April 26, 2024
Murder and rape in the sands
Yisrael Medad
It was to be a two or three day hike from Tel Aviv to Herzliya. But they never finished their trek.
Jerusalem Post Weekend Magazine, April 26, 2024
They were friends and perhaps wished to become lovers. They also loved the Land of Israel and set out to walk through it. Tragically, their walk was horrifyingly interrupted.
Yonatan Stahl was born in 1908 in Germany and was orphaned from his mother in 1925. His high school education was in an agricultural school at Ladenburg, east of Mannheim and he joined a socialist-Zionist youth movement. He applied and received an immigration certificate for Mandate Palestine and arrived in late1929, despite family opposition and leaving behind a girlfriend, Anna. He first worked at Kibbutz Bet-Zera and then Kibbutz Sarid in the Emek Yizrael but in December 1930, moved on to Givat Brener and worked in the orange groves near Rechovot. A relative described him as not that tall, curly hair and blue eyes.
Celia/Sarah Zohar (Zonnenshein) was born in Chodorów, south-east of Lviv, then Galicia, in 1902. At the outbreak of World War One, the family moved to Vienna. Her brother was Dr. Zvi Zohar, a founder of HaShomer HaTzair, the Tarbut Hebrew school system and Shomriya, the famous educational institution at Mishmar HaEmek. She also joined a Zionist youth movement and studied pediatric nursing. She made Aliyah in 1928, first working at Ben Shemen Youth Village and then moving to Sarid, just west of Migdal HaEmek and south of Nahalal. Professor Ezra Sohar, her nephew, recalled that Celia and Yochanan met at Sarid.
While she was on a family visit to Poland, he wrote to her that he had found a spot some “30 meters high; to my right Sidna-Ali, to my left Jelil village (today, south of the Accadia Hotel), behind me Herzliya and before me – the sea. I promise that when you return, we’ll hike to this place”.
On Sunday morning, June 28, 1931, the 13th of Tammuz, Celina packed a small suitcase, including a swimsuit, and left Ben Shem for Tel Aviv. Yochanan, after receiving a three-day leave from work, set out from Givat Brener to meet her. He took his grafting blade with him. Their intention was to walk by foot to where a Kibbutz Meuchad pioneer unit was camped at Herzliya III. They met up at Tel Aviv’s Herzliya High School at the corner of Herzl and Ahad HaAm Streets after Celina had met a friend and borrowed some clothes. They wrapped up sandwiches in a newspaper and took a bus to the last stop at the Yarkon River.
Arriving at around 10AM, they crossed the river in Natan Cohen’s boat. They turned left and walked west towards the sea and then began hiking northwards.
And then they disappeared.
^^^
The first notices in the newspapers asking for information leading to their disappearance appeared some two weeks later. A reward of 20 Palestinian pounds was offered, an insignificant amount. Nothing resulted. The Yagur murders in April that year were in people’s minds and concern for their lives was palpable in the additional multiple pleas for information throughout the summer. Several searches were conducted, covering the area between Tel Aviv and Hadera. Foreign consulates intervened. It was only on the Thursday night of November 12-13 that the bodies were found.
The case was broken by Avraham Drurian with assistance from Avraham Shapira, two Shomrim acting independently of the police, who managed, with financial inducement, to convince Bedouin chieftain Ali Kassem Abd-Al Kadar to have his tribesmen obtain evidence and proof. Ali Kassem, from Taibeh, lived near Tel Litvinsky, today’s Tel HaShomer. By September with the failure of the police to succeed, Druian enlisted 10 Arabs to be his eyes and ears, paying them the sum of 5 Palestinian Pounds (PP) each. The suspicion fell on Bedouins near Jelil after a young Arab shepherd found bits of garments and reported the find to Ali-Kassem.
Riding on horseback, Druian searched the area close by Sidna-Ali and found a piece of newspaper dated June 28. On November 10, Druian met Ali Kassem, who needed 300 PP to gift the mayor of Tul Karem so as to obtain his permission to marry his daughter who Ali-Kassem desired. The meeting took place at Miska village (just east of Ramat HaKovesh) and Druian learned that the murderers were at the encampment of the Al-Quran Bedouin. One of the Bedouin had bragged that his blade had recently “tasted the blood of a non-belever”, a remark passed on to Ali-Kassem. The police raid was made two days later during Thursday night, November 12 and into the next day. Arrests were made and confessions obtained.
The site of the murders was near Tel Michal (Makmish), a sandstone ridge south of Herzliya, 6.5 km. north of the Yarkon estuary and 4 km. south of Arsuf or further south, at Tell Rekeit, west of the Azorei Hen apartments. The bodies were buried, separately, in an area that had served as a line of defence dugouts by the Turkish army during World War One. Two of the suspects were forced to conduct the searchers to the place where the bodies were supposed to be buried and then a third led the police to the same place.
The actual search over a large area took nearly three hours, until one of the suspects came upon the body of Stahl. After a further search, the body of Zohar was found slightly to the south, near Cinema City Glilot. They were buried in Tel Aviv’s Trumpeldor Cemetery that Friday at 3 PM.
Further interrogations revealed that the couple had met one Arab mounted on a camel and after a short exchange, he left them and they continued northward. Then another group of camel-mounted Arabs overtook them, returning from transporting watermelons to Jaffa. They gave the two a short ride on the camels. Upon approaching the Arab-Al-Quran encampment, the two alighted and set off for the sea.
The camel riders met two shepherds and altogether planned to attack the couple. Stahl was approached from behind and stabbed repeatedly on his left side with a watermelon knife. They chased the fleeing Zohar, struck her on the head with a stone and then all five gang raped her. They then stabbed her to death. Post-mortem forensics found Stahl had been buried while still alive. The killers removed Zohar’s ring and took Stahl’s grafting blade.
^^^
The arrested included Rashid Mussa Abu Suliman, Hanni Ibn-Salib Abu Suliman, Said Mustafa Ahmad and Ahmad Ibn-Awad Abu-Hadib from the Al-Quran, Al-Malalha and Suarki tribes. Present at the arrest were Oved Ben-Ami and the brothers, Gad and Moshes Machnes, all of the Bnei Binyamin Society who provided the financial inducement.
Only two reached trial as reliable provable evidence was lacking. Rashid Abu Suliman, 20, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 15 year’s imprisonment. The second defendant, 17-year old Hanni Abu Suliman, his cousin, was released. Paradoxically, the press, both Jewish and Arab, expressed satisfaction that the murders were not politically motivated. Nevertheless, two members of the newly-formed Irgun Bet, the Revisionist breakaway group from the Hagana, requested permission for a revenge reprisal action but permission was denied.
