IPFS Menckens Ghost

More About: Israel - Palestine

Cherry-Picked Facts about Israel

I published a commentary on December 4, 2018, with the premise that the dissemination of fake news isn't the primary problem in the media and elsewhere today.  Rather, it is the dissemination of cherry-picked facts to make a point while ignoring countervailing facts.

One example in the commentary was how both Palestinians and Israelis cherry-pick historical facts to make their side appear morally superior to the other side.

A week later, the Wall Street Journal published a pro-Israel commentary by Max Singer that inadvertently gave another example of cherry-picked facts.  Singer is a founder and former president of the Hudson Institute, a senior fellow of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of Bar Ilan University, and author of "History of the Future."  

How dare I disagree with such a luminary?  Well, this non-luminary has been a student of history for 60 years, including a student of Middle Eastern history.  And unlike Singer, I have no rooster in the cockfight between Israelis and Palestinians—although, admittedly, for tribal reasons, I'm more simpatico with Israelis.

Singer wrote in his commentary: "Everyone has a right to his opinion, as Sen. Daniel Moynihan observed, but not his own facts."  But in defending Israel's right to exist, Singer cherry-picked facts.

First, he said that there is no such thing as occupied Palestinian territory, because there has never been a Palestinian territory to occupy, and certainly not a Palestinian state.

What Singer didn't say is that the area known as Palestine had been a defined part of Syria under Ottoman rule, and before that, a distinct part of Greater Syria.  If the Ottoman Empire hadn't been defeated in the First World War, and if Britain and France had kept Syria intact after the war instead of partitioning it (along with Mesopotamia), there would be no State of Israel today and probably no clamor by Palestinians for their own state.  

Nor would there be a State of Israel if it had not been for the Zionist movement that began in earnest at the end of the nineteenth century.  Due to centuries of anti-Semitism in Russia (and Europe), waves of Jewish immigrants had fled persecution, with a minority of about 30,000 Jewish Russians settling in the cities of Palestine, and with a majority settling in agricultural areas along the coastal plain and the highlands of Mount Carmel.  Then in 1896 came Theodore Herzl's landmark book, The Jewish State, which led to the First Zionist Congress in 1897—which in turn led to the establishment of the World Zionist Organization, headed by Chaim Weizmann.

Next came the secret Sykes-Picot agreement between the three Entente partners of the First World War, on how they were going to partition the Middle East.  At the same time, the British were lying to the Arabs about national independence. 

The Balfour Declaration of 1917, by contrast, was public. Britain Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour proclaimed in a letter to Weizmann that "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jewish people."  He went on to make the conflicting promise that nothing would be done to "prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine . . ."    

President Woodrow Wilson tried to calm the uproar that followed by establishing a multinational commission, the King-Crane Commission, to determine the wishes of the Syrian people about Syrian lands and make recommendations accordingly.  The Syrian Congress gave the commission a ten-point resolution.  One point was that Syria should be ruled as a constitutional monarchy.  Another was that Syria should be completely independent and not be under any British mandate.  And still another was that there should be no partition of Syria—no carving out of Palestine or Lebanon, and no establishment of Zionism within its borders.  In the process, the congress lambasted the secret wartime diplomacy of the Sykes-Picot agreement and the unilateral Balfour Declaration.

At the end, the King-Crane Commission's findings were ignored by Britain and France, both of which proceeded to partition Syria and carve out Palestine.

There is a lot more to the history of Palestine, but the foregoing snippets should suffice to show that Singer's claim of there never having been a Palestine territory was highly misleading and out of historical context.

Singer went on his commentary to repeat the popular red herring that Jews had a right to establish the State of Israel in Palestine because they had lived in the region for millennia, and this had been approximately the locale of the kingdom of King David.  Okay, but many other ethnic groups could make the same claim for their own state in Syria, because they go back for millennia.  Examples include the Akkadians, Amorites, Canaanites, Arameans, Druze, Hashemites, and Christians—some of whom suffered from persecution.   

In any event, Jewish Russians didn't hail from Palestine or Greater Syria.  They hailed from Russia.  

By a logical extension of Singer's point, all of the conquered and displaced peoples in the world have a right to establish a state in lands where they had lived millennia ago.  As such, the Pima Indians could move onto my lot in Tucson, the Cherokee could establish a nation in Georgia, the Comanche could take possession of the West Texas oil fields, and Christians could establish a city-state in Bethlehem. 

The only way for Singer to untangle his intellectual contortions is to either say that Jews are special or to claim that there never was a Palestine territory.   He didn't say the former, but he did say the latter.   

In closing, let me say the obvious:  that I cherry-picked facts in this commentary.  For a complete history of Palestine, Zionism, and the Middle East, one has to read scores of history books—scholarly ones without a religious or ethnic bias.  An excellent one is the international bestseller, The Arabs:  A History, by Eugene Rogan.  Another is also by Rogan:  The Fall of the Ottomans.  Still another is Power, Faith, and Fantasy:  America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, by Michael B. Oren.

PirateBox.info