Jeffrey Herf at Quillette reviews a new exhibition at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg which, he claims, peddles PLO myths about Israel’s war for independence in 1948. Along the way he provides a useful history lesson:
On 13 November 1974, Yassir Arafat, chairman of the PLO, addressed the United Nations General Assembly. His speech was written by a Palestinian writer and PLO member named Mahmoud Darwish, and it elicited a firm reply from Israel’s UN ambassador Yosef Tekoah. “Palestine Uprooted” cites Darwish’s poetry and presents an identical version of the 1948 war to that presented by Arafat and Darwish 52 years ago. That speech presented the Palestine Arabs of 1948 as the innocent victims of Zionist perfidy. It was a justification for the resort to war and terror that was the PLO’s modus operandi when Arafat spoke. Arafat and Darwish erased the responsibility that Palestinian and Arab nationalists bore for the war of 1948 and its consequences. That denial is at the centre of the version of events now being presented at a government-supported museum for human rights in Canada.
Neither Arafat in 1974 nor the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition today mention that the Arabs had rejected all suggestions of partition before they went to war in 1948. The first of these was proposed by the British Government’s Peel Commission in 1937. The Zionists accepted an offer of what would have been a state far smaller than the one that later emerged. The Palestine Arabs rejected the proposal and left no room for negotiation. They were led by Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. By the mid-1930s, his hatred of Judaism, Jews, and Zionism had attracted the attention of Nazi Germany’s consulate in Jerusalem. Between 1936 and 1939, he led an Arab revolt in Palestine against the Zionists and those Arabs who wanted to coexist with the Zionist project.
In 1937, Husseini fled Palestine after the British authorities tried to arrest him, and he elaborated his views in an important essay titled “Islam and Jewry” that was read in his absence to a pan-Arab nationalist conference in Bludan, Syria. The following year, a publisher in Berlin close to the Nazi regime published the text in German as Islam-Judentum. “Islam and Jewry” is a foundational text of Islamist ideology—a radical political interpretation of Islam that describes Jews as the enemies of Islam since the days of Mohammed. Husseini depicted the Zionist project as the latest episode in seven centuries of Jewish aggression against Islam and Muslims.
With arguments like these, Husseini and Hassan al-Banna, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, helped to transform a secular dispute over borders and territory into a religious campaign. This made opposition to any Jewish state in the land of British Mandate Palestine a religious obligation for all Muslims, in Palestine and everywhere else. The result, from the 1930s to the present, has been a long religious war to prevent and then to destroy the state of Israel.
That’s it. That’s the key point to the whole Palestine debate. It’s not about land: it’s about Islam.
Husseini spent 1941–5 in Berlin, where he and his entourage produced Arabic-language radio broadcasts that the Nazi regime sent via shortwave radio to audiences across the Middle East. Husseini occasionally spoke on these broadcasts in his own name and repeated—often word for word—the arguments he made in “Islam and Jewry.” He insisted that it was the religious obligation of all Muslims to oppose the establishment of any Jewish state in Palestine. He stated that the victory of Nazi Germany in World War II was in the interests of the Palestine Arabs because it would bring about the defeat of their enemies—the Allied Powers and the Jews.
The French arrested Husseini in May 1945 and held him under house arrest near Paris for a year. American leftists and liberals tried to have him indicted for war crimes before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. But French officials, aware that Husseini could support French post-colonial interests in Lebanon and Syria, refrained from sending him to trial and refused to deport him to Britain. In May 1946, he managed to escape to Cairo, where Hassan al-Banna and the Muslim Brotherhood gave him a hero’s welcome. Al-Banna noted that although Hitler and Himmler were dead, Husseini would “continue the struggle” against the Jews. The “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition says nothing about the ideological fusion of Nazism and Islamism during World War II or about the profoundly reactionary elements of Islamist Jew-hatred that were an important cause of the 1948 war….
On 14 May 1948, the British completed their withdrawal from Palestine and Israel declared its independence. The next day, four Arab states—Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria—ordered their armies to invade and destroy the new state of Israel. Jordan followed soon after. The leaders of these countries could have rejected calls by the Muslim Brotherhood to wage war. But doing so risked the wrath of Islamist organisations and domestic unrest.
