Sunday, July 31, 2005
Technically, not untold, but so obfuscated, covered over, revised, fairy-taled, political canted and overall erased and whited-out that it may as well be the untold -- and true -- story of the founding of Israel and Britain's role in it. I haven't read the entire document yet (it's long), but this is clearly interesting enough to link to right away.
Emperor's Clothes: The British Record on Partition - Reprinted from The Nation, May 8, 1948
1948 Report to the UN Explodes the PLO's Myth of National Liberation
by Jared Israel
Emperor's Clothes here makes available, for the first time on the internet, the Nation's 1948 UN Memorandum on British instigation of anti-Jewish terror. The memorandum is posted in full, in text form, following Jared Israel's comments below, and also as a PDF file, scanned from the original.
Taught to use the language of National Liberation politics at Soviet bloc schools in the 1960s, '70s and '80s, today's Palestinian Arab leaders employ the rhetoric of Third World anti-colonial struggle. This has given us the spectacle of Cuba, which was the passion of leftist intellectuals in the 1960s and '70s, teaching Arabs to blow up Israeli Kibbutzim, which were the passion of leftist intellectuals in the 1950s.
The 1948 Arab-Israeli war plays a key part in the Arab National Liberation tale. The Israeli victory in that war is presented as the defining event, the nakba or catastrophe. In order to claim that the PLO and Fatah are fighting for National Liberation in 2005, their promoters argue that British imperialism, using Jewish proxies, crushed Palestinian Liberation in 1948. The corollary: if the Jews will just grant Arabs the National Liberation they were denied in '48, Arab leaders will deliver on peace with Israel.
Of course, if this story is false, if in 1948 the Arab armies fought for genocide, not National Liberation, and if it was not the Jews but Arab leaders who were agents of imperial Britain, then it certainly suggests that their protégés are not fighting for National Liberation today.
Below is our text transcription of The Nation magazine's 1948 memorandum on Britain's role in the Arab attempt to kill Israel in the cradle. Based on British intelligence documents and written for the United Nations, the memorandum is significant today because it contradicts widely held views about the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict, including those put forward in today's Nation magazine.
Just for starters, the memorandum proves the falsity of the common perception that the creation of Israel was a project of Western colonialism. The Nation shows that during the half year prior to the all-out Arab invasion on 15 May, Britain incited, micro-managed and did public relations work for a campaign of Arab troop infiltration and terror. And this at a time when Britain was responsible for security in its Palestine Mandate territory.
The intelligence documents cited below show that before the 15 May invasion, British intelligence knew that the Arabs terrorizing the future Israel were being led in part by Nazi advisers. These included Bosnian Muslims from the infamous Handzar Division of the Waffen SS. According to a French intelligence document published by The Nation seven months later, the British sent thousands of Nazi prisoners of war, including top war criminals, to assist the Arab attack. This was after the Arab invasion. [1]...
Like this:
More on the British role in Palestine.
The British were generally partial to the Arabs because of the Arabists of their foreign services. In particular, it led to a number of incidents in 1948 where the retreating British Army left arms caches and strategic ground in the hands of Arabs. An even interesting anecdote is the role of British officers who helped command the British trained Jordanian Army against the IDF.
Course, as Yehudit's link reinforces, also relevant was lingering anti-Semitism within the British leadership class.
Generally, the Palestinians have the slickest PR agents of any other actor in international politics. Everything going for them, from 50 years of Soviet propaganda, to oil leverage, to Western self hate, false feelings of anti-colonialism [projection, as you noted in the other thread], and anti-semitism...Honestly, it is hard to come up with a more awful combination.
Please forgive a stupid question, but isn't this common knowledge? Or am I really over-estimating common knowledge?
When I hear people offer alternative "counter- factual" narratives (for example on NPR), I kind of take for granted everyone knows the real story. OK, so I'm naive.
Very interesting link, Yehudit.
Oh boy Will. If I could tell you the number of times I've heard people going on describing the most crazy explanations of Israel's founding -- it's as if the Jews landed on the beaches of Palestine like the beaches of Normandy bearing American weapons and kicking everyone out to make room for themselves in 1948.
This history has been amazingly well supressed. It's one of Israel's greatest problems.