? By Robert Kaplan.

Is Russia’s Destiny Autocratic? By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, February 20, 2014.

Kaplan:

In 1967, the late British historian Hugh Seton-Watson wrote in his epic account, The Russian Empire, 1801-1917, “If there is one single factor which dominates the course of Russian history, at any rate since the Tatar conquest, it is the principle of autocracy.” He goes on to explain how the nations of Western Europe were formed by a long struggle between “the monarchial power and the social elite.” In England, the elite usually won, and that was a key to the development of parliamentary democracy. But in Russia it was generally agreed that rather than granting special privileges to an elite, “It was better that all should be equal in their subjection to the autocrat.”

 

This profound anti-democratic tradition of Russian political culture has its roots in geography, or as Seton-Watson prefers to explain it, in military necessity. Between the Arctic ice and the mountains of the Caucasus, and between the North European Plain and the wastes of the Far East, Russia is vast and without physical obstacles to invasion. Invasion of Russia is easy, and was accomplished, albeit with disastrous results, by Napoleon and Hitler, as well as by the armies of the Mongols, Sweden, Lithuania and Poland. As Seton-Watson argues, “Imagine the United States without either the Atlantic or the Pacific, and with several first-rate military powers instead of the Indians,” and you would have a sense of Russia’s security dilemma. Whereas in America the frontier meant opportunity, in Russia, he says, it meant insecurity and oppression.

 

Because security in Russia has been so fragile, there developed an obsession about it. And that obsession led naturally to repression and autocracy.

 

Russia’s brief and rare experiments with democracy or quasi-democracy were failed and unhappy ones: Witness the governments of Alexander Kerensky in 1917 that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s that led to Vladimir Putin’s neo-czardom. Truly, Russia’s fare has been autocracy, and given the utter cruelty of czars and communists, Putin is but a mild dictator. When Western pundits and policymakers say they are unhappy with his autocratic arrangement, they are basically making a negative judgment on Russian history. For by Russia’s historical standards, Putin is certainly not all that bad.

 

Putin now represents an autocrat in crisis, a familiar story in Russia. His problems are, for the most part, unsolvable, like those faced by Russian autocrats before him. And there are many of them.

 

Controlling the ultimate destiny of Ukraine is of paramount importance to him, for reasons both geographical and historical. Russia grew out of ninth century Kievan Rus, located in present-day Ukraine. Ukraine’s population density (compared to immense tracts of Russia) and geographical position make it a crucial pivot for the Kremlin, if it wants to permanently dominate Eastern Europe and the Black Sea. Yet, Putin finds that he cannot wholly control Ukraine or further undermine its sovereignty. There is simply a very substantial element in Ukrainian politics and society that demands a shift closer to Europe and the European Union. Putin has various tools to undermine Ukraine, such as erecting trade barriers and rationing deliveries of natural gas. But it is hard work, and he probably can never achieve an outright victory.

 

Putin fears the westward, pro-NATO and pro-EU stirrings inside the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova. He fears unrest in former Soviet Central Asia, where reliably autocratic, Soviet-style regimes may soon face increasing turmoil at the hands of Islamic fundamentalists – the very force Putin fears could destabilize Russia itself. Russia needs stability and compliance in its near abroad, and both will be increasingly at risk in Central Asia: Witness Kazakhstan’s recent currency crisis. Putin not only worries about Russia’s possible deteriorating position in world energy markets in the long term, but of the rising demographic weight of Muslims in Russian society over the long term, too.

 

Putin worries about an American-Iranian rapprochement, given how the estrangement for so long between those two countries has been so convenient to Russia’s interest. Oh, and here’s what Putin really isn’t happy about: internal interference in Russian politics by American, pro-democracy nongovernmental organizations. What the United States considers human rights activity, he considers foreign subversion. And that goes for what American NGOs are doing in Ukraine also.