The version of this history on the “Palestine Uprooted” page of the museum’s website ignores these developments and refocusses attention on the refugees produced by a war of aggression that the Arabs had started:
In 1948, [Jewish] militias, followed by Israeli forces, expelled civilians, destroying or emptying hundreds of villages amid regional war and lasting instability. Around 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced during the creation of the state of Israel.
This is an extremely misleading account of the birth of the Palestinian refugee crisis. What Darwish and others called the Nakba (“catastrophe”) is inseparable from the war that the Palestine Arab leadership launched and that the Arab states then escalated. Israeli historian Benny Morris has concluded that the refugee problem was not the result of a Zionist plan or doctrine, it was a result of the war. When Arab forces managed to conquer villages, they expelled the Jews, a policy that Morris, in his book 1948, writes “stemmed quite naturally from the expulsionist mindset prevailing in the Arab states.” Israeli expulsions, when they occurred, tended to be motivated by strategic concerns not ideology….
“Palestine Uprooted” also ignores the fact that about 800,000 Jews were expelled from Muslim-majority societies across North Africa and the Middle East between 1948 and 1964. Almost all were uprooted from their homes, most resettled in Israel, and a small minority—the wealthier families—resettled in France and Britain. They were intimidated into flight by state oppression (in Egypt and Iraq in 1948–51), by intimidation from their Muslim neighbours (including pogroms during 1947–8 in Bahrain, British-ruled Yemen, French-ruled Morocco and Syria), and by terrorism (in Egypt and Iraq).
Hundreds of thousands of Sephardi Jewish refugees reached Israel during the 1950s, when the state was young and poor. Initially, they were often poorly absorbed—some lived in tent transit camps for years—and some suffered from social-ethnic discrimination at the hands of the existing Ashkenazi population. Many of the new immigrants were illiterate or poorly educated, and they remained unemployed for years or worked in menial jobs. Yet the Jews uprooted from the region did eventually become citizens of the state of Israel and ceased to be refugees. It turned out to be one of the most remarkable examples of the successful reception of refugees in modern history.
While Jewish refugees expelled from Arab states became Israeli citizens, Palestine Arabs in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, and Syria were denied citizenship by the host countries and left stateless. In Jordan and the West Bank, meanwhile, they became Jordanians but remained second-class citizens for decades. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was created in 1949 to address the Palestinian refugee crisis, and it adopted a unique policy towards Palestinian refugees that the UN has applied to no other refugees around the globe. Not only does it recognise their statelessness in countries that refuse to absorb them, but it also confers refugee status on the children and grandchildren of refugees, which ensures that the refugee population has grown steadily since 1948.
UNRWA in particular and the United Nations in general both bear significant responsibility for this absurdity. Today, Palestinian leaders continue to speak about a “right of return,” even though the vast majority of those who fled in 1947–8 are no longer alive. This has helped to foster the delusion that they can one day return to homes that no longer exist and many surviving refugees and their descendants retain the keys to the houses they lost. The absence of absorption, lack of citizenship, and mythology about the origins of their refugee status have made the Palestinian refugees a propaganda weapon against Israel, and their towns have become breeding grounds for anti-Israeli hatred and terrorism since they emerged in the late 1960s.
When the “Palestine Uprooted” exhibition refers to an “intergenerational trauma at the heart of personal stories and human rights issues,” it fails to acknowledge the disastrous nature of the political decisions made by generations of Palestinian and Arab leaders. It was the Arab rejection of the UN resolution, not the Zionist defence of the compromise, that was unjust and unwise. At its core, that rejection was a rejection of the values of diversity and tolerance that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights exists to support. The wars launched by Arab states, Palestinian nationalists, and Islamists ever since have been waged to advance religious and ethnic homogeneity. But remarkably, in recent decades, Islamists have largely escaped moral censure by waging wars in support of ideas that attack the very principles of human rights and liberalism.
It’s no surprise, of course, that an exhibition in Canada would distort this history in favour of a one-sided tale of evil Jews and brave Palestinians. This is the moment we’re in. The particular tragedy is that this takes sides against the Jews, part of our Judeo-Christian western heritage of liberalism and free thought against tyranny, while supporting precisely those forces which aim to destroy all that.
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