Jewish Times of South Jersey.
Stephen Kramer
November 27, 2009
Crybabies
Israelis are often accused of being crybabies about the
Holocaust. It’s `Holocaust this’ and `Holocaust that.’ Enough already,
they say. Of course, every foreign dignitary visiting Israel makes an
obligatory trip to Yad Vashem, Israel’s premier Holocaust resource
center. Israel is also the epicenter for many legal battles against
genocide and has adopted the motto, `Never Again!’ In addition, Israel
jealously guards its title as the primary home of Holocaust
survivors. The Holocaust is at least partially responsible for the
United Nations’ acceptance of Israel into its membership. Inevitably,
Israelis are accused of trading on the Holocaust.
As Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out in his address to the General
Assembly at the United Nations in September, `Last month, I went to a
villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20,
1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how
to exterminate the Jewish people. Here is a copy of those minutes, in
which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the
extermination of the Jews. In Berlin, a day before I was in Wannsee, I
was given the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau
concentration camp.’ Was Netanyahu trading on the Holocaust or
pointing out the real danger that Israel faces from Iran’s quest for
nuclear weapons?
Is the Holocaust the first and foremost genocidal tragedy of modern
times? The Armenians have made a case that the Turkish massacres
against them during the First World War make that tragedy the
archetype for genocide. But their claim is problematic: 1` the Ottoman
Turks didn’t have a leader like Hitler who built his whole career on
the annihilation of the Jews; 2 ` the Turks didn’t plan and carry out
an Armenian genocide to the same extent as the Nazis, who developed a
blueprint for genocide. The Nazis went so far as to continue
exterminating Jews even when it detracted from their military efforts
towards the end of WWII.
Today, in fact, there’s no consensus on whether there was an Armenian
genocide, and Armenia is even considering giving in on the issue to
cement a diplomatic deal with Turkey. The Armenians, nor any other
people for that matter, have never been subjected to such a
premeditated plan of genocide as the Holocaust. Regardless, genocide
continues to be a huge problem, especially in Africa.
So, with genocide being such an important issue and with the Holocaust
its most compelling example, surely the Israelis aren’t crybabies.
The Palestinians are the biggest crybabies on earth. What are they
crying about? The so-called usurpation of their country,
Palestine. Day in and day out, the Palestinians cry: at the United
Nations, at Arab congresses, on television, anywhere and to
anyone. But the facts are that there never has been a country called
Palestine.
There weren’t any `Palestinians’ in 1922, when the League of Nations
gave the British the Mandate for Palestine, using the ancient name for
the former Ottoman province. (The term became common usage to describe
Jews born in the Mandatory Palestine.) The name `Palestine’ refers to
the Philistines, an ancient sea people from Asia Minor who inhabited
the southern coast of Israel. `Philistine Syria’ (Greek) and
`Provincia Syria Palaestina’ (Roman) were names used to suppress the
Jewish influence there.
The 1947 U.N. Partition Plan divided Palestine into Jewish and Arab
areas. The Arabs rejected the plan and skirmishes against Jews began
immediately. Israel was declared a state by the U.N. after the ensuing
War of Independence. The West Bank and Gazan Arabs failed to declare
their own state or even agitate for one. Instead, Jordan occupied and
then annexed the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza. According to the
Arabs, all of Palestine-Israel is disputed territory, `Arab land,’
that they claim for themselves. (Technically, Jordan and Egypt, which
each have a treaty with Israel, accept Israel’s sovereignty within the
1949 armistice lines.)
Something happened after WWII which should have changed the status of
the Palestinians; it was `population transfer.’ The most prominent
example of this phenomenon happened in 1947 during the partition of
British India into India and Pakistan. In the largest and most rapid
population transfer in history, about 18 million Muslims and Hindus
left their homes to relocate with their co-religionists. Had the Arabs
accepted the U.N. Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947, Israel would
have fewer Arab citizens today.The Arabs could have grouped themselves
in the West Bank and Gaza, either as citizens of Jordan and Egypt or
as citizens of their own state.
Emphasizing the pragmatism of population transfer is the exodus of
Jews from Arab countries in North Africa and Arabia, which happened
throughout the decade following Israel’s Declaration of
Independence. Up to 800,000 Jews left their homes, almost all
unwillingly, when the hostility of their Arab neighbors forced them to
flee ` usually with little but what they could carry with them. Since
the number of Jewish refugees is roughly equivalent to the number of
Palestinian refugees in 1948, population transfer of the Palestinians
would have been a pragmatic solution to their problem. (It wasn’t that
any of the transferred populations chose to be exiled … it was a
necessary evil.)
Instead of accepting the U.N. Partition Plan or later peace offers,
the Palestinians have wallowed in their self-induced misery,
complaining bitterly about their conditions. They have made a habit of
turning down every peace overture from Israeli leaders, and later
complaining that the Israelis won’t begin new negotiations starting
with the terms that were summarily refused.
The Palestinians even managed to set up a unique U.N. agency, UNRWA,
to prolong their refugee status until such time as they could usurp
the Jewish state. Instead of building lives for themselves in their
own negotiated state or in neighboring Arab countries, they have
concentrated on trying to destroy Israel. Palestinians are the
crybabies, not Israelis.
Stephen Kramer resided and worked in the Atlantic City area until
1991, when he moved to Israel with his wife, Michal Langweiler, and
two sons. He can be reached at [email protected].