RUTHFULLY YOURS

* “During his time in Berlin, the mufti ran the Nazis’ Arab-language propaganda radio program, which incited Muslims in the Mideast to ‘kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.’ Among the many listeners was also the man later known as Ayatollah Khomeini, who used to tune in to Radio Berlin every evening (as reported in Amir Taheri’s excellent new biography of the Iranian leader). Khomeini’s disciple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still spews the same venom pioneered by the mufti as do Islamic hate preachers around the world.”

* “Zionists, inside and outside Israel, should ask themselves if acknowledging the Palestinian plight in 1948 really is synonymous with full-scale return of the 1948 refugees and their descendants, as the fearmongers argue. But isn’t it possible to acknowledge someone’s pain without promising to turn back the clock and undo the events that led to it? Surely we know from our personal lives that sometimes it is simply the acknowledgment itself – the admission of responsibility – that has a healing effect.”

* “Israelis have already acknowledged Palestinian pain. From school textbooks to official historiography, from academic works to popular film series, the sorrow and the pain, the tragedy and the truculence of the 1948 war are in the public domain. In his speech at the Annapolis conference in 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, referring to the “pain and deprivation” suffered by refugees, said: ‘We are not indifferent to this suffering.'”

* “Will Palestinians too engage in a similar act of contrition? Judging by the dearth of Palestinian scholarship even remotely resembling the Israeli self-flagellation inaugurated by the new historians in the 1980s, the lack of freedom and critical inquiry among Palestinian scholars, the militant devotion of its intellectuals to their national cause, and the glorification, among Palestinians at large, of terrorists past and present who have attacked civilians and killed innocents, it is hard to see how this could ever happen. And an Israeli endorsement of the Palestinian narrative will forever forestall the process of the introspection long overdue on the Palestinian side.”

(This dispatch can also be read here www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001060.html )

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CONTENTS

1. The extent of Arab-Nazi collaboration explains many of today’s Mideast problems
2. Video: The history the BBC won’t dare to mention
3. “Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts”
4. Time for Israel to say sorry
5. “No, I wouldn’t be flippant if the Arabs won the war. I’d be dead.”
6. “The Mufti of Berlin” (By Daniel Schwammenthal, WSJ Europe, Sept. 24, 2009)
7. “Cocktail of naivete” (By Emanuele Ottolenghi, Ha’aretz, Oct. 2, 2009)
8. “Maybe Israel just needs to acknowledge Palestinian pain” (By Jonathan Freedland, Ha’aretz)

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[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach seven articles. They are split over two dispatches for space reasons. I have prepared summaries first for those who don’t have time to read them in full, though I would suggest you instead read the full articles if you have time.

All the writers of these articles – Bret Stephens, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Schwammenthal, Emanuele Ottolenghi, Jonathan Freedland, and the writer of the lead editorial on Sarkozy, Obama and Iran for The Wall Street Journal who wants to remain anonymous – are longtime subscribers to this email list. (The only one who isn’t is Australian General Jim Molan, who was chief of operations of the Iraq multinational force from 2004-05.)

The other dispatch can be read here: www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001059.html

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SUMMARIES

THE EXTENT OF ARAB-NAZI COLLABORATION EXPLAINS MANY OF TODAY’S MIDEAST PROBLEMS

Writing from Berlin for the European edition of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal notes that “Arab-Nazi collaboration is a taboo topic in the West” and to ignore it impedes our understanding of Arab attitudes to Jews today and how best to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Schwammenthal writes:

One widespread myth about the Mideast conflict is that the Arabs are paying the price for Germany’s sins. The notion that the Palestinians are the “second victims” of the Holocaust contains two falsehoods: It suggests that without Auschwitz, there would be no justification for Israel, ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish history in the land. It also suggests Arab innocence in German crimes, ignoring especially the fascist past of Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini, who was not only Grand Mufti of Jerusalem but also Waffen SS recruiter and Nazi propagandist in Berlin. When a German journalist recently tried to shed some light on this history, he encountered the wrath of the Arab collaborators’ German apologists.

Karl Rössel’s exhibition “The Third World in the Second World War” was supposed to premier on Sept. 1 in the “Werkstatt der Kulturen,” a publicly funded multicultural center in Berlin. Outraged by the exhibition’s small section on Arab complicity in Nazi crimes, Philippa Ebéné, who runs the center, cancelled the event.