In the end, the two families Stahl and Zohar never spoke to each other again. Stahl’s parents were gassed at Auschwitz but his two brothers survived and reached Israel. Druian named one of his daughters Zohar and died in 1982. The poet Uriel Halperin (later, Yonatan Ratosh) issued a 43-page poem titled which sold 3000 copies, phenomenal in those days.
Ali-Kassem was suspected of treachery by Isser Be’eri of the Hagana’s Intelligence Service and executed on November 16, 1948. Be’eri was discharged as punishment. In 1933, Sima Arlosoroff referenced the Stahl-Zohar case in her testimony regarding the murder of her husband Chaim regarding the fear she experienced when accosted on the north Tel Aviv stretch of beach when her husband was shot and killed in June that year.
The plaque affixed to the graves of Stahl and Zohar reads:
To the memory of innocent wayfarers
Who were ambushed by man’s evil.
O how the pure and decent were eliminated.
Illustrations and newspaper clips:
April 19, 2024
The savagery element of the conflict
The following column appeard in the Jerusalem Post on April17, 2024 but at present has not yet been uploaded and if it is, I will add the URL.
The savagery element of the conflict
Savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds
Yisrael Medad
Mohammed El-Kurd, a Sheikh Jarrah activist, stood at the podium in New York where he studies on March 2 last month and addressed a pro-Gaza rally. His remarks were closed with a series of savage shout-outs: “we are beyond debating our resistance, there is no right to debate our resistance…we are past persuasion…abolish Zionism!…f*ck Israel!”
At that same rally, actress Susan Sarandon spoke of Gaza’s 75 years “going through this”, referring to Israel’s engaging with; the Arab terror emanating from there. She then raised her right arm in a sort of revolutionary salute and shouted, “Free Palestine!”
Already in May 2023 we could have read Nada Elia who wrote: “Zionism cannot be reformed; it must be abolished”. She argued that justice for Palestine must go further by “dismantling the supremacist ideology of Zionism itself.”
That slogan of “Abolish Zionism” had already appeared in Neukölln, Berlin on February 10 this year on a no-parking marker. In Montreal, pro-Palestine protesters performed Nazi salutes and called for the death of Jews outside a March 6th event at the Jewish Community Foundation and Holocaust Museum building, of all places. That same week, Jewish students at Tufts University were spat on and told they stink during a contentious BDS vote on anti-Israel actions.
The anti-Israel voices have become anti-Zionist roars. The arguments have become drowning outs. Disputes have become demands. There is no dialogue but vociferous viciousness. There is a policy of pollution and cancellation. It is not about Israel but rather the negation of Jewish national identity.
Seth Mandel, after noting several outrageous statements uttered by Islamist anti-Zionists, characterized them in Commentary as “indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Hamas or neo-Nazi groups.”
It appears that it is just simpler for the pro-Palestine forces to accuse Israel of genocide, apartheid and ethnic cleansing and thus be away with their problem altogether. The debates over Israel’s policies have moved from the verbal to multiple forms of physical and psychological intimidation as well as actual physical injury. The atmosphere is disparaging, threatening and venomous. It is a new form a pro-Palestine terrorism.
In adopting this extreme position, the pro-Palestine forces have not only assumed that all the truth is on the side of the Arabs and not only are they positioning the conflict into another zero-sum game result as in 1948 but they are engaged in a major regression, rolling back the confrontation between Jews and Arabs to where it was over a century ago.
In doing so, they not only are ignoring what happened during those 100 years and more, but they are repeating the same mistakes by the Arabs during that time as well as acting blindly to what we Jews accomplished since then. Today’s reality is vastly different from the situation that Chaim Weizmann, Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion faced at the time.
Moreover, the acts of blacklisting Jews, banning them from appearances whether on the music stage or the academic conference panel, gathering outside synagogues during services as happened at Temple Emmanuel in Manhattan and worse acts that have occurred should raise an alarm of greater proportion than what we have witnessed. They are not going after Zionists but Jews. Do they want Jews to protest outside mosques demanding the Imams denounce Hamas? Do they wish to import the Middle East violence into faraway countries?
Looking towards the centenary of the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority announced in November 2016 it was preparing a lawsuit against the British government, being that 1917 letter Arthur Balfour signed had paved the way for the creation of the State of Israel. That had followed Mahmoud Abbas’ speech in the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September 2016 when the Palestinian Authority president said that Britain should apologize for that declaration. In an op-ed in The Guardian on November 1, 1917, Abbas wrote that Great Britain should “atone” for the act.
Aside from the downright ridiculousness of that attempt to rewrite history, there is a more invidious effort being pushed, if for years, that has assumed dangerous proportions with online social media platforms and that is the actual rewriting of history for the younger generations.
In response to a post of mine on X, I received this response: “Bible stories are not scientific. And even if was true, if you’ve left for 3000 years that doesn’t give you any right to take it from the people who have lived there for 3000 years since.”
Of course, archaeological finds as well as external to the Bible documentation such as the Merneptah Stele, the Mesha inscription or the Monoliths of Shalmaneser III lend important credence to the Biblical narrative. But more relevant is the shared ignorance that Jews have continuously been present in the territory of the Land of Israel throughout the 1800 years of our loss of political sovereignty. I know of no popular book tracing the continuum of Jewish residency in our homeland under Roman, Arab, Mameluke and Ottoman imperial rule.
And as for the matter of pro-Palestine propaganda that they either preceded the Jews by thousands of years as Saeb Erekat once claimed or lived here for only 3000 years, too many pro-Israel advocates feel uncomfortable in denying those prevarications. They neither confront the fact that Arabs were themselves a mighty colonialist power as well as engaged in the slave trade, the sins of which they accuse their opponents.
In essence, those portraying Zionism as an evil force suffer from their own warped psychological requirement to see Israel’s actions as evil which allows them to be evil. People seeking to be evil need to see others as evil. It was Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morality who argued that the concept of evil stems from the negative emotions of envy, hatred, and resentment.
This latest development in the anti-Zionist campaign is savage: savage in thought, savage in words, savage in deeds.
^
April 15, 2024
“I don’t expect peace”
Neus Deutschland, Socialist newspaper Interview, 09/02/2010
“I don’t expect peace”
The settler movement in the occupied territories was unwilling to compromise
Yisrael Medad is spokesman for the YESHA Council (YESHA stands for Judea, Samaria and Gaza), an organization of settlers in the occupied territories of Palestine. He himself has lived in Shiloh, a notorious center of radical settlers, since 1970. Medad writes regularly for newspapers and has his own website (myrightword.blogspot.com). Martin Lejeune spoke to him for New Germany.
