Myths about Israel and Zionism

Last week a retired professor, Robert Boyd, attacked Zionism in our local newspaper. His argument has all the virtues of a good argument except truth.

His first allegation was that the UN’s partition of Palestine in 1947 was unfair to Arabs because non-Jews were 93% of Palestine and 78% of the land was left in Jewish hands.

But here is what Boyd left out: the part of Palestine allotted to Jews contained a substantial Jewish majority—538,000 Jews to 397,000 Arabs, according to official UN estimates.

Besides, the “Jewish national home” mandated by the League of Nations in 1920 originally included what is now the state of Jordan. Eighty percent of this was given to Arabs, in what was then called Trans-Jordan.

The remaining twenty percent was divided in 1947, which means Jews received 17.5% of what was originally designated to be theirs. Jews were unhappy because it did not include west Jerusalem, which had a Jewish majority, and because 60% of their portion was the Negev, an arid desert then thought to be useless. But they accepted the partition, and the Arabs did not.

Boyd also suggested that Jews bought up the land with the threat or use of force. By 1949 Britain had allocated 187,500 acres of cultivable land to Arabs and only 4250 acres to Jews. So Jews were forced to pay exorbitant prices for arid land to wealthy, often absentee landlords–$1000 per acre when rich black soil in Iowa was getting $110 per acre.

In his memoir King Abdullah of Jordan said the story of Jewish displacement of Arabs from their land was a fiction: “Arabs are as prodigal in selling their land as they are in . . . weeping [about it].”

Then Boyd charged that in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War 750,000 Arabs were expelled from their homes amidst reports of Zionist “atrocities” and “massacres.” What he fails to say is that the vast majority of these Arabs left their homes because Arab leaders told them to or they simply wanted to get out of the line of fire. The Syrian Prime Minister Haled al Azm wrote in his memoirs, “Since 1948 we have been demanding the return of the refugees to their homes. But we ourselves are the ones who encouraged them to leave.” The Economist, a frequent critic of Zionists, reported in 1948 that “the Higher Arab Executive . . . clearly intimated that those Arabs who remained in Haifa and accepted Jewish protection would be regarded as renegades.”

Were there some expulsions and massacres? No doubt the former, and yet some of these were simply to Arab towns a few miles away. We know that many reports of Zionist atrocities have been exaggerated and fabricated. For example, Syria’s UN delegate Faris el-Khouri charged in April 1948 that the seizure of Haifa was a Jewish massacre. But the next day the British UN representative Sir Alexander Cadogan told the assembly that the fighting had started because of Arab attacks on Jews, and reports of a massacre were erroneous.

Boyd made other reckless allegations of “genocide,” Jewish “terrorism,” and the suppression of free speech on Israel in the U.S. I wish I had space to deal with each one of these. Perhaps the best response is to use Northern Irishman William Abraham’s definition of terrorism as “the purposeful use of violence against innocents for political aims.”

It has become routine for Palestinians in recent decades to target Jewish civilians—non-combatant men, women, and children. The recent Gaza war started because thousands of Hamas missiles had been fired at Jewish towns and cities, not military installations.

In contrast, Israel goes out of its way to warn Palestinian civilians to flee an area or building about to be attacked because it houses soldiers or missiles aimed at Israeli civilians. It uses drones to cancel strikes if they see that children or civilians are too close. When Palestinian civilians are killed, it is often because their governments place weapons and missiles in their homes and schools and hospitals, using them as human shields—as in Gaza this past summer—and never because of Israeli intention.

The difference between unintended wrong and purposeful wrong is the difference between tragic necessity and terrorist atrocity.

In 1948 150,000 Arabs chose to stay in the Jewish State after it was established. Today they have grown to over one million, and they have a higher standard of living than Arabs in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. They are the only Arabs in the Middle East who enjoy freedom of speech and press, the right to vote, and access to world-class education and health care.

If Israel is planning genocide, its government didn’t get the memo.