Haj Amin al-Husseini in Berlin (photo: Jerusalem Post). Al-Husseini (1895–1974) was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian people before, during, and after World War II—and he was a zealous anti-Semite.
Settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing: Two false
assumptions about Israel’s inception
By Hendrik
van der Breggen
Two currently commonplace
assumptions in academic circles and on social media are these: (1) that Israel in
its 1948 inception was a settler-colonial regime, and (2) that Israel in its
inception engaged in ethnic cleansing (often called the Nakba, Arabic for “catastrophe”).[1,2] And thus, or so subsequent
reasoning goes, Israel is not a legitimate state. And thus, too, or so some
people also reason, Israel should be destroyed.[3] But the two assumptions on
which such reasoning is based are, I dare say, false.[4]
In
Part 1 of what follows I argue that Israel was at its inception not a settler-colonial regime. In Part 2 of
what follows I argue that Israel in its inception was not engaged in ethnic cleansing.
For
the sake of clarification I should point out that although I am a Christian, in
this essay I do not appeal to Christian Zionist theology. Confession: Whether
such theology should be accepted or rejected, I do not know.[5] Rather, in this
essay I take issue on non-theological
grounds with the above two non-theological
assumptions that many people take to be true. Again, in what follows I take
no position on Zionist Christian theology. Nor am I criticising the above assumptions
from the point of view of Zionist Christian theology. Rather, I will criticize
the above non-theological assumptions from the point of view of critical
thinking (careful reasoning) and historical evidence (which is publicly accessible).
Are the two commonplace assumptions about Israel reasonable to believe to be
true? It seems to me that the answer is no. I believe they are false—or at
least highly dubious.
My
hope is that this article will help reasonable people of good conscience (whether
Christian, Muslim, Atheist, or whatever) discern what is true about Israel.[6] Truth,
it seems to me, is a necessary condition for peace.[7]
Part 1: Israel at its inception was a
settler-colonial regime?
I have
three reasons for thinking that Israel was at its inception not a settler-colonial regime (these three
reasons work together as a strong cumulative case argument). First, the concept
of colonial does not apply to Israel, so neither does “settler-colonial.”
Second, Israel’s inception is better understood as a shedding of, or move away
from, colonialism. Third, Israel’s inception was part of a Jewish existential
resistance to a genocidal war launched by Nazi-collaborating Arabs—it was a
resistance to the continuation of the Holocaust.
Reason 1: The concept of colonial does not apply
Keeping in
mind that many Jews lived in the Palestine region prior to Israel’s inception in
1948 (and even prior to the waves of Jewish migration before 1948), we should
notice that, although there were waves of Jewish settlers into what would
become Israel, Israel at its inception was not a settler-colonial regime. Why
not? Because it was not an instance of colonialism at all.
To
understand this, let us first get clear on the notion of colonialism. According
to Merriam-Webster, colonialism is the “domination of a people or area by a
foreign state or nation: the practice of extending and maintaining a nation’s
political and economic control over another people or area.” According to Encarta World English Dictionary,
colonialism is “a policy in which a country rules other nations and develops
trade for its own benefit.”[8] The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy understands colonialism “as a broad
concept that refers to the project of European political domination that began
in the early sixteenth century.”[9] A
Dictionary of Political Thought defines colonialism (and clarifies the
aforementioned project of European political domination) as follows: “The
theory and practice of colonization” which is “[t]he establishment of a
‘colony,’ i.e., a collection of people whose origin is in some ‘mother
country,’ and who retain the language, customs and allegiances of that country,
but whose social and economic life is sustained in the place to which they have
moved.”[10]
Now
consider the following incisive critique of the
Israel-is-a-settler-colonial-regime claim from political analyst Rich Lowry:
An academic cottage industry
is devoted to deeming Israel a decades-long exercise in “settler colonialism,”
and Hamas itself is partial to the term.