… The mufti orchestrated the 1920/1921 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the 1929 Arab pogroms that destroyed the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. An early admirer of Hitler, Husseini received Nazi funding – as did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – for his 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed hundreds of British soldiers, Jews and also Arabs who rejected his Islamo-Nazi agenda. After participating in a failed fascist coup in Iraq, he fled to Berlin in 1941 as Hitler’s personal guest. In the service of the Third Reich, the mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He also conspired with the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Rommel’s defeat in El Alamein spoiled these plans.

After canceling the exhibition, Ms. Ebéné clumsily tried to counter the impression that she had pre-emptively caved to Arab pressure. As a “non-white” person (her father is Cameroonian), she said, she didn’t have to fear Arabs, an explanation that indirectly suggested that ordinary, “white,” Germans might have reason to feel less safe speaking truth to Arabs.

… This episode is typical of how Western historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration… In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war – scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman’s deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt’s president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a “war of destruction” against the fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian leader… the mufti’s and his followers’ virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today…

***

Tom Gross adds:

Of course you won’t hear any of this if you listen to the BBC or read The New York Times or Le Monde or The Guardian. As Robin Shepherd, author of an important new book on Western attitudes to Israel (“A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem With Israel”) put it: “The inconvenient truths about Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism must be denied even if this means providing a distorted picture of the Holocaust and its participants and collaborators.”

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VIDEO: THE HISTORY THE BBC WON’T DARE TO MENTION

Below is a short German documentary (with English subtitles) about the close relations between the Arab and Nazi leaderships dating back to even the days before Hitler assumed power in Germany in 1933.

Among those interviewed are the respected historians Sir Martin Gilbert and Robert Wistrich, both of whom subscribe to this email list. There is also important wartime film footage. I would urge you to watch it in full. (It lasts a little over seven minutes.)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLRTe-lZMB0

Jews celebrating the Jewish new year have been violently attacked at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in recent days after Palestinian nationalist leaders falsely claimed that the Jews were coming to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque. The incitement of yesteryear continues today.

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“PALESTINIAN DEMANDS ARE ROOTED IN A GRIEVANCE CULTURE OF VICTIMHOOD, NOT IN FACTS”

Emanuele Ottolenghi, writing in Ha’aretz, says:

Two weeks ago, Jonathan Freedland suggested on this page that “maybe Israel just needs to acknowledge Palestinian pain,” encouraging Israel to undertake a gesture that “may just unblock a peace effort which desperately needs unblocking.”

… For Freedland, recognizing the pain of the other would have a healing effect on all sides. He dismisses Israeli fears that recognition of responsibility for the refugee problem would open the floodgates to a mass return of Palestinian claimants, and bring an end to Israel as a Jewish state. His Palestinian interlocutors, he tells us, have assured him they are not after Israel’s demise, just an official apology.

Should Israel take Freedland’s advice? If Israel could unburden itself of the guilt Freedland and his Palestinian sources attribute to it and obtain peace in exchange, it might be a price worth paying. But a closer look at this argument shows a strange cocktail of naivete and misinformation.

First, Israelis have already acknowledged the pain. From school textbooks to official historiography, from academic works to popular film series, the sorrow and the pain, the tragedy and the truculence of the 1948 war are in the public domain. What Freedland does not know – or refuses to accept – is that the historical debate about facts and causal correlations is still far from over, and any serious scholar who’s escaped the facile temptations of propaganda will offer a very different picture from the one on which the demand for an apology rests.

… Freedland evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model of South Africa, only to claim that it is less important to discuss how things are done and more important to ensure that they are done. But how things are done does matter. If his premise is that the Palestinian narrative is beyond scrutiny, then such a commission will only succeed in working out the minutiae of introducing Palestinian propaganda into Israeli textbooks, and in coming up with elaborate ways to muzzle historians who may presume to question what the commission will define as truth, and what Palestinians consider a precondition for reconciliation. In short, Israel sacrifices truth and the Palestinians concede reconciliation.

Freedland incidentally omits that Israeli officialdom has already “acknowledged the pain.” In his speech at the Annapolis conference in November 2007, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did just that. When referring to the “pain and deprivation” suffered by refugees, he said: “We are not indifferent to this suffering.

