[an earlier version of this article was published in Midstream, New York, May-June 2001] LIARS AMONG US Elliott A Green (Added to this site January 2002) Israelis who receive foreign TV news broadcasts by cable or satellite may be amused or annoyed when they see a Western journalist standing in Jerusalem in front of the foreign ministry or the prime minister's office, while the journalist says, "Here in Tel Aviv..." in order not to acknowledge that Jerusalem is in fact Israel's capital. This is one of the blatant lies fairly often told in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Other lies may be less blatant. But even deadlier. Some of the lies are subtle, some are gross, and some could reasonably be considered a matter of interpretation. Let's amuse ourselves with --or deplore-- a few of the grosser ones. Walid Khalidi of Harvard explicitly denied on the Ted Koppel Nightline show (April 27, 1988) that Islam recognized any divine promise of the Holy Land to the People of Israel. Khalidi did acknowledge that the divine promise to the Jews was found in the Bible, but then in a politically motivated appeal to cultural relativism, he burst out, "Well, God may have promised it, but Allah didn't say so." Yet here cultural relativism does not apply since --if the Quran is a reliable guide to the words of Allah-- the Quran says: Allah made a covenant with the Israelites... ...the words of Moses to his people. He said: 'Remember, my people, the favours which Allah has bestowed upon you... Enter, my people, the holy land which Allah has assigned for you' (Sura V).1 ... when the promise of the hereafter cometh to pass [at Judgement Day] we shall bring you as a crowd gathered out of various nations (Sura XVII:104)2 It turns out that the Quran agrees with the Bible. Can it be that Khalidi, an educated Muslim, doesn't know what's written in the Quran? Perhaps for that reason, Khalidi qualified this position in a book, saying: "...if Jehovah meant to give present-day Palestine to the Jews, then Allah did not." The phrase "present-day" may mean that Allah meant to give the Land to the Jews in the past but would not now. In any case, Khalidi then feeds another lie to his readers: "Palestinians did not and do not deny the historical and spiritual connection between the Jews and Palestine."3 Of course, the PLO's Covenant does just that. The version now in effect (approved 1968) states: Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history... (Article 20) Khalidi also concealed an inconvenient truth during his appearance on the Koppel show. Speaking of the correspondence between his great-uncle, Yusuf al-Diya al-Khalidi, an Ottoman official, and Theodore Herzl, he neglected to quote what the earlier Khalidi had written about Zionism: The idea itself is natural, fine, and just. Who can challenge the rights of the Jews in Palestine?... historically it is really your country (Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 41, Winter 1987). The editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica saw fit to have the younger Khalidi write an article entitled "Palestine" for the encyclopedia (vol. 25, 1985 edition). Azmi Bishara is an Israeli Arab intellectual. Unlike some Arab spokesmen, he does not deny that there was a Holocaust of the Jews, in Europe at least. But, he insists: "The Shoah and everything connected with it are a European phenomenon... We as Arabs have no connection to it."4 Of course, he knows about the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, the main leader of the Palestinian Arabs at the time, widely esteemed in pan-Arab circles. Yet in Bishara's best yeoman-like style of falsification he tries to disarm those who have vague memories of Husseini's Nazi ties. Bishara admits that "the Palestinian national movement at least once considered... making an alliance with Nazi Germany." (As if this were not enough to contradict his own words quoted previously). Then he goes on to falsely claim that "This alliance did not come to fruition."5 This is a lie. Bishara conveniently overlooks the fact that the Mufti was active in the Nazi-fascist domain from November 1941 until the German defeat in May 1945. The Germans put considerable sums at his disposal to maintain himself and his entourage, which included other Palestinian Arabs from leading families, and to set up offices called "Buro der Grossmufti." In return, Husseini made propaganda broadcasts to the Arab world over Radio Berlin ("Kill Jews wherever you find them"), recruited Arab troops (among Allied prisoners of war) for an "Arab Legion," helped organize a Bosnian Muslim SS division (notorious for atrocities in its own right against Serbs, Jews and Gypsies), indoctrinated imams from the Soviet Union, and also broadcast in that direction, exhorting Soviet Muslims to support the Nazis, which some of them did by joining German-sponsored military units, and even the Einsatzgruppen. In his discourse, Husseini explicitly identified Nazism with Islam. All of