The NEWEST Official Discussion Thread for the creation of Israel, the UN and the British Mandate

[fncceo]

Regional war, massive casualties, eventually, PERMANENT Israeli control of all the land.

We can only hope.

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Arabs say Jewish challah covers were a factor that forced them to murder Jews in 1929. This is the "logic" of today's terrorist defenders.​

A tweet of mine went viral last week:

How is it that

• Hamas attacks Israel first
• Hezbollah attacks Israel first
• Iranian backed Syrian groups attack Israel first
• The Houthis shoot rockets at Israel first

And Israel is framed as the aggressor?

There were hundreds of furious responses, most saying that Hamas' pogrom was a reaction to Israeli actions and Israel was the original aggressor, that "history didn't start October 7." (I even saw one person made a poster twisting even these facts against Israel with the caption, "Only Israel can bomb four countries and still be perceived as the victim.")

To which I responded:

To the idiots who say Israel started - either in Jerusalem over the past few years, or in 1967, or in 1948. No doubt you would also claim that the Jews started the riots in 1929 as well.

Some reacted with astonishment that I should bring up 1929 - ancient history - when thousands of Palestinians are being murdered now. In other words, some people who say history didn't start October 7 also say history started on October 8 when one takes them at their word and looks at history.

Others responded that Jewish "colonialism" started before 1929 - implying massacres of Jewish rabbis, women and children was justified.

In other words, no matter what argument they use, they lose. But their attempts to justify the most horrific crimes prove their antisemitism.

I looked at Wikipedia's entry on the 1929 massacres, and found a "reason" for them I had never seen before: Challah covers.

For some time, Jewish institutions of Jerusalem had given their supporters abroad items such as Challah covers and Passover Seder tablecloths featuring imagery of the Dome of the Rock either below or emblazoned with Jewish symbolism such as the Star of David and the Temple menorah. Zionist literature published throughout the world had also used provocative, Judaized imagery of the Dome of the Rock. One Zionist publication featuring a Jewish flag atop the Dome of the Rock was picked up and redistributed by Arab propagandists.

Here is one of the challah covers from Jews in Jerusalem circa 1925, where the Dome of the Rock is shown behind the Kotel (Western Wall) which is featured.


Even as early as 1863, way before modern Zionism, the Dome of the Rock is depicted in a challah cover designed in Jerusalem (detail):



Yet here is how antisemitic site Palestine Rememberedcharacterizes another covering:


"Zionists place the Israeli flag and Jewish emblems over the Dome of the Rock and other Muslim holy places, documenting their plans for destruction and usurpation of these sites to build a Jewish Temple."

There is not even a hint of a desire to destroy the Dome of the Rock shown here. The Hebrew quotes the Psalm 137:5 "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning." Under that it says "The place of the Temple." Which it is.

The same site shows another picture, not sure whether it is also a challah cover, a picture for the wall or maybe a Simchat Torah flag.


It also shows the Dome of the Rock as the holy spot, as a place for veneration, and there is nothing close to a call for its destruction. If anything, the Jews who drew these pictures are showing extreme respect for the building. One cannot imagine Jews publishing pictures of churches to beautify their homes but this Muslim site was a central decorative motif in thousands of Jewish homes in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Arabs behind the site are upset at the Dome being shown underneath a Temple menorah.

So even today, Arabs are claiming that table coverings and other innocuous illustrations by Jews who consider the Temple Mount to be the most sacred spot in the world are justifications for murdering Jews.

No matter how far-fetched, today's antisemites will always find some supposed crime that Jews did to justify their being slaughtered. In fact, Mahmoud Abbas has used that same logic to justify the Holocaust, more than once, saying that how Jews acted brought it about. And it is the same logic that blames events in Jerusalem, or a "sirge" that had largely already been ended before October 7, for mass murder and rape and kidnapping of Jews.

There is no daylight between antisemitism and today's anti-Zionism. And you can see it in a challah cover.

Arabs say Jewish challah covers were a factor that forced them to murder Jews in 1929. This is the "logic" of today's terrorist defenders.

