#873 9/24/17 – This Week: Bernie Sanders and the Narrative of “Palestinians’ Displacement” by “Israel’s Founding”

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The internet is abuzz this weekend about Sen. Sanders interview on ”The Intercept,” in which he questioned the amount of U.S. military aid to embattled Israel and called the U.S. “complicit” in Israeli “West Bank occupation.”  Breitbart’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Aaron Klein, and others have provided persuasive responses, but it is Sen. Sanders’ deeper narrative of 1948 that maligns the Jewish homeland most deeply.

This Week:  Bernie Sanders and the Narrative of “Palestinians’ Displacement” by “Israel’s Founding”

A website called “The Intercept” published an interview with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders on Friday (9/22/17).  It was quite lengthy and touched on several domestic and foreign policy issues, including, of course, Israel.  What got headlines by Breitbart and the Jerusalem Post were the Senator calling the United States “complicit” in Israeli “occupation,” but what is most deeply troubling is the depth of the Senator’s belief in the Arab narrative that goes way back beyond Israeli presence in “the West Bank” and Gaza, to adherence to the Arab version of what happened, to borrow a recent book title, in 1948.

Arutz Sheva this morning, in summarizing Sen. Sanders’ “history of problematic statements on Israel,” quoted him as having previously said:

“’Like our own country, the founding of Israel involved the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people already living there, the Palestinian people.  Over 700,000 people were made refugees.  To acknowledge this painful historical fact does not ‘delegitimize’ Israel, any more than acknowledging the Trail of Tears delegitimizes the United States of America,’ Sanders claimed.”

This super-slanted claimed unilateral “displacement” of “Palestinians” by “the founding of Israel,” lies at the heart of Jewish homeland damnation.  It has resonated before with highly-placed U.S. political figures.  E.g.:

“It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding.”

Those were the words of Barack Obama, newly inaugurated President of the United States, to the whole world from Cairo, June 4, 2009.

What put belief in “Palestinians’ displacement by Israel’s creation” into not just top politicians’ , but likewise common people’s, heads is the very stuff that this media watch has been railing against since its very first weekly edition, 873 weeks ago.  Alert #1, 1/7/01:

WHAT’S BEING WRITTEN

This past week, the philadelphia inquirer told its readers in a Knight Ridder News Service news story that under President Clinton’s plan, “Palestinians would have to scale back demands that nearly four million Palestinian refugees and their descendants be able to exercise a right of return to land they fled or were forced to leave in 1948 during the creation of Israel. In exchange, Palestinians would gain . . . .” (Thurs., 1/4/01, article on page 1 and 16, emphasis added)

Except for the since-discredited “millions,” sounds like Barack and Bernie, nu?

It is shameful for us not to contest aggressively every bit of this Senator Sanders’-spun narrative of the “people already living there, the Palestinian people,” made refugees in 1948 by “the founding of Israel.”

***  “The people living there” weren’t purely Arab:  Palestine’s 1948 population was not purely Palestinian Arab.  A good third of the people living there were Jews – 600,000, versus c. a million to 1.2 million Arabs.  The Arabs did not then call themselves “the Palestinian people,” and the United Nations in its Palestine partition resolution called Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs “the two Palestinian peoples.”  (But for the World War II (as in ‘Holocaust’) and beyond [n.b.] British blockade, and before them ethnic population policies of the Ottoman Turks, Mamluks, Crusaders, foreign Arab dynasties, Byzantines and the Romans who’d defeated Judaea, aided, e.g., by medieval papal and other European decrees against “transporting Jews to the East,” there’d have been many more Jews.)

***  Israel was not “founded” in 1948 out-of-the-blue:  Israel attained its independence that year as the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea.  Every ruler in between – Romans, Byzantines, briefly Persians, Ommayad-Abbasid-Fatimid Muslim dynasties, European Christian Crusaders, Mamluks, Ottoman Turks – was a foreign invader.  Nascent Jewish governing institutions were recognized in the post-Ottoman Empire Palestine Mandate.  As historian Parkes rightly wrote in Whose Land: A History of the Peoples of Palestine, the continuous, tenacious, organized homeland-claiming post-biblical presence of the Jewish Yishuv wrote the Zionists’ “real title deeds.”

***  Arabs’ displacement came in an Arab invasion for Israel’s destruction: Israelis rightly call the 1948 war their War of Independence, not “War of Creation & Founding.”  The Arabs, including Arabs in Palestine, expressly rejected a second partition of the Palestine Mandate (they’d already gotten 78% as all-Arab Transjordan) with a multi-nation invasion for newly independent Israel’s destruction.  The bulk of Arabs who left did so at the invading Arab nations’ bidding to leave “temporarily.”  That multi-nation Arab invasion was thrown back by a homeland army of homeland Jews, not bad for a nation that had just been “created and founded.”

***  More Israel-absorbed Middle-eastern Jews were displaced from vast Arab and other Muslim lands in the 1948 war and its aftermath than Arabs left tiny Israel: As Samuel Katz cogently argued in Battleground (rev ed., p. 23):

     “In 1947, there were approximately one million Arabs in the whole of western Palestine.  (British figures, certainly inflated, put the number at 1,200,000; independent calculations claim 800,000 – 900,000).  Of these, the total number actually living in that part of Palestine which became Israel was, according to the British figure [emphasis original], 561,000 [footnote citing sources].  Not all of them left.  After the end of hostilities in 1949, there were 140,000 Arabs in Israel.  The total number of Arabs who left could not mathematically have been more than some 420,000.”

And to claim U.N. refugee status, they had to have lived in Palestine for all of, zounds!, two  years. Compare that to the c. 800,000 Jews displaced from Arab and other Muslim lands.  Most of these Jews fled to Israel, where they were absorbed (and have had grandchildren too), forming today, along with descendants of the old Yishuv, a major indigenously-Middle-eastern segment of Israel’s population, in contradistinction to the Arab refugees of 1948, whose descendants today (“apartheid”, anyone?) are isolated by their fellow-Arab “hosts,” including in the Palestine they never left, in “refugee camps.”  It is super-spin to wail about “the painful historical fact” of Arabs who left Israel during the Arab invasion for its destruction while being silent about the greater number of Jews displaced in that era from Arab and other Muslim lands.

So while great commentary – e.g., Aaron Klein in Breitbart. 9/24/17, “Bernie Sanders: US ‘Complicit’ in Israel’s ‘Occupation’ of the Palestinians,” 9/6/17, “Six Reasons Trump’s Israel Ambassador David Friedman was Correct To Question the Narrative of ‘Occupation” – has been written refuting Sen. Sanders’ claim, as he, e.g., had told “J Street” earlier this year, per this morning’s Aaron Klein article, “that Israel was occupying ‘Palestinian territories,” the deepest damage is done by the “Palestinians’ displacement by Israel’s founding” claim that Sanders and others endorse.