ND: What do you expect from the peace negotiations between Abbas and Netanyahu that begin today in Washington?
Yisrael Medad: Above all, I don’t expect peace from the peace negotiations.
Why?
Leaving aside the major intractable problems such as a right of return for Palestinians and the status of Jerusalem, I believe that the Palestinian Authority is neither willing nor able to offer Israel the terms of peace that we can accept. At the moment, the Palestinian Authority cannot even ensure peace in the West Bank. Furthermore, they never stop teaching their schoolchildren to hate Israel, to later become resistance fighters against Israel and that cities within Israel would belong to Palestine.
There is currently unrest again in the Silwan district of Jerusalem because Palestinians are being robbed of their land. Does Israel want to force all Palestinians out of Jerusalem?
No person in Israel, whether Jew, Muslim or Christian, has to move anywhere against their will. 20 percent of the Israeli population are of Arab origin and feel comfortable in Israel. The residents of Umm al-Fachem, for example, an all-Arab city in Israel with over 45,000 inhabitants, could stay where they are.
But Palestinians are being driven out of East Jerusalem every day.
Unfortunately, you are fundamentally misunderstanding something here. They think Jerusalem belongs to an Arab country that the Jews took over 150 years ago. But this is a Jewish land that was occupied by Arabs 1,300 years ago and is now gradually being liberated by us.
What will happen to the settlements in the West Bank? Should they all stay, or should some of them be evacuated so that they don’t stand in the way of peace?
All Jewish communities should remain. There is no reason why a Jew should be able to live in Berlin, Hong Kong or London but not in the territory that is the historic land of Israel. Leaving our holy land of Samaria (the occupied West Bank – M L.) is something we can never accept.
However, a Palestinian state would not be viable as a patchwork quilt.
I am not interested in a Palestinian state. I am not in favor of arrangements that could help establish a Palestinian state. But I am for peace and for giving all Arabs as many rights as possible – including autonomy and the right to manage their private property.
Gaza and the West Bank should be connected by a corridor. This was stated in the Oslo Treaty in 1993.
Thank God there is no such corridor through which Hamas operatives could travel unhindered from Gaza to Samaria.
Four settlers were shot dead on Tuesday. What impact will this have?
Very specific! We have just decided to continue building the settlement today at 6 p.m. in response to this crime. The moratorium is over!
______________
A video-recorded interview, April 14, 2024.
^
April 10, 2024
Israel needs to fight its legal battles in the multi-front war
The war on Israel’s third-front, Yisrael Medad, April 10, 2024, Jerusalem Post
Israel needs better-trained warriors on its third-front battles.
Israel, Jews and indeed Zionism, have faced for over a century a multi-front war. The campaigns in this war have been fierce, vicious and injurious even if at times no blood is shed. And they are ongoing.
They have been waged on battlefields and conference rooms; in halls of powers and campus quadrants; in courtrooms and trenches; in newspaper columns and television broadcast.
The first front is, of course, that of the military effort designed to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel. From murderous riots outside Jaffa Gate in April 1920 to Hebron’s Jewish Quarter in August 1929 to the 1948 War of Independence and all successive battles since, from Fedayeen to Fatah, to Hamas and Hezbollah.
The second front is the diplomatic efforts to deny Zionism its legitimacy and Israel its raison d’etre. The front is shared by the information public diplomacy engagements where there are, according to Binyamin Netanyahu, “people who can’t put two words together [in English]”.
The third front, the focus of this column, is that of the legal assault on Israel, employing claims of law to deny the national rights of Jews by pushing a line that the Mandate for Palestine itself was a legal error, at best, and that Israel has no rights to Judea and Samaria.
One recent instance is what Melanie Phillips termed “a contemptible letter…a disgrace to the legal profession”. She was referring to a letter sent to the United Kingdom’s Prime Minister and signed by 600 British lawyers. They asserted Israel is breaking international law and potentially committing genocide in Gaza. As Ms. Phillips pointed out, their ability to quote correctly from the January ruling of the International Court of Justice was not only a failure but in doing so, they misrepresented the Court’s findings, essentially lying.
On a previous occasion, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International simply redefined the term “apartheid” in order to have in applied to Israel in its new form. NGO-Monitor released a report in December 2021, authored by Joshua Kern and Anne Herzberg, titled “False Knowledge as Power”. It addressed the legal vacuum that existed and how it permitted the charge of the apartheid calumny to invade the debates over Israel’s policies and provided a full analysis based on international law. That campaign is ever ongoing.
A recent post, a rebuttal and a rejoinder at the prestigious OpinioJuris blog is worthy of attention. The prestigious blog seeks to inform discussion of international law by and among academics, practitioners and legal experts. It is read in 70+ countries daily on the average. The posts have been cited by international and domestic courts, international arbitrators, and government officials.
Dr. Alonso Gurmendi Dunkelberg of Kings College touted that Israel possess no sovereign claim to Judea and Samaria, that is, the “West Bank” a la Dunkelberg. His arguments were refuted by Kohelet’s Avraham R. Shalev and were countered by Dunkelberg, all this over a two-month exchange.
While my legal training is limited, it quickly became obvious that Dunkelberg’s knowledge of history was central to his interpretation of law. Moreover, that knowledge was one of a rigid ideological approach and a misrepresentations of history while his background is Latin America. He had armed his view with illegal ammunition.
To deny Shalev’s assertion that Zionism is not a “colonial endeavor”, Dunkelberg points to the 1899 established “Zionist Colonial Trust” and Ze’ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923 about Zionism’s “colonising aims”. That, of course, is etymological claptrap.
The term colonization there and then used was simply a synonym for “settlement”. Kibbutzim were “colonies”. Zionists engaged in resettling Jews on their national land, planting it and rebuilding it. Moreover, they were required to do so by buying it back from Arabs and others who had themselves occupied the country, conquering it centuries earlier.
In another section, he argues on behalf of “Arab Palestinians” and their rights as if they existed as a distinct people. Yet, at the time, those Arabs themselves denied Palestine’s independence. Orientalist Philip Khoury Hitti was active in 1918 in an anti-Zionist Arab-American movement. The group lobbied for the establishment of a Greater Syria and at the 1919 peace conference, they asked that Palestine not be independent and not detached from Syria.