The use of the word
“colonial” in all its forms [when describing Israel] isn’t meant to accurately
describe reality or clarify anything; rather, it is a term of abuse wielded to
delegitimize Israel and justify every means of resisting its very existence.
The “colonial” smear
can’t survive contact with the slightest critical scrutiny.
First of all, the
original Jewish settlers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries weren’t sent
by any mother country to set up enclaves for the honor and profit of the
homeland. To the contrary, they were escaping countries that, in many cases,
didn’t want them. It would have been perverse for Jews to have sought, say, to
establish an outpost of Russia in the Levant, given the atrocities routinely
carried out against them on Russian soil.
They thought of their
venture as a return to a place that Jews had inhabited for thousands of years.
Indeed, the colonialism
charge raises the question of how an indigenous people can be colonizers.
The Jewish people have
had a connection to Israel since Abraham. The people became fundamentally
identified with the land; indeed, they were synonymous. The land was a locus of
the Jewish faith—the site of its holy city, Jerusalem; the place where many
religious commandments, the mitzvot, were supposed to be performed; the object
of yearning after the dispossession of Ancient Israel (“Next year in
Jerusalem”).
There is a reason that
Zionists had no interest in settling in Uganda, as was proposed in the early
20th century.
On top of this, Israel
has been willing at key junctures, notably right at the beginning in 1948, to
accept a two-state solution.[11]
Also,
in an interview with The Free Press,
Haviv Rettig Gur, senior analyst for The
Times of Israel, echoes Lowry’s assessment. Gur sets out the following
reasons for thinking Israel is not a colonial project (my paraphrase):
- the
Jews came as refugees (often persecuted);
- there
was no mother country (in fact, there are many countries represented by the
Jews);
- Israel
was a nation-building project (not about exploiting resources for a mother
country);
- there
is an ancient Jewish tradition of return to the land (i.e., the land of their
ancient ancestors).[12]
Israel’s
inception, then, does not fit the definition of “colonial.”
But
Gur does not stop in his critique. To further the case against the
Israel-is-a-settler-colonial-regime claim, Gur sets out a reductio ad absurdum argument as follows.[13] If one takes Gur’s
(and Lowry’s) above-described characteristics of Israel also as features of
colonialism, then, according to Gur, “the word ‘colonialism’ no longer contains
any analytical value…it becomes an empty vessel.”[14] In other words (mine), by
applying the term “colonialism” to Israel’s founding the term gets redefined in
such a way that the salient features of colonialism are also not the salient features of colonialism.
By applying the term “colonialism” to Israel’s founding as if doing so is
appropriate, the crucial features of colonialism are negated. That a mother
country is being expansionist/imperialistic by sending its people to the land
to exploit the land for the people’s mother country; that the sent people have
no ancestral, historical, or cultural connection to the land and thus are not
returning to their homeland; that the sent people are not refugees avoiding
actual and probable pogroms due to their ancestral, historical, and cultural
connection to the land—all these features are not true for Israel. But to say
they are is to place a logical self-contradiction into the meaning of
colonialism. Thus, the notion of colonialism is gutted (because a contradiction
is logical nonsense/meaningless). An empty vessel, indeed.