 

Putin wants to engage in cynical geopolitical deal making; instead he often gets lectures on morality from the West.

 

Could Putin actually be toppled? Not likely. The unhappiness with his rule that the Western media fervently wants to believe in is probably manageable, and a really free and fair election today in Russia would probably return him to power. He is only 61 years old and lives a relatively healthy life, unlike Yeltsin, who drank to excess. Sure, Putin is under extreme levels of stress. But you don’t rise to his position in a place like Russia without the ability to handle levels of intrigue and anxiety that would psychologically decimate the average American politician.

 

The United States has every right to hate Putin for the Snowden affair alone. But, as I’ve indicated, Washington may be dealing with Putin for many years yet. As his dictatorship continues, he is liable to become more embattled, and rather than move toward reform, he is more likely to retreat further into a corrosive, authoritarian model. For that is a Russian historical tendency – something Seton-Watson would have understood. If that is the case, Russian institutions and civil society, such as they exist, will further deteriorate. And with that, a post-Putin Russia, whenever it comes, could be a Russia in some substantial degree of chaos.

 

Putin is not like Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, who in his latter years methodically laid the groundwork for a less authoritarian, post-Franco era. He is not like the collegial autocrats of present-day China, who have made their country – with all its problems – a relatively safe and predictable place for foreigners to do business and thus aid the development of the Chinese economy. While Russia, with its high literacy rates and quasi-European culture, cannot be compared with the much less developed Arab world, Putin’s Russia does contain a scent of the thuggery and benightedness that characterized former regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. Because Putin is not a modernizer – he is building neither a civil society nor a 21st century knowledge economy – he is leading Russia toward a familiar dead end, from which only chaos or more autocracy can issue.

 

Russia is not fated to be governed illiberally forever. Geography is being tempered by technology, and individual choice can overcome – or at least partly overcome – the legacy of history. Though one cannot speculate about which future leader or group of leaders can save Russia, one can outline the shape of a less autocratic yet stable power arrangement. And that shape must feature decentralization. Because of Russia’s very vastness – nearly half the longitudes of the earth – democracy in Russia must be a local phenomenon as well as a Moscow phenomenon. The Far East, oriented around Vladivostok, must be able to carve out its own political shape and identity, the same with other parts of Russia. The center must become by stages weaker, even as the whole Federation becomes more vibrant because of the emergence of a rule of law. Such a Russia would draw in a near abroad united by a legacy of Russian language use from Soviet and czarist times. Centralization is not the opposite of anarchy; civil society is. Thus only civil society can save Russia.

We Are Not Strangers in Our Homeland. By Avi Sagi and Yedidia Stern.

We are not strangers in our homeland. By Avi Sagi and Yedidia Stern. Haaretz, March 23, 2007.

Sagi and Stern:

The wheel comes full circle. Not long ago, we sinned by asserting lordship – “There is no Palestinian people.” Over the years this view was shorn from the marketplace of ideas of the Jewish majority in Israel, and we no longer reject the national identity of these others. Now however, leading figures among Israel’s Arab community are paying us back in a similar coin: Several recently published documents laying out their vision for the future call for the annulment of the Jewish identity of the State of Israel, from which it follows that they are rejecting a central element of identity of the Jewish people in our generation. This is a strategic move by a substantial portion of the leadership of about a fifth of the country’s citizens, and it should be taken seriously.

 

We pushed the Arab citizens into an alley with no exit: they are experiencing prolonged discrimination that cannot be justified. Their right to full civil equality is not being realized. Decent Israelis cannot remain silent in the light of the state’s ongoing failure in its treatment of minority group. Moreover, decent Jews cannot ignore their responsibility to protect the national minority from manifestations of racism. We did not make an effort to consolidate civil partnership; we did not create inviting conditions for honorable coexistence. The outcry of the poor Arab, who is discriminated against as a person and who feels excluded and alienated as the member of a minority group, is resonating across the country. It raises doubts about the depth of our true commitment to the values of a “Jewish state” and a “democratic state.”

