RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/the-israeli-medias-favorite-villain/

There’s nothing new about the unabashed slant of the mainstream Israeli press. Nor is it novel that the local media’s favorite villain is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu.

So much so that an alien from another planet might assume that it is Bibi—not Hamas and the “civilians” in Gaza raised to annihilate the Jewish state—who perpetrated the Oct. 7 massacre.

This creature from outer space might be puzzled, however, by the way in which Netanyahu is accused by his elitist detractors of contradictory failings, often in the same breath. Indeed, the editorial line of most Hebrew dailies is that Bibi is everything bad and its opposite: He’s weak and dictatorial; too capitulatory and excessively belligerent. In other words, unlike a broken clock, he’s not even right twice a day.

It’s enough to give a UFO pilot a bad case of vertigo—intellectual dizziness caused by disingenuous rhetoric. We Israelis are used to it by now. But there’s a limit to the quantity of distortions we can tolerate.

Take the coverage of Netanyahu’s speech at the graduation ceremony of the latest Ground Combat Officers Course. In attendance at the packed event at the Holon Toto Arena were the 600 soldiers receiving their new ranks, along with proud parents, spouses and children.

“I know what we have achieved, and at the same time, I know what we have lost,” he told the crowd. “The sacrifice of our sons and daughters will carry meaning for generations—the eradication of evil and the guarantee of Israel’s eternity. … This is your home. You planted the seeds, nurtured them and provided the backing—and today, you and the entire State of Israel reap the fruits of success. Congratulations and thank you.”

After expressing appreciation for their “patriotism and willingness to fight,” the prime minister held up a photo of the Bibas family, whose bodies had been returned to Israel mere days beforehand.

https://www.thejc.com/news/dr-denis-maceoins-letter-to-the-edinburgh-university-students-association-pf63hsy2

This letter was written in 2011 by the late Professor Denis MavEoin of blessed memory in 2011. It was reprinted in the Jewish Chronicle on February 25, 2025. It is both apposite and relevant today, rsk

“May I be permitted to say a few words to members of the EUSA? I am an Edinburgh graduate (MA 1975) who studied Persian, Arabic and Islamic History in Buccleuch Place under William Montgomery Watt and Laurence Elwell Sutton, two of Britain’s great Middle East experts in their day. I later went on to do a PhD at Cambridge and to teach Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle University. Naturally, I am the author of several books and hundreds of articles in this field.

I say all that to show that I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs and that, for that reason, I am shocked and disheartened by the EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a system of apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion, that is fact that can be tested against reality by any Edinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for this motion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, the victims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby.

Being anti-Israel is not in itself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a ‘Nazi’ state.

In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps? The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nüremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things nor anything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone on earth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza (or elsewhere). Where? When?

I’m speaking of a hatred that permits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out

No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the contempt it deserves. But calling Jews Nazis and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic a way to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/moral-case-mass-relocation-joseph-schechtman

“Population transfer is a grave surgical operation, justifiable, not for cosmetic reasons, but only where the sole alternative would be chaos and destruction.” —Joseph Schechtman, 1953.

President Donald Trump’s proposal to permanently relocate the entire population of Gaza to neighboring countries has caused a storm of condemnation. Foreign leaders, U.N. officials and experts have decried the plan as ethnic cleansing, a violation of international law, and a war crime. But in the years before and after World War II, the imperial powers, the fledgling international bodies, and global leaders alike, operating within the post-Versailles order founded on the breakup of large multiethnic empires, saw population transfer, both voluntary and compulsory, as a humanitarian tool to avoid future wars. In fact, they considered it not only necessary and legal, but also morally justified and advantageous. For British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon, who negotiated the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, population transfer would achieve the “removal of old and deep-rooted causes of quarrel”—an act that reflected the very basis for the existence of nation-states, which gave a political voice to individual peoples.

A pressing problem for the post-Versailles order occurred when part of the people of one nation-state found itself trapped by map-makers and the realities of defensible geography into living in someone else’s national home. The problem was especially acute when these ethnic minorities became embroiled in war between the nation-state of their ethnicity and their country of birth. To avoid both national disenfranchisement, and to limit future wars, the answer to such problems, whenever practical, was population transfer. The first internationally sanctioned example of “unmixing populations” after the Great War was the voluntary exchange of respective ethnic minorities between Bulgaria and Greece. The Treaty of Lausanne then sanctioned the compulsory exchange of Greeks in Turkey and Turks in Greece. While 1.6 million people endured all kinds of suffering in the process, in the end the misery was widely judged to be worth the price as the transfer created a new reality in which ethnic, religious, and culturally monolithic populations were formed, putting an end to violence and conflict.

Understanding the complexities of migration, refugees, and population transfer desperately requires a capable historian. Fortunately we have one in Joseph Schechtman, a Russian Jew who authored seminal books such as European Population Transfers, 1939-1945 (1946); Population Transfers in Asia (1949); The Arab Refugee Problem (1952); and The Refugees in the World: Displacement and Dislocation (1964). Schechtman was a believer in the utility of mass population transfer, which he saw as a useful solution to thorny and bloody nationality disputes and presented a difficult subject in political terms that leaders, politicians, and ordinary people could understand.

Schechtman saw the postwar population transfers as beneficial to peace in the continent. ‘To have saddled the Polish state with millions of ardently nationalistic Germans,’ he wrote, ‘would have threatened not only the existence of Poland but the peace of Europe.’