Moreover,
and significantly, the subjective effect (on unwary listeners or readers) of
the application of the newly gutted term to Israel in discourse about Israel serves
to transfer illegitimately onto Israel the negative connotations previously
associated with colonialism (the non-gutted version). The effect of this, as
Lowry points out, is to smear Israel. In other words, applying “colonialism” to
Israel is a logic-and-language-abusing case of changing the meaning of the term
for some political end—an anti-Israel end.[15] As such, it is a convoluted form
of deception now commonly known as gaslighting.[16]
Lowry
and Gur are, then, correct. The Jews in the region of Palestine, part of which
later became the State of Israel, were not settler colonialists because they
were not colonialists at all. Some Jews were living in the Palestine region
long before the 1948 formation of Israel as a state and many Jews who came to
the region before 1948 (and after) were
a people seeking refuge from persecution by moving to the ancestral land of the
Jews—their ancestral land. In other
words, many Jews were indigenous to the land and many Jews with ancestral
connections to the land were refugees fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms or
persecution. So the concept of colonial does not apply to Israel and thus the
descriptor “settler-colonial” does not apply to Israel either.[17]
Reason 2: Israel’s inception is a shedding of colonialism
At this juncture, I wish to go
further and add support to Lowry’s and Gur’s arguments against thinking
Israel’s inception was a colonialist project by pointing out that,
historically, Israel’s inception was more akin to a move away from or shedding of colonialism. The following
brief historical overview of the formation of the State of Israel will be
helpful background to understand this:
- Prior
to World War I, the geographic region called Palestine was a part of the
Ottoman Empire (emphasis on Palestine being a geographic region, not a state);
- Jews
had been purchasing (and continued to purchase) land in Palestine (often the
land was otherwise unwanted desert or malaria-infested swampland, sold to Jews
at exorbitant prices);
- the
Ottoman Empire was defeated militarily in World War I by the British Empire and
its allies (the Ottomans had sided with Germany which was defeated and which
was one of the main aggressors in World War I);
- after
World War I, in which the Ottomans were defeated and thus lost political
control of the lands of the Ottoman Empire, the British gained control over the
Palestine region via the “mandate” system (note: the era of empire was coming
to a close and the age of nation states was emerging; the mandate system was an
attempt by former empires such as Britain and France, encouraged by the U.S.,
to help distinct peoples become self-determining nation states; the British
mandate included Iraq and Palestine, the latter of which included modern-day
Gaza, West Bank, and Jordan, whereas the French mandate included Lebanon and
Syria);
- subsequently,
because there had been much Jewish migration (often due to persecutions) to the
region of Palestine, in which many Palestinian Jews already lived, and because
many Palestinian Arabs also living in the region were greatly annoyed (even
though Arabs had Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan), the British sought to divide
the region of Palestine (promised previously to Jews, but now without Jordan/
Transjordan) into a Jewish state and an Arab state, to allow for two distinct
peoples with legitimate claims to the land to co-exist as two nation states;
- leading
up to and during World War II, the Palestinian Arabs were led by Haj Amin
al-Husseini, a.k.a. the Grand Mufti (more on the ideological nature of this leadership
below);
- World
War II and the Jewish Holocaust (in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the
Nazis) ended in 1945;
- leading
up to, during, and after World War II, many European Jews sought the safety of
a Jewish state in the Palestine region (though many were turned away).[18]
Keeping
the previous historical sketch in mind, we can see that the situation in the
region of Palestine prior to Israel’s statehood was, for lack of a better word,
messy. In this context the British at first encouraged Jewish immigration and
then, to appease Arabs, thwarted Jewish immigration. Jewish Zionists resented
and sometimes violently resisted the British for this thwarting. In addition,
Arab and Jewish paramilitary groups were often in violent conflict with each
other. Not only was there Arab-Jewish conflict, but also there was a push in
the region of Palestine by both Jews and Arabs against the British Empire.
Frustrated by the volatile situation, the British handed the mess over to the
League of Nations, later to become the United Nations. On November 29, 1947, in
an attempt to appease both Jewish nationalists (Zionists) and Arab nationalists
(anti-Zionists), the UN voted in favour of an independent Jewish state in the
Palestine region along with an independent Arab state, much to the chagrin of
the Arabs (more on the nature of this chagrin below). Whereas the Palestinian
Arabs, led by Haj Amin al-Husseini, immediately rejected the plan and began
waging war against the Jews (this first part of the Arab-Israel war prior to
Israel’s statehood is known as the “civil war”), Israel declared itself an
independent state on May 14, 1948, a date that also marked the lowering of the
Union Jack and the (continued) withdrawal of the remaining British Empire
forces. On May 15, 1948, armies of several Arab-Muslim countries (Egypt, Iraq,
Jordan, and Syria) attacked Israel with the explicit intent of destroying
Israel. Approximately 750 thousand Palestinian Arabs fled Israel (to get out of
harm’s way and/or to make way for the Arab armies) or were pushed out of Israel
(by Israel), many expecting to return after the Arabs defeated Israel. The
Arab-Israeli war ended March 10, 1949.