 

However, the new initiatives of the Arab leadership in Israel are not making do with a call to rectify the wrongs done to the minority. The central innovation of principle in these documents lies in their categorical assertion that proper equality will not be achieved as long as Israel is a Jewish state. Accordingly, they launch a frontal assault against the state's Jewish character. If the previous generation of Arabs, the “stooped generation,” was content to aspire to civil equality, the present “erect generation” is challenging the right of the majority to maintain a Jewish nation-state.

 

Conspiracy of elites

 

The broad context of the “Future Vision” document arises clearly from its opening lines. The reproof sticks out like thorns in one’s eyes: “Israel is the outcome of a settlement process initiated by the Zionist-Jewish elite in Europe and the West and realized by colonial countries.” The voice that is speaking here is none other than the National Committee for the Heads of the Arab Local Authorities in Israel. These people, Israeli public representatives who live in close proximity to us Jews, believe that the State of Israel is not the realization of generations of Jewish longing to return to Zion, but a conspiracy by elites seeking to impose Western control over the Middle East. “Next year in Jerusalem, As long as deep in the heart . . . My heart is in the East and I am at the ends of the West” – none of these are authentic expressions of the Jewish soul across the generations.

 

This is historical nonsense. Postcolonial theories cannot transform a full life into a fiction. Even those who feel victimized by the Nakba cannot erase the fact that “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped,” as Israel’s Declaration of Independence states. Israel’s Arabs lose our attention if they refuse to recognize the fact that, as the declaration states, “After being forcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it hroughout their dispersion, and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for the restoration in it of their political freedom. We are not strangers in our homeland.”

 

The Arabs’ visions also offer concrete solutions. They are striving to shape Israel as a multicultural state. However, the Arab leadership is not content with protecting certain public spaces, which are populated largely by members of the Arab minority, as areas in which Arab culture and identity will be embodied. They want much more. They are demanding that all the elements of the Israeli space – sovereignty, territory, norms and symbols – be freed of any specific identity. They are unwilling to make do with the rights accruing to a cultural minority. They want the Jewish majority to narrow its identity and apply it only in sub-state spaces. The state will be a neutral playing field, transparent and hollow, possessing a universal character.

 

An attempt to fashion a multicultural state of this kind will not succeed. History shows that multiculturalism has blossomed only when it is cultivated in a stable national-political space. The leadership of Israel’s Arabs is seeking what no one had dared call for: for the overwhelming majority of the country’s citizens to withdraw their collective identity to outside the public space, which is so vital to realize identity. In the absence of another Jewish state, the import of their demand will be to dwarf and diminish Jewish identity in our generation to its private and community dimensions, just as it was for two thousand years, when we were a people in exile.

 

Moreover, states need a unifying national ethos. Without it, a state is liable to become a random federation of communities that will find it difficult to exist as a homogeneous unit. This is even more acute in the Israeli context. The Arab minority is tied to social-cultural communities that exist in the Arab states and it is part of the Palestinian nation, which is in the process of establishing an independent state abutting on Israel. Is it far-fetched to be concerned that the Arab minority is actually interested in a two-state plan: voiding the existing ethos and replacing it, when the time comes, with a different national vision that will integrate into Arab or Islamic visions that are shared by the rest of the Palestinian nation, across the border.

 

If the State of Israel is voided of identity components, it will lose one of the crucial elements of national resilience which that its continued existence in a hostile arena. Will Israeli youngsters – to whom the whole world is open – respond to a mobilization call that asks them to give up their best years, and sometimes also their very lives, for an organizational framework that does not provide them with meaning? The internal centrifugal forces will make us fall apart from within, and the opportunities that beckon in the global village will hasten the process from without.