this surely sounds like an alliance, despite Bishara's apologetics. Significantly, Husseini urged the Germans to extend the Holocaust to Arab lands. Concretely, he intervened several times with German and Italian ministers and Axis satellite governments in Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, to prevent Jews from leaving the Axis domain. He specifically described Jewish children as a danger and urged that they be sent to Poland, where, in his words, they would be under "active supervision." It is likely (if not certain) that he himself visited one or more murder camps, while documents demonstrate that members of his entourage did so, escorted by SS officers. So he was well aware of what happened to Jewish children sent to Poland. After the war, the Mufti was enabled to return to the Middle East where he was again acclaimed the leader of the Palestinian Arabs.6 This information has long been available in English and Hebrew, etc., for many years. Researchers who have written on the subject of Arab-Nazi relations and the Arab-Holocaust nexus include Bernard Lewis, Lukasz Hirszowicz, Elias Cooper, Daniel Carpi, Jenny Lebel, Joseph Schechtman, Bartley Crum, and others. Nevertheless, Bishara claims, "We Arabs have no connection to it" (the Holocaust), also ignoring the presence of other prominent Arab nationalists in Berlin during the war. The Palestinian Arab political leadership constituted in the Arab Higher Committee for Palestine (led by Husseini) demanded throughout the 1930s an end to aliyah --Jewish immigration to Eretz Israel, which the international community had juridically erected as the Jewish National Home in 1920 at San Remo, mandating Britain to implement it (League of Nations ratification 1922). The British violated their mandate by satisfying this Arab demand with the 1939 White Paper severely restricting Jewish immigration to the internationally designated Jewish National Home on the eve of Holocaust, when no country wanted to take in more than a token number of Jewish refugees, if any. The White Paper effectively doomed hundreds of thousands if not millions of Jews to die in the Shoah. But Azmi Bishara sees no Arab connection to the Holocaust. He also overlooks the role of one George Antonius, a member of the Arab Higher Committee on Palestine, led by Husseini, and simultaneously the Middle East representative of the New York-based Institute of Current World Affairs, funded and run by a wealthy, fanatic Judeophobe, Charles R. Crane, who was, incidentally, an admirer of Hitler. Bishara was formerly a senior lecturer in philosophy at Bir Zeit University near Jerusalem (supported by US taxpayer funds) and a senior researcher at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, specializing in 19th century German philosophy, the nexus between philosophy and society, etc. He now earns the salubrious salary of an Israeli MK, using the Knesset as a platform for Arab nationalist demands, sometimes wrapped in liberal, democratic fig leaves, sometimes in Stalinist garb. His university studies in Communist East Germany must have helped him perfect his mastery of demo-Stalinist sloganeering. It may have been his moral standing which led the Van Leer to have him chair a symposium on Eugenics: Philosophical and Moral Aspects (1997). Zmanim, which published Bishara's inventions (Summer 1995), was financed by the Department for Culture and Art of the Cultural Administration of the Israel Education and Culture Ministry. Emil Habibi was an Israeli Arab writer and Communist Party leader. His penchant for weaving fanciful tales did not go so far as Bishara's. Yet he too strove to present the Arabs as innocents. "Antisemitism is a European phenomenon," he tells us. "Arab history has known many diseases but antisemitism is not --could not be-- one of them."7 This is very inspiring but not convincing --except for those who want to be convinced. Let us overlook the repeated Arab publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf both before and after the Holocaust. By Islamic law, tolerated non-Muslims, dhimmis (Jews and Christians) were socially inferior and paid special taxes from which Muslims were exempt. Moreover, the Jews' inferior status made them prey to continual exploitation by Muslim officials and notables, to demands for bribes, irregular taxes and other exactions (documented for Jerusalem before and after the Crusades by M. Gil and J. Barnai). But hairsplitters might argue that this does not represent antisemitism since it affected Christians too. Hence, let us look at Jerusalem in the early nineteenth century, long before Theodore Herzl was born, long before political Zionism. Chateaubriand described the Jewish situation in Jerusalem as of 1806: Special target of all contempt [i.e., of Christians too] they lowered their heads without complaint; they suffer all the insults...; they let themselves be crushed by blows... these legitimate owners of Judea, slaves and strangers in their own country8 Karl Marx echoed