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[P F Tinmore]

1948: Creation & Catastrophe (Full documentary)​

 

[rylah]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

CAMERA’s Israel office yesterday prompted correction of an English-language Agence France Presse article which erroneously reported that all of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 were forcibly displaced from their homes. In fact, the vast majority of the estimated 760,000 Palestinian Arabs who left in 1948 fled, often at the urging of their own leaders. They were not “forcibly displaced.”


The Arab section of Safed, 1946 (Photo by Kluger Zoltan, GPO Photo Archive)
The Feb. 4 article, “Arab Israelis let out of Gaza recount ‘terrifying’ journey,” had initially erroneously reported: “The majority of the Palestinian population, around 760,000 people, was forcibly displaced during the [1948] conflict, in what they call the Nakba or catastrophe” (11:10 am GMT). (As of this writing, the original, uncorrected text is still available at L’Orient Today).

Neither the French nor Arabic versions of the same AFP article contained the error.
AFP’s usual language on this point accurately reports “more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes by the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.” (See, for instance, “Palestinian family in Lebanon grieves for dead Gaza relatives,” Nov. 27, 2023. Likewise, AFP’s Dec. 27, 2023 article, “Israel army chief says Gaza war to last ‘many more months,'” which cited “the 1948 war that accompanied Israel’s creation when 760,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.” (Emphases added.)

Following CAMERA’s correspondence with AFP, editors commendably updated the article, changing the sentence to accurately state: “The majority of the Palestinian population, around 760,000 people, either fled or were forced from their homes during the conflict, in what they call the Nakba or catastrophe.”

The Guardian and Reuters Arabic have previously corrected the identical error after wrongly referring to all 1948 Palestinian refugees as expelled.

AFP Corrects On 1948 Palestinian Refugees

CAMERA prompts correction of an English-language AFP article which erroneously reported that all of the Palestinian refugees from 1948 were forcibly displaced from their

www.camera.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of an important but largely unknown chapter of Middle Eastern history. It focuses on the concerted drive by Nazi Germany to promote anti-Semitism in the region between 1937 and 1945. This was in line with the Nazi’s goal of annihilating the Jewish people not just in Europe but worldwide.

From there Matthias Küntzel, a German political scientist and historian, draws a broader conclusion about anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In his view its origins do not lie in the Arab world’s reaction to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. It is instead better seen as an aftershock of the Holocaust.[ The negative reaction came from some Arab clans in 1920 who could not allow any Jewish or Christian, non Muslim, sovereign state on once conquered Muslim land 1400 years before (Sixties Fan) ] Several Arab regimes tried to destroy the newly formed Jewish state mainly because they were motivated by the Nazi propaganda campaign a few years earlier.

Of course, Küntzel is not denying there were instances of anti-Jewish hatred in the Islamic world before 1937. He is well aware, for example, that in many Muslim countries Jews were given the status of dhimmis. That is, they were protected as long as they accepted a clearly inferior rank and legal status. There are also several anti-Jewish passages in classical Islamic texts including the Koran. His argument is that Islamic anti-Semitism fuses together the racial anti-Semitism which emerged in Europe with the classic anti-Judaism evident in early Islam. It was the Nazis, Küntzel argues, who played the key role in bringing genocidal anti-Semitism to the region.

Küntzel identifies several channels through which the Nazis exerted their influence. From 1937 onwards they gave financial backing and other forms of support to Amin El-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem. El-Husseini was an important religious and political figure as well as an ardent anti-Semite. In 1941 he met Hitler in Berlin.

The Nazis distributed large numbers of El-Husseini’s pamphlet, Judaism and Islam, first published in Cairo in 1937. For Küntzel, , it was a seminal document, the first to link the Jew hatred of classical Islamic texts with the conspiratorial anti-Semitism that emerged in Europe in the late nineteenth century. In his view it was the foundational text of Islamic anti-Semitism. The document is helpfully reproduced as an appendix to the book. Küntzel also points out that later generations of Palestinian leaders, including Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, lauded El-Husseini as a hero.