… Apparently, Freedland wants an official apology, too, as a basis for negotiations… But this is naive. International law ensures that, once Israel’s government takes responsibility for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, it will not escape a cascade of class-action suits intended to force Israel to repatriate refugees. An international community that castigates Israel for defending itself, as the Goldstone report just did, will surely bring Israel to an international tribunal, have it condemned and then isolate it until such a time that it complies. Such an admission will forever deny Israel’s veto right on the refugee issue and therefore doom any peace deal.

Freedland… only remembers to suggest, in passing, and at the very end of his column, that Palestinians too should engage in a similar act of contrition. But can they? Will they? Judging by the dearth of Palestinian scholarship even remotely resembling the Israeli self-flagellation inaugurated by the new historians in the 1980s, the lack of freedom and critical inquiry among Palestinian scholars, the militant devotion of its intellectuals to their national cause, and the glorification, among Palestinians at large, of terrorists past and present who have attacked civilians and killed innocents, it is hard to see how this could ever happen. And an Israeli endorsement of the Palestinian narrative will forever forestall the process of the introspection long overdue on the Palestinian side.

But history shows us that Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts. Israel should not apologize for an injustice it did not commit and for which it does not bear primary responsibility…

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TIME FOR ISRAEL TO SAY SORRY

The piece which Ottolenghi critiques above is that by Jonathan Freedland, a leading columnist for the British daily The Guardian. Writing in Ha’aretz, Freedland says:

Many of Israel’s supporters around the world have spotted an alarming trend in the debate on Middle East peace. Call it the “Back to ’48” approach, which argues that any attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is doomed unless it gets to the root of the problem, tackling not only the “1967 file” – ending the occupation, plus or minus a chunk of land here or there – but also the “1948 file,” consisting of the issues left outstanding by Israel’s birth.

These 1948 questions are even knottier and more sensitive than the 1967 ones: among them, whether Palestinians can at last come to terms with what was established in that fateful year, namely Israel as a Jewish state, and whether Israelis can at last acknowledge the impact of that event on Palestinians, including the creation of at least 700,000 Palestinian refugees.

Plenty of Jews and Israelis shy away from that latter question, even if they can see that the Oslo approach – focusing narrowly on clearing up the mess left by 1967 – has not exactly been a stellar success.

For one thing, many, perhaps even most, Israelis believe there is nothing to answer for. Sure, they argue, bad things happened, but that was the Arabs’ fault for making war on the nascent Jewish state; if Palestinians had only accepted the UN partition plan, all this heartache could have been avoided… But even if you blame the Arabs for starting the war, you can still see that by the end of it, 700,000 people were dispossessed.

… [Other] Jews and Israelis fret that any discussion of 1948 will, almost automatically, call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Why else would anyone want to discuss the circumstances of a state’s birth if not to undermine it?

Those diplomats and others currently arguing that the peace process, set to be revived by U.S. President Barack Obama later this month, needs to go back to 1948, have to tackle these fears head on. Which may not be as impossible as it sounds.

… Zionists, inside and outside Israel, should ask themselves if acknowledging the Palestinian plight in 1948 really is synonymous with full-scale return [of the 1948 refugees and their descendants], as the fearmongers argue.

Isn’t it possible to acknowledge someone’s pain without promising to turn back the clock and undo the events that led to it? Surely we know from our personal lives that sometimes it is simply the acknowledgment itself – the admission of responsibility – that has a healing effect.

Indeed, this might provide a clue as to why previous efforts have failed. It’s possible that, in this relationship, Israelis are from Mars and Palestinians from Venus; Israelis have been the man who interrupts a sobbing woman as she explains a problem, rushing to come up with the mechanics of a solution instead of just listening. Such a man won’t realize that what the woman wanted most was to be heard, for her sorrow to be acknowledged.

… Some will immediately ask – Martian-style – what form this acknowledgment would take. We might revive an idea floated at Taba, establishing a panel of historians from both peoples, or we might adapt South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process. But the precise form is less important than the idea: an honest reckoning with the events that led those refugees to leave rather than a legalistic focus on preventing their mass return. My own conversations with Palestinians in the diaspora suggest it is this reckoning, this acknowledgment, that they are after.

Would admitting the truth of 1948 instantly undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel? Only if you believe that Israel’s legitimacy was predicated on the notion that its birth would be bloodless. Israel’s advocates can argue that the creation of a Jewish national home in 1948 was so morally necessary it remained, and remains, just – even if it came at a tragically high price…

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“NO, I WOULDN’T BE FLIPPANT IF THE ARABS WON THE WAR. I’D BE DEAD.”