these observations while describing intergroup relations in Jerusalem (1854): Nothing equals the misery and the sufferings of the Jews in Jerusalem... the constant objects of Mussulman [= Muslim] oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks [= Orthodox], persecuted by the Latins [= Catholics].9 Many other examples can be supplied not only for the Land of Israel but for other predominantly Arab lands. Of course, we can quibble. Was the oppression based on an explicitly anti-Jewish ideology or racist concept? And if so, was it as rabid and unreasoning as the Christian Judeophobia of Europe or based on the same notions? And if not, can we rightly call it "antisemitism"? This same attitude questions whether the mass murder of Blacks in Sudan (by pan-Arab, pan-Islamic forces) is "genocide" or simply the inevitable result of civil war. Meanwhile, the label "genocide" is glibly applied to the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo with much less justification. In fact, Western Judeophobic notions like the blood libel and the Jewish conspiracy have been adopted by Muslims in modern times, and added to their traditional beliefs in Jewish inferiority and treachery, and melded into the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.10 So much for the late Emil Habibi, a newscaster for the British mandatory broadcasting service, later a leader of the Israel Communist Party and editor-in-chief of its daily, al-Ittihad. Hicham Abdallah (first name pronounced Hisham) was a correspondent in Jerusalem for the Agence France Presse. He sent two interesting dispatches on 24 September 1996. On that day, Yasser Arafat aroused his masses and "police" to violent attacks on Israeli soldiers throughout the country where the zones of his "Palestinian Authority" bordered on Israeli controlled territory. Arafat's pretext was the opening by Jerusalem Mayor Olmert of a new entrance to a tunnel at least 2000 years old. The ancient tunnel (called the Hasmonean aqueduct) started at the northwest corner of the Temple Mount and ran about 60 meters in a northward direction away from the Temple Mount. The new entrance opened on to a street (the "Via Dolorosa") about 65 meters north of the Temple Mount. The ancient tunnel had been accessible to archeologists for at least eight years through a newer tunnel running alongside the Western Wall of the Temple Mount from the Jewish prayer plaza, facing a segment of the southern part of the Western Wall, to the Wall's northern tip. We bear in m,ind that the Western Wall of the Temple built by Herod has been preserved for its entire length --about 480 meters-- at least on the lower layers of rock, and on higher layers in some places. The newer tunnel was created by Mamluk Muslim officials who covered previously open ground at the foot of (alongside) the Western Wall by erecting buildings along it on the level of the Temple Mount surface, leaving hollows underneath these houses and other structures. In the 1980s, archeologists removed old rubble and trash from the hollows to open a tunnel alongside the long concealed northern part of the Western Wall. Arafat roused his rabble to rioting by claiming that Israel had dug a new tunnel underneath the Temple Mount.11 The Mount is holy to both Jews and Muslims, and had been under exclusive Muslim control since the end of Crusader rule in 1244, 752 years earlier, with brief exceptions including several hours during the Six Day War, after which the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, handed the keys over to the WAqf, the Muslim authority for mosques and Muslim holy places. Hicham Abdallah sent one dispatch on 24 September 1996 at 10:27 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). Here he wrote, under the headline, "Israel Irritates the Muslims by Digging a Tunnel Near the Mosques," that "The Palestinians expressed their anger Tuesday after the secret digging by Israel of a new entrance to an archeological tunnel running alongside [my emphasis, EAG] the Esplanade of the Mosques [= Temple Mount] in the Arab Old City of Jerusalem. 'It is a grave crime against our holy places,' stated the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat." Disregarding the tendentious and mendacious terminology ("Arab Old City," "secret digging," "Esplanade of the Mosques," "Palestinian president"), we note that Abdallah correctly reported that a new entrance was opened to "an archeological tunnel running alongside" the Temple Mount. However, four hours later, at 14:20 GMT, Abdallah sent another dispatch. Here he wrote something different: "The Palestinians demonstrated their anger... after the opening by Israel of a new access to an archeological tunnel situated under [my emphasis, EAG] the Esplanade of the Mosques in the Arab Old City..." This time Abdallah was giving credence to Arafat's lie through the facilities of Agence France Presse, a French government-owned press agency operating on a worldwide scope, like the Associated Press and Reuters. In