The Nazareth-based, British-born propagandist Jonathan Cook has been spreading the lie
that a Palestinian official was barred from entering Israel by the new
defense minister, Avigdor Liberman, for ‘trying to open a dialogue’ with
Mizrahi Jews. Lyn Julius takes him to task in Jewish News:
In actual fact, 70 Israelis of Mizrahi and Sephardi descent met Mohamed Madani and other Palestinian officials in Ramallah in April with the approval of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was Netanyahu’s last-ditch attempt to
persuade the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, with whom Madani is
close, to make peace. Bearing giant images of Baghdad in the 1920s and
sweets from Iraq, the Palestinians paid a return visit
to the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center Or Yehuda near Tel Aviv: they
warned that it could be Israel’s last chance to make peace while Abbas
was in power.
Mohamed Madani, Cook alleges, was banned for
‘European colonialist’ reasons. In fact the Israeli government has
accused Madani of ‘subversive activity’ and ‘political terror’.
Undeterred, Cook brazenly sets out his ‘European colonialist’ stall.
Using the offensive expression ‘Arab Jews’
Cook alleges that Israel’s Ashkenazi establishment “excluded Jews from
Arab countries from their nation-building project.” He pads out his
thesis with cherry-picked quotes from Ben Gurion and others denigrating
Mizrahi Jews as “a rabble” and “mentally-retarded.”
Cook cooks up the theory that Israel’s
European leaders were motivated by a need to prevent ‘Arab Jews’ from
making a political alliance with Palestinians. This explains why
Israel’s establishment smothered the immigrants with DDT, segregated
them from their Palestinian brothers and then tried to disinfect them of
their Arabness.
What’s even more clever, is that the Israeli
Government managed to make Mizrahi Jews “internalise the self-hatred
cultivated for them by the state.” Hence, Mizrahim have been brainwashed
to vote for the far-right and scream “death to the Arabs” at football
matches. Genius, no?
With impeccable logic, Cook says this
Arab-hatred has led to such incidents as the Hebron shooting by a
Mizrahi soldier of a Palestinian as he lay wounded.
Cook trots out other hackneyed fantasies, such
as “Israel engineered much of the migration of Arab Jews, inducing them
with false promises or conducting false-flag operations to foment
suspicion of them in their home countries.”
Even in his own writings, Mahmoud Abbas admits that Arab regimes made a ‘fatal’ mistake — causing the Jews to emigrate en masse as a result of discriminatory laws.
Jonathan Cook describes himself as a journalist — but he seems better at writing fiction.
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