Jonathan Freedland’s piece has evoked a particularly harsh range of comments from Ha’aretz readers, in addition to a few positive ones.

Among the comments by readers:

* Freedland forgot to say that most Arabs came after Israelis created jobs. Most Arabs came to “Palestine” to look for work, after the Jews started to arrive and create jobs and industries during the 1800s.

* Any acknowledgment of Palestinian pain has always let to more violence. Furthermore, the Arabs have never recognized the Jewish pain by evicting the same number of Jews.

* In 1948 there were 900,000 Jews living in the Arab world, second-rate citizens at best. Almost all of them left soon afterwards, 600,000 to Israel, 300,000 to the West. Why is this not mentioned in the article?

* 15 million Arabs and Turks have come to live in Western Europe in the last 40 years, but just like those that stayed at home they can’t accept that Jewish people returned to their homeland.

* In the knot of 1948 there is, unfortunately, also a big chunk of anti-Semitism. Because the main force behind the the denial of the creation of Israel was El-Husseini, an admirer of Hitler, a friend of Himmler and an officer of the SS between 1941 and 1945. The Hamas Charter shows that the ghost of El-Husseini is still around. So it’s trickier than Freedland’s article suggests, but I also like to dream of a world where people at least say sorry.

* Peace is now predicated on acknowledgement of Palestinian “pain”? What about the pain of all the oppressed majorities and minorities in every “state” in the Middle East? What about the pain of all those subject to Arab and/or Moslem regimes?

* No, I wouldn’t be flippant if the Arabs won the war. I’d be dead. Because they weren’t invading Israel with the intention of leaving any “refugees” behind.

* I think this is an excellent article. However, I think what would be most fruitful would be a mutual acknowledgement of pain on both sides.

* WW1 ended and many ethnic groups were left under the control of other groups which mistreated their minorities. This led to WW2. After WW2 ended, tens of millions of people were forcibly moved to new areas so that ethnic minorities were not left under the control of others. This is why there are no Germans now living in Silesia or East Prussia, among other areas. I don’t hear the Germans complaining about it. They have moved on and done quite well in my view. The same goes for the Japanese. Only the Palestinians believe that defeat in war entitles them to the victor’s spoils. They need to move on.

* For a “logical” Westerner admitting a mistake does not represent self-delegitimization. For most Arabs, it does. Particularly so if it comes without any reciprocal demand. Where is the Arab acceptance of their part of guilt in bringing about Jewish exodus from their countries? If we do not bring that up in the debate, any moral self flagellation will be just that – unnecessary pain with no positive effect.

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FULL ARTICLES

ARAB-NAZI COLLABORATION IS A TABOO TOPIC IN THE WEST

The Mufti of Berlin: Arab-Nazi collaboration is a taboo topic in the West
By Daniel Schwammenthal
The Wall Street Journal Europe
September 24, 2009

Berlin — One widespread myth about the Mideast conflict is that the Arabs are paying the price for Germany’s sins. The notion that the Palestinians are the “second victims” of the Holocaust contains two falsehoods: It suggests that without Auschwitz, there would be no justification for Israel, ignoring 3,000 years of Jewish history in the land. It also suggests Arab innocence in German crimes, ignoring especially the fascist past of Palestinian leader Haj Amin al Husseini, who was not only Grand Mufti of Jerusalem but also Waffen SS recruiter and Nazi propagandist in Berlin. When a German journalist recently tried to shed some light on this history, he encountered the wrath of the Arab collaborators’ German apologists.

Karl Rössel’s exhibition “The Third World in the Second World War” was supposed to premier on Sept. 1 in the “Werkstatt der Kulturen,” a publicly funded multicultural center in Berlin’s heavily Turkish and Arab neighborhood of Neukölln. Outraged by the exhibition’s small section on Arab complicity in Nazi crimes, Philippa Ebéné, who runs the center, cancelled the event. Among the facts Ms. Ebéné didn’t want the visitors of her center to learn is that the Palestinian wartime leader “was one of the worst and fanatical fascists and anti-Semites,” as Mr. Rössel put it to me.

