Posted on 05/27/2025 5:47:19 AM PDT by Milagros
I’v often wondered if you had Douglas McArthur, Charles DeGaulle, and Bernard Law Montgomery in a room would there be room for anyone else? I’m sure each one believed they alone were responsible for Victory.
and the Huns and Japs are now on our side, the russians oppose us, and we’ve ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia ...
Oh. Well, as a geographical term, Palestine has been used several times in history.
Wikipedia has an article on that, which makes a very interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_(region)
Sorry for being a wiseguy of a geographer once again, but it’s a professional defect.
With DeGaulle he carried the entire weight of British-French history, and in my view with that came a sense of inferiority that had to be hidden by excessive ego and pride.
I don’t know. A world without that massive de Gaullist ego might just collapse in on itself. He was perhaps the most brilliant man in history… don’t believe that? All you had to do was ask him. He’d tell you.
You really don’t know? Sad.
In a world where one de Gaulle might just be one de Gaulle too many, I'm not sure 10 de Gaulles could straighten out the mess France has gotten itself into.
A strand of virulent antisemitism has indeed run through anti-Zionism throughout its history. Following are a few examples:
• Neguib Azoury, whose 1905 Le Rived de la Nation Arabe is regarded as the founding document of Arab nationalism and a prescient critique of Zionism, presents Jews as the enemies of the rest of humankind, and his case against Zionism is infused by these views. He tells his reader in the preface of his book that it should be read together with a larger project that he expects to bring out soon: Le Peril juif universe!. He also mentions the advantages to Europe of siding with Arab nationalism: it is the Arabs who can nip the contemporary success of the Jews in the bud and thereby destroy their project of world domination.”
• In 1913 the influential Jaffa daily Filastin published a poem by a local Palestinian leader that included the lines “Jews, sons of clinking gold, stop your deceit. We shall not be cheated into bartering away our country! ... The Jews, the weakest of all peoples and the least of them, are haggling with us for our land.”
The following year, an anonymous anti-Zionist pamphlet asked the people of Palestine, “Do you want to be slaves and servants to people who are notorious in the world and in history?”
• The Jerusalem notable Aref Pasha Dajani told the King-Crane Commission, dispatched by the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 to ascertain how people in the former Ottoman Empire wished to be governed, that “in all the countries where .. are at present they are not wanted ... because they always arrive to suck the blood [sic] of everybody.”
• A year later [Apr 1920], Palestinian rallies chanted, “We will drink the blood of the Jews!” and “Palestine is our land and the Jews are our dogs,” while holding up signs with messages like “Death to the Jews” and “Shall we give back the country to a people who crucified our Lord ..?”’
• In the Hebron riots of 1929, many of the Jews killed were indigenous inhabitants of the land, not Zionists; the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hail Amin al-Husseini, also used the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as evidence that the Jews were responsible for these riots when testifying to the British commission investigating them.’
• The grand mufti is of course Exhibit A in the case that gets made for anti-Zionism as pervasively antisemitic. Friendly with Hitler, he was a thoroughgoing hater of Jews from early on in his career... But it is also important that he was regarded as the leading political figure in Palestine until at least the end of the 1940s, as well as the likely head of a Palestinian state had one been founded in 1948. Had the Palestinian national movement been truly free of antisemitism, let alone opposed to it, one would have expected most of its adherents to condemn the mufti and reject his claims to leadership. Moreover, the mufti was not alone among advocates for the Palestinian cause in the 1940s in his enthusiasm for Nazism.
• The most important leader of the Palestinian military forces in the 1947-49 war, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, also spent World War II in Berlin, calling for a German-Arab alliance based on their shared opposition to “the role of Jews and their intrigues.””
• A fondness for Hitler and Nazism was rife in the Arab world after World War II. In 1956 a Muslim Brotherhood newspaper in Damascus declared, “One cannot forget that Hitler enjoys high esteem in the Arab world, unlike in Europe. His name awakens sympathy and enthusiasm in the hearts of our supporters.” On the eve of Adolf Eichmann’s trial, the Jordanian ((located Palestinian. Ed.)) Jerusalem Times published an open letter to him, calling his role in the Holocaust “a blessing to humanity” and looking forward to “the liquidation of the remaining six million.” At a meeting with Kamal Jumblatt in 1974, Hafez el-Assad also noted that the Arabs thought of Hitler “in a positive way,” upon which Jumblatt added, “National Socialism should be revived a bit.””
• One argument against the creation of a Jewish state in 1947, used in the UN by representatives of the Arab states bordering Palestine, was that the response to such a thing would be attacks on Jews throughout the Arab world. And this indeed occurred. Dozens of Jews were murdered and homes, stores, and synagogues were destroyed in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, and Bahrain after the Partition Plan was approved.” Persecution of indigenous Jews in these countries also continued for decades after Israel’s creation, despite the fact that the result of such policies was to lead more Jews to go to Israel. And Palestinian terror attacks in the 1970s and 1980s targeted synagogues, kosher restaurants, and other Jewish communal centers all over the world, despite claims by the movements they represented that their enemy was Israel and Zionism, not Jews and Judaism.
==
Fleischacker, Sam. “CHAPTER 13 Three Paradigms for Understanding the Israel-Palestine Conflict”. Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, edited by Omer Bartov, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021, pp. 261-281. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800731301-016
Pretty sure
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