The First Palestinian Congress of January-February 1919 resolved: “We consider Palestine as part of Arab Syria…we desire that our district Southern Syria or Palestine should be not separated from the Independent Arab Syrian Government”. The King-Crane Commission was also so informed. The Emir Feisal, the most senior Arab diplomat, meeting with Chaim Weizmann in January 1919, accepted that there would be an Arab state and a Palestine for the “Jewish people”. Article VII of their agreement recognized a “Zionist Organization”.
In arguing that Israel was created “in Palestine” but itself is not “Palestine” nor did “Palestine” disappear, Dunkelberg conveniently ignores the existence of Jordan in Palestine territory in a colonial maneuver by Great Britain. In addition, in his logic, the Ottoman Empire somehow wasn’t a colonial empire, occupying Judea, the Jewish national homeland but rather possessed sovereign rights that should only be transferred to Arabs, not Jews.
Despite never existing as a separate, distinct state entity with an Arab character in any form, Dunkelberg suggests the territory cannot have a Jewish national identity. Ignoring that a Palestinian nationality was specifically legislated in 1925 so that Jews could obtain naturalization status, Dunkelberg traipses through a purposeful misreading of history to the downgrading and disadvantage of the legal rights of the Jewish people.
His method is shared by many other denigrators of Zionism and is but a form of a totalitarian newspeak. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, “if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” And as he added, “debased language…is in some ways very convenient.”
Israel needs better trained warriors on its third front battles.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.
^
April 3, 2024
The real Arab problem that’s ignored
The real Arab problem that’s ignored
Yisrael Medad, JNS, April 2, 2024
Aaron Gell is a former Habonim camper and a self-described “secular American Jew”. He decided to write “about the questionable legacy of Zionism” and his essay appeared in the New Republic entitled “Has Zionism Lost the Argument?”. Thanks to my reading it, I was reminded of what he termed “the so-called Arab Question”, one, he asserted, that is “conspicuously unasked”.
That Zionists are accused of ignoring the “Arab Question”, and Gell notes the articles that Ahad Ha’Am published in 1891 (his source being Avi Shlaim) to highlight that this failing had been noted 130 years ago, is a staple of anti-Zionist propaganda. Of course, Ahad Ha’Am also wrote about a “Jewish problem” but let’s leave that for another day.
Gell is not upset that that 1891 article, “Truth from Eretz-Yisrael”, has Ahad Ha’Am terming the Arabs “lazy” or that “Arabs do not like to labor much so as to care for the future” or that they are “cunning” and “exploit” the Jews regarding land purchases. That would the type of language that would land Ahad Ha’Am in no small amount of trouble in today’s woke lexicon. It would also undercut Ahad Ha’Am’s moral stature even if that is what he saw just like other things he observed that put Jews in an unkindly light.
Ahad Ha’Am, at that point in time was not the Zionist as Gell perhaps wants him to be seen. He viewed the idea and practicality of the ingathering of Jews in Palestine withy little enthusiasm, considering it a messianic ideal rather unfeasible. He actively sought out negativities on his trip. Nevertheless, Gell skirts and avoids any further discussion of the Arab Problem and declines to confront what that problem is and what are the ramifications of it as do most other anti-Israel protestors and activists.
That “Arab Problem” has several components.
In the first instance, over a period of some five years during which the international political and diplomatic foundations for the establishment of the future Jewish state to be reconstituted, between 1917-1922, not one of over 50 countries viewed the Arab residents of the area of historic Palestine as a people deserving a state in the area of the Jewish national homeland.
In fact, there is no mention of an Arab national entity in either the United Kingdom’s 1917 Balfour Declaration, the deliberations of the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference the decision of the 1920 San Remo Conference attended by four Principal Allied Powers of World War I England, France, Italy and Japan, with the United States as observer, and the League of Nations Mandate decision of 1922 adopted by 50 countries. In Palestine, there were Jews and non-Jews.
It is one thing to claim Jews persuaded this or that politician and even bribe them to favor the goals of Zionism. To insist that somehow several hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Arabs, that is, were completely ignored by dozens of countries due to some Jewish magic is akin to a space-laser belief. In short, no one of any international importance acknowledged an Arab nation called ‘Palestinians’.
In the second instance, the national movement that did develop during the Mandate years and set the underlying character until the current slogan of “from the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free” was non-compromising, rejectionist of any diplomatic resolution and violent to the extreme.
In his seminal 1923 two-part “Iron Wall” essays, Ze’ev Jabotinsky observed,
“it is quite another question whether it is always possible to realise a peaceful aim by peaceful means. For the answer to this question does not depend on our attitude to the Arabs, but entirely on the attitude of the Arabs to us and to Zionism.”
Jabotinsky insisted the Arabs possessed agency and responsibility, elements removed from them in past years. That is a problem as they can always insist on a victimhood and escape any answerability for their own actions.
The Arab violence was both physical and verbal as well as conceptual. The Arab assertion was that Jews had no rights whatsoever in any area of their national homeland, a region they originally demanded be reunited with Syria. Arabs promoted a policy of ethnic cleansing, first killing and expelling Jews from Tel Hai in March 1920, then attempting the same in Jerusalem’s Old City in April 1920, in Jaffa and Petah Tikva in May 1921, in Hebron, Safed, Tiberias, Be’er Tuviah, Hulda and other locations in 1929 including Gaza and on and on throughout the period of 1936-1939 with over 525 Jews murdered, raped and property destroyed.
In 1948, they wiped out the Jewish communities of Kfar Etzion, Revadim, Masu’ot Yitzhak, Ein Tzurim, Atarot, Beit Ha’arava, Neveh Ya’akov, Gaza’s Kfar Darom and others, including the entire Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City. And the Hadassah Convoy. Mass murder and ethnic cleansing was the agenda. Yet, soon enough, a change of costume into refugees and gone was the Arab problem.
But they returned to terror and for some seven years, infiltrations for murder, rape and theft were the new problem. Yet, as soon as the 1957 Sinai Campaign was over Arab Fedayeen terror escaped being a problem and Israel’s links with British and French imperialism was the problem for the anti- and the non-Zionists. The same pattern was essentially repeated in 1967. Within weeks, the New Left tore into Israel, conveniently ignoring the Arab problem. A caricature that appeared in a 1967 SNCC pamphlet recently reappeared at Harvard.
To sum up, the Arab problem also is the unwillingness of observers, like Gell and the Jewish groups he writes about, to accept the immoral and vicious conduct of the ‘national struggle’ of the Arabs of Palestine while accepting claims of a parallel conducted Jewish struggle, as if equal in wrongdoings.