The mufti orchestrated the 1920/1921 anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the 1929 Arab pogroms that destroyed the ancient Jewish community of Hebron. An early admirer of Hitler, Husseini received Nazi funding – as did Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – for his 1936-1939 Palestinian revolt, during which his thugs killed hundreds of British soldiers, Jews and also Arabs who rejected his Islamo-Nazi agenda. After participating in a failed fascist coup in Iraq, he fled to Berlin in 1941 as Hitler’s personal guest. In the service of the Third Reich, the mufti recruited thousands of Muslims to the Waffen SS. He intervened with the Nazis to prevent the escape to Palestine of thousands of European Jews, who were sent instead to the death camps. He also conspired with the Nazis to bring the Holocaust to Palestine. Rommel’s defeat in El Alamein spoiled these plans.

After canceling the exhibition, Ms. Ebéné clumsily tried to counter the impression that she had pre-emptively caved to Arab pressure. As a “non-white” person (her father is Cameroonian), she said, she didn’t have to fear Arabs, an explanation that indirectly suggested that ordinary, “white,” Germans might have reason to feel less safe speaking truth to Arabs.

Berlin’s integration commissioner, Günter Piening, initially seemed to defend her. “We need, in a community like Neukölln, a differentiated presentation of the involvement of the Arabic world in the Second World War,” Der Tagesspiegel quoted him as saying. He later said he was misquoted and following media criticism allowed a smaller version of the exhibit to be shown.

Mr. Rössel says this episode is typical of how German historians, Arabists and Islam scholars deny or downplay Arab-Nazi collaboration. What Mr. Rössel says about Germany applies to most of the Western world, where it is often claimed that the mufti’s Hitler alliance later discredited him in the region. Nothing could be further from the truth. In the Mideast, Nazis were not only popular during but also after the war – scores of them found refuge in the Arab world, including Eichman’s deputy, Alois Brunner, who escaped to Damascus. The German war criminals became trusted military and security advisers in the region, particularly of Nazi sympathizer Gamal Nasser, then Egypt’s president. The mufti himself escaped to Egypt in 1946. Far from being shunned for his Nazi past, he was elected president of the National Palestinian Council. The mufti was at the forefront of pushing the Arabs to reject the 1948 United Nations partition plan and to wage a “war of destruction” against the
fledgling Jewish state. His great admirer, Yasser Arafat, would later succeed him as Palestinian
leader.

The other line of defense is that Arab collaboration with the Nazis supposedly wasn’t ideological but pragmatic, following the old dictum that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” This “excuse” not only fails to consider what would have happened to the Jews and British in the Mideast had the Arabs’ German friends won. It also overlooks the mufti’s and his followers’ virulent anti-Semitism, which continues to poison the minds of many Muslims even today.

The mufti “invented a new form of Jew-hatred by recasting it in an Islamic mold,” according to German scholar Matthias Küntzel. The mufti’s fusion of European anti-Semtism – particularly the genocidal variety – with Koranic views of Jewish wickedness has become the hallmark of Islamists world-wide, from al Qaeda to Hamas and Hezbollah. During his time in Berlin, the mufti ran the Nazis’ Arab-language propaganda radio program, which incited Muslims in the Mideast to “kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion.” Among the many listeners was also the man later known as Ayatollah Khomeini, who used to tune in to Radio Berlin every evening, according to Amir Taheri’s biography of the Iranian leader. Khomeini’s disciple Mahmoud Ahmadinejad still spews the same venom pioneered by the mufti as do Islamic hate preachers around the world.

Muslim Judeophobia is not – as is commonly claimed – a reaction to the Mideast conflict but one of its main “root causes.” It has been fueling Arab rejection of a Jewish state long before Israel’s creation.

“I am not a Mideast expert,” Mr. Rössel told me, but “I wonder why the people who so one-sidedly regard Israel as the region’s main problem never consider how the Mideast conflict would have developed had it not been influenced by fascists, anti-Semites and people who had just returned from their Nazi exile.”

Mr. Rössel may not be a “Mideast expert” but he raises much more pertinent questions about the conflict than many of those who claim that title.

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“A COCKTAIL OF NAIVETE AND MISINFORMATION”

Cocktail of naivete
By Emanuele Ottolenghi
Ha’aretz
October 2, 2009

Two weeks ago, Jonathan Freedland suggested on this page that “maybe Israel just needs to acknowledge Palestinian pain” (September 18), encouraging Israel to undertake a gesture that “may just unblock a peace effort which desperately needs unblocking.”

Having drunk from the fountain of Israel’s so-called new historians for over 20 years now, Freedland thinks the history debate is settled. Israel is guilty as charged – even though he may still think the moral foundations of a Jewish state are justified.

