With thanks: Avril
Three cheers for Seth Frantzman. His piece at the Jerusalem Post rightly points out that the Israelis who feature in Arab or leftwing propaganda, such as Caryl Churchill's 10-minute post-Gaza play Seven Jewish children, are invariably blond European refugees from the Holocaust. Where are the Russians, the Jews from Arab countries and the Ethiopians who found a safe haven in Israel in more recent times?
The 40 percent of the Jewish population who took refuge in Israel from Arab antisemitism are notably invisible. Any mention of them would spoil the neat narrative that Israeli Jews are all colonials from Europe or Brooklyn who came to usurp the land from the 'indigenous' Palestinians.
This distorting fantasy also insinuates itself into sophisticated stories like The Lemon Tree, a book by Sandy Tolan.
The Lemon Tree is about the friendship between Dalia, who lives in a house in Ramla which used to belong to Palestinian Arab Bashir, displaced a few dozen kilometres away in Ramallah. Dalia is from a Jewish family who escaped persecution in Bulgaria. Bashir's family was forced out of Ramla. Of course the stories are not symmetrical: Dalia's family found itself in Israel on account of European antisemitism, while the author has chosen to focus on a Palestinian victim of one of the few examples of expulsion by the Israeli army during the war of independence. The simplisitc refrain is - why should Palestinians be made to pay for the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews?
The reader will have little inkling that the Arabs started the 1948 war itself following the Arab rejection of the UN partition plan for Palestine - much less that the Palestinian leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, himself a steadfast ally of the Nazis, was personally responsible for violence, hatred and incitement not just against Jews in Palestine, but in Arab lands.
The book refers to the dark-skinned Mizrahi Jews from Arab countries who moved to Ramla, but makes no attempt to romanticise the homes with lemon trees they were expelled from in Baghdad or Tripoli or Damascus - homes now occupied by Palestinians or other Arabs. The vicious antisemitism which propelled these Mizrahim to Israel has been passed over in silence. The reader will remain blissfully unaware that an entire millenarian Jewish civilisation has been wiped out in these countries. The Mizrahi Jews in the story are only useful to illustrate the tensions and discrimination between themselves and 'light-skinned' Ashkenazi Jews in Israel.
This fundamentally lopsided perception is responsible for the fiction that Palestinian Arabs are the real victims in this conflict.
This line has been carefully propagated for about 45 years, coming into play around the time when the PLO was founded in 1964. Of course, the Jews who came from Russia and Rumania before WW I were not exactly Western colonialists. In those days, nobody called Russia the "West" and the Jews' status there was low. We could of course have an academic discussion as to whether Jews were treated worse in the Russian Empire or in the Ottoman. According to George Bensoussan, Jews were worst treated in Russia, Rumania, Persia [not yet called Iran] and Morocco in the last 1/2 of the 19th century. Rumania by the way was part of the Ottoman Empire up to 1878, after which the treatment of Jews may have worsened. Aharon Aaronsohn's family came to Israel about 1882. Young Aaron was born in Rumania while it was still Ottoman [1886?]. So does he acquire a "colonialist" status by staying within the Muslim Empire into which he was born by coming with his family to Ottoman Israel in 1882??
ReplyDeleteFurther, Britain was one of those countries in Europe where Jews were typified as dark and swarthy [including the Ashkenazim, of course, as was the chief villain of George DuMaurier's Trilby. Jews in Europe were never considered true Europeans, and that was certainly true of the UK before and after WW I, as far as I know. Jews were typically considered Orientals, including Orientals. Now, the changing of the Jews' identity into "Aryan" was a post-1948 endeavor of psychological warfare [or cognitive warfare].
Of course, the subject gets more complex and cannot be fully treated "on one foot" על רגל אחת as we say.
Nazi propaganda used heinous caricatures of Jews to try and show that the Jews were vermin, "aliens" in Germany. The Nazis exploited physical characteristics as a way to convince the German public that Jews had no place in Germany. Now, lefties (aka the new Nazis) are using the Nazi tactic of exploiting physical characteristics (e.g. blond hair, blue eyes) to show that Jews are "alien" to the Middle East, that they "don't belong there." As Eliyahu rightly points out, Jews had been traditionally depicted in Europe as dark & swarthy, unlike the blond northern Europeans. This means that Nazi propaganda and the current anti-Israel propaganda have a great deal in common.
ReplyDeleteThanks for blogging about my article. It is good that you have taken 'The Lemon Tree' to task, it representes every wealthy self-hating western dream of "discovering the other."
ReplyDeleteThere is another side to all this. The European and his friends in Israel seek to expell Jews from West Bank and after that much or all of Israel. Among those Jews will be the Sephardim and Ethiopians and others. It is ironic that the European, having killed and destroyed the Jews of his continent now sets his sights on the Jews of the East, those Jews already once expelled by Europeans in 1492.
It is an amazing injustice to see the Khaffiya-clad white Europeans tramping around the West Bank and spitting on Ethiopian Jewish soldiers and calling them Nazi. No greater evil exists in this world than that scene, the grandson fo the Nazi calling some Jew from Africa a "Nazi." Its like the European didn't finish his job in carrying out the Holocaust and now he re-invents himself as a 'Human rights activist' so that in this modern world he can continue his task of Jew-hatred, under a new guise, and now it will be directed at the Jews the European didn't succeed in destroying; Russians, Yemenites, Moroccans, Iraqis, Kurds, Ethiopians...all the remaining Jews outside of the U.S.
And that is the great tragedy.