the ensuing rioting and gunfire initiated by Arafat's rabble and "police," sixteen Israeli soldiers were shot dead and over sixty Arabs. Apparently Abdallah's superiors at AFP did not see fit to question the contradiction by Abdallah's second dispatch of his first one, whereas the second conveniently fit Arafat's mendacious incitement. Abdallah was not reprimanded for violating journalistic ethics. Photocopies of his two dispatches were published in France-Israel Information (April-May 1998). For the record, a scientific account of the ancient and newer tunnels had appeared in the French language seven years before Abdallah's dispatches, in Le Monde de la Bible: Arch*ologie & Histoire, Sept-Oct 1989; p 16. So the correct information had been long available to AFP before 1996. We also note in Abdallah's words from 1996, an effort to obscure the Jewish identity of Jerusalem in history, and especially an effort to hide the Jewish origin of the Temple Mount and the Western Wall. Faisal Husseini, recently deceased after quarreling with fellow Arabs in Kuwait, was a veteran of Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO. Living in Jerusalem, this scion of a long wealthy and influential Arab Muslim family was courted by Western diplomats, fawned over by Western correspondents, admired by Arab notables, and hobnobbed with Western "aid workers." His father, Abdel-Qadir el-Husseini, was a nephew and close associate of Amin el-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem, mentioned above. In the early years of the Second World War, Faisal Husseini's great-uncle and father were active in Bagdad, intensely intriguing and agitating there in favor of the Nazis. Faisal himself was born there in 1940. The Mufti's anti-Jewish incitement among Bagdad Arabs in those years was officially blamed, among other causes, for a massacre of 600 Jews there in 1941.12 Amin el-Husseini and other Arab leaders then resident in Bagdad, petitioned Hitler early in that year to "recognize the right of the Arabs to solve the Jewish Question... in the same manner as in the Axis countries"13 Abdel-Qadir worked closely with his uncle in those years of political intrigue and incitement in Iraq.14 Yet, instead of asking forgiveness for his father's pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish activities, Faisal Husseini gave an Israeli reporter a sanitized and embellished depiction of his father's Bagdad machinations. Instead of inciting against the Jews, intriguing in favor of the Nazis (whose representatives in Bagdad were close to the Mufti), Abdel-Qadir had tried to protect Jews in Bagdad. Said to be teaching school there then, he had scolded Arab children for beating Jews, on the premise that "Our struggle is against the British."15 How nice! Not only a liberal but an anti-imperialist! A touching, perhaps charming, fiction but as realistic as the story of Cinderella and falser in regard to motives than the "Tale of the Ensorcelled Prince" from The Arabian Nights Tales. Besides knowing that Abdel-Qadir worked closely with his uncle the Mufti, we know that Faisal Husseini was an infant at the time. In this interview, Faisal neglected to mention any pro-Nazi activity on the part of either kinsman. Arab-Israeli peacemaking must take account of the mass of lies piled on lies by the Arabs and their supporters. 1. The Koran (Nissim Dawood tr.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959; pp.378-379. Some editions number these verses V:12, 20-21. Also see The Holy Qur-an (Abdullah Yusuf Ali, trans. and commentary), Vol. I, New York, 1946, p. 248; verse V:23. 2. Mohammed M. Pickthall, The Meaning of the Glorious Koran, New York: NAL, 1953. This prophecy paraphrases Zechariah 8:7-8 and 10:9-10 and Ezekiel 38:8. For detailed textual comparisons of the Quran with the Hebrew Bible, see works by Shalom (AndrÙ) Zaoui in Hebrew and Denise Masson in French. 3. Walid Khalidi, Palestine Reborn (London-New York: Tauris, 1992), p 3. 4. Zmanim, Summer 1995, v. 13, no. 53; p 56. 5. Ibid., p. 54. 6. See detailed documentation in my article "Arabs and Nazis -- Can It Be True?" Midstream (October 1994). 7. Emil Habibi in Tel Aviv Review, 1 (1988), p335. 8. Chateaubriand, ItinÙraire de Paris Jerusalem (Paris 1811). 9. New York Daily Tribune April 15, 1854; repr. in S. Avineri, ed., Marx on Colonialism and Modernization (Garden City, New York 1969). 10. See Raphael Israeli, "Anti-Semitic Attitudes in Islam," Nativ no. 3 (2000) (Hebrew). 11. "Fight for the cause of Allah! Kill and be killed." France-Israel Information, April-May, 1998; p 2. 12. Norman Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia 1991); pp 414-15. 13. L. Hirszowicz, The Third Reich and the Arab East (London 1966), p. 110; M. Khadduri, Independent Iraq (London 1960), p. 185. 14. Zvi El-Peleg, HaMufti HaGadol (Tel Aviv 1989), pp. 43-4. This is a favorable biography of the Mufti. 15. Yits'haq Rabihiya in Yerushalayim, July 1, 1988. |
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