February 1992, Page 36

Special Report

For Some Zionists, Truth Depends on When and to Whom It Is Spoken

By Philip Collier

More than 20 years ago I read Crossroads to Israel by Christopher Sykes. I still consider it one of the best available histories of the Palestine Mandate under the British. Howard Sachar, in his A History of Israel, describes Sykes as one of the "most astute" of the "pro-Zionist" historians. Some years after reading Sachar's book, however, I was amused to see Sykes described as "pro-Arab" by a hard-line Zionist. Perhaps this is because Sachar and Sykes are both historians and thus have a respect for evidence that certain militant Zionists do not. In the conclusion of his book, Sykes warns about "Zionist propaganda" and how Zionists are prone to use different arguments to different audiences at different times.

This tactic can be quite effective, since the average American watching Nightline and seeing Benjamin Netanyahu and his well-spoken arguments is not likely to check what Netanyahu himself says in Hebrew in Israel or what an Israeli spokesman said 20 or 30 years ago.

People who do check such things, however, obtain fascinating insights. Recently I attended a social function at a synagogue. In the synagogue library I found a book titled Rebuilding Palestine by Ben N. Edidin, published in 1939 by the Behrman Jewish Book House of New York.

Facts and Figures

Most of the book concerns various building projects in Palestine. It also includes many details about leading Zionists at the time. Eventually the book does get around to discussing the Arabs who, it explains, are "necessary to understand." "Thoughtful Zionists," the author tells us, "do not dismiss the Arabs lightly for it is a fact that Arabs constitute two-thirds of the Palestine population." On page 46 he even gives us some population figures:

Muslims-950,000
Jews-450,000
Christians-109,800
Other-11,500

Beginning on page 213, and for the next several pages, Edidin goes much further than would any present day Israeli official in giving meaning to these statistics:

"Palestine has been an Arab country for 1300 years. In the 7th century, Palestine became Arab land. Arabs were the rulers, Arabic became the spoken language, the Moslem faith was accepted by most of the population, new buildings were erected in the Arabic Moorish style, and it has remained Arabic in language and religion to this day in spite of the many wars. . ."

During all this time, the author tells us, "Jews were permitted to govern their own communities and to practice their religion." Before you suspect that this author was a self-hating Jew," you should read his assessment of all this on page 224. "Arab patriots fail to understand that the Jews have a prior claim to Palestine and are in greater need of the land."

This book was written just after the Arab revolt was crushed by the British. The author provides his perspective on this:

"The majority of fellaheen bedouins and city Arabs feel friendly towards the Jews. They joined in the attacks because they were told that the Jews were planning to take possession of the Moslem holy places and to drive all of the Arabs out of the country." Whatever could have given them that idea?

This book's author has obviously spent some time in Palestine and the facts as he saw them were plain. He could not have known that half a century later the received wisdom among many Zionists would be expressed in such books as From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters. Her current politically correct Zionism has turned all those Arabs that the author of Rebuilding Palestine saw with his own eyes living in their ancient villages into recent immigrants who only came to Palestine to take advantage of economic opportunities provided by the Jews.

This is only one example of the different arguments used at different times by hardline Zionists to advance their cause. Rabbi Elmer Berger, one of the prominent early American anti-Zionists, who today is alive and well and living and writing in New York and Florida, recalls in his memoirs debates he held with James Heller, a prominent Zionist spokesman before World War II, who kept accusing Berger of dragging in "red herrings" by accusing Zionists of wanting to build a Jewish state. They had no such intention, Heller insisted. He may really have believed this. At that time, Zionist spokesmen from Chaim Weizmann down often were denying in public that they wanted a Jewish state. I suspect that was because an average person looking at the facts as presented in Rebuilding Palestine, for example, might have had questions about the justice of trying to build a national state on land overwhelmingly populated by another people.

That is why so many Zionists ever since have had to use incredibly dishonest arguments to try and convince us that the Palestinians were never really there. I should note that what I have said does not apply to genuine Israeli doves, those who are Zionists and those who are not. The basic moral position of those Jews who wanted genuine reconciliation with Arabs at the beginning of the Zionist movement is unchanged today. Their opponents, however, have much to hide, and are still getting away with it.

"Palestine has been an Arab country for 1300 years."

The aforementioned Netanyahu, for example, remarked in Hebrew in Israel at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacres in China that Israel should have taken advantage of the world's diverted attention by expelling large numbers of Palestinians from the territories. One suspects that he would not say this to Ted Koppel on American television. Sometimes, nevertheless, embarrassing information can leak out in obscure places. Recently Insight magazine, edited by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz's son Jon, ran an article on the younger generation of Likud activists in Israel. The article quoted Israeli Knesset Member Benny Begin, former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's son, saying it was a "mistake" for Israeli spokesmen to claim that "Jordan is Palestine" because the land east of the Jordan River is part of the "land of Israel," and therefore not a potential Palestinian state.

By contrast, Israeli Jews who are ready for genuine reconciliation with Arabs need not be embarrassed by what their fellow doves have said at other times or other places. For example, Nathan Chofsi, who emigrated to Palestine before World War I, wrote in William Zuckerman's Jewish Newsletter in 1959 something that many Israeli doves would agree with today: "We came to this land and turned native Arabs into tragic refugees, and still we dare to slander and malign and besmirch their name."

Philip Collier is a free-lance writer specializing in Middle East affairs. He is the former managing director of the Committee to Avert a Middle East Holocaust.

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