As even Anat Kamm commented, in Ha’Aretz (!), reflecting on radical Left infighting in Israel, that their goals for both Israel and the Arabs do not overlap and worse, “the Palestinian nationalist aspiration, which was one of the motives for an incredibly cruel massacre, isn’t equated with “human rights”… anyone who considered themselves a leftist had to choose: either human rights, or Palestinian nationalism.” They could not legitimize such evil behavior.
They needed, Kamm insisted, to make “a significant ideological choice of good over evil” for no “occupation” could justify the slaughter of infants in their beds. She even reminded them of the Kulan feminist movement that was popular among young Tel Aviv women. It turned out, Kamm wrote, “that it had whitewashed a case of sexual assault in a manner that would have caused the organization itself to take to the barricades had it happened somewhere else.”
Benny Morris put it quite well a few days ago: “people always forgive the Palestinians, who don’t take responsibility. “It’s accepted that they are the victim and therefore can do whatever they like.”
Gell, IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace and others abroad, still have not faced that dichotomy and its moral and political ramifications. They knowingly avoid the Arab Problem preferring to besmirch Zionism by focusing on a so-called Jewish Problem.
For Peter Beinart, in his latest NYTimes “conversation”, the problem is can liberalism and Zionism “continue to coexist for American Jews.” Once again, he prefers misrepresentation. The real problem is Beinart and others leading American Jews to justify the rampant anti-Semitism terrorizing Jews while ignoring the very illiberal and bloody pro-Palestine struggle.
^
March 28, 2024
They have tasted blood
They have tasted blood
JNS, March 28, 2024 and the Jewish Press
Predators disguised as “pro-Palestine” activists are on the prowl. But their prey are Jews.
The CEO of the Jewish Federation in Rochester, N.Y., and other officials were the recent objects of an antisemitic letter and sexist cartoon accompanied by racist tropes. In Newton, Mass., there have been seven recent instances of hate crimes in the past two months, including the breaking of windows of Jewish-owned homes, with vandals targeting one residence twice. The actual threats of violence and acts of violence have moved out of the campuses and into the streets, and with the success and the comfort of a lynch-mob atmosphere, physical assaults on Jews as Jews are bound to increase. Even the Anti-Defamation League is finally concerned.
In England, it is reported that authorities are struggling in the face of extremist tactics and actions pushed both by Islamists and the far-right, according to an official report. The adviser to the UK government on social cohesion has concluded that in some areas, there is “no infrastructure in place” to tackle a “triple threat of conspiracy theories, disinformation and harassment that poses a threat to democracy.” At King’s College, death threats canceled a discussion on conflict resolution.
It’s obvious that there has been a progression of violent escalation from protests to intimidation to assaults.
First, they came for the Zionists. Then, they came for the Jews. As the ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt wrote, “Anti-Zionism is a belief that Jews—alone among the peoples of the world—do not equally deserve freedom and self-determination in their homeland. It is an ideology of negation and a form of discrimination.”
Yet until lately, senior American Jewish establishment figures—those being paid extraordinary salaries—have been either purposefully ignorant of or complacent in the face of the camp of political progressives evolving into a hotbed of anti-Jewish passion.
Indeed, the only genuine progress being made by those engaged in progressive politics is to move from disassociating from Jewish national identity’s justness to a rampage of vocal denunciations, and on to physical property and bodily harm. Moreover, Jews are in the lead of all this, assuming a Pied Piper role.
The Australian Deborah Weiner has it right. She divides today’s Jews into those who are proud, stand up for other Jews and acknowledge that the vast majority of Jews are Zionists. But somehow, they are the “Bad Jews.” That is because there are other Jews who appear on the media self-described “AsAJew.” They “deracinate themselves from any attachment or connection to the ‘Bad Jews.’”
She further sharpens her point: “The Good Jew despises the Bad Jew. Yet, like Cain and Abel, they are inextricably joined. … Where the Good Jew seeks to demonise his cousin the Bad Jew in the hope that in the next pogrom he will be spared, the Bad Jew knows in the next pogrom no one will be spared.”
That prognosis is not nuclear science. The scenario has been repeated and replayed throughout history. Indeed, prominent among the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre were peace-loving leftists living in Gaza Envelope kibbutzim who sought to improve the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, even driving them to their medical treatments in Israel and employing them in their fields. Those very Jews were murdered, dismembered, raped and incinerated along with others that day. Their politics, their hopes and their vision were of no assistance. The terrorists were seeking out Jews as well as those assisting them. In Arabic, the cries were clearly enunciated: Yahud.
Those AsAJews are in U.S. Congress, too. Sen. Chuck Schumer began his infamous recent speech that the SenateDemocrats website termed “major,” saying, “I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish Americans.” How many? By what right did he make that assumption?
In his analysis (not found on his website), he suggested that “Israel must make some significant course corrections.” And what about Hamas? Do they possess any self-agency?
He engages in sucking up to the new pro-Palestinianism. He wants us to accept that the Arabs of Palestine “formed their own distinct culture, identity, cuisine and literature.” On the other hand, in a sweeping false equivalency, he enumerates four major obstacles to peace, including Hamas, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, “radical right-wing Israelis” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Schumer’s arrogant chutzpah and lack of wisdom were immediately recognizable. Worse, it is apparent that he and other identifiable Jewish leaders are being subjected to a Jacobin-like reign of terror. Indeed, from 1793 to 1794, the first to fall to the instruments of revolutionary violence were fellow Jacobins, if of the wrong faction. With activists of IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace and Bend the Arc raging at doorways, in hallways and at rallies of political candidates, there is a real threat to democracy.
When the revolution unfolds in its later stages, the predators disguised as “pro-Palestine” activists on the prowl at present will not be sufficed. Their banner will not be one of social justice but of authoritarian dominance.
And their prey will be Jews.
^
March 27, 2024
The Organ-Grinder Monkey’s Syndrome
There are signs of growing antisemitism, and Jews are at the heart of all this
Instead of helping people relate to what happened at Auschwitz and highlighting the brutal extermination of the Jewish people, Glazer assisted those who sought to downplay the Holocaust.
By YISRAEL MEDAD, Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2024
To be fair, Jonathan Glazer of London, who won an Academy Award as director of The Zone of Interest, did not say that he and those in whose name he supposedly spoke refuted their Jewishness. Some misconstrued his rambling presentation. What he did read out from his prepared remarks included:
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
A fortnight later, Jonathan Jakubowicz, who directed Resistance, joined many in Hollywood who criticized Glazer’s remarks, saying “conflict disinformation prolongs the war.” Indeed, Glazer was spreading disinformation.
But Glazer’s first problem was that within days, both men who were standing next to him not only distanced themselves from his remarks but denied that they had approved them in any way. Glazer fabricated their support, it would seem.
