RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=536&Source=email

By David Isaac“We have frankly said, and always will say: If there is an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital, we won’t agree to the presence of one Israeli in it,” Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, remarked on December 25th.

Of course, even as Abbas demands that all Jews get out of a future PLO Arab state, he also insists that millions of Arab “refugees” be admitted to Israel as part of a “Palestinian right of return” – code words for Israel’s destruction. The number of these so-called refugees keeps growing – is it 4, 5, or 6 million now? As University of Haifa Professor Steven Plaut points out, such an influx would “derail Israel demographically and turn it into the Rwanda of the Levant.”

The story of the Arab refugees, as purveyed by the Arabs, is itself a fraud. In his book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine” (Bantam Books, 1973), Shmuel Katz devotes a chapter to “Arab Refugees”, in which he writes:

Only a George Orwell or a Franz Kafka could have done justice to the story of the Arab refugee problem. …The Arabs are the only declared refugees who became refugees not by the action of their enemies or because of well-grounded fear of their enemies, but by the initiative of their own leaders. For nearly a generation, those leaders have willfully kept as many people as they possibly could in degenerating squalor, preventing their rehabilitation, and holding out to all of them the hope of return and of “vengeance” on the Jews of Israel, to whom they have transferred the blame for their plight. ….

The Arab refugees were not driven from Palestine by anyone. The vast majority left, whether of their own free will or at the orders or exhortations of their leaders, always with the same reassurance – that their departure would help in the war against Israel. … Most pointed of all was the comment of one of the refugees: “The Arab governments told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in.”

The world’s movers and shakers ignore this fact and choose instead to support false Arab claims, judging the Arabs who fled Israel during the 1948 War of Independence and the 1967 Six Day War to have been forcibly evicted. And so, over the years, politicians from Europe and elsewhere have expressed their support for the Palestinian Arab demand to “return” to their homes in Israel, or at least to receive compensation if they choose not to return.

Yet, these same politicians, when Jews are forcibly evicted from their homes, have a completely different reaction. In 2005, when Israel transferred some 9,000 of its Jewish citizens from Gush Katif, many of them dragged from their homes kicking and screaming, European Union officials like EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, had this to say: “Three days into disengagement, I am pleased to note the orderly conduct of the withdrawal operations so far. I commend the real courage and the determination of the Israeli government.”

Defending its support for the transfer of Jews, but not that of Arabs, the world argues feebly that Jews are relatively new to the region while Arabs have lived there for centuries. But as Joan Peters documents in “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine” (Harper & Row, 1984), most of the Arabs in Palestine were of recent arrival, having come in response to the new economic opportunities created by Jewish immigrants.

Rather than counter the Arabs’ false narrative, which the world eagerly buys, Israel’s government instead continues to evict Jews from their homes.

On Dec. 15, for example, in Tekoa, Yigal and Mayan Carlebach were woken at 4 a.m. to the sounds of Israeli policemen preparing to tear down their home. The young couple had not received an eviction warrant. Nor were the policemen fazed when Mayan told them she could barely stand and was recovering from a Caesarean section she’d undergone a month before. The policemen simply told her that they already knew that and escorted the two from the house they had built from scratch for the last two years. Yigal and Mayan watched helplessly as an Israeli bulldozer razed it to the ground.

International outrage will not be forthcoming. Jews can be pulled from their houses. Arabs cannot. Many have pointed out that such a double standard – one rule for Jews, one for everyone else – is one of the perverted pillars on which classic anti-Semitism rests.

In “Kosher for Both or for Neither” (The Jerusalem Post, Aug. 20, 1993), Shmuel wrote:

Who can forget the uproar made by scandalized journalists and orators and, most of all, by members of the Knesset at the very mention of the name of Maj.-Gen. (res.) Rehavam Ze’evi – “Gandhi” – who believes that the rational most just solution to the dispute between Israel and the Arab nation is the movement of a large segment of the Arab population into Eastern Palestine (Jordan) and other neighboring Arab states. In short, “transfer.” Moral revulsion and horror came not only from Mapam and the rest of the left but even from some in the Likud. There were MKs who walked out of the House when Ze’evi was about to speak.Here was a great demonstration of moral superiority not, of course, only over “Gandhi” but also over almost every Zionist leader of the Mandate period. These included Weizmann, Ben-Gurion, Katznelson – indeed the whole Mapai leadership – when transfer was proposed by the British Royal Commission of 1936-37 and a long, long list of movements, bodies and personalities, including the Conference of the British Labor Party. (Jabotinsky was a notable exception – but he never vilified or boycotted his opponents.)

Now we are in 1993, and the proposition that “for the sake of peace” Jews will “have to be transferred from territory which the Rabin-Aloni government proposes giving away (also “for the sake of peace”) is so self-understood that it does not even have to be discussed. What does this mean, if not that the transfer of population is permissible and morally acceptable? Or does it mean that only the transfer of Jews is permissible (and there has been one example in our generation – the forcible expulsion of Jews from Sinai in 1979)? Does this mean, in other words, that Israel accepts the age-old anti-Jewish principle of the “double standard” and is prepared to serve as the prime promoter on a grand scale of end-of-century anti-Semitism? This is not acceptable. By all criteria of logic, of equity, there is every reason why the proposition that the “Palestinian” Arabs should relocate in Eastern Palestine, or in some other neighboring Arab territory, should be seen as being at least as kosher as the proposition that the Jews of JSG and the Golan will “have to be” transferred.

Will Israel bend its knee once more to this anti-Semitic double standard and carry out still another forcible transfer of Jews? – this time on an unprecedented scale as supporters of such a policy, like Defense Minister Ehud Barak, talk about the resettlement of some 80,000 to 100,000 Jews. Barak gives as one of his reasons the need to counter Western “moral” pressure. But what kind of morality commends the destruction of homes and transfer of population for one and condemns the same for another? The Jews should have only one answer for such a twisted morality. It’s the answer Shmuel gave. Either it’s kosher for both or for neither.

Jacob remains in his house. Whether Esau likes it or not.