 

Behind the multicultural rhetoric

 

The suspicion arises that behind the multicultural rhetoric lies the aspiration to liquidate Israel as a political entity. Implicit in it is the ouster of the Jewish nation from the world’s nations. Academic language possessing political charm might turn out to be a weapon in the struggle against the State of Israel. The Arab elite is leading its followers into dangerous realms. They must understand that the members of the Jewish people, including the salient supporters of civil equality for all, will not forgo the realization of their right to self-determination in this space, the cradle of the Jewish nation. The Jewish people has an inalienable right to the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.

 

Israel’s Arab citizens have to demand – and the Jewish majority must agree to – a fair division of the public space between the two groups. The Jewish majority will have the larger part of the realization of identity in this space, and the Arab minority will be left with the smaller part. Any other alternative will undermine, and ultimately void of content, the concepts of identity that underlie multiculturalism.

 

However, not all the public assets are amenable to division between majority and minority. Thus, for example, the definition of the state’s character as “Jewish,” to which the documents of the Arab vision object, is indivisible. This is the source of the argument that the right of the Arab minority to equality in the public space is infringed upon. Even though this is true, it cannot lead us to hesitate in our insistence on preserving the state’s definition as “Jewish.”

 

Isaiah Berlin stated that “[equality] is neither more nor less rational than any other ultimate principle.” The basic point of departure of a liberal society is that equality is the primary value that must be applied, but it is possible to depart from this value if there is sufficient cause. Indeed, in Berlin’s view, the majority of social disputes are related to the question of the nature of the sufficient cause to depart from equality.

 

As we noted, the demand of the Arab minority for civil equality is meritorious because no sufficient cause to justify its rejection is posited against it. In contrast, their demand for equality in the public space, to be achieved by removing the collective identity of more than three-quarters of the country’s citizens from the sovereign space, is intolerable. Posited against it are extremely cogent sufficient causes, above all the discrimination against the Jewish national identity (vis-a-vis either national identities which find expression in a political space, including the Arab identities) and the degeneration it is liable to suffer as a result. To this we must add the concrete concern that the Israeli political state will be disassembled into unconnected sub-units, and the danger that strategic harm will accrue to national resilience.

 

The Arab public in Israel would do well to direct its energy to a struggle for civil equality, in which it will find many partners among the Jewish people. But continuing to build verbal sandcastles in the form of documents of the vision is pointless. The Jewish people does not intend to divest itself of its aspiration to realize its nationhood in the political space of the State of Israel.

Homemade Israel-Bashers. By Amnon Rubinstein.

Homemade Israel-bashers. By Amnon Rubinstein. Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2008.

Rubinstein:

Shortly after I began teaching at Columbia University, I was taken aback to hear that the Iranian ruler Ahmadinejad had been invited to speak on campus. There was hardly any time to organize a protest against the event. Despite this, three kipot-wearing students from Hillel House worked day and night to distribute posters and pamphlets featuring a choice selection of the guest’s hate-filled, genocidal invective. They organized a demonstration in front of the hall where the Iranian president was to speak, and all without any outside help. I spoke at the demonstration, where I discovered that almost all the participants present were local Orthodox Jewish students. The number of secular Israeli students could be counted on the fingers of one hand – with fingers to spare. Inside the hall sat an Israeli student who applauded Ahmadinejad. I asked another Israeli who witnessed this behavior to tell me about her. I asked: How can she applaud someone that wants to exterminate her? His matter of fact reply: “She’s known to be a leftist.” In other words, “leftists” applaud a tyrant, a Nazi, a persecutor of minorities, oppressor of women, stoner of “adulterers,” and executioner of homosexuals. If he protests the oppression of the Palestinians, then he must clearly be a member of the “left” and should therefore be cheered. Later, I encountered other Israeli academicians at Columbia who added more fuel to the fire of hatred against Israel – all belonged to what is known as the radical Left.

