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Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there came, on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.
Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/war-guilt-middle-east
War gilt in the Middle East by Murray and Rothbard.
A selection from left and right,
a journal of libertarian thought,
Spring to Autumn, 1967.
The chronic Middle East crisis goes back
as do many crises to World War I.
The British, in return for mobilizing the Arab peoples
against their oppressors of Imperial Turkey,
promised the Arabs their independence when the war was over.
But at the same time, the British government,
with characteristic double-dealing,
was promising Arab Palestine as a national home
for organized Zionism.
These promises were not on the same moral plane.
For in the former case, the Arabs were being promised
their own land freed from Turkish domination.
And in the latter, World Zionism
was being promised the land most emphatically, not its own.
When World War I was over,
the British unhesitatingly chose to keep the wrong promise,
the one-two-world Zionism.
Its choice was not difficult.
If it had kept its promise to the Arabs,
Great Britain would have had to pull gracefully
out of the Middle East and turn that land over to its inhabitants.
But to fulfill its promise to Zionism,
Britain had to remain as a conquering,
imperial power ruling over Arab Palestine.
That it chose the imperial course is hardly surprising.
We must then go back still further in history
for what was World Zionism.
Before the French Revolution,
the Jews of Europe had been largely encased in ghettos
and they emerged from ghetto life
a distinct Jewish cultural and ethnic
as well as religious identity with Yiddish as the common language,
Hebrew being only the ancient language of religious ritual.
After the French Revolution,
the Jews of Western Europe were emancipated from ghetto life
and they then faced a choice of where to go from there.
One group, the heirs of the Enlightenment,
chose and advocated the choice of casting off narrow,
parochial ghetto culture on behalf of simulation
into the culture and the environment of the Western world.
While assimilationism was clearly the rational course
in America and Western Europe,
this route could not easily be followed in Eastern Europe
where the ghetto walls still held.
In Eastern Europe, therefore,
the Jews turned toward various movements
for preservation of the Jewish ethnic and cultural identity.
Most prevalent was Bundism,
the viewpoint of the Jewish Bund,
which advocated Jewish national self-determination.
Up to and including a Jewish state
in the predominantly Jewish areas of Eastern Europe,
thus, according to Bundism,
the city of Vilna in Eastern Europe
with a majority population of Jews
would be part of a newly formed Jewish state.
Another less powerful group of Jews,
the territorialist movement,
despairing of the future of Jews in Eastern Europe,
advocated preserving the Yiddish Jewish identity
by forming Jewish colonies and communities,
not states in various unpopulated virgin areas of the world.
Given the conditions of European Jewry
in the late 19th and turn of the 20th centuries,
all of these movements had a rational groundwork.
The one Jewish movement that made no sense was Zionism,
a movement which began blended with Jewish territorialism.
But while the territorialists simply wanted
to preserve Jewish Yiddish identity
in a newly developed land of their own,
Zionism began to insist on a Jewish land in Palestine alone.
The fact that Palestine was not a virgin land
but already occupied by an Arab peasantry
meant nothing to the ideologues of Zionism.
Furthermore, the Zionists,
far from hoping to preserve ghetto Yiddish culture,
wished to bury it and to substitute a new culture
and a new language based on an artificial,
secular expansion of ancient religious Hebrew.
In 1903, the British offered territory in Uganda
for Jewish colonization.
And the rejection of this offer by the Zionists,
polarized the Zionist and territorialist movements,
which previously had been fused together
from then on, the Zionists would be committed
to the blood and soil mystique of Palestine.
And Palestine alone while the territorialists
would seek virgin land elsewhere in the world.
Because of the Arab's residents in Palestine,
Zionism had to become in practice
and ideology of conquest.
After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine
and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage,
and abet the expropriation of Arab lands
for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration.
Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up
and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry
on behalf of European Zionist immigration.
Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world
of the Middle East, their thus game is colonists.
And on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism,
a largely European colonizing people.
While Zionism was now committed to Palestine
as a Jewish national home, it was not yet committed
to the aggrandizement of an independent Jewish state
in Palestine.
Indeed, only a minority of Zionists favored a Jewish state
and many of these had broken off from official Zionism
under the influence of Vladimir Jabotinsky
to form the Zionist revisionist movement
to agitate for a Jewish state to rule historic ancient Palestine
on both sides of the Jordan River.
It is not surprising that Jabotinsky
expressed great admiration for the militarism
and the social philosophy of Mussolini's fascism.
At the other wing of Zionism were the cultural Zionists
who opposed the idea of a political Jewish state.
In particular, the Iehud Unity movement
centered around Martin Boober and a group
of distinguished Jewish intellectuals
from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
advocated when the British should leave,
a binational Jewish Arab state in Palestine
with neither religious group to dominate the other,
but both to work in peace and harmony
to build the land of Palestine.
