Meeting Efraim Karsh

Author of Palestine Betrayed,


Zionist Jews were not interlopers in Palestine. The creation of the Jewish state was not an "original sin" foisted upon the Arab world. The tragic flight of the Palestinian refugees was overwhelmingly not the fault of the Zionists. To the contrary, at every momentous junction the Zionists opted for compromise and peace, the Arabs for intransigence and belligerency.

This, in summary, is how most people once understood the Arab-Israel conflict. Today, however, as Israel marks its Independence Day, an entire generation has come to maturity believing a diametrically opposite "narrative": namely, that the troubles persist because of West Bank settlements, because of Israeli building in east Jerusalem, because of the security barrier, because of heavy-handed Israeli militarism-in brief, because of a racist Zionist imperialism whose roots stretch back to 1948 and beyond.

The new view has been shaped by a confluence of factors: unsympathetic media coverage, an obsessive focus by the UN and others on Israel's alleged shortcomings, improved Arab suasion techniques, and the global Left's adoption of the Palestinian cause. Added to the mix is the influence of Israel's own "New Historians," whose revisionist attacks on the older understanding have helped shape today's authorized academic canon.

Such attacks have themselves not gone altogether without challenge-and at least one prominent New Historian, Benny Morris, has since moderated his views. Outstanding among the challengers has been the scholar Efraim Karsh, head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program at King's College, University of London, and the author of a 1997 debunking of the New Historians entitled Fabricating Israeli History.

In his just-published book, Palestine Betrayed, Karsh zeroes in on the 1948-49 war, its background, and its consequences, in an analysis that re-establishes the essential accuracy of the once-classic account of the Arab-Israel conflict. Basing itself on Arabic as well as Western, Soviet, UN, and Israeli sources, Karsh's is corrective history at its boldest and most thorough.

Who "betrayed" Palestine?

Palestine was betrayed by its corrupt and extremist Arab leadership, headed by Hajj Amin Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem. From the early 1920s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, these leaders launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival, culminating in the violent attempt to abort the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

You dedicate this book to Elias Katz and Sami Taha. Who were they?

A native of Finland, Elias Katz won two Olympic medals in the 1924 Paris games before immigrating to Mandatory Palestine and becoming coach of the prospective Jewish state's athletic team for the 1948 games. A firm believer in peaceful coexistence, he was murdered in December 1947 by Arab co-workers in a British military base in Gaza. Sami Taha, scion of a distinguished Haifa family, was a prominent Palestinian Arab trade unionist and a foremost proponent of Arab-Jewish coexistence. He was gunned down by a mufti henchman in September 1947, at the height of the UN debate on partition.

What were the obligations of Great Britain under the Mandate for Palestine?

The League of Nations instructed the British to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine as envisaged by the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

How did Britain fulfill these obligations?

Almost from the beginning the British authorities repeatedly gave in to Arab efforts to avert the implementation of the Mandate. Finally, in July 1937, Arab violence reaped its greatest reward. The Peel Commission, appointed by London, concluded that Arabs and Jews couldn't peacefully coexist in a single state and recommended repudiating the terms of the Mandate altogether in favor of partitioning Palestine into two states: a large Arab state, united with what was then called Transjordan, and a truncated Jewish state.

But hadn't the British "twice promised" Palestine, first to the Arabs and then to the Jews?

Certainly not. In his correspondence with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, which led to the Great Arab Revolt during World War I, Sir Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner for Egypt, specifically excluded Palestine from the prospective Arab empire promised to Hussein. This was acknowledged by the sharif in their exchanges and also by his son Faisal, the future founding monarch of Iraq, shortly after the war.

You bring to light a World War II conversation about atomic weapons between Nazi-SS chief Heinrich Himmler and the mufti Hajj Amin Husseini.