For Freedland, recognizing the pain of the other would have a healing effect on all sides. He dismisses Israeli fears that recognition of responsibility for the refugee problem would open the floodgates to a mass return of Palestinian claimants, and bring an end to Israel as a Jewish state. His Palestinian interlocutors, he tells us, have assured him they are not after Israel’s demise, just an official apology.

Should Israel take Freedland’s advice? If Israel could unburden itself of the guilt Freedland and his Palestinian sources attribute to it and obtain peace in exchange, it might be a price worth paying. But a closer look at this argument shows a strange cocktail of naivete and misinformation.

First, Israelis have already acknowledged the pain. From school textbooks to official historiography, from academic works to popular film series, the sorrow and the pain, the tragedy and the truculence of the 1948 war are in the public domain. What Freedland does not know – or refuses to accept – is that the historical debate about facts and causal correlations is still far from over, and any serious scholar who’s escaped the facile temptations of propaganda will offer a very different picture from the one on which the demand for an apology rests. Even Benny Morris, the erstwhile hero of the new historians, has rewritten the same account of the refugee problem at least four times in the last 22 years – and his latest version looks very different from the first.

There will be more nuanced assessments in the future. Governments should not be made hostages to the present contentiousness of history. Peace must recognize reality and offer a better future. The past cannot be changed. Leave it to historians to assess, not for politicians to bargain over.

Freedland evokes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model of South Africa, only to claim that it is less important to discuss how things are done and more important to ensure that they are done. But how things are done does matter. If his premise is that the Palestinian narrative is beyond scrutiny, then such a commission will only succeed in working out the minutiae of introducing Palestinian propaganda into Israeli textbooks, and in coming up with elaborate ways to muzzle historians who may presume to question what the commission will define as truth, and what Palestinians consider a precondition for reconciliation. In short, Israel sacrifices truth and the Palestinians concede reconciliation.

Freedland incidentally omits that Israeli officialdom has already “acknowledged the pain.” In his speech at the Annapolis conference in November 2007, prime minister Ehud Olmert did just that.

When referring to the “pain and deprivation” suffered by refugees, he said: “We are not indifferent to this suffering. We are not oblivious to the tragedies you have experienced.” Is this not enough? If not, what more is needed?

Apparently, Freedland wants an official apology, too, as a basis for negotiations. Once Israel becomes unburdened of the injustice committed, he reasons, and Palestine’s honor is restored, an equitable solution will be found. Palestinians, he promises, will be content with the apology and will not ask for their refugees to “return.”

But this is naive. International law ensures that, once Israel’s government takes responsibility for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of refugees, it will not escape a cascade of class-action suits intended to force Israel to repatriate refugees. An international community that castigates Israel for defending itself, as the Goldstone report just did, will surely bring Israel to an international tribunal, have it condemned and then isolate it until such a time that it complies. Such an admission will forever deny Israel’s veto right on the refugee issue and therefore doom any peace deal.

Freedland may not see all of this, because, presumably, he thinks the burden of guilt is with Israel alone. That is why he only remembers to suggest, in passing, and at the very end of his column, that Palestinians too should engage in a similar act of contrition. But can they? Will they? Judging by the dearth of Palestinian scholarship even remotely resembling the Israeli self-flagellation inaugurated by the new historians in the 1980s, the lack of freedom and critical inquiry among Palestinian scholars, the militant devotion of its intellectuals to their national cause, and the glorification, among Palestinians at large, of terrorists past and present who have attacked civilians and killed innocents, it is hard to see how this could ever happen. And an Israeli endorsement of the Palestinian narrative will forever forestall the process of the introspection long overdue on the Palestinian side.

But history shows us that Palestinian demands are rooted in a grievance culture of victimhood, not in facts. Israel should not apologize for an injustice it did not commit and for which it does not bear primary responsibility. And it should certainly not offer comfort to its enemies before any claims – past, present and future – on final-status issues have forever been put to rest.

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RECONCILING MARTIAN ISRAELIS AND VENUSIAN PALESTINIANS

Maybe Israel just needs to acknowledge Palestinian pain
By Jonathan Freedland
Ha’aretz
September 18, 2009

Many of Israel’s supporters around the world have spotted an alarming trend in the debate on Middle East peace. Call it the “Back to ’48” approach, which argues that any attempt to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is doomed unless it gets to the root of the problem, tackling not only the “1967 file” – ending the occupation, plus or minus a chunk of land here or there – but also the “1948 file,” consisting of the issues left outstanding by Israel’s birth.