But the inner logic of Zionism was not to be brooked
in the tumultuous world Zionist convention
at New York's hotel built more in 1942.
Zionism, for the first time, adopted the goal
of a Jewish state in Palestine, and nothing less.
The extremists had won out.
From then on, there was to be permanent crisis
in the Middle East, pressured from opposite sides
by Zionists, anxious for a Jewish state
and by Arabs seeking an independent Palestine,
the British finally decided to pull out after World War II
and turn the problem over to the United Nations.
As the drive for a Jewish state intensified,
the revered Dr. Judah Magnus, president
of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
and head of the Iehud movement, bitterly denounced
Zionist totalitarianism, which, he charged,
is trying to bring the entire Jewish people
under its influence by force and violence.
I have not yet seen the Zionist terrorists
called by their rightful names, killers, brutalized men
and women.
All Jews in America share in the guilt,
even those not in accord with the activities
of this new pagan leadership, but who sit at ease
with folded hands.
Shortly afterward, Dr. Magnus felt it necessary
to exile himself from Palestine and emigrate the United States,
under unbelievably intense pressure from the United States,
the UN, including enthusiastic US and USSR,
reluctantly approved a Palestine partition plan
in November 1947, a plan that formed
the basis of the British pullout and the Israel declaration
of existence on May 15th of the following year.
The partition plan granted the Jews
who had a negligible fraction of Palestine's land,
almost half the land area of the country.
Zionism had succeeded in carving out a European Jewish state
over Arab territory in the Middle East,
but this is by no means all.
The UN agreement have provided a,
that Jerusalem be internationalized under UN rule
and b, that there be an economic union
between the new Jewish and Arab Palestine states.
These were the basic conditions under which
the UN approved partition.
Both were promptly and brusquely disregarded by Israel,
thus launching an escalating series of aggressions
against the Arabs of the Middle East.
While the British were still in Palestine,
the Zionist paramilitary forces began
to crush the Palestinian Arab armed forces
in a series of civil war clashes.
But more faithfully, on April 9th, 1948,
the fanatical Zionist revisionist terrorists
grouped in the organization Irgun Zvielomi
massacred 100 women and children in the Arab village
of Dair Yassin.
By the advent of Israel's independence on May 15th,
the Palestinian Arabs demoralized,
were fleeing in panic from their homes
and from the threat of massacre.
The neighboring Arab states then sent in their troops.
Historians are want to describe the ensuing war
as an invasion of Israel by the Arab states,
heroically rebuffed by Israel.
But since all of the fighting took place on Arab territory,
this interpretation is clearly incorrect.
What happened, in fact, is that Israel managed
to seize large chunks of territory,
assigned to the Palestinian Arabs by the partition agreement,
including the Arab areas of Western Galilee,
Arab West Central Palestine as corridor to Jerusalem,
and the Arab cities of Jaffa and Bershiba.
The bulk of Jerusalem, the new city,
was also seized by Israel and the UN Internationalization Plan,
discarded.
The Arab armies were hampered by their own
inefficiency and disunity,
and by a series of UN imposed trusses,
broken only long enough for Israel
to occupy more Arab territory.
By the time of the permanent armistice agreement
of February 24th, 1949 then,
600,000 Jews had created a state which had originally
housed 850,000 Arabs out of a total Palestinian Arab population
of 1.2 million.
Of these Arabs, three-quarters of a million
had been driven out from their lands and homes,
and the remaining remnant was subject
to a harsh military rule, which two decades later
is still in force.
The home's lands and bank accounts of the fleeing Arab refugees
were promptly confiscated by Israel and handed over
to Jewish immigrants.
Israel has long claimed that the three-quarters
of a million Arabs were not driven out by force,
but rather by their own unjustified panic
induced by Arab leaders.
But the key point is that everyone recognizes
Israel's adamant refusal to let these refugees return
and reclaim the property taken from them.
From that day to this for two decades,
these hapless Arab refugees, their ranks now
swollen by natural increase to 1.3 million,
have continued to live in utter destitution
in refugee camps around the Israeli borders,
barely kept alive by meager UN funds and care packages,
living only for the day when they will return
to their rightful homes.
In the areas of Palestine originally assigned
to the Arabs, no Palestinian Arab government remained.
The acknowledged leader of the Palestinian Arabs,
their grand Mufti Haj Amin El Hussaini,
was summarily deposed by the long-time British tool,
King Abdullah of Transjordan,
who simply confiscated the Arab regions
of East Central Palestine, as well as the old city of Jerusalem.
King Abdullah's Arab legion had been built, armed, staffed,
and even headed by such colonialist British officers
as Glob Pasha.
On the Arab refugees, Israel takes the attitude
that the taxpayers of the world,
that is, largely the taxpayers of the United States,
should kick in to finance a vast scheme to resettle
the Palestinian refugees somewhere in the Middle East.
