Is This True or is it False?

Mike L.

The Jewish colonialists who began to invade Palestine at the end the 19th century perpetrated a deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian indigenous peasantry who had been living on their land for centuries; the policy was deliberately designed to cleanse the area of the Jewish State of its Arab population, and in the course of the War of Independence they carried out the planned deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

Ultimately, how we view the conflict depends, at least in part, on the degree to which we agree with the above. It's taken from a piece by Erez Tadmor and Erel Segal called Nakba Nonsense. I am not familiar with either of these writers, nor have I read more than a few pages of the piece, itself, but the above quote strikes me as a very good example of what we typically call the "Palestinian Narrative."

It is certainly the case that large numbers of progressives, and progressive Jews, (pretending to be liberals) believe the above.  But it is either true or it is not true.  Or it is largely true or largely false.  If you are a Jewish supporter of Israel and you think that the above is largely true then you have a serious dilemma on your hands.  It means that the country that you support was born out of sin and that the anti-Zionists are essentially correct.  If Israel was born from the deliberate and pre-conceived ethnic cleansing of the local Arabs (they did not yet self-identify as "Palestinians") then Israel is pretty much everything that its worst critics say that it is.

If, on the other hand, the above is largely false (which it is) then it is incumbent upon supporters of the Jewish state of Israel to make it clear that it is false.  We need to stand up and remind people, particularly progressive-left detractors of the Jewish state of Israel, that the Arabs launched a genocidal war against the Jews in November of 1947 directly after the Holocaust.  If some Palestinians were kicked out of Israel at the time it was because the Israelis, unlike their dhimmitudenous Jewish counterparts elsewhere, believed in self-defense and were hell-bent on parrying Arab rapiers.

Our friend Daniel Bielak likes to say that we just need to tell the truth and while I recognize that "truth" is not so easily conveyed or understood, he is essentially correct.  We do need to tell the truth.  Let the historical record serve as a parry to Arab and progressive anti-Israel propaganda.  If the progressive-left actually stands for social justice, as they claim, then they need to stand with the Jews of the Middle East who remain under perpetual assault.  If, however, the progressive-left stands with the Arab Palestinians, which is more and more the case, this can only mean that they do not stand for social justice because it is the Palestinian national movement, itself, that absolutely refuses to accept a state in peace next to the Jewish one.

Almost entirely ignoring the history of the Jewish people under the boot of Muslim imperialism, progressives (under the influence of Arab and Soviet propaganda) are convincing themselves that Israel is a racist state that is oppressing the "indigenous" Arab population.  In this way they, much like the Nazis before them, paint the Jewish people as aggressors who must be stopped for the good of all humanity.

The progressive movement is, thus, playing an exceedingly dangerous game with the lives of Jewish people in the Middle East.  The Jews are a tiny minority in this world and we have seen very well what can happen when enough people convince themselves that we are the source of the world's problems.  Every time some progressives says that "Zionists" control the American media or government they are, in essence, repeating exactly the same kind of slander that the Nazis pointed at the Jews prior to the Final Solution.  Every time some progressive tells the world that the "Zionists" are oppressing the poor, "indigenous" Palestinians they are laying a stone of hatred toward the Jewish people, a stone that paves a trail to anti-Jewish slaughter.

If sometime in the future we get something that resembles another Holocaust it will be the Jews of the Middle East who will pay the biggest price.  Any future scenario involving large numbers of Jewish dead will be the result of Arab or Persian violence.  And if that day comes do not look to progressives for sympathy.

They will be the first to tell us that the violence against us is the richly deserved outcome of Jewish crimes.  If they tell one another that we are guilty as sin now, would you expect them to change their tune after the slaughter?  Paul Berman has noted that it was during the Second Terror War (intifada), in which over 1,000 Israelis were slaughtered and in which Israeli society endured the death-toll equivalent of a 9/11 every two weeks for several years, that progressive accusations against the Jews of the Middle East reached its highest pitch of hysteria.

Don't expect anything different the next time the Arabs or the Palestinians go on an anti-Jewish killing spree.

You won't get it.