Yes. Arriving in Berlin in November 1941, and promptly awarded an audience with Hitler, the mufti spent the rest of the war in the service of the Third Reich, broadcasting Nazi propaganda and recruiting Balkan Muslims for the German killing machine. Himmler and the mufti spent hours ruminating on the absolute evil of the Jews. It was during one of these conversations, sometime in the summer of 1943, that Himmler gleefully told Hajj Amin of the Nazi "final solution," which by that time had led to the extermination of some three million Jews. He also confided the great progress made in developing a nuclear weapon that in Himmler's opinion would win the war for Germany. The mufti would never forget this conversation, boasting decades later in his memoirs that "there were no more than ten officials in the German Reich who were privy to this secret."

Arab historians and others now say that Israel's victory in the 1948-49 War of Independence was preordained, given the weakness of the Arabs.

Hardly. By April 1948, after four months of fighting against the mufti's men as well as an irregular pan-Arab force-dubbed the Arab Liberation Army-that had penetrated Palestine from outside, the Jewish position had become precarious. It was only after the Jews launched their first large offensive in early April, aimed at breaching the siege of Jerusalem, that the Palestinian Arab war effort began to unravel rapidly, culminating in total collapse and mass exodus by mid-May.

Then Israel proclaimed its independence.

Yes-and immediately the country was invaded by the regular armies of the neighboring Arab states. The previous succession of Jewish victories was checked, the nascent state was thrown back on the defensive, and the fight became a struggle for its very survival. Ultimately, the newly-established Israeli army managed to turn the tables, at the exorbitant human cost of one percent of the new state's population.

At the village of Deir Yasin in April 1948, the Irgun, a pre-state paramilitary force, is said to have massacred hundreds upon hundreds of innocent and unarmed men, women, and children.

According to a reliable report a day after the event, some 100 Arabs, including women and children, were killed in the fighting for the village. This figure is confirmed by Arif al-Arif, the doyen of Palestinian Arab historians, in his seminal Arabic-language study of the nakba (disaster), as Palestinians refer to the events of 1948-49. Al-Arif stipulates heavy fighting on both sides, claiming that the villagers killed more than 100 Jewish fighters (the actual figure was four dead and 32 wounded). Of the 110 Arab fatalities, he alleges that only seven were killed in action while the rest were peaceful civilians murdered in their homes. By contrast, an intelligence report issued three days after the event by the Haganah, the main Jewish fighting force, underscored the operational incompetence and disarray of the attacking Irgunists as well as their lack of discipline, manifested among other ways in acts of plunder, but makes no mention of a massacre.

In Palestine Betrayed you come to essentially the same conclusion as does Benny Morris in his recent book 1948: namely, that the only party systematically interested in "transfer" or "expulsion" in this period was the Arabs.

Morris does seem to have tacitly disowned his early writings, not least by acknowledging that the underlying cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict was and is the adamant Arab and Muslim refusal to accept the idea of Jewish statehood in any part of Palestine. Millions of Arabs, Jews, and foreign observers of the Middle East fully recognized these facts as early as 1948; at that time, the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society were nowhere described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews. Regrettably, this historical truth has been erased from public memory.

But in the case of the town of Lydda, the Haganah did drive out Arab residents.

The Lydda expulsion of July 1948 was the only instance where a substantial urban population was driven out during the course of the war. It stemmed not from a pre-existing plan but from a string of unexpected developments. Only when Israeli forces encountered stiffer resistance than expected was the decision made to "encourage" the population's departure to Arab-controlled areas a few miles to the east. The aim was to avoid leaving a hostile armed base at the rear of the Israeli advance and, by clogging the main roads, to forestall a possible counterattack by the Arab Legion.

This is not to deny that Israeli forces did on occasion expel Palestinian Arabs. But these were exceptions that occurred in the heat of battle and were uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military considerations-notably the need to deprive the enemy of strategic sites where no Jewish forces were available to hold them.

You write that, in any case, hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled Palestine while the British were still in place-that is, prior to Israeli independence.

That is correct. And this tells us that even if the Zionists had instigated a plot to expel the Palestinian Arabs-which they most certainly did not-Britain's extensive military presence in the country would have precluded the slightest possibility of a systematic "ethnic cleansing."

What then was the catalyst for their flight?

