KGB against sionisme

 Antisémitisme / Antisionisme

1985, the KGB-supervised Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public, known by its Russian acronym as AKSO, issued a brochure, Criminal Alliance of Zionism and Nazism.[i] The brochure reported on a press conference that the Committee had held some months earlier. The site for the press conference, the press center of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, indicated the official blessing of the messages AKSO had to deliver. The brochure was translated into English and distributed abroad by Novosti Press Agency, a news service and an important arm of Soviet foreign propaganda.

A propagandistic document reporting on a propagandistic event, the brochure painted a harrowing picture of Zionism. Senior members of the AKSO, most of whom were prominent Soviet Jews (an intentional choice on the part of the KGB, meant to deflect accusations of antisemitism) claimed that they had irrefutable proof of Zionist co-operation with the Nazis. They described Zionists as facilitators of Nazi expansionism, accused them of falsely inflating the significance of antisemitism and Jewish victimhood in World War II, and claimed that the 1930s agreement that permitted the transfer of 60,000 German Jews to Palestine had made it ‘easier for the Nazis to unleash World War II.’ They claimed that Zionists had colluded ‘in the genocide against the “Slavs, Jews and some other peoples of Europe”.’ Speakers concluded by rejecting, in advance, any attempts by ‘pro-Zionist press’ to represent the committee’s assertions as antisemitic; disassociated Zionists from Jews; and promised that Zionism would never succeed in repudiating the ‘historical reality’ of cooperation between the Zionists and the Nazis.

The brochure might have read as a shocking smear that distorted history had it not been an integral part of a massive Soviet anti-Zionist campaign that entered a particularly active stage in 1967. Its language reflects its epoch – one marked by Cold War tensions, propagandistic jargon that permeated all aspects of Soviet public life, and virulent demonisation of Israel and Zionism. Alleged Zionist-Nazi collaboration and false equivalence between the two were among the campaign’s centerpieces.

Designed by the KGB and overseen by chief Communist Party ideologues, the campaign had achieved numerous successes. For a significant portion of domestic and some foreign audiences, it succeeded at emptying Zionism of its meaning as a national liberation movement of the Jewish people and associating it instead with racism, fascism, Nazism, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, militarism and apartheid. It contributed to the adoption of the notorious 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, which held Zionism to be a form of racism and paved the way for the demonisation of Israel within that organisation.

In the course of the campaign, hundreds of anti-Zionist and anti-Israel books and thousands of articles were published in the USSR, with millions of copies entering circulation in the country. Many were translated into foreign languages – English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic and numerous others. In 1970 alone, the comparison between alleged Zionist and Nazi racism – just one of the campaign’s numerous memes – merited 96 mentions (Pinkus 1989:256). Demonisation of Zionism continued in films, lectures, and radio broadcasts. Anti-Zionist cartoons, many of an obvious antisemitic nature, were a regular feature of Soviet publications.

The campaign used the significant Soviet broadcasting and publishing capacity abroad, as well as front organisations and friendly communist and other radical left organisations in the West and third world countries to transmit its messages to foreign audiences. The U.S. State Department viewed the AKSO committee as an important tool within that campaign, one that it classified as a tool in the Soviet arsenal of ‘active measures’ – ‘covert or deceptive operations conducted in support of Soviet foreign policy.’

The antisemitic nature of this campaign was appalling. The main authors contributing content– many of whom had direct links with the KGB and top party leadership – relied heavily on antisemitic tropes borrowed directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Some in the group were closet admirers of Hitler and Nazism and used Mein Kampf as both a source of ‘information’ about Zionism and inspiration for their own interpretations.

The Soviets vehemently rejected accusations of antisemitism, arguing that they were ‘Zionist tricks’ and ‘nefarious imperialist scheming.’ But some 2.6 million Soviet Jews knew better. In 1976, during one of the peaks of the campaign, the Soviet Jewish activist Natan Sharansky said that he sensed ‘the smell of pogrom’ in the air.

Virulently antisemitic anti-Zionism that was so central to the late Soviet Union’s propaganda seems to have faded from the West’s collective memory. Yet, in a strange case of déjà vu for those who, like myself, have lived through the late Soviet anti-Zionist campaign or have studied it in detail, the same memes and ideas that were in use then continue to circulate in contemporary far-left anti-Zionist circles.

Political cartoons equating Israel with Nazi Germany that might as well have been lifted from Soviet newspapers have appeared on mainstream progressive blogs. One-time London mayor and prominent member of the Labor party Ken Livingstone has claimed that ‘Hitler was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.’ Lenni Brenner’s 1983 anti-Zionist classic Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is built around supposed Nazi-Zionist equivalency. References to Zionism and Israel as racist, imperialist, colonial, genocidal and apartheid abound in contemporary far-left discourse. The anti-Zionist discourse of the UK Labour Party, which is part and parcel of its current crisis over antisemitism, is replete with the same memes.

The similarity begs the question of the ideological origins of this discourse. Just as it is important to understand the ideological heritage of the far-right’s antisemitic rhetoric, it is important to wrap our heads around the origins of the far-left’s anti-Zionist discourse, particularly where it intersects with antisemitism. We can begin by re-examining what historian Jeffrey Herf calls ‘the toxic ideological brew’ that the communist anti-Zionist and anti-Israel campaigns left behind (Herf 2016, p. 461).

‘INTERNATIONAL ZIONISM’ AS A WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY TO DESTROY SOCIALISM AND SPREAD IMPERIALISM

The idea of Zionism as a hostile ideology began to solidify in the post-World War II USSR in the late 1940s, once it became clear that Israel was aligning itself with the ‘imperialist camp’ rather than the Soviet Union. Allegations of Zionist conspiracy became a prominent feature of Stalinist purge trials. The Slansky Trial in particular featured the idea of ‘international Zionism’ as a worldwide conspiracy aiming to destroy socialism. Manufactured by the Soviet secret services, the trial tied together Zionism, Israel, Jewish leaders, and American imperialism, turning ‘Zionism’ and ‘Zionist’ into dangerous labels that could be used against one’s political enemies. The trial opened the door to vicious antisemitism.

Over the following decade, the Soviet press continued a broad anti-Israel campaign. It received an extra boost with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Soviets were determined to undermine the legitimacy of the trial, whose emphasis on the Holocaust challenged their concept of Slavic victimhood in World War II. One way to do so was to attack Israel’s diplomatic relationship with West Germany, which the Soviets painted as a ‘fascist’ heir of Nazi Germany.

The ‘obvious’ conclusion was that Zionism was a natural bedfellow with fascists and Nazis. Drawing this parallel allowed the Soviets to tap into a visceral sentiment. For the Soviet people, whose sacrifice in World War II was enormous, fascism and Nazism represented the greatest evil imaginable. By equalising Zionism with these two, Soviet propaganda architects sought to create a visceral reaction – of a kind that didn’t depend on fact but on a deep feeling.

By the 1960s, the Soviets’ anti-Zionist propaganda arsenal widened courtesy of a book, Judaism without Embellishments by Trofim Kichko. A deeply antisemitic tract featuring Der Stürmer-like cartoons, it proposed that Judaism, with its concept of Jews as a chosen people, was an inherently racist religion and linked to American imperialism and Israeli colonialism. One of the cartoons showed a stereotypical Jewish capitalist licking a boot with a swastika painted on it.

The book initially generated a storm of indignation, including from foreign leftist groups, and the Soviets disavowed it – but only temporarily. In the following years, Kichko became one of the key authors contributing to the massive volume of anti-Zionist propaganda.

Beside the ongoing advancement of the alleged Nazi-Zionist connection, his book introduced an idea that Soviet propagandists would use repeatedly in the coming decades: that Zionism was an outgrowth of Judaism and as such asserted Jewish racial superiority. The Soviets would use this line repeatedly over the years, including at the UN, as they worked toward the adoption of the ‘Zionism Is Racism’ resolution.

THE TURNING POINT: THE SIX-DAY WAR OF 1967

It was the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, however, that really intensified Soviet anti-Zionist campaigning. For Moscow, which had supported the Arab forces, the war was a crushing defeat, handing a clear ideological victory to the ‘imperialist’ camp. At home, Israel’s victory served as the catalyst for a national awakening among Soviet Jews. All of a sudden, the old enemy – international Zionism and its Jewish fifth column at home – seemed to be rearing its head. A new propaganda tool was needed to help shape public opinion at home and abroad.

On August 7, 1967, an article titled ‘What Is Zionism?’ appeared simultaneouslyin several Soviet publications. Its author, Yuri Ivanov, an employee of the KGB and Central Committee apparatus who would go on to become one of the leading Soviet anti-Zionist writers, took his clue from age-old tropes of Jewish conspiracy and influence: he presented Zionism as a centrally-controlled international system that gripped the entirety of global politics, finance and the media, had unlimited resources, and sought to establish monopolistic control over the entire world.

Similar articles followed, including one by Kichko, now back in favor. In 1968 he produced a new book, Judaism and Zionism. Building on his original ideas, he blamed Judaism for the ‘crimes’ of Israeli ‘aggressors.’ ‘There is a direct connection between the morality of Judaism and the actions of the Israeli Zionists,’ wrote Kichko. ‘Weren’t the actions of the Israeli extremists during their latest aggression against the Arab countries in keeping with the Torah?’