Surprisingly,
the Arabs, who started the war against Israel and expected victory, i.e.,
expected to wipe the fledgling State of Israel off the map, lost. As a result,
Israel continued its existence as a legally established UN-approved independent
state. Subsequently, about 800 thousand Jews fled or were pushed out of nearby
Arab countries to find safety in Israel and elsewhere.[19]
The
above historical sketch shows that Israel’s inception was (along with the
inception of some Arab states) a move away from—a shedding of—British empire
and colonialism. The historical bits that are significant to our present
discussion are worth repeating here for the sake of clarity. After World War I
and the defeat of the Ottomans, the era of empire was coming to a close and the
age of nation states was emerging. The mandate system was an attempt by former
empires such as Britain and France (encouraged by the U.S.) to help distinct
peoples within the former Ottoman Empire become self-governing nation states.
The British mandate included Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, whereas the
French mandate included Lebanon and Syria. The British and French colonial
empires were on their way out, and self-governing nation states were on their
way in. All this to say (again) that Israel’s coming to be as an independent
state in the region of Palestine was, historically, a move away from, or
shedding of, colonialism, not an instance of colonialism.
But it
was not merely a shedding of colonialism, it was a fight for survival—which
brings us to reason 3.
Reason 3: Israel’s inception was part of a Jewish
existential resistance against a genocidal war launched by Nazi-collaborating
Arabs—it was a resistance to the Nazi continuation of the Holocaust
To make the case that Israel’s
inception was also an existential resistance—a fight for survival—against a
genocidal war launched by Nazi-collaborating Arabs as a continuation of the
Holocaust, it should be noticed and emphasized that the Arab Higher Committee
(founded in 1936[20]), which was the main Arab political organization in
Palestine, was chaired by Haj Amin al-Husseini.[21] Al-Husseini was the Grand
Mufti of Jerusalem and leader of the Palestinian people before, during, and
after World War II. Why should this be noticed and emphasized? Because the
Grand Mufti was a Jew-hating Nazi
collaborator. In fact, during World War II he lived in Berlin and worked
for the Nazis (with a large salary from the Nazis), visited with Adolf Hitler
(the Jew-hating German Nazi dictator), associated repeatedly with Heinrich
Himmler (a major organizer of the Holocaust), and helped organize a Muslim SS
(an elite murderous military guard of the Nazi Reich/Empire). The Grand Mufti
characterized his friendship with the Nazis as their being united in wanting to
get rid of the Jews. They hoped that as Field Marshall Erwin Rommel moved the
German army victoriously through northern Africa during World War II, the
Jewish holocaust that was being carried out by the Nazis in Europe would also
be carried out in the Middle East (fortunately, Rommel’s army was stopped by
the British). This sheds important light onto the situation in which the
Israeli state was born: Palestinian leaders were as anti-Jewish as Nazis and,
like the Nazis, Palestinian leaders wished to kill all Jews. To survive this
existential threat—to survive this continuation of Jewish genocide of World War
II—the Jews had to come together politically to resist.
Is this
bit about the Nazi-Arab alliance just a non-evidence-based opinion, offered
here as pro-Israel propaganda? No. Consider what follows.
In the
recent essay “A Historian for Our Moment” author Sol Stern discusses important
findings by American historian Jeffrey Herf concerning the pro-Nazi influence
in Palestine before and after the founding of Israel. Here are some significant
snippets from Stern’s article:
Herf’s most important scholarly
discovery was of Nazi Germany’s campaign to win ideological and political
adherents in the Arab world by using radio broadcasts and printed materials.