The fear, disorientation, and economic privation that accompany all armed hostilities. But to these must be added, crucially, the local Palestinians' despair of their own leadership, the role taken by that leadership in actively forcing widespread evacuations, and perhaps above all the lack of communal cohesion or of the willingness, especially at the highest levels, to subordinate personal interest to the general good.

You cite documents by Jewish figures in Haifa actually pleading with the city's Arab leaders not to flee.

They did not listen to such pleas, no doubt because remaining would have amounted to a tacit acquiescence in Jewish statehood.

The UN says there are 4.7 million Palestine refugees today. How many Arabs actually fled Palestine?

By the time of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948, some 300,000-340,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled their homes. By the end of the war several months later, the numbers had swollen to 583,000-609,000 refugees.

Why didn't Israel welcome them back afterward?

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told his cabinet on September 12, 1948 that if direct talks with the Arabs should culminate in a real peace, the refugees would return. On the other hand, "Should [postwar arrangements] fall short of peace with the Arabs, we will not allow their return."

You contend that Palestinian Arabs, if left to their own devices, would have chosen coexistence.

Therein lay the great tragedy of the 1920-48 era. Despite constant terror and intimidation, including the killing by Arab fanatics of moderates within their own community, peaceful coexistence with Jews was far more prevalent than were eruptions of violence, and the violence was the work of a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs.

It was the Arab leadership that rejected Jewish statehood even in a small part of Palestine-not from concern for the national rights of the Palestinian Arabs, but from the desire to fend off a perceived encroachment on the pan-Arab patrimony.

So the Arab war goal was not to create a Palestinian state?

It was common knowledge at the time that the pan-Arab invasion was more of a geopolitical scramble for Palestine than an attempt to secure the Palestinians' national rights. After 1948-49, neither Egypt nor Transjordan moved to establish an independent Palestinian entity in Gaza and the West Bank; this reflected the wider perception of the Palestine problem as a corollary of the pan-Arab agenda rather than as a distinct or urgent issue in its own right.

Abdel Rahman Azzam, the first head of the Arab League, once mused that it took centuries for the Arabs to reconcile themselves to having lost Spain; he wasn't sure they could ever adjust to losing any part of Palestine.

Unfortunately, the prospect of such an adjustment still seems far from auspicious. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of his recent predecessors, agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state provided the Palestinians recognized Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority's negotiator, reacted to this by warning that Netanyahu "will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him."

And so, more than six decades after the mufti condemned his people to statelessness, his reckless policies live on and are continually reenacted. Only when today's Arab leaders end this legacy of intransigence can the Palestinians hope to put their self-inflicted nakba behind them.
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UNIFIL: Peacekeepers or Enablers?

The response of the civilized world to events in southern Lebanon—where Hizballah, in preparation for its next act of aggression, is reportedly digging tunnels at the border with northern Israel—is doubly revealing. It says much about the non-enforcement of international law in an area dominated by Islamist irregular forces. And it is a reliable indicator of what might happen if, in the event of an agreement between the Palestinian leadership and Israel, international peacekeepers were to be stationed in the West Bank and Gaza.

The UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) has been an ineffective presence in south Lebanon dating back to 1978, when the area was subjugated by Palestinian gunmen. But in 2006 the force's mandate was enlarged under Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War, to include monitoring the ceasefire between Israel and Hizballah and supporting a 15,000-strong contingent of Lebanese troops south of the Litani River. The resolution, which has no real enforcement mechanism, also calls for the disarming of "all militias" (read: Hizballah) and an end to arms smuggling (meaning from Syria and Iran to Hizballah). But the militia is booming, and the smuggling is unabated.
Meanwhile, only 6,000 Lebanese troops have been deployed; anticipating trouble with Hizballah, they have been known to refuse to accompany UNIFIL in carrying out maneuvers that could rile the terrorist militia. After a recent incident in which weapons of French peacekeepers were seized, a UNIFIL officer was wounded, and an armored vehicle was vandalized by "villagers," Beirut promised to send 5,000 more soldiers to the south and France has reportedly offered to bolster its presence. But the UN has yet to respond to France's offer, and all it could muster in response to the "villagers'" depredations against its forces was a limp Security Council plea, addressed to no one in particular, for ensuring the "safety and freedom of movement of the peacekeepers."

