Mick Hartley

A brief history lesson from Jake Wallis Simons at Spiked:

People often forget that Judaism is two millennia older than Islam and 1,500 years older than Christianity. Israel was the cradle of Jewish civilisation. At least a thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ, Jerusalem’s most famous Jew, King David, made the city the capital of the Land of Israel. It has been home to greater or lesser numbers of Jews – the very word ‘Jew’ is a shortening of Judea, the ancient kingdom radiating from Jerusalem in the Iron Age – in Jerusalem ever since.

Culturally, Jews have always intertwined their identity with the land of Israel, particularly since they were exiled to Babylon around 598 BC, when their powerful yearning for return took hold. For millennia, Jews in the diaspora have prayed facing towards the Holy City, exclaimed ‘next year in Jerusalem’ at Passover, mourned the destruction of the Temple by breaking a glass at weddings, longed to be buried there, prayed at the remaining walls of the destroyed Temple, and visited on pilgrimage. Many throughout history have taken the step of uprooting their families and returning to their homeland. All these practices continue to this day….

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle in 1896, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Israel, laid out the concept of Zionism. ‘I am introducing no new idea’, he pointed out. ‘On the contrary, it is a very old one. It is a universal idea – and therein lies its power – old as the people, which never, even in the time of bitterest calamity, ceased to cherish it. This is the restoration of the Jewish State.’ He added: ‘It is remarkable that we Jews should have dreamt this kingly dream all through the long night of our history. Now day is dawning. We need only rub the sleep out of our eyes, stretch our limbs, and convert the dream into a reality.’…

The Holocaust deepened the case for a Jewish state, which would be able to stand its own army and fulfil the pledge of ‘never again’. In the manner of an indigenous people revolting against the British Empire – and sharing a common struggle with other colonised nations groaning under the imperial jackboot – Jewish guerrillas mounted an armed campaign against the British to push them out of Palestine. As had become the norm across the Middle East and Europe, in 1947, the UN agreed to partition the land into a Jewish state and a Palestinian one, with borders traced around ethnic-majority areas (the vilayets of Jordan had been parcelled up and placed under Hashemite rule a year before). Under the terms of this two-state solution, Israel would comprise 56 per cent of the land, while the Palestinians would occupy 43 per cent. The populations would be mixed, with half-a-million Arabs on the Israeli side, and 10,000 Jews living in the State of Palestine. Israel’s neighbours reacted with dismay; they had harboured their own lust to annex the territory. On 14 May 1948, eight hours before British rule officially ended, in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art on Rothschild Boulevard, David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, got to his feet and proclaimed Israel’s independence. Forty-four years after Herzl’s death, his prediction had come true.

The Jewish side had accepted the UN partition plan. After all, to the north, the Syrians and Lebanese had likewise agreed to be partitioned, despite much grumbling from the Alawites and Druze. But the Palestinians – led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who had collaborated closely with the Third Reich during the war and relished the idea of exterminating the Jews – rejected any treaty that involved the establishment of a Jewish state. Just hours after Ben-Gurion’s speech, following Husseini’s lead, the armies of Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria attacked the fledgling Jewish country. ‘This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre’, announced Abdul Rahman Hassan Azzam, secretary-general of the Arab League, ‘which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’. The Mufti called for jihad, crying: ‘Murder the Jews! Murder them all!’ Ironically, as the scholar Joseph Spoerl has pointed out, ‘the plan for ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1947-8 was an Arab plan, not a Zionist one’.

The cry of  "Murder the Jews!" has echoed down ever since across te Islamic Middle East, in Tehran, and in the Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah. And now, in chants like "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", it's spread to the West, in the endless demonstrations through our cities, and across university campuses. 

Palestinian dispossession has become one of the world’s best-known historic injustices. In that same period, millions of other people were driven across borders in Europe and Asia, amid the same post-colonial turmoil, in more violent circumstances, their homes seized, their relatives killed, their cultures lost and their families fragmented. Yet their stories have been buried by history.

Who laments the plight of the Greek Orthodox Christians, or the Indian Hindus and Sikhs, or the Armenians, or the Irish refugees created after the bloody British partition of 1921, or the 12million ethnic Germans expelled from Eastern Europe on Churchill’s instigation after the Second World War? Or the Jews of the Middle East, for that matter?

That’s not to say that Israel’s sins must not be condemned, or that the Palestinian injustice should be forgotten. It’s simply a question of exposing demonisation. And no nation it seems is more singled out and demonised than Israel.