This massive propaganda effort was supervised by Haj Amin al-Husseini—also
known as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—who was the undisputed political and
religious leader of the Palestinian Arabs from 1921–49….
As Herf has shown, what
occurred in Berlin was “a meeting of hearts and minds—a cultural fusion of
Nazism and Islamism.” Husseini personally contributed to the efforts of the
German war machine by recruiting Bosnian Muslims to the Waffen SS and
organizing intelligence operations in the Middle East. In turn, the Nazis
celebrated him in an official proclamation as “one of the great personalities
of the Islamic world who had led the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs against
onrushing Jewry.”
After the military defeat of
Germany and the ideological defeat of Nazism, the center of radical Jew-hatred
shifted from Europe to the Middle East….
[A]fter World War II,
revolutionary antisemitism enjoyed a second life in the Middle East,
specifically “in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in Husseini’s leadership of the Palestine Arabs in the 1947–1948 war to
prevent the establishment of the state of Israel, in the Islamic Republic
of Iran, the Hamas Covenant of 1988, the ideology of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and
the Islamic state.”[22]
Permit me to repeat part of the
last sentence so the reader will linger on the words I put in italics:
[A]fter World War II,
revolutionary antisemitism enjoyed a second life in the Middle East,
specifically “…in Husseini’s leadership
of the Palestine Arabs in the 1947–1948 war to prevent the establishment of the
state of Israel.”[23]
Elsewhere Stern writes:
New archival research by the
German historians Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cuppers reveal that the
Nazis had drawn up a plan for the physical destruction of the Yishuv [the
Jewish community in the Palestine region] that would have been set in motion if
Erwin Rommel’s Afrikacorps had achieved victory at El Alamein [in Egypt].
Mobile killing units called Einsatzgruppen,
which were used to kill Jews on the Russian front, were attached to Rommel’s
army. The Nazi plan called for the mufti to be flown back home to help carry
out another Final Solution for the Jews of Palestine.[24]
Israeli historian Benny Morris, author of the highly
acclaimed book 1948: The First
Arab-Israeli War,[25] writes the following in Quillette:
Palestine’s Arabs—like most of
the Middle East’s Arabs—would have preferred a Nazi German victory and the defeat
of the Western democracies. The British were seen as the common enemy of the
Germans and the Palestinians. As Sakakini, a Palestinian nationalist, relates
in a diary entry of 1941, the Arabs of Palestine “had rejoiced when the British
bastion at Tobruk [in Libya] fell to the Germans,” and “not only the
Palestinians rejoiced … but the whole Arab world.”
This support for Hitler wasn’t
merely a matter of the old adage that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.” [Haj]
Muhammed Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestine national movement, was
an outspoken antisemite. He aided the 1941 pro-Nazi revolt in Baghdad. When it
collapsed, he fled to Berlin, where he spent the rest of the war years enjoying
a handsome salary for his work as a Nazi propagandist and a recruiter of Balkan
Muslims for the SS.
Palestine’s Arabs thus assisted
in the destruction of European Jewry in two ways: They successfully pressured
the British into closing the gates of Palestine to European Jews fleeing the
Holocaust; and they supported Germany’s efforts to win the war. In radio
broadcasts from Berlin, Husseini called on the Arab world to rebel against
Britain and “kill the Jews.”[26]
After investigating the relevant historical evidence
concerning al-Husseini, Harvard Professor of Law (emeritus) Alan Dershowitz
writes the following:
It is fair to conclude that the
official leader of the Muslims in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was a
full-fledged Nazi war criminal, and he was so declared at Nuremberg….. [He]
helped to organize many former Nazis and Nazi sympathizers against Israel.