Kichko’s book was one of many Soviet publications that attempted to show that the evils of Zionism could be traced back to Judaism. Judaism had always been the bête noir of the Soviet struggle against religion, and it was persecuted with particular harshness. Even as a few synagogues continued to function into the 1970s and 1980s, the study of Hebrew was prohibited, and so was the training of the next generation of clergy, indicating that the Soviet leadership had clearly marked Judaism for extinction. The problem was that to paint every aspect of Jewish religion and tradition in black, rendered Soviet claims that they were not antisemitic but simply anti-Zionist, meaningless.

Next in the line of prominent Soviet anti-Zionist texts came Ivanov’s Caution: Zionism! The state-owned press greeted the 1969 book with rave reviews. The initial 70,000 print run was followed by three additional re-printings. Moving into the early years of the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of copies were put into circulation. The book was translated into sixteen languages and became one of Soviet anti-Zionism’s foundational texts. It described Zionists as representative of colonialist-imperialist powers, hostile toward the working people of Palestine and cultivating an insatiable thirst for power. It portrayed Judaism as the world’s most inhuman religion, one that had spawned the world’s most vicious nationalism. The supposed connection between Zionism and fascism received detailed treatment, as did the idea that ‘Israeli militarism and West German neo-Nazism are fed from the same source.’

Like Kichko before him, Ivanov devoted ample space to detailing Judaism’s idea of Jews as a ‘chosen people,’ which, he showed, demonstrated the supposedly racist underpinnings of Zionism. He also took time to discredit the idea of a single Jewish nation. He called the idea a Zionist invention that was ‘false and reactionary in content’: this notion, he claimed, had prevented Jews from comfortably assimilating into their host nations, promoted a ghetto mentality, kept the Jews separate, and consequently provoked antisemitism.

Some of these ideas could be traced back to the early Bolshevik discourse on the Jewish question, but in the new environment, they had a new purpose. With Ivanov’s book, the Soviet ideologists were sending their Jewish citizens a clear message: assimilate or be viewed as adherents of the most racist, reactionary, and genocidal religion and ideology on the planet—and suffer the consequences.

The book came out at a crucial time. The Six Day War led to a national awakening among Soviet Jews. Growing awareness of the tragedy of the Holocaust (the Soviets had sought to internally suppress information, in particular, about the Jewish aspects of Hitler’s war) was strengthening the Soviet Jewry’s Jewish identity. As the Soviet regime’s antisemitic rhetoric intensified, more Soviet Jews began to reach out to the United States and Israel for help. Arrests and trials on charges of Zionist activity began. In 1970, a group of 16 refuseniks attempted to hijack an empty plane to fly it to freedom. They were arrested before they even got to the plane. The harsh sentences that the group received – including two death sentences, later commuted as a result of an international outcry – drew attention abroad to their plight. The campaign for Soviet Jewry began to gather steam in the West.

Inside the country, the increasingly antisemitic anti-Zionist campaign continued unabated. Ivanov and Kichko were among a dozen or so primary anti-Zionist ideologues who throughout the campaign’s twenty year span produced some fifty books, with nine million copies in circulation, propagating ‘paranoid,conspiratorial anti-Zionism mixed with antisemitic, xenophobic, and ultra-nationalist messages, combined with anti-capitalist and anti-Western rhetoric,’ wrote historian Andreas Umland. Titles included Fascism under a Blue Star, which compared Zionism to fascism; De-Zionization (this one was translated into Arabic and published in Syria in 1979 on Hafez al-Assad’s direction); and Zionism and Apartheid, a deeply antisemitic tractate whose author was a fan of Nazi ideology and borrowed for his writings directly from Mein Kampf.

SOVIET JEWRY AND THE NAZI ANALOGY

In 1983, two new books from the same genre received international attention thanks to the US Jewish organisations engaged in the campaign for Soviet Jewry. One was called On the Course of Aggression and Fascism. It detailed Zionism’s alleged ‘criminal alliance with the Fascists’ and blamed the Zionists for the extermination of non-Zionist Jews during the Holocaust. The second, titled The Class Essence of Zionism, declared Jews a ‘fifth column in any country.’ The two books were written by a notorious antisemite with a doctoral degree Lev Korneev and must have been so egregious as to prompt an unexpected act of personal protest by a non-Jewish Soviet scholar. In the oppressive climate of the early 1980s USSR, it’s doubtful if anyone followed in his steps.

Each book publication spawned endless reviews and ‘analytical pieces’ aimed at different audiences, including the military, party functionaries, trade unions, and youth. The Academy played an important role in lending legitimacy to the effort through its ‘scholarly’ articles. Reporting on this output, the Washington Post observed in 1979: ‘Soviet bureaucrats vehemently reject suggestions that “anti-Zionism” means “anti-Semitism.” But to many Soviet Jews, it is a distinction without a difference.’

The campaign did not rely on printed word alone. The Soviets produced several documentaries to support the campaign. One was called The Concealed and the Apparent: Goals and Actions of the Zionists. With its manipulation of historical footage, deeply antisemitic imagery, and parallels between Zionism and Nazism, it was deemed so inflammatory as to be limited to selected audiences. Although it was never released to the broader public, the film, which is today available online, serves as a stark visual testimony to the deep connections between Soviet-style anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

What drove this campaign was the Soviets’ apparent belief that a vast Zionist conspiracy did, in fact, exist, and that this campaign aimed at undermining the Soviet Union and socialism itself. The more the West criticised the Soviet human rights record and its treatment of its Jewish minority, and the more the Soviet Jewry expressed a demand to emigrate, the more the authorities felt confirmed in their belief, and the more the campaign intensified.

The authorities engaged numerous resources to discredit the very idea of emigration. They claimed that those who had done so experienced nothing but misery abroad and were begging to come back. For foreign audiences, the message was that discrimination against their Jewish citizens was fiction, and that Soviet Jews had no desire to leave their motherland. Geared at English-speaking foreign audiences in particular were English-language booklets, published by the same Novosti Publishing House that distributed other Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda abroad. Their titles spoke for themselves: Soviet Jews: Fact and Fiction; The Deceived Testify: Concerning the Plight of Immigrants in Israel; and Deceived by Zionism.

By the mid-1970s the KGB felt the Zionist threat was so acute that it warranted establishing a special department to focus specifically on Zionism. American Jewish organisations were viewed as a particularly important link in the presumed anti-Soviet Zionist conspiracy. The Soviets believed the international movement for Soviet Jewry to be a cynical manipulation manufactured from the top in order to give a black eye to the Soviet image abroad and meddle in the country’s domestic affairs. Countless articles were devoted to discrediting it. According to Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, the Soviet secret services targeted some of the organisations involved in the movement by discrediting them and attempting to sow discord and confusion.

By the early 1980s, US-Soviet relations were hitting a new low, and emigration demands were surging. The newly created Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public provided the much-needed propagandistic boost, producing brochures and delivering press conferences on the evils of Israel and Zionism, including for foreign audiences. In a 1983 Pravda article announcing the launch of the Committee, its members declared Zionism a concentration of ‘extreme nationalism, chauvinism, and racial intolerance, justification of territorial seizure and annexation, armed adventurism, a cult of political arbitrariness and impunity, demagogy and ideological sabotage, sordid maneuvers and perfidy.’ A 1985 TASS broadcast commenting on one of the committee’s English-language brochures announced: ‘Zionist leaders are responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews annihilated by the Nazis. It is precisely the Zionists who assisted the Nazi butchers by helping them to make up the lists of the doomed inmates of ghettoes, escorting the latter to the places of extermination and convinced them to resign to the butchers.’

GLOBAL POLITICAL WARFARE

The Soviets didn’t limit themselves to fighting Zionism within their borders. An enemy such as this one had to be fought on multiple fronts, including through information warfare abroad. Here at their disposal was a powerful state-owned media apparatus whose goal was to ‘spread the truth about the USSR in all the continents’ (Hazan 2017, p. 49). It published numerous newspapers and magazines with a combined circulation of tens of millions of copies per year in English, German, Spanish, Hindi, French, Arabic, and other languages. Radio Moscow broadcast more than 1,000 hours per week, in eighty languages, to Europe, the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas. The Soviet Union’s main foreign broadcasting arm and primary carrier of foreign propaganda, the Novosti Press Agency, worked in over 110 countries. One of its tasks was to build relations with the local press (Hazan 2017: 31, 34-61). Numerous friendship societies were established by the Soviets abroad as well as front organisations designed to promote Soviet international interests, mobilise sympathisers, and offer propaganda support (Hazan 2017: 103-14).

The Soviet relationships with the local media meant that they could rely on these outlets, whenever necessary, to inject prefabricated items of a propagandistic or disinformation nature into the global news stream. Novosti could then pick these up and disseminate them throughout their network (Hazan 2017: 49). It was in this way that the Soviets scored one of their biggest Cold War disinformation successes: getting the CBS television anchor Dan Rather to broadcast to millions of viewers a version of a KGB-fabricated story of American scientists inventing the AIDS virus to kill African-Americans and gay people.

The Soviets structured their foreign anti-Zionist messaging in accordance with their specific foreign policy priorities for that country or audience. ‘Zionism played a role of a bugaboo,’ Israeli historian Nati Cantorovich told me. ‘In Africa it was about South African apartheid and Zionism. In Latin America it was about American imperialism and Zionism. In Asia, it was Japanese revanchism and Zionism.’

