I got this article by Adi Schwartz out from behind the paywall of
Ha'aretz. It's mostly tosh, being an interview with
Zionism: False Messiah author, Nathan Weinstock. Weinstock was one of these star anti-zionist Jewish writers like, say, Ilan Halevi or Uri Davis but he had this epiphany, denounced his former self and became a rather nasty zionist. I heard that he had banned anyone from promoting or selling his old book but it is still findable on
google and
it is still obtainable from Amazon brand new (£97.60) or used (from £4.84)
Here's a taste of the article:
According to Weinstock, underlying the growing hostility toward the
Jewish population in Palestine was the realization that the dhimmi Jews
were shaking off their traditional legal status of humiliation and
submission. In retrospect, the writer maintains, dhimmi status, on the
one hand, and the declared attempt by the Zionist movement to be free of
it, on the other, led ultimately to the Arabs’ rejection of the United
Nations partition plan in 1947 and to the War of Independence the
following year.
It's interesting that much of the article takes the form of an interview whereas that bit and some others are in reported speech. I'm guessing that, like Benny Morris, his direct speech has become too openly racist for
Ha'aretz transfer straight to the page. But I'm only guessing.
Anyway, Weinstock's position is that the rejection of The State of Israel by the Arabs is nothing to do with ethnic cleansing or discrimination or the fact that Israel is a colonialist plant but because of some inborn negative feeling that Arabs have towards Jews. I should note here that Christians don't warrant a mention in the article. I don't if they get a mention in the book.
But all that above is not actually the point of this post. The point is that after so much anti-Arab hasbara, Adi Schwartz looks for and finds a balancer in the form of Dr Sami Shalom:
“[Nathan] Weinstock is a classic servant of the erasure of my history
and of the history of the Jews in the Islamic lands,” says Dr. Sami
Shalom Chetrit, a Moroccan-born Israeli intellectual who deals
extensively with relations between Ashkenazim (European-born Jews) and
Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin). He teaches
Hebrew culture and Middle Eastern studies at Queens College, in New
York.
“Like the textbooks in Israel, Weinstock focuses primarily
on the Zionist, national era, in which Jewish nationalism developed in
Europe in parallel to Arab nationalism from the Maghreb to the Mashriq
[i.e., from the West to the East]. There he finds ‘pogroms,’ which are
an Eastern European Jewish issue. He ignores the role played by the
Zionist movement in undermining the relations between Jews and Muslims
in the Arab countries. He talks about ‘anti-Semitism’ in the Arab
countries and about expulsion, after much has been written about the
ties between the Zionist leadership and the corrupt leaders of Iraq and
Yemen, which lead to the decision to deport the Jews from those
countries – without a passport and with only a laissez-passer – to
Israel only.
“Let’s assume that things were very bad and
stressful – why didn’t they get a passport allowing them to choose any
destination? Or the Jews of Morocco, who were not allowed to leave after
Morocco became independent. No one was allowed to leave Morocco in
those years unless he was close to and well connected with the
authorities. The Zionists had to use the Jews of the United States and
the administration in Washington to bring pressure to bear on the palace
in Morocco to allow the Jews to leave after 1956. Why not talk about
the years before Moroccan independence, when [Prime Minister David]
Ben-Gurion could have brought all the Jews of Morocco to Israel, but
took fright and chose to conduct a racist selection in which the
strength of their muscles and the width of their shoulders were
measured!
“Let us not forget, also, that in the background, the
Mossad was running Zionist ‘undergrounds’ that incited the Muslims
against the Jews, including throwing a grenade into a Baghdad synagogue,
painting anti-Jewish slogans in French on Jewish stores, and spreading
harsh rumors about the Jews in order to hasten their departure. This was
all done by good Zionists, and I am not saying anything new here.
“Indeed,
the life of the Jews in the Islamic lands was no paradise, but neither
was the life of the Muslims a paradise in the Islamic lands, unless they
were close to the government. And above all, the life of the Jews in
the Islamic countries was never the hell of the Jews of Europe. Never at
any point in history. The Jews from the Islamic lands came to Israel
out of love. Not because of hatred, not because of persecution and not
for revenge. Only for love of the Land of Israel.”
That's a tad enigmatic at the end, but note it's "love of the
Land of Israel", not the State of Israel and not hatred of or in the lands they left.