The Zone of Interest producer, Len Blavatnik, who invested in Israel’s Channel 13, had his spokesperson release to the media that he “didn’t clear the speech.” Danny Cohen, another executive producer, repudiated Glazer’s statement, saying, “I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this.” They may be disappointed that, at present, Glazer has managed to have public opinion discuss not the film but a few inanities he uttered.
Glazer’s second problem was people not grasping his syntax.
The cultural reporter at the Vox site tried to be helpful. What Glazer meant to say, she clarified, was that “he and his collaborators reject that Jewishness and the Holocaust are being used to justify the ongoing military offensive in Gaza.” She suggested that Jews around the world have perceived that their identity “has been co-opted.”
But is this charge that the Gaza campaign is justified by referring to the Holocaust true? Or is it the truth that Jews are being reminded of the atmosphere and political reality that existed prior to the Holocaust? When Jews could not enter the Palestine Mandate because the number of certificates was curtailed and then severely restricted. When Western democracies turned Jews away from their countries and instead sought a comfortable arrangement with Nazi Germany. When Jews had no protectors. When very few cared about Jews at all.
The issue in Glazer’s speech
Thus, we arrive at the third problem in Glazer’s speech. Instead of helping people relate to what happened at Auschwitz and to the character and personalities of the Nazis who sought to exterminate the Jewish people – subjects of his film – and the ideology that guided them, Glazer assisted those who seek to downplay the Holocaust. Moreover, he aided those who, wrongly, compare those events with the situation of Arabs today, who claim to be suffering a genocide, instead of with the Israelis, who suffered a mini-Holocaust event on the seventh of October.
The fourth problem with Glazer’s readout was the simple fact that Israel has not occupied Gaza since 2005. Of course, if he was referring to the Arabs asserting that Israel has been an occupying power either since 1948 or even 1967, his understanding of the issue is facile.
So, once again, the debate over the Holocaust has been reignited but within a negative, anti-Jewish context that played into the hands of the anti-Israel, anti-Zionism crowd.
To grasp just how damaging the content of Glazer’s speech was, we need not only to deconstruct the heart of his statement that accused an “occupation” of having “led to a conflict,” in which “so many people” suffer “dehumanization.” We need to realize that the viciousness of his words is a result of what could be called the organ grinder’s monkey syndrome. US Senator Charles Schumer’s recent speech attacking Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu only highlighted that affliction. As renowned writer John Podhoretz framed it, Jews seem to feel comfortable “trash[ing] Bibi while supporting Israel.”
Seeking acceptance?
OR IS IT that in order to feel comfortable, accepted, and safe in a Gentile society, these Jews trash Israel, various members of its government, policies of the government, or elements of Israeli society? Those suffering from the syndrome hear the music being played, and they dance accordingly. They see the welcoming applause of acceptance.
Several prominent Jews who donate to the US Democratic Party have now joined together in signing a letter from other Democratic funders, calling on President Biden to renege on his “unconditional” support for Israel’s military engagement with Hamas. They are warning him that if he continues that support, it could hurt his reelection prospects.
The increase in recent years of Jew vs Jew confrontations is an important success for the forces seeking to erase Jewish national identity. In centuries past, notwithstanding all the internal bickering, including Orthodox vs Reform, Enlightenment vs ultra-Orthodox, Hassidim vs. Litvaks, and Ashkenazim vs Sephardim, opposition to Zionism has attracted the widest range of dissentious antipathy except, perhaps, for the apostates, who cooperated with the Spanish Inquisition and the anti-Talmud condemnations.
Whether it is auto-antisemitism, seeking to assimilate, uneasiness with high-profile Jewish identity, or overt rejection of the idea of ethnicity altogether, the willingness of too many Jews to align themselves with what is obviously negative as well as harmful phenomena, like what we have been witnessing, points to psychological and social weaknesses.
The attacks on AIPAC, the sit-ins at major Jewish organizations, the cooperation with pro-Palestine forces on campuses, and the rampaging through the streets have long superseded the norm of protests. These actions constitute battles. There is irrational anger displayed. There are signs of growing antisemitism. And Jews are at the heart of all this.
The organ is grinding out raucous and off-tune music. And the monkey is baring teeth.
^
March 14, 2024
The world must be reminded of the Palestinian genocide campaign against Jews
There was a genocide campaign. It was conducted not against ‘Palestine’, but in Palestine, in the Mandate of Palestine.
By Yisrael Medad, Jerusalem Post, March 14, 2024
If you do a Google search for the entry “Palestinian genocide accusation”. It starts with the 1948 Nakba, goes on to the 1967 Naksa, includes the Maronite-perpetrated Sabra and Shatila killings and ends with the Gaza blockade. It references such terms as “ethnic cleansing”, “politicide”, “spaciocide” and “cultural genocide”.
However, if you are looking for this year’s model, the entry is entitled: “Allegations of genocide in the 2023 Israeli attack on Gaza”. That includes such sub-sections as “Alleged genocidal intent”, “Academic and legal discourse”, “Statements by political organizations and governments” and “Cultural discourse”. When I last looked, there were 299 references, not including footnotes.
The charge that Israel is engaged in a campaign of genocide in Gaza is ubiquitous from The Hague, to campuses, to the media and in the streets. It is heard in museums and art galleries7. It has led to the slogan “Abolish Zionism”. In a medical journal, British Medical Global Health, Israel’s policies were described as “eliminatory settler colonial strategy”.
All this is propaganda, of course. After all, despite Israel’s campaigns against Hamas aggression, Gaza’s population shows no real signs of any serious demographic downfall. Neither has that of Judea and Samaria, except for voluntary emigration abroad.
Yet, there was a genocide campaign. It was conducted, not against ‘Palestine’, but in Palestine, in the Mandate of Palestine. It was a campaign of attempted genocide not against Arabs but against the Jews. It began in April 1920 and, through riots, pogroms and terror, as well as political and diplomatic pressure, it has not let up.
Following the first murderous riot in Jerusalem during the Passover festival which coincided with the Nebi Mussa celebration, mob violence occurred again and again throughout the Mandate period. These attacks, as well as those that followed, targeted almost exclusively the defenceless and the weak, women, the elderly and the young.
Although there were instances of violence over property and land purchases, as in Jerusalem in 1851 when Rabbi Avraham Shlomo Zalman Zoref was stabbed to death after obtaining permission to reconstruct the Hurva synagogue or at Petah Tikva in 1886, these were localized events. With the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Conference and the separation of the Palestine, known as Southern Syria from Syria, the violence assume a nationalist character which categorized all Jews as justified potential victims for Arab violence.