"We are fully aware of the problems [UN] military operations in civilian areas may cause," said UNIFIL commander Alberto Asarta Cuevas at a meeting with village chiefs to urge greater "dialogue" with his peacekeepers. No doubt. With any number of private homes serving as Hizballah arms depots, or sitting astride bunkers and command centers, unrestricted UNIFIL access would clearly have the potential to cause friction.

The Israeli army recently declassified intelligence it has gathered concerning Hizballah's deployment in southern Lebanon and handed its findings to the UN. According to the IDF's copious documentation, Hizballah has positioned weapons caches less than 200 feet from schools and hospitals, embedded some 20,000 militia members inside 160 villages, and camouflaged 40,000 short-, medium- and long-range missiles—the last being capable of striking Tel Aviv. In the village of Khiam, located twelve miles from the Israeli city of Kiryat Shmona, there are no fewer than ten weapons-storage facilities. Also operating in the area, unhindered by UNIFIL, are Iranian military advisers.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon responded to the IDF's revelations with a stern rebuke—of Israel. He holds Jerusalem to blame for raising "the specter of a miscalculation by either party leading to a resumption of hostilities, with potentially devastating consequences for Lebanon and the region."

In fact, the IDF may have had a much more specific aim in mind, and Ban Ki-Moon may have guessed it. By publicizing some of what it knows about Hizballah's deployment of forces amid the civilian population in south Lebanon, Israel may intend to signal that, in any future round of fighting, non-combatant casualties will be the legal and moral responsibility of Hizballah—and, ultimately, of UNIFIL itself, the body charged with preventing the very situation it has permitted to develop.

Beyond the case of southern Lebanon, the utter lack of any international will to disarm Hizballah, or to penalize Syria and Iran for unlawfully arming it, delivers a stark lesson to Israelis about the folly of delegating their country's security, particularly in the West Bank, to peacekeepers under the aegis of the United Nations, NATO, or any other international body

-- July 2010

Christianity in the Middle East

Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Cyprus on Sunday was marred by events that cast their own, baleful light on the purpose of his mission: to unveil a Vatican position paper on the deteriorating condition of Christianity in the Middle East. Hours before his arrival, one of the document's authors, Bishop Luigi Padovese, the apostolic vicar of Anatolia, was murdered by his "mentally unstable" driver. Padovese had only recently met with Turkish authorities to discuss the problems of that country's tiny Christian minority—and had previously extended Christian forgiveness to a Muslim youth who in 2006 murdered a Catholic priest. Three more Turkish Christians were murdered in their Bible publishing house in 2007.

The draft document, "The Catholic Church in the Middle East," exemplifies the tightrope walked by the Vatican with regard to the ever-worsening circumstance of Christianity in the region. Worried about the dwindling indigenous communities of Christian Arabs and about newly arriving Christian workers from Asia, but with an eye to Islamic sensibilities, the paper artfully cites Israel's "occupation of Palestinian territories" as harming Christian Arabs no less than their Muslim compatriots. In its Italian-language version, as the New York Times points out, the document goes further, explicitly warning against the use of the Bible "to justify the political injustice imposed on the Palestinians." In this same connection the Church also thoroughly dissociates itself from "certain Christian fundamentalist theologies"—in other words, Christian Zionism with its unstinting support of Israel.
But the heart of the document—cushioned by its de-rigueur genuflecting to the Palestinian cause—is the assertion that "Oftentimes, relations between Christians and Muslims are difficult, principally because Muslims make no distinction between religion and politics, thereby relegating Christians to the precarious position of being considered non-citizens." "Too often," it hastens to add, Muslims mistakenly identify Christianity with the West—even though "modernity" also poses risks to Christians. Finally, the Church warns against active Christian proselytizing among Muslims.

Early in his papacy, at Regensburg in Germany, Benedict quoted an "erudite Byzantine emperor" talking with "startling brusqueness" about Islamic religious violence. If his intention then was to engage Muslims in vigorous but reasoned polemical disputation, it failed; many of his hoped-for interlocutors reacted with rage, some by killing Christians and burning churches. Four years later, the tone of "The Catholic Church in the Middle East" suggests an abandonment of any claims to religious rights and justice in favor of a plea for Muslim forbearance.