It is also fair to say that
Husseini’s pro-Nazi sympathies and support were widespread among his
Palestinian followers, who regarded him as a hero even after the war and the
disclosure of his role in Nazi atrocities. According to his biographer, “Haj
Amin’s popularity among the Palestinian Arabs and within the Arab states
actually increased more than ever during his period with the Nazis,” because
“large parts of the Arab world shared this sympathy with Nazi Germany during
the Second World War.” Nor was it merely a hatred of Zionism that animated this
support for Nazi ideology. The grand mufti’s “hatred of Jews…was fathomless,
and he gave full vent to it during his period of activity alongside the Nazis
(October 1941–May 1945).” His speeches on Berlin Radio were anti-Semitic to the
core: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them—this pleases God, history and
religion.” In 1948, the National Palestinian Council elected Husseini as its
president, even though he was a wanted war criminal living in exile in Egypt.[27]
In view
of the above information about al-Husseini and the Nazis, Joseph S. Spoerl,
Professor of Philosophy (emeritus) at Saint Anselm College (Manchester, New
Hampshire), observes the following:
Given this background, it is
hardly surprising that fear of another Holocaust was a major motive driving
Zionist forces to fight in 1947–8. Zionist leaders were well aware that Hajj
Amin al-Husseini had supported Hitler and the “final solution.” The Jews of
Palestine were outnumbered by Arabs two-to-one within Palestine and by a much
larger factor if Arabs outside of Palestine are counted. Most Palestinian Arabs
revered someone [i.e., al-Husseini] who had openly called for genocide against
Jews—all Jews—and who rejected any compromise regarding Palestine.[28]
Spoerl sums up the historical
evidence for the Arab-Israel War of 1947–49 as follows:
[I]t was a war of self-defence
[by Israel] against a ruthless, pro-Nazi, and openly genocidal Palestinian
leadership that enjoyed enormous popularity among the Arab and Palestinian
masses.[29]
All this to say: Israel’s inception was also a resistance
to the genocidal war against Jews begun by fanatical Nazi-like, Jew-hating
Palestinian Arabs. At the end of World War II, Jews in the region of Palestine
were aware of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Arab-Nazi alliance. Instead
of succumbing to a repeat of World War II’s Nazi slaughter of Jews en masse but this time carried out by
Nazi-embracing Islamic jihadists,[30] Jews organized themselves politically to
become a Jewish state and they militarily resisted the Arab-initiated attempted
slaughter—the Arab continuation of the Holocaust—and they survived.[31]
In sum,
Israel was not a “settler-colonial regime” at its inception, contrary to popular
opinion. Rather, Israel at its inception was (a) a non-colonial state for
Palestinian indigenous Jews and for Jewish descendants/ refugees often fleeing
persecution, (b) a state whose inception contributed to the withdrawal of
British colonial forces from the Middle East, and (c) a state whose inception
was in part an existential act of self-defence against an attempted Nazi-like
genocide of Jews by Islamic Arabs who sought to expand the Holocaust into the
Middle East.[32]
Part 2: Israel at its inception was engaged in ethnic
cleansing?
War is
terrible. Nevertheless, in its inception in the midst of war the State of Israel
did not attempt to ethnically cleanse
the indigenous Palestinian people (though there may have been some Israelis who
wished to do so). To understand this, it helps to get some clarity on the so-called Nakba.
The
Nakba (“catastrophe”) of the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war refers to the fact that
750,000 Arabs were displaced from Israel. It should be noticed that the term nakba was originally used by Arabs to
refer to the embarrassing-to-them defeat of Arabs by Jews when in 1948 the
Arabs attacked the new State of Israel. The goal of the Arabs, led by
Nazi-collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini and company, was to exterminate the Jews
and dominate the whole of the Palestine region. But the Arabs failed miserably.
And this failure was for Islamic Arabs a humiliation of epic proportion—a catastrophe.
Why? Because of a culmination of at least three reasons.