German Nazi agents also had friendly ties with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. The Brotherhood, founded in 1928, was the prototype Islamist organisation. In 1938-39 the focus of the collaboration between the two sides was Palestine. El-Husseini, while not a member of the Brotherhood, also had close links to it. In 1945 the Brotherhood, which by then had become a mass movement, pushed the Arab rulers towards war with Israel.

Book Review | Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of an important but largely unknown chapter of Middle Eastern history. It focuses on the concerted drive by Nazi Germany to promote anti...

fathomjournal.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2


In addition, the Nazis put a lot of effort into anti-Semitic radio broadcasts to the Arab world. These broadcasts addressed the audience as Muslims, rather than as Arabs, with each news report starting with a recitation of verses from the Koran. Küntzel builds on the work of Jeffrey Herf, an American historian of modern Europe, by examining the transcripts of the broadcasts. Most of the study focuses on Arabic language broadcasts but there are also references to those in other regional languages such as Farsi and Turkish.

From a contemporary perspective the focus on radio might at first seem strange. But back then it was arguably even more important than social media is today. The Arab population was largely illiterate at the time, so radio was the main means of mass communication.

Finally, even when it was clear that the Nazis were losing the Second World War they still provided support for a forthcoming Arab war against Israel. This included an attempt to provide a large store of light arms for Muslims to use to fight the nascent Jewish state.

Küntzel, building on the work of Herf, has made an important contribution in drawing to public attention a neglected aspect of anti-Semitism. In fact, he deserves particular praise as Islamic anti-Semitism is considered a taboo area of discussion in many corners of academia.

If there is a weakness it is that, to establish his case about the Nazi influence, he sometimes leans too heavily against other parts of the story. He arguably plays down the importance of trends that emerged both before and after 1937-45.

Earlier developments had already prepared the ground for the Nazi’s ideological intervention in the region. Christian missionaries had already begun to export traditional European conceptions of Jews into the region in the nineteenth century. For example, the idea of the blood libel – that Jews drank the blood of non-Jewish children – was an import from Europe.

Then the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War brought an important change. The division of the region between Britain and France opened the way for Germany to intervene later on in the name of anti-colonialism. It was also shortly after the First World War that, as Küntzel himself points out, the first Arabic edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a classic Tsarist forgery, was published in Palestine in 1918. And the Muslim Brotherhood was established in Egypt in 1928.

The impact of the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel also had an important impact. As early as 1917 the British government declared its support for a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration. Shortly afterwards it took over control of the area with a mandate from the League of Nations. From 1936 there was a concerted indigenous reaction [ Mizrahi, Sephardic and Hashkenazi Jews are the indigenous people, not the Arabs, and the Jews did not start a concerted war against other Jews to rebuild Israel (Sixties Fan) Muslims did not like the idea of a sovereign Jewish State exactly because of learned anti Jewish feelings from Islam] to Jewish settlement – with Jewish migrants fleeing from Europe – in the Palestine revolt. After the establishment of the state of Israel the Six-Day War of 1967 played an often underestimated role. Israel’s rapid victory over the surrounding Arab armies gave an important impetus to anti-Semitism in the region. It discredited pan-Arabism, a relatively secular movement, and paved the way for a sharp increase in influence for Islamism.

Küntzel is of course aware of these historical developments. His argument is that the Nazi influence played a key role in melding traditional Islamic Jew hatred with racialised anti-Semitism imported from Europe. From this merged perspective there is no difference between opposing Zionism as a political movement and calling for the extermination of world Jewry. That is despite the fact that there is nothing in the Koran about wiping out the entire Jewish people.

It is also important to recognise the distinction between Islamism and what could be called Islamic nationalism. Küntzel is careful about his use of terminology but it would be easy for the non-specialist to miss this point. Islamism in this usage refers to totalitarian social movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. His focus is more broadly to include the often Islamic-imbued nationalism in the Arab world and beyond.

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East is an important work for anyone who wants to grapple with the emergence of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. Matthias Küntzel should be particularly commended for investigating what some have deemed an illicit subject.