-- June 2010

American Jewish Congress: The End?

Shrunken and wizened, the American Jewish Congress lies on its evident death bed, debilitated by a loss of raison d'être as much as by Bernard Madoff's financial depredations. Under the circumstances, reflections on the spotty record of its approach to Jewish life, or on waste and duplication in the alphabet soup of the Jewish organizational world, may forgivably give way to a longer-term look at a once-proud agency's origins and purposes.

The AJCongress was established in 1918, largely by "downtown" East European Jews out to challenge "uptown" German Reform Jews and their flagship agency, the American Jewish Committee, founded twelve years earlier. The downtowners, no underachievers themselves, were irked by the AJCommittee's elitism and its antipathy toward Zionism. The idea for a more representative umbrella group, which began to germinate as early as 1915, gained momentum in response to the AJCommittee's unenthusiastic reaction to the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

After World War I, the new "congress" lobbied the Versailles conference on behalf of Europe's remaining Jewish communities. While some uptowners, led by Adolph Ochs of the New York Times, were urging President Woodrow Wilson not to support the Balfour Declaration, the downtowners pressured from the opposite direction.

The congress was supposed to disband after Versailles, but in 1928 an ad-hoc coalition of Orthodox, Zionist, and fraternal groups reassembled under Stephen Wise and ultimately reconstituted themselves as an independent membership organization. Unlike the AJCommittee, which worked behind the scenes, the new AJCongress engaged in direct action. In the 1930s it organized boycotts of goods from Nazi Germany. In 1942, convinced that reports of Hitler's genocide were true, it held a mass rally at New York's Madison Square Garden—although Wise also acquiesced in FDR's ruling that the rescue of European Jewry would have to wait until the fighting ended.

In the postwar era, the AJCongress co-founded the National Conference on Soviet Jewry and established a niche for itself with its 1960s campaign against the Arab economic boycott of Israel. But its main passions centered on domestic American affairs, where, faithful to the left-liberal agenda, it positioned itself as the Jewish community's progressive lawyer: challenging restrictive clubs, litigating for the rigid separation of church and state, backing special legal dispensations for American blacks, and opposing the Vietnam war.

In the late 60s and 70s the AJCongress came under sharp criticism for its conspicuous failure to speak out against roiling black anti-Semitism and for its opposition to Jewish parochial schools. In response, AJCongress leaders claimed that some Jews preferred day-school education for their children "not because they loved God but because they were afraid of the Negro." In time they would re-think such reckless aspersions, somewhat modifying the agency's position in the process.

By now, in any case, much of the Jewish communal agenda had become dominated by Israel. Like other liberal establishment figures, AJCongress leaders were aghast and befuddled at the 1977 election of Menachem Begin as Israel's prime minister. Arthur Hertzberg, the group's president, sought to sever support for the Jewish state from support of its government, especially when it came to settlements in the Israel-administered territories. Joachim Prinz, a former president and staunch Begin foe, prophesied that the community's obsession with Israel would damage its own spiritual well-being. Henry Siegman, the agency's executive director during the crucial period 1978–1994, went on to become one of Israel's harshest critics.

Always junior to the Anti-Defamation League and AJCommittee, the AJCongress survived on communal money, its own fundraising, and the "memberships" of tourists visiting Israel through its travel service. In its heyday, it boasted 300 chapters and published a fortnightly newsletter and the quarterly Judaism. But by the 1990s the agency was moribund. Both its leaders and its base had moved on, as new organizations on either end of the political spectrum—and, in the liberal center, its old nemesis the AJCommittee—were rendering it redundant or irrelevant.

All the more reason, then, to recall the once-revolutionary contributions made by this organization in behalf of Zionism, a more representative Jewish leadership, and the willingness forthrightly to pursue Jewish interests in the public square.

-- July 2010

Understanding AIPAC

Against a background of sharp disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem, the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee winds down today.


On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.
But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?

Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.

But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.

In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."

Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?



-- March 2010