In response to my Oct. 11 LTTE in The Observer criticizing an LTTE by Professor Jay Geller on the conflict in Israel-Palestine, which he wrote earlier this year, he says that he appreciates my taking time to engage with him. I likewise appreciate the positive tone he sets. He models a civil, respectful, open discourse that is missing in much of the debate over I/P.
He sticks to the issues and does not engage in the personal animus that so often accompanies disagreements over I/P. He does point out my factual error in my Oct. 11 LTTE where I said, “the majority of the Jews who founded Israel immigrated after the Holocaust.” He makes clear that the founders in 1948 were there before the Holocaust. I thank him for his correction.
I confused the timing of the mass migration of Ashkenazi Jews, who survived the Holocaust, into Israel from the refugee camps of Europe. (I stand by my other positions taken, especially on the genetic roots of the Ashkenazi Jews of Israel from Europe.)
Professor Geller cannot, however, change the fact that Israel was founded by European settler-colonialists who were dominant in Israel’s early history. My primary point was that these Ashkenazi Jews were the ones who “committed the war crime known as ethnic cleansing,” in which 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes. This Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe”) of 1948 is now a well-established historical fact.
We may ask, “is this history even important, given current events in Gaza?” As we know, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has accused UN Palestinian Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese of being an anti-Semite based on Albanese defining Israel’s military actions in Gaza as genocide. Genocide is now a key issue for justice in Palestine.
Well, the question hinges on history. Zionists in Israel and the U.S. subscribe to Old Testament biblical-historical-theology, that “God gave this land to me.” The same for the founding of Israel in 1948. Pat Boone actually sang “God gave this land to me” in the 1960 Hollywood film, “Exodus.”
Evangelical Christians in the U.S., who are not fans of the separation of church and state, believe the U.S. should be a Christian nation. These evangelicals are predictably Christian Zionists and are very influential in the U.S. Israel Lobby, standing politically with Israel. Establishing all of “Greater Israel,” from the river to the sea, as a Jewish nation, is the goal of Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing political coalition. History and religion are conjoined.
More than 43,000 civilians in Gaza have now been killed, including so many innocent women and children.
The great American journalist I.F. Stone, who first exposed the intellectual dishonesty of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war in Vietnam, before Daniel Ellsberg, also spoke to the contradictions in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In 1976, he stated Israel is “creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry.”
Thomas Kim Hill 1973