Book Review | Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East

Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East tells the story of an important but largely unknown chapter of Middle Eastern history. It focuses on the concerted drive by Nazi Germany to promote anti...

fathomjournal.org

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

 

[Sixties Fan]

1920

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

Let's close this thread.

The Arabs lost.

They will always lose.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Let's close this thread.

The Arabs lost.

They will always lose.

No thanks. I like finding new information about that time and posting it here.

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]

 

[Sixties Fan]

The nutty conspiracy theory that the most respected Arab historians take seriously​

In 2012, to some fanfare, a history textbook meant for high school students was published called "Side by Side: Parallel Histories of Israel-Palestine."On the left pages of the book is an Israeli (leftist) narrative of the the history of Zionism, and on the right hand pages is a corresponding Palestinian history, meant for people to compare and juxtapose both with each other.

Because of the parallel structure, there is no room for the "Israeli" side to mention anything about the 3,000 year Jewish history in the Land, the centuries of Jews sacrificing everything to return, the two millennia of Jews praying for the era when they can all return. Which means that the book was a failure before it began, by framing the history of Israel to start shortly before the Balfour Declaration - a framework that ignores thousands of years of history and that makes it look like Jews are strangers in their own homeland.


On the Palestinian side, on page 3, we see a narrative that I had never heard before. And it is one that Arab historians have apparently been teaching as fact for a long time.

PARTITIONING OF THE ARAB EAST

In light of the strong European colonial competition, Britain called for the formation of a high committee of seven European countries. The committee submitted its report in 1907 to British Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The report asserted that the Arab countries and the Muslim-Arab people living in the Ottoman Empire presented a very real threat to the colonial countries. The report made the following recommendations:

1. To promote a state of disintegration, division and separation in the region.
2. To establish puppet political entities under the aegis of the European imperialist countries.
3. To combat all kinds of unity (intellectual, spiritual, religious, or historical) and find practical means to divide the region and inhabitants from each other.
4. To ensure the implementation of the previous recommendations, to create in Palestine a "buffer state" which would be populated by a strong, foreign human presence hostile to its neighbors and friendly to European countries and their interests.

It could be strongly concluded, beyond any doubt, that the recommendations of the Campbell-Bannerman High Committee did in fact pave the way to Palestine for the Jews. They also gave British foreign policy and the Zionist movement the green light to annex Palestine from the other Arab lands and thereby create the nucleus of a colonial entity that would ensure the colonialists' influence in the region.

So the British secretly conspired to wrest Palestine from the Arabs and give it to the Jews a decade before Balfour? That's big news! Why don't the Jews know about this?
I looked up what I could about Campbell-Bannerman and the 1907 Imperial Conference that he chaired. I found a two volume 800 page 1911 book that goes into great detail about Campbell-Bannerman and the Conference.
Not a word about Palestine. Not a word about the Arabs that were supposedly a "threat to colonial countries."
How can something this important be first mentioned in English in a 2012 textbook, given the intense interest in Palestine?

The answer can be found in a 2017 article in Al Zaytouna by Dr. Mohsen Mohammad Saleh. He says that many respected Arab historians have referenced and even quoted this document in their history books over the years, but none of them ever gave an actual reference to it, always quoting their colleagues.He traced the origins of this "document" to an Arab historian who says that an Indian fellow he sat next to on a plane in the 1940s told him he once heard about such a document.

From that secondhand rumor came an entire branch of false Arab scholarship!

Saleh is careful not to say that the document is fiction, even though there is not the slightest bit of evidence for it. But he does caution Arabs not to reference it anymore because it makes Arab "scholars" look silly.

This is the state of Arab scholarship in the history of pre-war Palestine. Nobody until 1917 bothered to verify the document because it was too good to check. The most basic thing any amateur historian does is look for the sources, and for decades no Arabs bothered.

(After I wrote this I found that Maurice Hirsch of Palestinian Media Watch discovered the same thing in a 2022 article.)

The nutty conspiracy theory that the most respected Arab historians take seriously

Blogging about Israel and the Arab world since, oh, forever.

elderofziyon.blogspot.com