That is somewhere far from Israel.
The refugees, however, understandably have no interest
in being resettled.
They want their own homes and properties back, period.
The armistice agreement of 1949 was supposed to be policed
by a series of mixed armistice commissions,
composed of Israel and her Arab neighbors.
Very soon, however, Israel dissolved the mixed armistice commissions
and began to encroach upon more and more Arab territory.
Thus, the officially demilitarized zone of El Aoya
was summarily seized by Israel.
Since the Middle East was still technically in the state of war,
there was an armistice but no treaty of peace.
Egypt, from 1949 on, continued to block the strait of Tehran,
the entrance to the Gulf of Akhaba,
to all Israeli shipping, and to all trade with Israel.
In view of the importance of the blocking of the Gulf of Akhaba
in the 1967 war, it is important to remember
that nobody griped at this Egyptian action.
Nobody said that Egypt was violating international law
by closing this peaceful international waterway.
Making any waterway open to all nations,
according to international law, requires two conditions,
Consent by the powers of budding on the waterway
and be no state of war existing between any powers on the waterway.
Neither of these conditions obtained for the Gulf of Akhaba.
Egypt has never consented to such an agreement,
and Israel has been in a state of war with Egypt since 1949,
so that Egypt blocked the Gulf to Israeli shipping unchallenged
from 1949 on.
Israel's history of continuing aggression had only begun.
Seven years later in 1956, Israel,
conjoined to British and French imperialist armies,
jointly invaded Egypt, and oh how proudly Israel consciously
imitated Nazi blitzkrieg and sneak attack tactics,
and oh how ironic that the very same American establishment
that had for years denounced Nazi blitzkriegs
and sneak attacks was suddenly lost in admiration
for the very same tactics employed by Israel.
But in this case, the United States momentarily abandoning
its intense and continued devotion to the Israeli cause,
joined with Russia enforcing the combined aggressors
back from Egyptian soil.
But Israel did not agree to pull its forces out of the Sinai Peninsula
until Egypt agreed to allow a special UN emergency force
to administer the Charm-L-Shake fortress
commanding the state of Tehran.
Characteristically, Israel scornfully refused the UNEF permission
to patrol its side of the border.
Only Egypt agreed to allow access to the UN forces,
and it was because of this that the Gulf of Akhaba
was open to Israeli shipping from 1956 on.
The 1967 crisis emerged from the fact that
over the last few years, the Palestinian Arab refugees
have begun to shift from their previous bleak and passive despair
and begun to form guerrilla movements which have infiltrated the Israeli borders
to carry their fight into the region of their lost homes.
Since last year, Syria has been under the control of the most
militantly anti-imperialist government
that the Middle East has seen in years.
Syria's encouragement to the Palestinian guerrilla forces
led Israel's frenetic leaders to threaten war upon Syria
and the conquest of Damascus.
Threats punctuated by severe reprisal raids against Syrian
and Jordanian villages.
At this point, Egypt's premier,
Gamal Abdel Nasr, who had been an anti-Israel blowhard for years,
but had concentrated instead on demagogic
status measures that wrecked Egypt's domestic economy,
was challenged by the Syrians to do something concrete to help.
In particular, to end UNEF control, and hence continuing Israeli shipping,
in the Gulf of Akhaba, hence Nasr's request for the UNEF to leave.
Pro-Israeli griping at Uthans' swift compliance is grotesque.
When we consider that the UN forces were there only at Egyptian request,
and that Israel has always adamantly refused to have the UN forces
on its side of the border.
It was at that point with the closing of the Strait of Tehran
that Israel evidently began to set the stage for its next blitzkrieg war.
While giving lip service to peaceful negotiation,
the Israeli government finally knuckled under to hawk pressure within the country,
and the appointment of the notoriously war-mongering,
General Moshe Dayan, as Minister of Defense, was obviously the signal
for the Israeli blitz attack that came a few days later.
The incredibly swift Israeli victories, the press glorification of Israeli tactics and strategy,
the patent unreadiness of the Arab forces despite the hoopla.
All this indicates to all, but the most naïve, the fact that Israel launched the war
of 1967, a fact that Israel scarcely bothers to deny.
One of the most repellent aspects of the 1967 slaughter is the outspoken admiration
for the Israeli conquest by almost all Americans, Jew and non-Jew alike.
There seems to be a sickness deep in the American soul that causes it to identify with aggression
and mass murder. The swifter and more brutal, the better.
In all the spate of admiration for the Israeli march, how many people were there to mourn the
thousands of innocent Arabs' civilians murdered by the Israeli use of napalm?
As for Jewish chauvinism, among so-called anti-war people on the left,
there is no more sickening demonstration of a total lack of humanity than that displayed by
Margot Hentoff in the left liberal village voice. Is there any war you do like? If so, are you Jewish?