First,
the catastrophe was a self-inflicted
wound. Arabs started the war—and lost. As Schwartz and Wilf point out: “For the
Arabs, the results of the war were a complete humiliation—a small community of
some 650,000 Jews succeeded in overpowering Arab Palestinian militia and the
combined Arab armies of the surrounding states.”[33] And one of the results of
the war (begun and lost by the Arabs) was the flight of 750,000 Arabs out of
Israel. So Arabs were the main cause
of the refugee problem. If the Arabs had not started the war, which they lost,
there would be no refugee problem.[34]
Second,
the Arab defeat was an (alleged) injustice against God. According to Islamic doctrine,
all once-Muslim lands always belong to Islam. This includes the Palestine
region—once part of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic caliphate—which was to be
divided by the UN between Arabs and Jews. But in 1948–49 the Muslim Arabs lost
the once-Muslim land to the Jews in a war started and lost by the Muslim Arabs.
Such a loss is a violation of Islam’s Allah-ordained domination of the world.
Daniel Pipes, an American historian and president of the Middle East Forum,
elaborates:
Islamic doctrine holds that
once a land has been conquered by Muslims, it becomes part of the lands of
Islam (Dar al-Islam) and an
inalienable Islamic patrimony (a waqf).
Accordingly, its loss constitutes a robbery, and Muslims must exert to bring it
back under their rule…
Palestine became a part of Dar
al-Islam after its conquest by Muslims in 638 CE, six years after the Islamic
account records the death of Muhammad. Muslims then ruled it until 1917, with
the exception of two centuries, from 1097 to 1291, when Crusaders controlled
parts of it. The British ruled all of it from 1917 to 1948 and Israel, most or
all of thereafter. This history has created a deep sense of entitlement:
Palestine belongs under Muslim control.[35]
Third,
according to Islam, Islam is the “true religion” whereas Judaism, the religion
of the Jews, is not (nor is Christianity or any other religion[36]). For Islamists,
that is, for Muslims who take Muhammad seriously as their prophet and revealer
of God’s will, Muhammad’s later hateful and violent teachings against Jews
(teachings that abrogate the prophet’s earlier peaceful views of Jews) are to
be taken seriously.[37] Indeed, very seriously. For Islamist Muslims like the
popular al-Husseini and his many followers in the Arab world, Jews are less
than human, like disease-laden “microbes” or “mangy dogs.”[38] And they should
be treated as such.[39] According to al-Husseini: “The world will never be at
peace until the Jewish race is exterminated... The Jews are the germs which
have caused all the trouble in the world.”[40] Thus, Spoerl writes: “In March
1948, [al-Husseini] told an interviewer in a Jaffa newspaper that the Arabs did
not intend merely to prevent partition but ‘would continue fighting until the
Zionists were annihilated and the whole of Palestine became a purely Arab
state.’”[41] The reality, then, of a Jewish
state simply cannot be the case for Islamists. A Jewish state is anathema to
Islam (especially fundamentalist Islam, what I am calling “Islamist Islam,” as
followed by al-Husseini and many Arabs, which takes Muhammad’s teachings
against Jews seriously). Hence, the defeat of Arabs by Jews was a deeply
embarrassing catastrophe—a Nakba.
But now
Nakba has a meaning used by Palestinian propagandists to divert attention away
from the Arab anti-Semitic (i.e., anti-Jewish) violent aggression of 1948 and
instead promote Palestinian victimhood. Nakba now means an alleged 1948 ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel by
Israel. But this narrative is false. Yes, many Arabs, especially those deemed
hostile to Israel, were forced out by Israel in 1948. This is truly tragic. But
it was war—a war started by the Arabs. And these facts remain: Many Arabs left
Israel willingly to get out of harm’s way because a war (to exterminate Jews)
was at hand (and these fleeing Arabs planned to return to Israel after Israel was
destroyed); many Arabs left Israel because the surrounding Arab nations
(wishing to wage genocidal war on the Jews) ordered them to leave to facilitate
the war effort (and return later to a Jew-ridden land); many Arabs who were not
hostile to Israel stayed in Israel (as citizens of Israel). In other words, the
criterion for Arabs being forced out of Israel was not whether they were Arab,
but whether they were hostile to Israel.