In 1970, for example, Soviet Weekly, a Soviet English-language outlet that targeted the United Kingdom, reprinted, in four consecutive issues, an article that defined Zionism as ‘not so much the Jewish nationalist movement it used to be but an organic part of the international – primarily American – imperialist machinery for the carrying out of neocolonialist policies and ideological subversion’ (Hazan 2017: 150). In 1977 the same publication printed a piece titled ‘Why We Condemn Zionism,’ which proclaimed Zionism to be a racist doctrine and characterised Israelis as ‘worthy heirs to Hitler’s National-Socialism’ (Wistrich 2012: loc 5882). Several Africa programs, in English, French, and Portuguese, broadcast on the same day in 1973, claimed that Zionism had ‘an ideological affinity with South African racism’ and was ‘part of the global strategy of imperialism aimed against the liberation movements’ (Hazan 2017: 152).

Numerous Soviet anti-Zionist books were translated and distributed abroad. According to the Israeli investigative reporter, Bergman, the 1979 Soviet anti-Zionist tractate titled The White Book, was distributed to a variety of audiences in thirty-two countries, including US and Canadian Communist Party leaders, ‘parliament members, ministers and social activists from different countries, libraries, as well as representatives of international organisations, libraries, and higher education institutions.’ Among the English-language propaganda brochures published by Novosti were: Zionism: Instrument of Imperialist Reaction, Soviet Opinion on Events in the Middle East and the Adventures of International Zionism, and Anti-Sovietism – Profession of Zionists, Zionism Counts on Terror and others.

Senior members of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public regularly published articles in foreign press and addressed foreign audiences. The head of the committee, General David Dragunsky, took part in Soviet Hebrew-language broadcasts directed at Israel. In October 1983 he appeared on Radio Damascus to boast of the Committee’s successes and to claim that its anti-Zionist work was receiving broad support from outside the USSR, including from Israel. He ensured the audiences of the Committee’s close relationship with the Arab world and especially Syria. Syria was one of the most militantly anti-Zionist states in the Middle East, and the Soviet-Syrian friendship treaty of 1980 specifically named Zionism a common enemy. In conveying his anti-Zionist message to Syrian audiences, Dragunsky was lending a helping hand to Soviet foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis the country (Korey 1989:35).

Arab-language anti-Zionist literature was an important part of Soviet propaganda directed at the Middle East. According to Bergman, it served as source material for Mahmoud Abbas’s 1982 Ph.D. dissertation. In the early 1980s, Abbas was enrolled at Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University, a school established to train future Third World elites in Marxism-Leninism and prepare them to become pro-Soviet influencers (Hazan 2017: 87-88). He defended his dissertation at Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies – an important institution within the Academy of Sciences, which regularly churned out ‘scholarly’ works demonizing Zionism and Israel. During Abbas’s tenure, the Institute was headed by Yevgeny Primakov, an Arabist with lifelong connections to Soviet intelligence in the Middle East, who would eventually head the Soviet foreign intelligence agency SVR. That Primakov personally appointed Abbas’s dissertation advisor shows the importance that the Soviet foreign policy and intelligence establishments attached to the educational output of this already prominent Palestinian leader.

Abbas’s dissertation was published as a book in 2011 in Arabic under the title The Other Side: The Secret Relationship between Nazism and Zionism. Several passages from the book reproduced in Bergman’s article, replicate some of the mainstays of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign, including those concerning the alleged Zionist collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust and casting doubt on the number of Holocaust victims.

A particularly curious piece of historical falsification that made it into Abbas’s book concerned Adolf Eichmann’s capture by the Mossad. According to Bergman, Abbas wrote that the Mossad abducted Eichmann in order to prevent the high-ranking Nazi from revealing the secret of Zionists’ role in the Final Solution.

Strikingly, the very same piece of fabrication was employed by a member of the Anti-Zionist Committee of the Soviet Public at a press conference in Moscow in June 1983. At the event, Yuri Kolesnikov, author of numerous works demonising Zionism and Israel, claimed that during the war the Zionists were ‘in league with the Gestapo and SS’ and that the Israelis executed Eichmann years later ‘to prevent the “sacred secrets” of this collaboration from becoming public.’ The repetition of the same provocation by these two individuals, who shared a connection to Soviet propaganda and intelligence structures, shows that they were drawing on the same source for their anti-Zionist claims.

THE TOXIC LEGACIES OF SOVIET ANTISEMITIC ANTI-ZIONISM

We have yet to understand fully how Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda influenced the world. In those individual instances where this influence is evident, it is apparent just how negatively it impacted the lives of Jews around the globe.

One instance of such influence is documented in Dave Rich’s book The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism. Rich details how the adoption of the ‘Zionism Is Racism’ resolution by the UN – an effort the Soviets spent a decade promoting – opened the door for British Students’ Unions to restrict the activities and funding of Jewish societies on campuses or even ban them.

The logic was simple: the UN has ascertained that Zionism is racism; Jewish societies declare their support for Israel; ergo Jewish societies are racist and cannot be tolerated on campus. British Student Unions ‘mostly did this for honorable anti-racist reasons, but in doing so they discovered something disturbing,’ writes Rich. ‘When you use the “Zionism is racism” idea as the basis for practical politics, you can end up with an antisemitic campaign’ (Rich 2016).

In July 1990, less than a year before the USSR fell apart, Pravda published an editorial admitting to the wrongs of the anti-Zionist campaign of the previous quarter century. ‘Considerable damage was done by a group of authors who, while pretending to fight Zionism, began to resurrect many notions of the antisemitic propaganda of the Black Hundreds and of fascist origin’, it read. ‘Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they came out with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism and on Jews in general.’ But the damage inflicted by the two decades of the campaign could not be undone with a single editorial. A 1990 Soviet poll showed that a significant percentage of Soviet citizens thought that Zionism was ‘the policy of establishing the world supremacy of Jews’ and an ‘ideology used to justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East.’

Among the organisations that had risen to prominence as perestroika lifted controls over civil society were the virulently anti-Semitic Pamyat (Memory) and Otechestvo (Homeland), which blended fascist and neo-Nazi ideas with a particular form of Russian ethnic ultranationalism. Some of their leaders were the same ideologues who had manufactured the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign. In the summer of 1988, as the Russian Orthodox Church prepared to celebrate the millennium of Christianity, rumors of impending pogroms sent the country’s Jews into panic. Two million Jews left the country in the following decade.

CONCLUSION: ‘WHEREVER AND WHENEVER THEY EMPLOYED ANTI-ZIONISM FOR THEIR POLITICAL PURPOSES, ANTISEMITISM BLOSSOMED’

One of the lessons that the late Soviet anti-Zionist campaign teaches is that anti-Zionism and antisemitism have historically been deeply and, possibly, inextricably intertwined. True to their ideological tenets, the Soviets never attacked the Jews in purely racist terms. Accused of antisemitism, they indignantly claimed that they were simply anti-Zionist. But wherever and whenever they employed anti-Zionism for their political purposes, antisemitism blossomed.

Examples of other countries further prove this point. Poland’s 1968 anti-Zionist campaign quickly degenerated into an antisemitic witch-hunt, resulting in expulsions and forced emigration of some 15,000 Jews. A recent investigationinto the US Women’s March revealed crude antisemitism hiding behind its leaders’ anti-Zionist rhetoric. UK Labour’s overt anti-Zionism has been revealed – including most recently by this publication – to have been a cover for vulgar, racist antisemitic sentiments.

Today, as some of the leading opinion-makers on the left are seeking to build consensus around the idea that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same, understanding this history is vitally important. As I have written elsewhere, claiming that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are not the same may make for an interesting intellectual exercise. What happens in practice is another matter.

At its core, the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign of 1967-1988 was a campaign of propaganda and disinformation. It built and weaponised narratives based on made-up or twisted facts. It distorted history. It employed classic propaganda tools such as deception, guilt by association, and repetition to inculcate the key messages. It shamelessly played on people’s sentiments, and it used both Soviet Jews and Muslims as instruments of propaganda (Hazan 2017: 230-93).

Despite its claims, the Soviet anti-Zionist campaign was hardly motivated by a search for justice, peace or liberation for the Palestinian people. Conceived by master propagandists, it was an instrument whose purpose was to divert attention, manipulate, solidify control, purge enemies, and broaden influence for one of the most oppressive regimes in humanity’s history.

A particular trick of Soviet anti-Zionism, according to the Israeli historian Kiril Feferman, was that it ‘proposed a version of antisemitism to Western audiences that did not have obvious antisemitic overtones.’ It did so by substituting anti-Zionism for antisemitism in its propaganda, which made it passable for the many well-intentioned, idealistic individuals who otherwise would have recoiled in disgust from this rhetoric. Yet, underneath the relatively benign covers, the messages of the campaign packed a powerful antisemitic charge.

The messaging emanating from today’s far-left anti-Zionist camp is strikingly similar to the messaging of the Soviet anti-Zionist campaigns. From the claims of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis in the Holocaust, to the idea of Zionism as an inherently racist and oppressive ideology, to the concept of Israel as a settler-colonialist state that engages in genocidal behavior and apartheid – all of these ideas were part and parcel of the Soviet anti-Zionist narrative.

More research is needed to shed light on the trajectory and impact of the ideas that the late Soviet anti-Zionist campaign brought forth. Soviet anti-Zionism borrowed from the tsarist Protocols and Hitler’s Nazi propaganda; it adapted those ideas to its Marxist-Leninist framework; and ended up fertilising the ideologies of post-Soviet Russian ultranationalism. Did its ideological precepts also influence the global left and its view of Zionism and Israel? If so, to what extent? Is it possible that some of those ideas have outlived the system that produced them? To answer these questions is to find a crucial missing link in our understanding of contemporary left antisemitism

je suis en colère

Je suis en colère.