These 1948 questions are even knottier and more sensitive than the 1967 ones: among them, whether Palestinians can at last come to terms with what was established in that fateful year, namely Israel as a Jewish state, and whether Israelis can at last acknowledge the impact of that event on Palestinians, including the creation of at least 700,000 Palestinian refugees.

Plenty of Jews and Israelis shy away from that latter question, even if they can see that the Oslo approach – focusing narrowly on clearing up the mess left by 1967 – has not exactly been a stellar success.

For one thing, many, perhaps even most, Israelis believe there is nothing to answer for. Sure, they argue, bad things happened, but that was the Arabs’ fault for making war on the nascent Jewish state; if Palestinians had only accepted the UN partition plan, all this heartache could have been avoided.

Of course, Palestinians respond to that by asking why they should have accepted 45% of the land in which they were then a majority.

But even if you reject that, even if you blame the Arabs for starting the war, you can still see that by the end of it, 700,000 people were dispossessed – and, as those Israeli historians who have trawled through the key archives have established, Israel played a crucial part in that process.

Others are wary of looking back at 1948 because they fear any discussion of the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem will end with the demographic death of Israel as a Jewish state. They fear any right of return for those refugees and their descendants would see a wave of migrants numerous enough to erase Israel’s Jewish majority. Pretty soon Israel would become just another Arab-majority state.

What’s more, Jews and Israelis fret that any discussion of 1948 will, almost automatically, call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel. Why else would anyone want to discuss the circumstances of a state’s birth if not to undermine it?

Those diplomats and others currently arguing that the peace process, set to be revived by U.S. President Barack Obama later this month, needs to go back to 1948, have to tackle these fears head on. Which may not be as impossible as it sounds.

Some might be tempted to fall back on the usual method of reassurance, telling Israelis that even if a Palestinian right of return were ceded in the abstract, it would never be implemented in any concrete fashion worth worrying about.

Recognition of the right would be expressed by the return of a purely symbolic number of Palestinians and, mainly, by a multibillion dollar restitution fund, just as the Clinton peace plan of 2000 envisioned.

The trouble is, that may not convince too many doubters, if only because Palestinians themselves so far have seemed unlikely to accept such a package.

Another tack might prove more fruitful. Zionists, inside and outside Israel, should ask themselves if acknowledging the Palestinian plight in 1948 really is synonymous with full-scale return, as the fearmongers argue.

Isn’t it possible to acknowledge someone’s pain without promising to turn back the clock and undo the events that led to it? Surely we know from our personal lives that sometimes it is simply the acknowledgment itself – the admission of responsibility – that has a healing effect.

Indeed, this might provide a clue as to why previous efforts have failed. It’s possible that, in this relationship, Israelis are from Mars and Palestinians from Venus; Israelis have been the man who interrupts a sobbing woman as she explains a problem, rushing to come up with the mechanics of a solution instead of just listening. Such a man won’t realize that what the woman wanted most was to be heard, for her sorrow to be acknowledged.

So Israelis have sought to cut short the discussion of 1948, preferring to pull out the calculator and work out the compensation package that might make the problem go away. But done like that, it never will. If Israelis and their supporters were able instead to face the truth of what happened in 1948 and admit it, who knows what progress might be made?

Some will immediately ask – Martian-style – what form this acknowledgment would take. We might revive an idea floated at Taba, establishing a panel of historians from both peoples, or we might adapt South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process. But the precise form is less important than the idea: an honest reckoning with the events that led those refugees to leave rather than a legalistic focus on preventing their mass return. My own conversations with Palestinians in the diaspora suggest it is this reckoning, this acknowledgment, that they are after.

Would admitting the truth of 1948 instantly undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel? Only if you believe that Israel’s legitimacy was predicated on the notion that its birth would be bloodless. Israel’s advocates can argue that the creation of a Jewish national home in 1948 was so morally necessary it remained, and remains, just – even if it came at a tragically high price.

If most Zionists believe that – and they surely have to – then they should not balk at spelling out precisely the price paid by others. It is the morally honest thing to do – and, taken together with a similar process of national contemplation on the Palestinian side, may just unblock a peace effort which desperately needs unblocking.