 

WHEN THE semester ended, my wife and I were invited to a Shabbat meal on Friday night prepared by the organizers of the demonstration. I am a professed and impassioned secular Jew. My Judaism is national and cultural. I believe that my approach is in no way inferior to the Orthodox or haredi one. It contains neither temptations of paradise, the punishment of hell, nor the revival of the dead. It is filled with a rich, multifaceted and wondrous Jewish-Hebrew culture. I also believe that secular humanism is the right answer for us as individuals and as a nation. But if I had to choose between the kipa-wearing Jews at Columbia and the representatives of what is known in Israel as the radical Left – I know where my heart is. That is the entire story. No, it is the end of the story. It is also the end of the story of the anti-Israeli squadrons in the Israeli academia.

 

FOR SOME time, I have been waiting for a hysterical outburst from this direction, one that would bring their claims to such an absurd point, that they would be finished. I always believed that their “post-intelligent” anti-Israeli claptrap would eventually climax in an paroxysm of extremist mumbo-jumbo lunacy, after which there would no longer be anything to argue about. They’d be exposed. Ben-Dror Yemini provided me with just that evidence (Ma’ariv, January 11), in an article in which he tells of a research project carried out by graduate student Tal Nizan at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research question was: How is it that, contrary to the accepted practice among other occupation armies, the Zionist occupation army does not rape? The researcher had two explanations: First, IDF soldiers do not rape Palestinian women because for them, these women have been dehumanized, and “consequently, a sexual act cannot be carried out with someone that is perceived as less than human.” Second, the soldiers refrained from raping the Palestinian women in the service of a higher, demographic goal, because the rape could cause pregnancies that would subsequently increase the numbers of our enemies. In other words, not only are there no rapes, there are no condoms either. The significant aspect is not this surreal research project. It is not unusual. Incitement against Israel can be found on the lowest level in some of the social science departments in Israel’s universities. A well-known philosopher in Tel Aviv University called Israel the dustbin of Europe – and students, as we know, are influenced by their teachers, even when the latter are seized by a frenzy of hatred toward the state that provides their livelihood, and at the expense of which, thanks to their attacks on it, they make their names. The interesting thing is that this “research” project won a prize from a sociology association, with a number of distinguished professors voting in favor of granting the researcher a prize. It would be interesting to hear how these professors propose that Israel amend this serious flaw, that IDF soldiers are not serial rapists. Does that fact that female tourists are not raped mean that they too have been dehumanized? These professors are wrong. It's not true that there is no rape. There is – the rape of the academia, of science and of the students forced to listen to these professors’ drivel.

America’s Failing China Paradigm. By Gordon G. Chang.

America’s Failing China Paradigm. By Gordon G. Chang. The National Interest, February 19, 2014.

What Primary Sources Tell Us About Lydda 1948. By Naomi Friedman.

What primary sources tell us about Lydda 1948. By Naomi Friedman. Jerusalem Post, February 17, 2014.

Myths and Historiography of the 1948 Palestine War Revisited: The Case of Lydda. By Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Autumn 2005).

Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948. By Benny Morris. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1986).


Friedman:

On July 13, 1948, thousands of Arabs left their homes in Lydda (now Lod) and marched in the heat of the summer toward Ramallah, then held by the Arab Legion. Why they did this has been the subject of great historical and political debate.

 

One account explains the exodus as a product of the civil war that preceded the May 1948 attack on Israel by its Arab neighbors.

 

Another account, now making the rounds of Jewish book clubs across the United States, is Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land. Ignoring the recent work of prominent Israeli academicians and the growing body of first-hand narratives and other primary sources, Shavit paints the exodus as an act of ethnic cleansing.

 

Citing primary sources, from by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) telegrams and reports, to documents found at the Lydda Military Command, to personal accounts by both Jewish and Arab participants, Israeli academicians Avraham Sela, Alon Kadish and Arnon Golan’s book, The Occupation of Lod, July 1948, meticulously documents the unfolding of events. Here is the account, in brief.