Lucky. What a time to be Jewish. Have you ever known any Jewish pacifists? Did you know any last
week? Besides, this was a different war. An old kind of war, a kind of war in which death
was life-giving, and Arab deaths didn't count. What a pleasure to be, once again, in favor of a war.
What a good clean wholesome feeling to cheer those jeeps,
careening across the television screen, filled with tough, lean, hard-faced,
gun-bearing Jewish soldiers. Look at them go, wow, zap! Nothing's going to stop them now,
said an old-time radical pacifist. This is an army of Jews. Another whose major contribution
to Judaism until now has been to write articles disowning Israel and announcing that Judaism
is dead and deserves to be, spent the week confusing his nationality. How are we doing,
he kept asking? How far have we gotten now? What a clean wholesome feeling indeed when Arab deaths
don't count. Is there any difference at all between this kind of attitude and that of the Nazi
persecutors of the Jews whom our press has been attacking? Day in and day out for well over 20 years.
When this war began, the Israeli leaders proclaimed that they were not interested in one inch of
territory. Their fighting was purely defensive. But now that Israel sits upon its conquests,
after repeated violations of UN ceasefires, it sings a very different tune. Its forces still occupy
all of the Sinai peninsula. All of Palestinian Jordan has been seized, sending another nearly
200,000 hapless Arab refugees to join their hundreds of thousands of four-learn comrades.
It has seized a goodly chunk of Syria, and Israel arrogantly proclaims that it will never,
never return the old city of Jerusalem or internationalize it. Israeli seizure of all of Jerusalem
is simply not negotiable. If Israel has been the aggressor in the Middle East, the role of the
United States in all this has been even more unlovely. The hypocrisy of the US position is almost
unbelievable, or would be if we were not familiar with US foreign policy over the decades.
When the war first began, and it looked for a moment as if Israel were in danger, the US rushed
into a vow its dedication to the territorial integrity of the Middle East. As if the borders of 1949
to 67 were somehow embalmed and holy writ, and had to be preserved at all costs. But as soon as it
was clear that Israel had won and conquered once again, America swiftly shed its supposed
cherished principles. Now there is no more talk of the territorial integrity of the Middle East.
Now it is all realism and the absurdity of going back to obsolete status quo borders and the
necessity for the Arabs to accept a general settlement in the Middle East, etc. How much more
evidence do we need that an approving United States has always stayed in the wings, ready to come
to the aid of Israel if necessary? How much more evidence do we need that Israel is now the ally
and satellite of the US, which in the Middle East as in so many other areas of the world has assumed
the mantle once worn by British imperialism? The one thing that Americans must not be lured into
believing is that Israel is a little underdog against its mighty Arab neighbors. Israel is a European
nation with a European technological standard battling a primitive and undeveloped foe.
Furthermore Israel has behind it feeding it and financing it the mast might of countless
Americans and West Europeans as well as the Leviathan governments of the United States and its
numerous allies and client states. Israel is no more a gallant underdog because of numerical inferiority
than British imperialism was a gallant underdog when it conquered far more populist lands in India,
Africa and Asia. And so Israel now sits occupying its swollen territory, pulverizing houses and
villages containing snipers, outlawing strikes of Arabs, killing Arab youths in the name of
checking terrorism. But this very occupation, this very elephantiasis of Israel, provides the
Arabs with a powerful long-range opportunity. In the first place as the militant anti-imperialist
regimes of Syria and Algeria now see the Arabs can shift their strategic emphasis from hopeless
conventional war with a far better armed foe to a protracted mass people's guerrilla war.
Armed with light weapons the Arab people could carry out another Vietnam, another Algeria,
another people's guerrilla war against a heavily armed occupying army. Of course this is a long run
threat only because to carry it out the Arabs would have to overthrow all of their stagnant
reactionary monarchies and form a united pan-Arab nation for the splits into nation states in the Arab
world are the consequence of the artificial machinations and depredations of British and French
imperialism. But for the long run the threat is very real. Israel therefore faces a long run dilemma
which she must someday meet either to continue on her present course and after years of mutual
hostility and conflict be overthrown by Arab people's guerrilla war or to change direction drastically
to cut herself loose completely from the Western imperial ties and become simply Jewish citizens
of the Middle East. If she did that then peace and harmony and justice would at last reign in
that tortured region. There is ample precedent for this peaceful coexistence. For in the centuries
before 19th and 20th century Western imperialism, Jew and Arab had always lived well and peacefully
together in the Middle East. There is no inherent enmity or conflict between Arab and Jew.
In the great centuries of Arab civilization in North Africa and Spain Jews took a happy and
prominent part in contrast to their ongoing persecution by the fanatics of the Christian West.
Shorn of Western influence and Western imperialism, that harmony can reign once more.
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