Je suis étonné,

Chaque année pour l’anniversaire du Soulèvement du ghetto de Varsovie je  ressens la même colère.

Le souvenir revient des années 50-60 lorsque avec mon père nous allions à la cérémonie devant le monument.

Une compagnie de soldats, baïonnette, uniforme de parade , musique de Chopin (Szopin).

Une personne en vêtements rayés de déporté prononçait le kaddish en version ashkénaze, puis Elmore Rahamim.

Le discours classique, à la gloire des combattants polonais. Le combat héroïque de Żydówka Organizacja Bojowa ZOB et la lettre de Mordechaj Anielewicz était  lue. Le mot juif ne fut jamais prononcé.

Puis l'hymne national était  joué par une fanfare militaire.

Alors je croyais qu'en France les représentants des organisations juives allaient faire plus.

Et bien pas si sûr.

Les combattants du ghetto de Varsovie appartenant au Beitar ne sont jamais évoqués. Pourquoi ?

Même le vrai nom,Henryk Goldszmit, de Janusz Korczak n'est pas cité.

Comme en Pologne après la Shoah.

Pourquoi les représentants de la communauté juive française répètent-ils les discours staliniens ?

Pourquoi l’expulsion d’environ 15000 juifs en 1968 est-elle toujours ignorée ?

Pourquoi ?

Ignorance, chez certains oui.

D'autres pouvaient le faire mais c'est tellement commode.

J’observe que sur ~16 millions de juifs ~ en 1936, 11 millions ont disparu d’Europe orientale et centrale.

Henryk Paszt 

art Figaro's

L'art le figaro

L’article de Mr Mayeul Aldebert publié dans Le Figaro le 25 avril, dont le titre est : Entre la Pologne et l’Ukraine, le très sensible travail de mémoire autour des massacres de Volhynie est truffé d’inexactitudes et d’oublis.

Des le début on comprend l’objectif : évoquer les massacres des civils polonais par les Ukrainiens qui ont eu lieu a partir du 11 juillet 43, donc 2 ans après l’opération Barbarossa commencée en juillet 41. J’aimerais apporter quelques précisions sur cette période dans cette region. Des juillet 41 un gigantesque génocide de la population juive est commis par la population civile urkrainienne, massacres commis a la main, au couteau et a la hache. Par exemple dans la capitale de Volhynie Luck : hommes et garcons juifs ont enfermes dans la synagogue et brûlés vivants et les femmes violées, assassinées et les femmes enceintes eventrees. Deux semaines après, dans le village à côté de Luck, les auxiliaires nazis ont commencé des massacres par balles contre la population juive. On ne peut pas parler de la guerre entre les polonais et les Ukrainiens sans dire que la population juive, en juillet 43, était exterminée a quasiment 100 %, par les civils ukrainiens. Comment peut-on évoquer l’UPA sans évoquer le général soviétique A Vlasov qui rejoint les nazis avec 180 000 soldats soviétiques ? Bandera et Vlasov étaient des nationalistes ukrainiens. Ce massacre des juifs par les civils ukrainiens est l’un des plus importants massacre de juifs de la seconde guerre mondial, par la population civile. On ne peut pas parler de massacre de la population civile polonaise sans parler de ce qui s’est passé avant. Et après, car la population civile polonaise s’en est prise aux juifs qui restaient ! 

Le terme de “Shoah par balle” est réducteur, il se limite aux massacres commis par les Allemands, et aux moyens employés : ça n'était pas que par balles !

Par ailleurs pourquoi Mr Aldebert n’evoque-t-il pas la guerre que les Soviétiques ont déclenché en 1920 ? Elle était structurante dans les relations entre les populations polonaises, juives, et ukrainiennes ; les Ukrainiens ont notamment reproché ax juifs les quelques dizaines de milliers d’entre eux qui sont entres dans l’armee rouge, car les Ukrainiens et les polonais étaient pro-allemands..

Mr Aldebert fait l'impasse sur la Shoah qu'il qualifie de “Shoah par balles”...

Je suis particulièrement outre par ce genre de présentation tronquée a caractère négationniste car toute ma famille a été victime de massacre de Juifs en 1941, sans sépulture. Pour les juifs pas d’exhumation, car cela pourrait rappeler des mauvais souvenirs aux polonais et aux ukrainiens…

A l’aide du terme “Shoah par balles” le sujet des Juifs est évacué.

Henryk Paszt 

Une analyse stratégique 10/08/2024 :L’Iran est en train d'évaluer les pour et les contre d'ouvrir un conflit ouvert avec Israël.Ils savent que comme en avril, la coalition peut les empêcher d’atteindre ISR.Ils savent très bien que leur régime est menacé de l’intérieur.L’élimination de Haniyeh montre clairement que l'appareil de sécurité iranien est faible.D'ailleurs il est clair que le Mossad a mis la main sur des documents sur le nucléaire Iranien.L'aviation iranienne est vieille d’environ 45 ans donc chaque décollage peut être immédiatement stoppé.Les drones sont peu précis et très leurs vitesse est médiocre ( Avril) L’axe Iran , Turquie, Russie existe , cependant chaque partie a ses priorités souvent en contradiction avec celle des “ partenaires”.D'ailleurs au Moyen-Orient ça toujours été là cas.L’Iran contrôle un certain nombre de milices chiites.En Irak par exemple, certaines milices chiites sont davantage nationalistes et essaient de se libérer de l’emprise iranienne.Donc le Hamas est probablement à court terme une cause perdue pour la stratégie de domination du Moyen-Orient. Le Hezbollah est bien armé mais sans aviation. La Syrie…est uniquement dirigée par des clans qui s’opposent..Parallèlement l'aviation israélienne régulièrement bombardé les livraisons d'arme sur le corridor iran Syrie et l'aviation russe stationné a cote dans 3 bases n’intervient pas. Les Houthis constituent un atout car le contrôle du passage de la Mer Rouge est vital, vital pour tous les pays du monde. Les Houthis contrôlent le passage de 3 km. Y compris pour la Chine, la Russie, l'Egypte, il y a une perte actuellement d’environ 30% des revenus du Canal du suez) également pour les Émirats, Le Qatar, la France, le UK, l’Ukraine,.....Une coalition doit se constituer pour éliminer les Houthis.

distortions d'histoire des juifs

Il n'y a pas de signe égal entre la politique historique polonaise et israélienne [POLÉMIQUE AVEC KONSTANTY GEBERT]

Jan Grabowski

11–14 minutes

L'essence de la politique historique israélienne avec l'Holocauste en arrière-plan est la conviction que seul un État fort et propre est une garantie de la survie de la nation juive, ou - en regardant les choses sous un angle différent - l'Holocauste a été possible parce que les Juifs étaient à la merci (principalement en disgrâce) des non-juifs parmi lesquels ils vivaient. Gebert en est conscient et on ne peut être en désaccord avec ses conclusions sur ce point. Cependant, la situation est différente en ce qui concerne la description de la politique historique polonaise. Nous lisons dans Gebert : « La Pologne elle-même a commencé à appliquer sa propre politique historique, faisant de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et de ses conséquences immédiates un moment déterminant de l'histoire polonaise. Les deux tentatives [israéliennes et polonaises] sont tout aussi insensées, car en construisant une identité autour de la souffrance, ce sont surtout ceux qui veulent souffrir qui sont incités à le faire, parmi ceux qui veulent souffrir – comme le voudrait Gebert. il suffit de regarder la foule qui visite le musée de l'Insurrection de Varsovie.

Ce que Gebert oublie ou préfère ne pas écrire, ce qui diffère fondamentalement des politiques historiques polonaises et israéliennes concernant l'Holocauste, c'est le fait que si le récit juif est basé sur une hypothèse avec laquelle on peut être d'accord ou non, mais qui pour se défendre, la base de la politique historique polonaise est un simple mensonge. Un État d'Israël fort garantit-il la survie du peuple juif ? Est-il faux que les Juifs persécutés dans le monde n'aient nulle part où fuir un futur génocide ? On peut discuter, mais c'est une question ouverte, certainement digne de discussion. D'autre part, l'affirmation selon laquelle la société polonaise a traversé l'occupation sans tache, que la nôtre n'a pas participé au plan allemand de génocide des Juifs, que l'attitude dominante dans la société polonaise était la volonté d'aider ceux qui mouraient - ce sont tous des contes de fées et des mythes qui sont aujourd'hui alimentés par des nationalistes qui sont prêts à écouter les Polonais. 

Il suffit de citer ici les mots rarement mentionnés de Jan Karski, un courrier clandestin, qui, à l'hiver 1940, informa le gouvernement polonais en exil : « La nation hait son ennemi mortel – mais cette question [la solution de la » question"] crée une sorte de passerelle étroite sur laquelle, après tout, les Allemands et une grande partie de la société polonaise se rencontrent à l'unisson. À l'ère de l'auto-admiration nationale, les paroles de Karski devraient être trouvées, comme un antidote, sur l'information des panneaux à l'entrée de chaque exposition consacrée à l'occupation.

Déformer l'histoire de l'Holocauste

Par conséquent, comme le propose Konstanty Gebert, on ne peut pas mettre un signe égal entre les deux récits, car l'un d'eux est basé sur un mensonge grossier. Il convient également de rappeler que bien qu'Adolf Hitler ait perdu la guerre avec les Alliés, il a été victorieux dans la lutte contre la nation des Juifs polonais. Cette nation, avec ses propres traditions, sa propre langue, sa propre littérature et ses propres héros, a cessé d'exister. Il en reste aujourd'hui plusieurs milliers de personnes qui luttent pour trouver leur propre identité, basée sur des racines plus ou moins clairement définies. Pouvez-vous oser faire des comparaisons avec la nation polonaise ici ? Gebert résout ce problème en une phrase : « Dans le cas d'Israël, la seule justification possible est la double discontinuité radicale causée par la guerre. Le génocide a interrompu la continuité biologique de la nation qui, à ce jour, n'a pas retrouvé ses chiffres d'avant-guerre." Cela ne sonne pas bien.

La liste des institutions recommandées par la partie polonaise à la jeunesse israélienne comprenait des musées dédiés aux "soldats maudits", comme Józef Kuraś, le meurtrier des juifs. Pour Gebert, c'est un défi intéressant, un défi pédagogique : "Des éducateurs intelligents cependant pas protester contre de telles visites - bien au contraire." - écrit Gebert - "Après tout, il est difficile de trouver un meilleur moyen de renforcer l'identification des jeunes avec leur propre nation qu'en leur permettant d'expérimenter le récit de quelqu'un d'autre, qui fait l'éloge des meurtriers de juifs et déforme l'expérience de leurs sauveurs". Les enseignants israéliens joueront une guérilla avec des guides polonais - le fait est que les institutions qui glorifient les meurtriers de juifs ou celles qui - comme le Musée des Polonais sauvant les juifs à Markowa - ont été introduites dans le protocole diplomatique officiel - avec le consentement des autorités israéliennes - déforment et déforment l'histoire de l'Holocauste.

Pourquoi Samek Abrahamer est-il mort ?

La famille Abrahamer dans les années 1920. Samek - debout le premier à partir de la droite dans la rangée arrière - pose pour une photo avec son père Izrael et ses frères.

La famille Abrahamer dans les années 1920. Samek - debout le premier à partir de la droite dans la rangée arrière - pose pour une photo avec son père Izrael et ses frères. photo. Archives de Jan Grabowski

Je suis désolé, mais je ne peux pas écrire à ce sujet d'une manière aussi équilibrée. Au lieu de théoriser sur la valeur cognitive des musées des "soldats maudits", je propose de tenter, ne serait-ce qu'un instant, une immersion dans l'histoire. Zofia Scheinborn, qui l'accompagnait, a assassiné Zofia Scheinborn, âgée de vingt-deux ans. Samek a été tué d'une balle dans la tête, son compagnon d'une balle dans le cœur. Aujourd'hui, ils doivent être un modèle pour la jeunesse polonaise et l'objet de visites éducatives recommandées par l'État polonais (et maintenant aussi israélien).

Les victimes n'avaient rien à voir avec le communisme ou les nouvelles autorités. Il était propriétaire du moulin, elle était commis au moulin. Ce n'étaient que des juifs. Mon père et mes grands-parents n'osaient pas se rendre à Cracovie pour les funérailles de Samek. Pas étonnant qu'en 1946 d'autres "soldats maudits" aient fouillé les trains dans le cadre de la soi-disant action ferroviaire, traînant les Juifs hors des wagons et les assassinant dans toute la Pologne, et d'autres encore devaient bientôt prendre part au pogrom sanglant de Kielce, qu'il écrit en détail dans l'étude en deux volumes récemment publiée par le professeur Joanna Tokarska-Bakir.

Pour comprendre l'énormité de l'indignation qui a prévalu en Israël à la nouvelle de l'accord signé par Netanyahu et les autorités polonaises, il faut se rendre compte que des dizaines de milliers de familles israéliennes se souviennent de leurs parents éloignés et proches morts avec la participation des Polonais. Si l'indignation suscitée par ce scandale se traduit par des votes électoraux qui noieront un jour l'avenir politique de Netanyahu, tant mieux.

La tombe de Samek Abrahamer au cimetière juif de Cracovie

La tombe de Samek Abrahamer au cimetière juif de Cracovie. Archives de Jan Grabowski

La négation de l'Holocauste (connue en anglais sous le nom de négation de l'Holocauste) nie le fait même que l'Holocauste a eu lieu. Le négationnisme de l'Holocauste est une forme plus sophistiquée de déni, dont le but est de prouver que les Juifs ont été assassinés, mais les Allemands l'ont fait, et notre peuple n'a rien à voir avec cela.

Au terme de ses réflexions, Konstanty Gebert écrit sur l'accord signé par Israël et la Pologne comme "un succès presque complet de la partie polonaise", la négation de l'Holocauste, qui devient ainsi l'interprétation officielle de la politique historique polonaise.

Jan Grabowski, professeur d'histoire à l'Université d'Ottawa, membre de la Société royale du Canada

There is a clash of civilisations’: An interview with Benny Morris

In this in-depth interview, Israeli historian Benny Morris speaks with Professor Gabriel Noah Brahm about his work, his critics and his regrets. He also charges Western academics with dishonesty about the Middle East, gives his prognosis for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and outlines his view of Israel’s place in the ‘Clash of Civilisations’.

 Benny Morris hasn’t changed. One of the world’s leading chroniclers of the Arab-Israeli conflict tells the truth as he sees it, based on the facts he discerns as a historian. While some have perceived a dramatic shift from the ‘old’ (more optimistic and liberal) Morris of the Oslo period to the ‘new’ (more realistic/pessimistic) Morris of today, this is something of a myth. He hasn’t changed what he says about the reality of 1948, the Palestinian refugees, or anything else. Rather, he has added, to his knowledge of the history of Israel’s rebirth as a modern nation-state, a painful analysis of more recent history. When Yasser Arafat walked away from Israeli peace offers in 2000 and 2001, a disillusioned Morris started to examine the possibility that the Palestinians weren’t serious about wanting a two-state deal. He has since come to rate more highly the importance of Islamism and jihadism as forces driving Palestinian rejectionism.Moreover, as a firebrand who tends to ‘call a spade a spade’, he is irked by a censorious political correctness that limits what can be talked about honestly —  policing thought in line with ‘Western guilt’ over colonialism. He is equally disdainful of the romantic cult of ‘the Other’ in academia that tries to assuage that guilt. He regrets not the substance of any of the things he has said, but only the ‘intemperate’ way he expressed himself on occasion. We talked about his books and his thoughts about the future of Israel and the region at his home.

 ALBERT CAMUS’S MOTHER: JUSTICE OR MORALISM?

Gabriel Noah Brahm: You’ve been both widely celebrated and also condemned by some for your work. Have you paid a price for your outspokenness and originality?

Benny Morris: I’m not sure that’s what the price is paid for. I certainly paid a price for writing things that the Israeli establishment wasn’t happy with in the late 1980s and 1990s. But The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem andIsrael’s Border Wars also won me a place in an Israeli university — so it cuts both ways. I was unemployed for six years — you pay a heavy economic price for that. But on the other hand, it got me a type of position that I wanted. So I’m not bitter.

GNB: Responding to critics, you once said that you respected Albert Camus’s aperçu about his mother — whom he happened to prefer, for some strange reason, to the moralising Jean-Paul Sartre’s endorsement of revolutionary violence directed at civilians in the name of a pristine concept of justice. ‘When he referred to the Algerian problem, he placed his mother ahead of morality’, you said, adding that, in your own case, by analogy, ‘Preserving my people is more important than universal moral concepts’. Haven’t morals got to be consistently applied?

BM: I’m not sure I would say ‘placed his mother before morals’. One type of moral value is wanting your mother to stay alive. And the same applies, I suppose, to the Jewish people. I think it’s a value to want to preserve your people, and that’s more important to me than some universal values which speak in terms of absolutes but don’t look concretely at what is happening.

Looking concretely is what Camus did in Algeria. He understood that the Arab struggle for independence was going to cost one and a half million colonists dearly. He thought this was going to be a tragedy and wanted some kind of rapprochement between the nationalist Arabs and the immigrants who had arrived 100 years before. It didn’t work out that way. But he thought that the Europeans in Algeria, because of the history of the place, also deserved a place in the sun.

GNB: Undiluted commitment to an abstract, theoretical idea of ‘justice’ may in fact not always be just in practice. Can it also be moral to care about one’s own?

BM: To care for your own people as well as others is not contrary to universal morality. Many people try to pose it as such, as contrary to universal ‘human values’. I think that’s mistaken. One has to look at the reality of things, and not just talk of abstract concepts which are often very difficult to apply. You may cause far more injustice by trying to apply what you call ‘justice’ than by trying to find some sort of middle way.

SEEING THE PALESTINIANS PLAIN: THE LONGEST JIHAD?

GNB: Your work has been hugely controversial. Looking back, would you do anything differently if you could?

BM: To be completely honest, in the interview with Ari Shavit, in Haaretz in 2004, I should have said some things in a more temperate way. Not that I have a problem with what I said, but there were one or two phrases which provided ammunition to hostile critics . But I don’t think I have changed anything I have ever written. I would take nothing back regarding my views about 1948 or the conflict, because what I wrote originally and what I continue to write is always based on persuasive evidence.

Politically, the thing which has changed for me (and you can see that in my journalism), is my view of the Palestinians and their readiness to make peace with the Israelis. This is the crux. I would say that in the 1990s, while I was not persuaded by Arafat — the man was always a vicious terrorist and a liar — I thought then maybe he is changing his approach, because he now accepts the realities of power and what is possible.

But when it came to the crunch, when he was offered a two-state solution in 2000 by [Ehud] Barak, and then got an even better offer from [Bill] Clinton at the end of 2000, Arafat said ‘no’. And I think this was the defining moment for me. He was simply unable to reach a compromise with Israelis.

GNB: And that affected you how, exactly?

BM: From that point on, I lost a lot of sympathy for the Palestinians — and I came to understand that they are not willing to reach a two-state solution. And then there was Mahmoud Abbas’s rejection in 2008 of the Ehud Olmert proposals, which were fairly similar to the Clinton proposals of December 2000. Abbas was offered a state with 95 to 96 per cent of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, and he too said ‘no’.

I understood that it wasn’t really a question of a bit of territory here or there —  it was a matter of the Palestinians non-acceptance of the legitimacy of the Jewish state. That was what lay behind Abbas’s inability to accept any Jewish state next to a Palestinian state. This is really what it has always been about: for Arafat, for Abbas, and before them for [Haj Amin] al-Husseini in the 1930s and 1940s.

Let me add that during the 1990s I was working on my book, Righteous Victims, in which I looked at the conflict from its origins until 1999. Before that, I had written about segments of the conflict, about the emergence of the Palestinian refugee problem and about the 1950s, but in the 1990s I devoted my time to writing a comprehensive history of the clash between the two peoples — between the Zionists and the Arab world. I came to the conclusion, on the basis of what I read about the conflict during that decade, that the Palestinian Arabs were not willing to reach a compromise. What happened in 2000 capped the conclusions I had more or less reached on the basis of the material that went into Righteous Victims. I understood that even if there were some Palestinians who were genuinely moderate and conciliatory, and willing to live with a two-state solution, they would always be out-flanked, or crushed, by the much larger segment of the Palestinians who would be completely rejectionist.

Abbas can’t reach a solution. Even if he were a real moderate, he would never sign on the dotted line. First, he would be shot by the Hamasnicks. Second, even if he wasn’t shot by the Hamasnicks, the deal would come unstuck because Hamas would send out suicide bombers and enrage the Israeli right. There are simply too many extremists; the moderates end up bowing to their will. This is what always happens when it comes to the crunch.

GNB: Was it then, a matter of a shift in focus — from a close-up look at the origins of the refugee problem, where you’re naturally feeling more sympathy for the Palestinian refugees, to the bigger picture, where it was not so easy to retain as much sympathy?

BM: Yes, maybe that’s true. The focus of my original work on the refugees, and then my subsequent book on the infiltration problem and the border wars, did look more narrowly at the Palestinians and the bad things that happened to them. And this, with any normal, decent person, would generate sympathy — so this is true. But when you look at the wider picture, you end up attributing to them a great deal of responsibility for what happened as well.

GNB: To return to the question of Palestinian  rejectionism, Norman Finkelstein and Avi Shlaim have questioned the narrative you present, arguing that both the Palestinians and the Israelis did not accept the Clinton parameters.

BM: This is not true. The response by the PLO to the Clinton parameters, which was published and is on the internet, is essentially a complete dismissal of any compromise on the ‘right of return’, which is crucial—the Palestinians offered no conciliation.

On the matter of territories, they were vague and they certainly didn’t accept what Clinton outlined — 94 to 96 per cent of the West Bank, 100 per cent of the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem —  all of this is insufficient for them. The Temple Mount, where Clinton offered a number of different alternatives — Israeli-Palestinian condominium, the Arabs owning the Temple Mount surface, the Jews owning the interior — these are variations on a compromise. On these there was no give at all by Arafat.

Clinton in his autobiography, and Denis Ross in The Missing Peace, both insist that the Palestinian response was a total rejection of the Clinton parameters. Whereas Clinton said the Israeli response (which incidentally Israel didn’t publish, and the Americans never published, though most of it is in my book,One State Two States), was much, much closer to the details of the Clinton parameters. In other words, there were one or two things that Barak’s government wanted revised or re-discussed. They wanted more than 4-6 per cent of the West Bank — they wanted up to 8 per cent. But that was ‘up for discussion’. The same applied to the Temple Mount, and the sacred basin around the Old City. I don’t think Shlaim and Finkelstein are correct on this.

The Arafat response to the Clinton parameters, when a historian looks at it, is completely commensurate with the previous responses over many decades of Palestinian leaders to international and bilateral proposals for a compromise peace.

In 1937, the British Peel Commission put the first two-state solution on the table. Haj Amin al-Husseini and the Arab world (save for Prince Abdullah in Transjordan) all said ‘no’, and went back to rebelling against the British. They said ‘no’ to a peace proposal which actually gave them close to 80 per cent of Palestine’s land surface, and gave the Jews 17 per cent. But the Arabs said ‘no, we don’t want this compromise, they [the Jews] don’t deserve one inch of Palestine!’

In 1947, the international community put a second two-state solution on the table in the form of UN General Assembly Resolution 181, on 29 November 1947 — and the Arab world and the Palestinians again rejected it. That resolution offered the Palestinians something like 45 per cent of the country and the Jews 55 per cent.

Their problem wasn’t only in the percentages, which had now turned less favourable to the Palestinians. The problem was with the entire concept of partition and a two-state solution. They said all of Palestine belongs to us, and that is the only solution we will accept. And the Jews, some of them, can live here as a minority.

Essentially Arafat did the same thing in 1978, in response to Sadat and Begin’s proposal, at Camp David, of Palestinian autonomy. He did the same in 2000, with the Clinton parameters, and Abbas did the same thing with Olmert’s offer in 2008. The problem here, when you look at it as a historian, is the consistency one sees in the rejection of a two-state compromise. This is what should make reasonable people depressed.

 OBSTACLES TO PEACE

GNB: In the US and Europe, of course, liberal folks think the obstacle to peace is the settlements.

BM: Look, the problem is that settlements are an expression of occupation and expansionism. The settlements are the symbol of the fact that Israel has been in occupation of the Arab territories in one way or another since 1967. We left the Gaza strip, but we can still control the airspace, the borders, the water. We control everything — even though we are physically not in the Gaza Strip. And in the West Bank, there are a large number of settlements which express the will of some of the Israeli public to expand and take over the West Bank in general.

Many in the West have been living with things as they have been since 1967. They don’t go back to 1967 and look at why Israel conquered these places, or why it ended up retaining these places, even in the first years of occupation. They look at what exists now, and they see tanks vs. Kalashnikovs, and Israelis basically stealing land from Palestinians. This dominates their view of what the conflict is about, and it’s a mistake. But the Palestinians of course understand this and exploit it.

The problem is that the Arabs rejected Zionist and Jewish presence in the area. They rejected the legitimacy of the Zionist and Jewish claims to even part of Palestine, and they continue to do that. But now they say, ‘well, the conflict is because of the settlements and the occupation’.  What I would say is this: the settlements and the occupation are obstacles to peace, without doubt; but the bigger obstacle is the essential rejectionism of the Palestinian national movement. The religious wing of the Palestinian movement is open about this, while the so-called secular variety (which is really not so secular) is more subtle. But for both, their rejectionism is the essential driving force of the conflict.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we have a prime minister who is very right wing — a prime minister who appears dishonest, where you don’t know what he’s actually thinking or what he’s after. One day he says ‘two states’, one day he says ‘no two states’, so he generates a great deal of mistrust amongst enlightened people across the world. He may generate trust in the Katamonim [a Jerusalem neighbourhood] in Israel, but most thinking people don’t trust the man, and this includes most thinking Israelis as well. Abbas appears to be a much more genial character than [Bibi] Netanyahu. He dresses in suits, he speaks the language of two states — he sounds normal. And Netanyahu sounds fishy.

GNB: Do you think it would have made a difference if Isaac [‘Bougie’] Herzog had won the last election in Israel?

BM: We’d be a bit better off, in terms of image and in terms of relations with the wider western world. We wouldn’t be any closer to peace, though, because I don’t think Herzog has it in him to do what is necessary. And even if he does what is necessary, I’m not sure that would bring peace either.

Somebody like Sharon might have been able to deliver Israeli withdrawal from the territories. He did this with the Gaza Strip and slightly with the West Bank. He promised or seemed to promise that this is what he would do — a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, if you cannot reach an agreement with the Palestinians. This wouldn’t have led to peace because, as I say, the Palestinians seem to want all of it — not just the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But, at least in terms of Western public opinion and governments, unilateral Israeli withdrawal from 90 per cent of the West Bank, back to what is called the Defence Barrier, this would certainly put us in better stead amongst Western governments and publics.

But the Palestinians — or a large segment of them — would continue the fight, shoot rockets into Israel, make life unlivable in Tel Aviv, or flights untenable at Ben-Gurion International Airport. And Israel would have to reconquer the West Bank.

But maybe the Palestinians would surprise me by not shooting rockets if we withdrew from the West Bank. If Israel gave that a chance, at least, as I say, we would be doing the right thing in terms of the West.

 ISRAEL AND THE ‘CLASH OF CIVILISATIONS’

GNB: Is there a ‘clash of civilisations’ taking place in the world?

BM: I think there is a clash of civilisations. There are Western values at odds with an Islamic world whose attitude to life, to political freedom, to creativity, is completely different.

Arab regimes are all dictatorships — there’s absolutely no value to human life in such regimes. Families care for their loved ones, but the regimes themselves don’t show a great respect for civil liberties, nor for life in general in the Arab world.

The Islamic world is resurgent, and the radical wing in Islam is furthering the idea of actually taking over the world and turning it into one Islamic polity — a Caliphate. In other words, Islam is the correct religion, everything else is wrong and Allah’s will is that Islam dominate the earth. This is what the radical Islamists want, though Hamas at the moment is busy with us so it doesn’t express its universal pretensions. Other movements like Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, ISIS —they talk more bluntly about a universal message, which they are trying to both propound and achieve around the globe. So yes, there is a clash of civilisations.

Leaders like Obama would prefer to wish away this clash of civilisations. Many television stations completely ignore it and, like Obama, don’t use the words ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islamist’ when it comes to terrorism — they just talk about ‘international terrorism’ or ‘extremism’. Well, the real problem is Islamic terrorism and Islamic pretensions to world dominance. The fact that they sell millions of Osama [Bin-Laden] t-shirts in Cairo or Pakistan is a sign that they are popular. It’s not just some minor, small extremist group.

GNB: That all goes contrary to politically correct dogma.

BM: Yes, they say that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate and peace loving and the same as us. I don’t know if this is true. Maybe [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, who heads IS [Islamic State], had it right when he gave a sermon and said Islam is not a religion of peace.

He didn’t say that it is a religion of war, but that’s what he meant when he said it’s not a religion of peace. And then he said ‘we have to go out on jihad’. I think a lot of Arabs believe that. I think they believe the West has been aggressing against them. They don’t see it as a resurgent Islam attacking the West, but as a resurgent Islam defending itself against what they see as a Western incursion. And Israel is seen as the front line of the incursion. This is our problem.

The truth is that the Zionist movement did define itself as a Western movement, with Western ideals of democracy and development. The Arabs who saw us come here in the 1880s, 1890s, and early 1900s, regarded us as an extension of the West. So it’s not just us, it’s them as well — we all see Israel as a part of the West and unfortunately we are at the forefront of this battle line of the clash of civilisations. There are other places where East meets West. Northern Nigeria, Northern Kenya bordering on Somalia, the Philippines, Thailand — these are the border lands between Islam and the West. And we’re one of them, unfortunately.

GNB: In your view, was the Palestinian rejection of Israel always rooted in Islamism? Was 1948 a jihad?

BM: One of the things I understood from my work in the 1990s, and later, is that Islam plays a major role in the hatred of the Zionist movement by Arabs in the Middle East and in Palestine. It’s not just a political matter of territory; it’s also a matter of religion and culture which opposes the arrival of the infidel and his taking of Muslim holy land.

Sometimes Palestinian rejectionism is more political in nature, while at other times, such as now, Islam plays  a major role in Palestinian thinking about the conflict with Israel and the Zionist movement. In 1929 the big riots were all about the Temple Mount and the Wailing Wall and how these holy places are being threatened by the ‘infidel Jews’. We’re in one of those times again, partly because the entire Islamic world has radicalized, including the Palestinians. When I was young, you could walk in the streets of East Jerusalem and never see veiled women. Never. So the Muslim Arabs of Palestine have changed over the last 40 years, and this is a reflection of what has happened in the Muslim Arab world in general.

You can’t avoid the conclusion that Islam is playing a major role in what’s happening. The business of the suicide bombers is another indication, Hamas are the people who in a sense introduced it into the conflict between us and the Palestinians at the end of the First Intifada and it got stronger at their Second Intifada.

Occasionally Israel captured would-be suicide bombers whose vest didn’t work or who were weak-willed and didn’t blow themselves up. Some were from the Fatah, which had begun to copy Hamas and send out suicide bombers. When they interrogated the Fatah ‘secular’ suicide bombers, they found that their motivation was exactly the same as the Hamas suicide bombers: religion, the 70 virgins and paradise, and all the rest of it. The secularism of the Fatah is not that deep. It’s maybe a varnish. When you look into what drives the Fatah member towards resistance, especially towards suicide bombing — you will find he is exactly the same as the Hamasnik.

GNB: It’s not an optimistic picture. Yet in Israel, you’re considered on the left. You’re a man of the Left, you refused to serve in the West Bank.

BM: No, I’m not sure I’m considered on the Left I used to be considered a left-winger because of the subject of my writing — the Palestinians. Nobody had looked at them before, at the refugee problem. Just your choice of subject puts you on the Left in Israel.

However, it’s true I refused service in the West Bank and was jailed in 1988. I consider myself a man of the Left, if the left in Israel is defined, at least in foreign policy terms, as somebody who supports a two-state solution. A lot of leftist Israelis by now wouldn’t regard me that way —because I’m pessimistic about a two-state solution and essentially say it’s the Palestinians who will never agree to a two-state solution. Some left-wing Israelis regard me as a right-winger because I have said that the Palestinians are to blame for the continuation of the conflict.

ACADEMIA, BDS, AND THE POLITICS OF MENDACITY

GNB: In your famous interview with Ari Shavit in 2004 which you mentioned, you said something else in particular that interested me very much: ‘I am trying to be realistic. I know it doesn’t always sound politically correct, but I think that political correctness poisons history. In any case it impedes our ability to see the truth’. How much of a factor is ‘political correctness’ today? How important is the phenomenon itself—both in the academy and in the wider political arena?

BM: Political correctness in academia means that there are certain things which you can’t say even if the evidence and the documents tell you that that’s what happened — you can’t say these things because they sound wrong. If a document from 1936 says ‘the Arabs in this village are out to slit the throats of all their neighbours’, a politically correct academic will tell you, ‘well you can’t say “The Arabs”, you have to say ‘three Arabs in the village’. But the document actually says ‘the Arabs in the village’, it doesn’t say ‘three particular Arabs’. It says they’re jihadists, and you say ‘well you can’t identify them as jihadists’, maybe it’s wrong to even use the term. The problem is the moment you start paring down the truth of what the documents are telling you, you end up with history that isn’t true. You end up with a distorted view of what actually happened. I think this happens in some Western academics’ approach to the Middle East.

I’m talking about Middle East Studies departments. It’s not just a matter of political correctness; it’s also a matter of access to assets and to material and money which you need in order to function as an academic. You want grants; you want to be able to visit Damascus. If somebody wants to talk to you, you want to be able to get to him. If you say the wrong things, then you won’t get a visa to Tehran or wherever. You see it occasionally vis-a-vis Turkey. I used to see people refusing to actually call a spade a spade when it came to the genocide of the Armenians, because they wanted access to Turkish materials.

Middle East Studies departments in America look to the Arab Middle East — they don’t care about Israel. Israel isn’t really in the Middle East for them. It’s not part of their domain; their domain is the Arab/Muslim countries. Those are the ones you have to keep in with; otherwise you can’t even function properly and get access to the material.

There is also an element of guilty conscience in all of this. The West did misbehave toward the Arab and other Third World countries; so some try to make amends by leaning over backwards and depicting the Arabs more positively today, even if that’s not actually the reality.

GNB: You’ve said that you don’t think Israeli Jews would survive or would wish to remain as a minority in a future ‘one-state solution’. In Israel it’s completely common to talk about ‘the demographic question’, yet demography-talk can sound strange if not culpable to non-Israeli ears.

BM: Yes, people who talk about demography are vulnerable to the charge of racism. The point is that the most of the world is divided into nation states in which there is a majority of one people in a country, sometimes with minorities, sometimes without. It’s true that America is an unusual country. It’s an immigrant society; it’s not a normal nation state. In the Middle East, nationality counts for a lot. We even see this happening in the break-up of countries like Syria and Iraq, in which particular ethnic groups that see themselves as nations want a separate domain. They don’t want to be merged or overwhelmed by a majority in their country.

Arabs and Jews haven’t been able to live well together over the past 100 years — they have been in constant conflict and to believe that they will live in peace in a ‘one-state solution’ is contrary to what history has been telling us has been happening. What we do know is that the Arab world in general used to have Jewish minorities that no longer exist. Jews did not in the end feel comfortable living there. In fact, they were intimidated into leaving the Arab world and that’s why there are not Jewish communities in Yemen, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria —they all used to have large Jewish communities, and they have all vanished. The way that nation states and nationalism has developed in the Middle East basically alienated them, and threw them out.

The same would apply to a Palestine in which there was a majority of Arabs — especially given this increase in Islamic radicalism. Jews never actually faired that well in the Islamic world, and there’s a sort of myth about how nice and good relations were among Jews and Arabs in the Islamic world over the centuries. It is nonsense. Jews were tolerated because they were a very small minority and didn’t threaten anybody. If they had become much larger perhaps they would have been treated more violently; as it was they were mistreated and oppressed and there were pogroms all over the Arab world over the centuries. So expecting Jews who would turn into a minority in a united Palestinian state to want to stay here rather than go off to America and live a normal life in a tolerant democracy is nonsense. Those who say that Jews and Arabs in Palestine would live in peace and mutual tolerance in a single state are being dishonest — or are either too naïve or too ignorant to be allowed to publish books and articles.

When Arabs say ‘well, why can’t the Jews live with us together as equals in a joint society?’ this is nonsense. They’re presenting an imaginary future to Westerners that sounds like coffee shops in New York, but actually it’s not — we are talking about the Middle East. It’s not New York. A hundred years of what has happened between Israelis and Palestinians, the centuries of what happened to Jews in Arab lands, all of this means that the Arabs are not speaking honestly when they speak about living jointly in some sort of parity. Demography would tell. If it’s one person one vote, then they would control of what happened in the state and the Jews would of course prefer to leave. Arabs understand that. They are being dishonest.

GNB: The BDS [boycotts, divestments and sanctions] movement has been getting attention in Israel lately. Meanwhile, it’s been dismissed as fundamentally mendacious by everyone from Dennis Ross who calls it a ‘dishonest movement’, to Norman Finkelstein who calls it a disingenuous ‘cult’. Although the movement leaders pretend otherwise at times — for the sake of convenience, in order to seduce more reasonable people — BDS is in fact focused around achieving the ‘one state’ that you are so sceptical of, and have written about in your book, One States, Two States. Do you have any observations about BDS?

BM: There are different people working in the BDS movement and they say different things. I assume that the most vocal people, like Omar Barghouti, do support one statism and, as I say, I don’t think it’s honest because I think they are basically striving for an Arab-Muslim majority state. I think they understand there’s no reason to expect a Palestinian Arab state to be any more tolerant than any of the neighbouring Arab states. There is no reason for them to behave differently from Arabs in Syria, Arabs in Egypt, or Arabs anywhere else. I think they know that. They know that they won’t, and some of them also will acknowledge that there is a growing Islamist radicalisation among them, which would also not allow for coexistence because Islamic radicals think the Jew is an ‘ape’ or ‘pig’, as defined in the Quran.

EDWARD SAID AND 1948: NATIONS AND NARRATIONS

GNB: In 1998, in a meeting between Palestinians and some Israeli ‘New Historians’, Edward Said said that ‘one of the most remarkable things about the Israelis, except for [Ilan] Pappé, is the profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia, that informs their work. Benny Morris, for example, 10 years ago wrote the most important work by an Israeli on the birth of a Palestinian refugee problem. Morris’s meticulous work showed that in district after district commanders had been ordered to drive out Palestinians, burn villages, systematically take over their homes and property, and yet strangely enough, by the end of the book, Morris seems reluctant to draw the inevitable conclusions from his own evidence. Instead of saying outright that the Palestinians were in fact driven out, he says that they were partially driven out by Zionist forces and partially left as a result of war. It is as if he was still enough of a Zionist to believe the ideological version that Palestinians left on their own, without Israeli eviction rather than completely to accept his own evidence which is that Zionist policy dictated Palestinian exodus’. How do you respond? Said clearly thought that you didn’t understand your own work!

BM: You have to look at the facts of history: there were two national movements striving for territory in Palestine. The international community proposed a compromise between the two movements, giving to each part of the territory, so that they each would have a small state. The Palestinians said no and went to war — this is the basic fact of what happened in 1947.

There was a war which they started, the Palestinians attacked the Jewish community, maybe wanting to destroy it, maybe not, but they attacked the Jewish community and said ‘no’ to the compromise. They were joined subsequently by the armies of surrounding Arab states in an attack on the newborn State of Israel, and in the course of the war, the Israeli side, for reasons of war, ended up conquering territory and conquering hundreds of Arab villages and towns. This is what was necessitated by the circumstances of the war, and Palestinians fled in large numbers as a result of these military operations. Here and there, some of them were expelled by Jewish troops; here and there, some of them fled because Arab leaders told them to; by and large, people left their homes as a result of fear of the encroaching war.

In all places — and this is completely correct if you look at the facts — Israel did not allow the refugees to return. But then you say, well, what is the Israeli argument for not allowing these 700,000 people, who were innocent, to return to their homes? If you let them back in, you are basically inviting a destabilising minority, or even a majority, as it would have turned out, who want to stab you in the back. So the Israeli government at the time, and still to this day, rejects the idea of a mass return of refugees who would be disruptive of the existence of the Jewish state. You have to look at it politically. Israel would have been committing suicide by taking back, in 1949, the refugees, and would be committing suicide today.

What befell the individual Palestinians and their families — and not everybody went to war, not everybody was shooting at Israelis — has to also be looked at in a national political context, not just in terms of individual rights. That’s the only way of looking at history.

It’s unfortunate, and I can understand what Said is saying; but you should be able to understand what I’m saying. I don’t think it is reasonable of him to have expected Jews to commit suicide in 1949 and let the refugees back. And it’s not reasonable for him to expect that Israel would accept a mass refugee return today. On the UN rolls there about five million Palestinian refugees; Palestinians say there are about six million or even more. There are six million Jews in Israel today and one and a half million Israeli citizens who are Arab. If you add six million Palestinian refugees returning to one and a half million Arabs that are citizens of Israel, you end up instantly with a majority of Arabs in the Jewish state — which means it is no longer a Jewish state, which means the Jews would be committing suicide to allow these people to return en masse. It’s as simple as that.

GNB: Do you know, as a historian, what percentage of Arab Palestinians fled versus what percentage were really expelled?

BM: There is no way of working out the percentages, because even those who were expelled left in part because of all sort of things that happened to them over the months of warfare.

In most cases, as I say, there weren’t expulsion orders. We know that in places like Ramla there were large expulsions, but we know in other places, like Haifa, the local Arab leadership instructed the Arabs to leave the town and in most places people just left because it was war. That’s what people do in most places if they don’t want to be in a war zone — because you can get killed, your daughter can get raped, all sorts of nasty things happen in war, especially in civil wars.

GNB: Why do you think there were, relatively speaking, so few atrocities in 1948? You’ve written that there were around 900 or so Arabs massacred.

BM: I would say that all together, during the 1948 war, which lasted from the end of 1947 to the beginning of 1949, around 800-900 Arab civilians or prisoners of war were deliberately killed in massacres, when you take all of the various 20 or so incidents. I would also say that between 200-300 Jews were massacred by Arabs in the course of the war. In general, I would say there were very few massacres in this war compared to civil wars, say, in Spain in the 1930s, or Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Rape almost was unheard of — perhaps a dozen incidents, in a year-long war in which civilian populations were overrun.

I would say that, by and large, the Jews — there is no other way of saying it — behaved well in the 1948 war, given the circumstances of Arab attack and fear of a holocaust at Arab hands. The quality and quantity of massacres were very small by comparison to other civil conflicts around the world in the modern age, and certainly in past centuries.

Why so few Jews were massacred by Arabs is because the Palestinian Arabs and Arab armies conquered only a very small number of Jewish villages during the war. I would add that, by and large, Arab armies behaved well in terms of their prisoners — they abided by the Geneva Conventions and didn’t massacre prisoners; especially the Jordanians, who had the largest number of Israeli prisoners.

Even the Syrians and the Egyptians by and large respected the Geneva Conventions and did not massacre Jews. On the other hand, the Israelis overran 400 Arab villages and towns in the course of 1948 — many of them with civilians in them. And the number of those massacred is very small.

ON ARI SHAVIT’S MY PROMISED LAND

GNB: I wonder if you think Ari Shavit’s gambit will work in his bestselling book,My Promised Land. It seems to me that he hopes to be seen as having shone a light once and for all into every dark corner of what he called ‘Zionism’s black box’, so that he can, in effect, mixing metaphors, hit the ‘reset’ button on Israel’s reputation. But there are those who contest his telling of certain events; for example, what happened in Lydda. Is the book accurate? And can it do the job of persuading people that Israel is a country without secrets; flawed to be sure but a miracle none the less, and a progressive cause that deserves support from liberals among others?

BM: The book is a problem because it — I think it’s delibérate — pretends to be both pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist at the same time. It does project the good things about Israel — its creativity, its gathering of Jewish communities in distress, and so on. It also highlights the negative side of Zionism, vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and highlights what happened in Lydda, where there was a massacre and mass expulsion.

GNB: Would you call it a massacre?

BM: I definitely would call it a massacre.

GNB: Not fighting?

BM: Documents say that about 250 Arabs were killed in Lydda on 12 July 1948. They also tell us that between two and four Israelis died in that battle. So the disparity points to massacre. There was a battle — it didn’t happen out of the blue with people put against a wall and shot down. That’s not what happened.

There was a fire fight, and there was sniping at Israeli troops, and the commanders of the Israeli troops, the Third Battalion and the Yiftach Brigade commanders, told the troops to shoot anything that moves. And this is what they did and they killed 250 people, some of them inside a mosque.

So those are the facts of what happened in Lydda, on a particular day in a particular battle. The problem with Shavit’s book is that it gives too much prominence and importance to what happened on the 12th of July in Lydda, because this isn’t what happened throughout the war.

The war was begun by the Arabs; they were the ones who launched aggression; they were the ones who killed many, many Jews in the course of the war — 6,000 people or 1 percent of the Israeli population was killed in this war. One percent of Americans dead today would be 3 million — that’s what happened to the Jewish community in Palestine at the time, so the Israelis had good reason to feel anger in response to Arab violence.

Calling Lydda the ‘black box of Zionism’ is ridiculous. When Israeli troops conquered 400 villages they did not commit massacres in all of those villages and did not expel the inhabitants of all villages. This happened at Lydda — in one particular place and one particular time. I think he has distorted the history, focusing on one little bit of what happened and, in a sense, saying this was representative.

GNB: Anecdotally, my students in the U.S. seem to like Shavit’s book — and the Israel they discover in its pages, both the ‘tragedy’, which they can empathise with, and the ‘triumph’ even more so. Leaving the distinct question of historical accuracy aside, does this approach help Israel or not, this ‘warts and all’ account?

BM: I don’t know. We will see in about 20 years. I have a feeling that its impact will ultimately be negative, because of the prominence given to the chapter on Lydda. That’s the chapter that was published in The New Yorker.

GNB: Is it true when he says that the early Zionists ‘didn’t see’ the Palestinian Arabs?

BM: This is true. The early Zionists settlers, when they came here, were like Europeans in most third world countries — the settlers among them, like Nairobi or wherever the British or the French settled. They didn’t really see the natives. This is what Europeans were like at the end of the 19th century. A native wasn’t part of the geography, he wasn’t seen as human, certainly not on par with a European.