In Jerusalem, when Jewish schoolchildren marked the occasion of the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in a procession on November 2, 1918, Arab ruffians, encouraged by the Arab Mayor, fell upon them with clubs. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who was in the city, reported to Chaim Weizmann that there was a pogrom atmosphere and decried the lack of essential British security personnel.
As for Weizmann, he found himself engaged in countering an anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that claimed the Zionists were planning to replace the Dome of the Rock with a Temple, the echoes of which reverberate today. He even travelled to Egypt to meet the Sultan there in an attempt to defuse this religious-activated potential explosion.
On November 27, 1919, a protest against Zionism was sent to the U.S. Consulate offices in Haifa which including a direct threat of violence: ‘We hereby declare that we are not responsible for any trouble or disorder that may occur in this country as a consequence of the obvious general excitement and dissatisfaction.’
Tel Hai was attacked by marauding Bedouins in December 1919 and on February 2, 1920, resulting in two fatalities. It was then overrun on March 1 and Joseph Trumpeldor and his five compatriots were killed.
Sunday, April 4, 1920, during Pesach, developed into a day of blood. Here is what Khalil al-Sakakini recalled watching:
“[A] riot broke out, the people began to run about and stones were thrown at the Jews…there were screams…I saw one Hebronite approach a Jewish shoeshine boy…take his box and beat him over the head…The riot reached its zenith. All shouted, ‘Muhammad’s religion was born with the sword’ … my soul is nauseated and depressed.”
At the end of the day, 7 Jews had been murdered and two Jewish women raped. Many dozens were injured. The pattern had been set. Any and all Jews were to be killed; any and all Jews were legitimate targets for Arabs and the method of killing was beastly and barbaric.
Those events were repeated in May 1921 in Jaffa, November 1921 in Jerusalem, August 1929 and for the almost three continuous years of 1936-1939 when over 500 Jews were murdered. Arab genocidal terror occurred during the in-between years such as the operations of Sheikh Izz ad-Din al-Qassam at Yagur and Nahalal, for example. During the 1948 war, the genocidal phrase “drive the Jews into the sea” was often repeated.
Scholars over the past three decades have researched and chronicled what historians Matthias Küntzel and Jeffrey Herf term “the collaboration of leading [Arab] Palestinian nationalists with the Nazi regime”, this despite Yad Vashem’s official unwillingness to link the Mufti directly to the Holocaust.
What is undeniable is that the British, under pressure to halt Arab terror, chose to severely restrict Jewish immigration into the Mandate just when the Hitler regime was beginning to accelerate its anti-Jewish policies. Due to the Arab violence, Jews could go nowhere to flee. When the war broke out, they were trapped. The Mufti had assisted the fulfillment of the Nazis’ genocidal final solution.
In an invidious current inversion expropriation, Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Mahmoud Abbas’ Advisor on Religious Affairs, said on February 10 this year, as Palestine Media Watch reported: “It may be that what the Palestinian people is experiencing now…by Israel…did not happen even in World War II…[and] are worse and a more criminal holocaust against the Palestinian people.”
Yes, there was a campaign of genocide in Palestine, but it was directed at the Jews. We need remind the world that happened.
^
Chloroformed, Again
The Jews have been ‘lulled to sleep by chloroform’
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, politically cognizant of the trap that Jews were caught in, asked: “What happened to you, my brothers, chosen stepsons of the Almighty?
In mid-June 1939, Ze’ev Jabotinsky published a column in Warsaw’s Yiddish-language daily Der Moment. In it, he gave his assessment of the attitude of Polish Jewry and those elsewhere in Europe which he viewed disappointingly. He was even depressed for he observed that his fellow Jews were as if “lulled to sleep by chloroform” with “their lethargy, their…’it doesn’t concern me’ attitude.” It was if they were all in a “huge hospital, reeking of the alluring smell of anesthetic…crowded from the basement to the attic.”
The title of Jabotinsky’s “Chloroformed” in the Yiddish daily Der Moment, June 11, 1939
Jabotinsky, politically cognizant of the approaching storm and the trap Jews were caught in with nowhere to go, asked “What happened to you, my brothers, chosen stepsons of the Almighty? The world of today does not live in illusions, does not believe in miracles, one cannot expect gifts from heaven, and this calm is completely incomprehensible.” He wrote that he witnessed the abeyance of his fellow Jews’ “abilities to think, fight, desire, even groan in pain.” Their “conscience has been lulled to sleep by chloroform.”
Jabotinsky’s words immediately came to mind upon watching a video clip of Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Oscars. His core message was that he and his fellow awardees, producer James Wilson and financial backer Leonard Blavatnik, “stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people’. He added, “Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanisation, how do we resist?”
I am not sure any other person of whatever ethnicity or religion would similarly declare a refutation of his identity and affiliation if faced with the behavior of terrorists on behalf of “Palestine” and in fact, I am sure they would not so announce. Actually, if Susan Sarandon is any example, many in the entertainment and art worlds go all-out to justify and praise Hamas’ “resistance” in a renewed gilgul of radical chic a la Leonard Bernstein or what Jonathan Tobin termed the “fashionable rationalizations of hatred for Jews.”
This is not the classical religion-based hatred. It is not the racial hatred of the hard-right. It is not even the Marxist economic hatred. Not that elements of all those are not present is the current wave of extreme animosity. The year 1939 was six years after Hitler had come to power, five years after the Racial Laws began and a year after the failure of the Evian Conference when Europe’s Jews realized they were essentially trapped. We are not in that situation.
But if there is something that can be learned from Jabotinsky, it is that Jews themselves cannot be trusted to recognize the danger looming nor to take the proper steps to prepare to meet the threats.
The establishment Jewish leadership was warned for years that their ignoring of the menace from the Left, from the progressives and the liberals, too, was dangerous, at least, as that menace of the Right if in a different manner. The problems Jews have at the universities, Michael Oren writes, was the result of a “process that led to the current morass was more than half-century in the making”.
Jews have backed the wrong politicians in a variety of countries. They have generously funded the many associations that actively undermine Jewish identity and ethnic self-pride. They have hosted and even fawned over intellectuals who set out to destroy the organizational and educational frameworks that were in place to assure a Jewish future.
Moreover, they actively engaged in degrading and demeaning as well as shunning those activists and programs that could have added balance and a political and educational alternative for the communities they oversaw. Speakers weren’t invited to conferences and alternative voices were squashed.