 

On November 30, 1947, the day after the UN voted to partition the British Mandate of Palestine, Arab fighters launched the War of the Roads. Stationed in Lydda and other towns along the major trade routes, they attacked trucks and later convoys carrying supplies to Jewish Jerusalem and other Jewish villages. In July 1948, the IDF implemented Operation Dani whose ultimate goal was to gain control of the road to Jerusalem. The first objective of the operation was to capture Lydda.

 

The attack on Lydda was not organized or carried out as planned, as indicated by IDF reports and telegrams. It was led by the Palmach, a part of the IDF. On July 11, Moshe Dayan’s jeep force drove into the city, opened fire, got lost, came under heavy attack by the Arab Legion, and withdrew permanently.

 

Then 300 foot soldiers, led by Palmach commander Mula Cohen, with no heavy arms (and not aware of Dayan’s intention not to support their push) entered the city. They took tenuous hold of part of the city center.

 

According to accounts by both Jewish and Arab sources, Arab fighters gathered at their headquarters, olive groves, and the police station.

 

This is well-established by first-hand accounts of Shmaryahu Gutman, the Palmach leader in charge of negotiating with the Arab population of Lydda, and Arab civilian guard member Spiro Munayyer.

 

On the following day, July 12, two or three Arab Legion tanks entered Lydda and opened fire on Jewish forces. Arab Legion forces stationed at the police station and other local fighters launched a counterattack. After heavy fighting, the Palmach maintained its precarious hold on part of the city center. The Palmach exchanged fire with soldiers at the police station throughout the night and by the morning of July 13, they discovered that all but one injured fighter in the police station had abandoned the city.

 

Meanwhile, Shmaryahu Gutman, according to his 1948 testimony, had spent two days negotiating with the Arab leaders of Lydda asking them to lay down their arms. They had sent a town crier to announce that all arms were to be placed in the front of the houses.

 

Not a single weapon was handed over. Like the Jews, the Arabs anticipated a counterattack by the Arab Legion and hoped to wait it out. The Palmach, however, had gathered approximately 4,000 men of military age, held in a mosque and a church. Still, the Arabs refused to surrender. Only after the city leaders realized that the Arab Legion forces had abandoned the police station on the morning of July 13, did they agree to make a deal. If the 4,000 men were released, the Arabs would leave the city. And so it was that most, but not all of the Arab residents left Lydda.

 

Shavit’s account rests on two false premises.

 

The first is that the IDF captured Lydda from an unsuspecting civilian population who were easily overtaken. Primary sources, however, indicate that the Arab fighters were wellarmed and vastly outnumbered the Jewish forces. Sela and Kadish estimate that at least 1,000 local fighters and 50 soldiers from the Arab Legion held 25 anti-tank launchers, 20 machine guns, armored cars, submachine guns and rifles.

 

The second false premise is that prime minister David Ben-Gurion issued a top-down order to Yigal Allon, head of the Palmach, to expel the Arab inhabitants. This fallacy is one enthusiastically embraced by those who accuse Israel of ethnic cleansing. Primary sources clearly show that the decision was initiated by the commanders on the ground under fire.

 

These primary sources include Palmach commander Mula Cohen’s reports and telegrams from Lydda, other first-hand accounts, and an official IDF directive issued on July 6, 1948.

 

The directive, found in the IDF archive 2135/50, File 42, on the subject of “Discipline,” orders that: “Outside of active fighting, it is forbidden . . . to expel Arab residents from their villages, neighborhoods, and cities and to displace residents without special permission or the clear instruction from the Defense Minister in each specific case. Anyone violating this order will be tried.” The directive was issued to prevent expulsion, not to provoke it. 