Middle East expert Denis MacEoin observes: “It is true that the Israelis expelled
some Arabs, but they were mainly those in frontline areas and who were known to
be cooperating with the enemy. But they were only a small percentage of those
Arabs who became displaced.”[42] Thus, embedded in the criterion of expulsion
is a distinction that shows the Nakba was not
genocide, not ethnic cleansing,
Hostility, not ethnicity or religion, was the concern. This is a significant
distinction that should not be missed (but often is) and it refutes the
genocide/ethnic cleansing charge.
This
distinction is additionally significant because it also refutes the oft-heard
theft charge, i.e., the charge that Israel stole Arab land. That is to say, the
distinction shows that in 1948 many Palestinian Arabs forfeited the ownership of their houses and land by siding with
those who waged war on the Jews with the intent of murdering all the Jews. Is
“forfeited” too strong a word? No. As MacEoin points out, “The Arabs in
Palestine were being told: ‘You can leave now, you can get out of the way, let
the armies—let the Egyptian army, the Jordanian army—let them do their work,
and then when you come back you can have all the properties that belong to the
Jews when we have wiped them out.’”[43] Surely, abandoning one’s property (even
with intent of doing so only temporarily) so
thereby one aids and abets a genocidal war against one’s neighbours
constitutes no legitimate grounds whatsoever for one’s complaint of theft
concerning the abandoned property’s subsequent appropriation by those
neighbours (as a nation state) when the genocide attempt is stopped by those
neighbours.
Thus,
contrary to popular thought, Israel in its inception did not ethnically cleanse
Arabs.[44,45]
(For
additional perspective, keep in mind that whereas 750,000 Palestinian Arabs
fled or were pushed out of Israel during the 1948 war, in subsequent years
about 850,000 Jews were expelled from surrounding Arab countries.[46]
Conclusion
As I have
argued, two commonplace assumptions in academic circles and social media today
are false (or at least highly dubious). As I have argued, Israel in its
inception was not a settler-colonial
regime, and Israel in its inception did not
engage in ethnic cleansing. Thus, insofar as these assumptions undergird criticisms
of Israel’s legitimacy as a state, such criticisms fail. And thus, too, insofar
as these assumptions undergird calls for Israel’s destruction, such calls are
unfounded.
My
hope is that this article will help reasonable people of good conscience (whether
Christian, Muslim, Atheist, or whatever) draw nearer to what is true about
Israel. And thereby may we also draw nearer to peace.[47]
End notes
1.
For examples, see the abundance of news about protests against Israel by
students and professors on many major university campuses. Also (and closer to
home for me), see Yousef Kamal AlKhouri, “Engaging the Bible in Bethlehem:
Encountering Palestinian Christians,” Didaskalia,
Volume 31 (2023–2024), 68–74. (Didaskalia
is an academic journal published by Providence Theological Seminary. Before I
retired I taught philosophy at Providence University College.)
Book
(free pdf)
Untangling Popular Anti-Israel Arguments:
Critical Thinking about the Israel-Hamas War (Amazon KDP, 2024).
Articles
Separation wall between Israel and West Bank is NOT apartheid, APOLOGIA, December 11,
2024.
Book review of Adam Kirsch's On Settler Colonialism, APOLOGIA, November 7, 2024.
The Problem of the Misleading Headline: Yet another way news media promote anti-Israel bias, APOLOGIA, June 19, 2024.
Untangling
Anti-Israel Propaganda for Today’s College Students,
APOLOGIA, May 23, 2024.
Correction
of mistakes, again, APOLOGIA, May 9, 2024.
Correction
of mistakes, APOLOGIA, April 18, 2024.
In
defence of Israel, APOLOGIA, October 28, 2023.