The next generation, the students of today at the universities who are under siege, were not provided the tools and knowledge to face the onslaught of the pro-Palestine campaigns, from BDS to genocide. Not only were the leaders chloroformed but they failed to avoid the facilitating of the chlorofomation of this current generation. IfNotNow activists proudly claim their shared experience at Ramah camps and sought to deepen the divide there which seems to have been thwarted to a large extent.
Israel’s right-wing nationalist camp was barely tolerated as Jewish community leaders in America were liberal and voted Democratic. They would not be found in the company of such people. There was no genuine analysis of Zionist historic and legal rights nor of contemporary political developments, local or global. Peter Beinart was welcomed for years until is abandonment of the need for a Jewish state.
The radical left forces within the community were given more than a relative free pass and were more than just tolerated. They were fawned over and invited inside the communal tent. Jewish leadership created an self-contained aloofness and thus, assisted preparing the gauze mask for the application of the chloroform that would dull the senses and weaken the ability to confront the growing danger.
The result of this is too apparent: the terrorizing of the Jews aided and abetted by Jews from the academia to the Academy Awards stage.
Who will reawaken this current generation of Jews under siege?
^
March 6, 2024
Dispelling the myths regarding Ramadan
‘Sacred’ myths of Palestine from Al-Buraq to Ramadan
Yisrael Medad, Jerusalem Post, March 6, 2024
Jerusalem, declared Sir Mark Sykes, is “inflammable ground” the New York Times reported on December 12, 1917. Sykes, of the Cairo Arab Bureau fame, had spoken in Manchester three days earlier at a Zionist assembly called to thank Britain’s government for the Balfour Declaration. Sykes noted the city “throbbed with history” and “a careless word or gesture might set half a continent aflame”.
Sykes further explained that Jerusalem called for more than “diplomacy, tact, virtue or the delicacy of the drawing-room politician”, even more than “toleration”. What was required was “sympathy, understanding and sacrifice”. For whom was that “sympathy”? It was “to the Moslem for whom the Mosque of Omar is the most sacred spot on earth”.
This might be the first time that the warning that the Temple Mount possesses a most incendiary potential was sounded. It also contained, incidentally, all the misrepresentation – historically and religiously – the matter has come to assume in today’s politics, providing the Arabs, gratis, with all the combustible material they need. No match need be lighted; just a hint of the threat is enough. Sykes had fashioned a political myth.
Chaim Weizmann, present at that Manchester rally, was to learn very quickly what Sykes meant. In April 1918, he needed to visit the Sultan of Egypt to dispel rumours that the Zionists had received British permission to destroy the Mosque of Omar and rebuild the Temple. In 1922, High Commissioner Herbert Samuel had to deny rumours that Moslem possession of the Haram A-Sharif was threatened. But the myth had been implanted and became quite a potent tool.
During 1922-1924, the Mufti Amin Al-Husseini dispatched a delegation to tour Moslem countries that churned out those rumours from Saudi Arabia to India and beyond. He nurtured the myth and politicized it.
Ever since non-Moslems were prohibited from entering the sacred compound following the signing of the 1229 Treaty of Jaffa until the mid-19th century, the exclusiveness of the site was accepted by all. That treaty assured that the Temple Mount area would remain under the control of the Moslem religious authorities. It created another myth, one at the foundation of today’s “status quo”. That myth-cum-policy subjected Jews to a discriminatory denial of their national and religious rights.
During the early Mandate period, the Supreme Moslem Council enlarged the myth and worked to delegitimize not only rights of Jews to the Western Wall but at the Wall also. Following the mechitza removal incident of 1928, Al-Husseini began his “Defend Al-Buraq” campaign claiming Jews wanted to take over the Haram compound.
Buraq was the name of a mythical flying creature that had transported the Prophet Muhammed to Jerusalem and that was tied near the Wall. This myth supplied an Islamic sanctity to the Western Wall courtyard which the Mufti managed to convince the British was superior to the Jewish claim to pray at the Wall.
No matter how much official Jewish institutions denied the assertion, it was to no avail. Following the murderous August 1929 riots that the Mufti instigated, the decision of the International Commission appointed by the British was that the sole ownership of the Western Wall belongs to the Moslems as well as the pavement in front of it. It’s all Waqf property even if outside the Haram.
The pattern had been thus set. First, establish an unassailable right or presumed privilege, one that dare not be challenged or considered inauthentic. Secondly, assert that any Jewish competing claim is invalid. Thirdly, in a menacing fashion, contend that the Jews are actively involved in acting to undermine and harm Moslem interests. Fourth, express aggression, in words and deeds, in an assumed righteous anger, while blaming the Jews and browbeating any supporting opposition. That’s how their myths are constructed.
In post-1967 Israel, that policy was applied with great success, first by Yasser Arafat on behalf of the “Palestinian people” and then by Northern Islamic head Sheikh Raed Salah and others, with assistance from Arab MKs and their Jewish extreme left colleagues.
A history of a Jewish Jerusalem was denied. Entrance of Jews even in a most restricted manner to the Haram precincts was termed “storming’. And the Ramadan month became sacrosanct in a most scurrilous way.
Riots at the Temple Mount became regular which led to terror attacks. The Haram compound became a site of rallies and chanting of nationalist slogans while flags and pennants of various terror groups were unfurled. A march of Jews was exploited to fire rockets from Gaza at the city. And all the while, Israel’s security services adopted a cowering position of blaming and punishing Jews for Arab aggression. Their slogan was ‘the situation is explosive’.
According to Muslim tradition, as the MEMRI site explains, during Ramadan Allah grants the Muslims glorious victories. The great battles of Islam, from Badr in 624, the conquest of Mecca in 630 to the October 6, 1973 “War of Ramadan” fought by Egypt against Israel, all occurred during Ramadan. Ramadan in Israel has been marked in recent years by many terrorist attacks.
Prominent Islamic religious leaders, in their sermons, stress that Ramadan is the month of jihad, conquest, and victory in Islam. This outlook is also found in books for school pupils. The result of this is a Jewish media clamoring for Jewish surrender to Moslem sensibilities.
Is there another approach?
One recent example occurred in Saudi Arabia. There, after a woman raised a flag of Palestine at the Ka’aba in Mecca, Sheikh Abdul Rahman Al-Sudais, one of the imams of the Grand Mosque, stressed that the holy site is a place of worship where only religious slogans and chants should be heard. I would suggest that neither is the Temple Mount the place to unfurl Hamas banners.
Whatever action is proposed to counter Islamic violence, let us dispel another myth. Ramadan violence is not the fault of the Jews.
^
MEDAD'S WORDS 