Mula Cohen, however, was unaware of this directive. In his memoirs To Give and To Receive, Mula Cohen writes “Let me be clear: I do not deny that it was I, as head of the brigade, who made the decision, and only after did I receive the permission of the commanders of Operation Dani.” Yigal Allon accepted Cohen’s view that the only way to hold Lydda was to expel the residents. Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, his deputy, argued about it and went to Ben-Gurion. They were perhaps aware of the directive and of the fact that they needed to obtain his permission, since at the time he was also serving as defense minister.

 

What’s missing in Shavit’s books and in most popular histories that are now being written, the elephant in the room, is why the IDF targeted Lydda in the first place.

 

Lydda had been housing both local and foreign fighters who attacked the Jewish convoys during the War of the Roads. Today this war is gradually being written out of popular history and national memory.

 

Operation Dani, which precipitated the mass exodus of the Arabs from Lydda and Ramla, was the first in a series of three initiatives, the ultimate goal of which was to free the road to Jerusalem to feed the 100,000 Jews living there.

 

When I tried to explain this to my Jewish book club, nobody had heard of the War of the Roads, or of the Jewish children who were starving in Jerusalem. I couldn’t forget, of course, because my father was one of those children.

Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath” and the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism. By Petra Marquardt Bigman.

Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath” and the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. The Louis D. Brandeis Center, February 17, 2014.

Another Milestone for the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: The New America Foundation and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. The Louis Brandeis Center, February 17, 2014. PDF.

Whitewashing BDS and antisemitism in the New York Times. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. Jerusalem Post, February 5, 2014.

In “Goliath,” the Past Is Always Present for Palestinians. By Nadia Hijab. The Nation, February 25, 2014.

Max Blumenthal Discusses Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel at the New America Foundation. NJBR, December 5, 2013.

The Anti-Zionist Civil War on the Left. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, November 4, 2013.


Marquardt Bigman:

While Blumenthal was perfectly capable to adjust his presentations according to the audience he was addressing, he provided a chilling demonstration of what he hoped to accomplish with Goliath during an event at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was hosted on October 17 by political scientist Ian Lustick to promote his book. Lustick noted at one point in the discussion that Blumenthal showed in Goliath that “Israel is not just a little bit fascist, Israel is a lot fascist,” and according to Lustick, this was the “ultimate delegitimizer,” because after World War II, “nothing fascist can even be allowed to survive.” Referring to the biblical story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, Lustick invited Blumenthal to fancy himself in the position of God in order to decide whether there are enough “good people” in today’s Sodom-like Israel to save it from destruction. Blumenthal, who clearly didn’t need convincing that Israel as a Jewish state shouldn’t be allowed to survive, responded by explaining that his first concern was relieving “the suffering of the indigenous people of Palestine.” According to him, the only way to achieve this was by placing “external pressure” – such as the BDS (boycotts, divestment and sanctions) movement is advocating – on Jewish Israelis in order to force them to choose between emigrating and agreeing to “become indigenized” by accepting Arab dominance in political, cultural and social terms.

 

This open call for the demise of the Jewish state and a “Juden raus”-policy for those of Israel’s Jews who would be unwilling to “become indigenized ”after the hoped-for victory of the BDS movement did not remain one of the many barely noticed events staged regularly by so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists, but was reported by the Forward’s J.J. Goldberg. Yet, there were no consequences, which arguably only illustrates the urgent need to fight the alarming deterioration of the debate about Israel on American campuses.

 

When NAF President Anne-Marie Slaughter was notified at the end of November that her organization’s planned event for Blumenthal had been criticized at Commentary as completely inappropriate, she dismissed the criticism by quoting the popular notion that the “best answer for speech is more speech.” Unfortunately, however, there was no attempt whatsoever to counter Blumenthal’s “speech” during the NAF event; instead, as was to be expected, Blumenthal received some mainstream endorsements after the event, most notably from veteran NAF board member James Fallows.

 

With the Research Article published today, LDB is providing the long overdue answer to Blumenthal’s “speech” by documenting that promoting his work on Israel ultimately means to contribute to the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism.