By the time this letter is received I am hopeful that I will officially be staying on as your rabbi for years to come. I have been blessed to be the rabbi for this community, and it is for this reason that I want to hang around. It is a community of self-starters and strivers, of leaders and active members, of those who help maintain the shul physically and financially, and of those committed to its spiritual and community aspect. These last two months have been no exception. We have had a stirring Pesach season, and wonderful presentation at Yom Hashoah. We have been entertained by our off-Broadway actors. We have seen our youngsters wow us for Aleph-Bet Shabbat and our Consecration Class rock our sanctuary with their program. We have witnessed another stirring graduation of our oldest Religious School students of Bar and Bat Mitzvah age. We have enjoyed the special flavor of our precious yontif Shavuot. We have enjoyed and qvelled at the wonderful Bar and Bat mitzvahs of two special young people, Evan Keiser and Melanie Spitz, and we look forward to three more such milestones in the month of June. We savored the taste of our cholent, heard our young people and women chant Torah and Haftorah, and we have also enjoyed scoops of ice cream sundae at our recent Tikkun Leil Shavuoth. Our Youth Group has led a service, and our new Sulam Emerging Leadership has been honored for their special training. Our Men's Club has recently taken us “out to the ball game,” and just a few days ago, we celebrated our Sisterhood Women's League Women of Achievement, regionally. Our committees are busily planning for the new season, and very soon, our Ritual Committee will gear up for the early arrival of Rosh Hashanah! It doesn't just seem busy here–it is a dizzying reality–But in a good way!
May we continue our steady and vibrant pace, all the while providing a haimish flavor in our Kehila, in which everyone man, woman, and child feels welcome and honored. And may we continue, Rabbi and congregation, our beautiful relationship as well.
I hope to see you in shul this month, enjoying all of our end-of-season events and all our Shabbatot. May all of us continue to go from strength to strength.
Please read on for my essay on Israel and "colonialism."
Don't be taken in by the propaganda of those
who claim the State of Israel is "colonialist"
by Rabbi Ian Silverman
In past decades, both in the media and in “academic” forums, arguments have been made, advancing the idea that Zionism is colonialism. The problem with this argument is that is essentially fallacious. It is a case where “narrative” has dismissed factual reality. Herein, you will read facts that counter the argument made by those who contend that an indigenous Palestinian population was ''ethnically cleansed” by colonialist Zionists fleeing from or surviving the Holocaust.
1. The population of all Palestine during the Ottoman empire, both Jewish Christian and Muslim (in the early to middle 1800s), was no more than 100,000 total.
2. A large bump in the “Palestinian Arab” population was caused by the migration of Egyptian Arabs in the 1830s (some 20-30,000) by 1880 or so. The actual Palestinian Arab population did not exceed 100,000 souls by that time, even with this late migration from Egypt.
3. The Zionist movement caused an uptick in Jewish population in cities by some scores of thousands at the turn of the century.
4. During the Ottoman Turk regime, starting in the 1890s, large land was purchases were made with Jewish funds from “foreign Arab landlords,” who resided in Egypt, Damascus, Iraq, Turkey and elsewhere. The Arab residents of Palestine were, at this time, largely Bedouin and tenant farmers. (One of these Egyptian landlords was Yassir Arafat’s grandfather. Yassir Arafat was an Egyptian). The land, our historic mandate, was, nonetheless, purchased at premium prices from those who held title. Some land was seized from Palestinian Arabs along the Latrun route from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during the siege in 1948 of the Jewish quarter, as some Arab villages there were serving as launching points for Arab terrorism along the road. The most notable example was the massacre of 78 doctors patients and nurses who were bringing medical provisions and food to the inhabitants of the Jewish quarter in the Old city and Haddasah Hospital. This belt of villages including Sheich Jarra and Dir Yassin were eventually occupied by Israeli forces.
5. There was no “historic Arab Palestine culture” or political entity until this last century, beginning in the 1960s. The Arabs of Palestine, as late as the end of World War I, contended that they were part of Syria. Their language, religion and lifestyle were not different from Levantine Arabs elsewhere.
6. The Jewish people have had a continuous emotional and geographic tie to the land of Israel since the destruction of the Judean kingdom 2000 years ago. There have always been Jews in the land, except when foreign rulers expelled them. Jews have had a continuous presence in Jerusalem, Yaffo, Akko and Tiberius, since 1500 BCE. Archeological evidence, still being found daily in Israel, attests to a Jewish habitation (not governance) throughout biblical Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ummayad Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman times. One might more accurately say, “Foreign occupation limited, but never fully eliminated, the indigenous Jewish population!” In the 7th century CE, Mohammed recognized that the land of Israel was “The land of the Jews.” The Koran itself states it. Jerusalem is known as El Kuds–as the Holy place–because it is a play on the Hebrew words Kodesh Kedoshim, the holiest place where the Holy temple stood.
7. Everyone, at the time of the British mandate, beginning in 1920, was reckoned a “Palestinian.” There were Palestinian Arabs and Palestinian Jews. There is no Arabic word for Palestinian. Between 1920 and 1947, the Arab population in Palestine ballooned five-fold. This was largely due to economic opportunities, both by the British Empire’s efforts to build up the mandate, and the Jewish enterprise to build a homeland by laying down an infrastructure of roads and municipalities. Arab villages sprung up around growing Jewish population centers. (Confer the remarks of Robert F. Kennedy shortly before the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, who reflected on the pride of Tel Aviv Jews, who were providing a livelihood for Arab residents as well, whose population growth increased from 100 to 500,000 in the decades of the 30s and 40s)
8. The Arab immigration, both legal and illegal, was allowed to increase through the British Mandate administration’s issuance of the White Papers, and by turning a blind eye to illegal immigration. At the same time, it actively restricted Jewish immigration and eventually contended that the mandate of building a Jewish homeland was not in Britain's interests. This flew completely in the face of the English intent that Palestine be allotted a Jewish homeland (The Balfour Declaration of 1917). The summit in Italy of the major powers at San Remo in 1920, and in the League of Nations in 1922, reinforced this initial position. In 1934, ‘35 and ‘36 alone, when Jews were seeking asylum from the restrictions and persecution of Nazi Germany, 90,000 Jews were turned away. As the years leading to WWII approached, Jewish immigration became even more restricted, due to the onslaught of Arab riots in the Mandate years and a clear bias against Jews by the British.
9. Had this imbalance of immigration not been in place for the decade of 1935-‘47, the Jewish population in Palestine would have also grown at a rate at least equal to that of the Arab population. In any case, the “Palestinian Arab” population was far from indigenous. This is why UNWRA categorizes a legitimate Palestinian refugee as an Arab who had established residency by 1947! This was classification was made because the vast majority of “indigenous” Palestinians arrived in the Holy Land not at the dawn of the Islamic religion in the 8th century CE, but rather in the hundred years beginning from 1830 CE, in emigrations from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Northern Africa, Circassia and elsewhere, and exploded in the interwar period, as a response to the economic and industrial development opportunities at the time of the British Mandate.
10. The indigenous nature of the Palestinian people is, therefore, suspect. Certainly there were Arabs in Palestine for centuries before the 20th century. But the population was Bedouin and nomadic, and the numbers were small. Its elements, even then, were not so much indigenous as comprised of many Arabs and Muslims who had immigrated from Turkey, Syria, Egypt and Africa, often decimated by poverty, disease and drought.
11. Between 1947 and 1948, there is some evidence of the expulsion of Arab residents by Jews, but this phenomenon was largely circumscribed to the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Under siege, the Jewish population of Jerusalem, numbering in the tens of thousands, was starving and in need of medicine, fuel and food. A string of Arab towns had embedded hostile elements in this stretch of land that was destroying the convoys transporting these vital supplies. There is also evidence, however, of the incipient Jewish state wanting its Arab residents to stay. Golda Meir was sent by David Ben Gurion to try to persuade the Arabs to stay put in Haifa. The Israel Declaration of Independence calls on Arab residents to participate in Israeli society. Finally, other evidence exists showing that that due to their fear of war, brought on by promises of invasion by Arab leaders and their own leadership, the belief that the Jewish state would be wiped out, and afraid that staying put would label them traitors and collaborators, as the airwaves of Arab countries were contending, many fled. Some, no doubt, also fled in the face of imminent war, after the Arab States attacked the newly minted Jewish State. In addition, the Israeli army did, at this point, mobilize to remove hostile adversaries from its new borders, for fear of constant attack on its newly established sovereignty.
From these facts we see that the claim of “indigenous” Palestinians is, to a large degree, fallacious. Both Arab and Jewish populations were ballooning in the last century. The British White Papers tilted these population numbers in the Arab direction, but only as recently as the interwar period. Claims that Palestinians hold historic ties to the land of Israel is hollow in the face of the absence of any historic sovereign or national culture, or national character. The ties of the “colonialist” Zionism rests on solid archeological and scriptural evidence. A vast majority of Israelis wish for a peace settlement, establishing two nations side by side. This is not due, however, to any historic validity or accuracy of the Palestinian narrative, however passionately it is argued. It is due to the State of Israel’s awareness of the need to maintain its Jewish character.
Whether or not the Palestinians should have state of their own is a political determination among nations, in conjunction with the State of Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. The present day demographics of the State of Israel are an important factor in this determination. This essay addresses only the accuracy and truthfulness of certain elements of the Palestinian narrative. Is the media or the Palestinian people entitled to profess a narrative that is not fully reflective of historical truth, merely because it is argued passionately by Palestinians and their sympathizers? Should it not be held up to the microscope of true events? Should the UNWRA curriculum in refugee camps, which teaches only this narrative, be allowed to continue unchallenged, even when funded largely by the US tax payer? Should Hamas and the Palestinian Authority be entitled, without challenge, to glorify violence and resistance against the “occupier,” and continue to promote this narrative completely unchallenged by the outside world? Something said over and over again is eventually believed. It is time for those concerned with historical truth and accuracy to articulate it.
Sources:
Kuran: Bani Israel own the land of Israel, 17:104
William Ziff, The Rape of Palestine 1937; Arieh Avineri, Claim of Dispossession: Jewish land settlement and the Arabs 1878-1948
Fred Gottheil, Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2003, pp.53-64, esp. the section on Economic Growth 1922-1931
B. Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2004
Harry Mandelbaum, Arabs in the Holy Land, Natives or Alien
Robert F. Kennedy, June 3 1948, Articles printed in the now defunct Boston Post.
For a related essay, read Judy Davis' essay How Palestinians Arrived in Palestine, by clicking here.